4 See Clemens Brentano, Gockel, Hinkel, und Gackeleia (Frankfurt: S. Schmerber, 1838).
CHAPTER 8. Borsig
We’ve already experienced quite a lot of Berlin: we’ve learned about the markets and street trade, about traffic, about the old Berlin schools, about the uncanny Berlin of a century ago, about the Berliner dialect, even a bit about the construction history of Berlin, not to mention our grand toy tour.1 However, we have conspicuously avoided touching upon the one thing that has allowed Berlin to become a city of three million inhabitants — of which we are but a few — and it’s perhaps to this that we owe our knowing one another as Berliners. This thing is big industry and wholesale trade. Today we won’t talk about trade, I’ll be showing you an industry instead, just one single company, to be exact, in which you’ll find one thousandth of Berlin’s three million inhabitants. It’s actually even more than that: the workforce at Borsig, which I will tell you about today, is 3,900 strong, plus 1,000 clerks, which leaves you with an operation that in good times employs 5,000 people.
What is Borsig? Many of you have heard the name. And you probably know that Borsig is a machine works. From your Sunday excursions many of you know where it’s located. When you head out of Berlin on the street toward Oranienburg and Velten, you pass through Tegel where it’s already in plain sight. On your class trips to Tegel, your teacher has surely shown you the villa belonging to the Humboldt family. I mean the two brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, who sit atop the columns in front of the university, as if they still haven’t graduated or they’re playing hooky.2 One of these two Humboldts will appear again shortly, in exactly seventeen minutes. Then there’s the prison in Tegel, of which you can see more from the outside than you usually can with prisons; a great number of cell windows face the street. But it seems they’re so high that the poor inmates cannot see out. Then walk a few more minutes down the street toward Oranienburg and you’re at Borsig. The main gate opens onto a hall, which, like all other Borsig buildings, is constructed of red brick. In this hall there’s already something quite startling: a row of posts or stands covered from left to right and top to bottom with numbers, and next to each number a name, and under each name a little slot. Many of these slots have cards peeking out of them, which say, for instance, that employee no. 698 or no. 82 or no. 1014 is currently not at the factory. Each person, upon arrival, must take his card from his slot and stamp it with the automatic time clock, and then, usually after eight hours, have it stamped again when he leaves. Ultimately he gets paid according to the number of hours indicated on this control card.
Walking through the gate, the first thing that would strike you would probably be how difficult it is to find your way around, how foreign the place feels, how someone that doesn’t work at the factory has no business being here at all. What are we supposed to make of these more than twenty halls and workshops, sheds and chimneys, randomly connected not so much by streets as by rails? The trains drive right into the factory. The boilers, the ship engines, the steam turbines, the ovens, the chemical contraptions, and the countless other products manufactured here are loaded right on the premises. But they’re loaded not only onto freight trains. These large grounds are bordered on the other side, opposite the entrance, by Lake Tegel. From here, the barges, laden with machines ordered from Borsig by overseas customers, begin their slow journey along the Havel and the Elbe until they reach Hamburg, where their cargo is loaded onto ships. The second thing that strikes you is a tower. Twelve stories high and built from beautiful glass bricks, its sixty-five meters made it the tallest structure in Berlin when it was built back in 1923. And by the way, it’s still not completely finished, as there’s always something more urgent to spend money on at the factory.
Let’s say someone asks you which part of the factory grounds you would like to see, the hall where they make airlift pumps, perhaps, or tempering devices with agitators, or coil-tube boilers, or low-pressure rotators with high-pressure leveraging? You’d stand there with your mouth agape and understand what it is to know German. You could easily realize that you’ve never in your life heard at least three quarters of the most important words that are used here, year in and year out, from early morning to late at night, and that you can’t even guess at the meaning of some, even if you should recognize a couple of the easier ones and know, for instance, what a lathe is, or a milling machine. However, other children, some even younger than you, know all about it, at least those who are apprenticing at Borsig. For up on the fifth floor of one of these factory buildings — I took an elevator up there, a strange feeling, I must say, because it’s usually only used to carry chains, machine parts, and other such things — there’s a training department where almost 300 apprentices, for the most part children of men who have been employed at the plant for some time, are molded into future workers. They have 100 machine tools up there to help them learn. The company is proud of this department, because it began as a program to hire apprentices not merely on a case-by-case basis when they needed new employees, but instead to systematically train them from the outset. In addition to the apprentice workshop, there’s a factory school with classrooms, teachers, a cinema, and proper theoretical training that the youngsters must complete over four years.
But let us not dally any longer with the particular names of machines or the many more I’d like to tell you about; instead let’s proceed into one of these halls. Assume we are lucky enough to be there when Borsig is busy building locomotives. Then we could see the various departments, but let’s only concern ourselves with the first and the last. And sure enough, we’re in luck. Just now Borsig is building seventy locomotives for Serbia, to settle war reparations. The first station is the boiler shop. Let’s go in. Every year around 600 locomotive boilers are forged here. The noise that greets us sounds like the 600 are being forged right now and all at once. Forty to fifty people, not more, might be at work in this giant hall. And since it’s over 100 meters long, the individual naturally disappears. But that’s the remarkable thing: the noise is deafening yet you barely see anyone. At first, until you’re accustomed to being here, you move with caution, step by step. Because not only are there rail tracks everywhere below, but there are even more overhead, where large cranes, fixed on wheels, roll from one end of the hall to the other hauling loads, ironware, boiler parts, and wheel halves, since large wheels are always manufactured in halves and then welded together afterwards. You never know when one of these graceful gems might swing back and forth above your head. The boilers are riveted using a so-called hydraulic riveter, a type of pump, with pistons under extremely high pressure. One man alone operates this machine, riveting together parts under 2,000 hundredweights of pressure. But don’t think the Borsig manufacturing process begins here. No, the individual parts that are forged to make this boiler are manufactured in a separate shop, located in a different hall, the so-called hammer works, housing twelve forging furnaces and eighteen steam hammers, seven hydraulic presses and whatever else is used to process raw iron into the desired form. Of course Borsig itself does not own the iron ore from which this crude iron is extracted; it is bought in Germany or Scandinavia. But from then on, everything up to the finished product, the locomotive, is handled in-house. The raw iron is not extracted from the ore here, but rather in Borsig’s factories on the Polish border in Upper Silesia. Such a system, where everything from raw materials to the finished goods is produced by a single firm, is called vertical integration. One imagines the iron lying in the farthest depths of the Earth and then the production process rising higher and higher, refining itself more and more, until it culminates in the finished product, in this case the locomotive.