Completed associated PhD project
Sponsored by Stiftung Bildung und Wissenschaft, Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and Universität Potsdam.

In March 1970, the 250 employees of the Süßmuth glassworks in Immenhausen in northern Hesse took over their company and thus found a collective response to the threat of bankruptcy and the loss of their jobs. This event, which was a first in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany and almost unique, attracted nationwide attention at the time and became a political issue. By the time the company closed in 1996, however, the story of self-management had already been forgotten.

The dissertation project examined the background of the self-mangement of Süßmuth glassworks and the associated upheavals and changes, as well as the specific factors that made it difficult for democratic practice to become established in a West German industrial enterprise at the time. The micro-historical case study focused on the actors, their practices and guiding ideas, as well as the reception and historical significance of the self-management of Süßmuth glassworks. On four levels of analysis (production, products, management, labor relations), the developments at Süßmuth glassworks before, during, and after self-management are examined and compared asymmetrically with the conditions in eight other companies in the West German mouth glass industry. In this way, the work made an empirical contribution to the historicization of self-management as a form of collective economic activity and to the scarcely researched history of the industry, as well as an actor-centered contribution to contemporary historical research on economic structural change, changes in the world of work, and changes in social debates over forms of democratic participation in the last third of the 20th century. The Süßmuth case can thus be read as a trace of the history of the grassroots democratic awakening in the world of work around „1968“ to which the view in historical scholarship – not least due to the decline of the labor-intensive „traditional industries“ –  is often obscured.