If an attempt were made to analyze German society before 1914 in
terms of a class structure whose primary criterion was the ownership
and control of the means of production, it would be very difficult to
place salaried employees, on the one hand, and artisans and small trades-
people on the other, within such a framework. In the writings of the day,
these two groups -- along with most peasants, civil servants, and profes-
sional people -- frequently were lumped together as the "Mittelstand"
(roughly, "lower middle classes") to mark them off from those above and
those below, from capital and wage labor, from the ruling classes and the
proletariat. This essay deals with the socioeconomic characteristics, the
ideologies, and the social alliances of these middle groups, with their
wartime development and resulting changes.

According to the last prewar occupational census ( 1907), there were
about 2 million salaried employees or white-collar workers (Angestellte) as
compared with 13.7 million wage earners or manual workers (Arbeiter);
that is, for every ten salaried employees there were approximately seventy
wage earners. Most of the salaried employees (about 1.1 million) were
employed in the service sector, which had in fact offered white-collar jobs
(in very much smaller numbers, to be sure) long before industrialization,
mainly for shop-assistants. About 700,000 worked as technicians, trades-
people, supervisors, and office personnel in manufacturing and mining;
this group was largely a by-product of industrialization and had rapidly

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