How does the job impact the individual, and through what? You know, this question was effectively resolved at one time, centuries ago. It happened in the guilds; their members’ entire lives, down to the most private matters, were consciously subordinated to the necessities and forms of the work process. Since the last remnants of the guild system disappeared in the nineteenth century, these questions, which are of such importance to the life of every individual, were disregarded for a long time. Lately that has changed, because of the decisive advances made in the science of work, newly subjecting the unilluminated, unscrutinized course of everyday work life to the control of human cultural will. There have been three advancements in the science of work: the first in sociology, in the form of research into the social structure of the professions; the second in psychology, in the form of research into the so-called work environment; and finally, the new American movement of behaviorism. This last, disconcerting concept demands explanation. “To behave”3 means sich verhalten. The foremost proponent of this new science of Sichverhalten,4 Watson — some of whose works have been translated and published by Deutscher Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart — declares that people’s habitual behavior is the foundation upon which all of anthropology rests.5 It is clear why this approach places the science of work and jobs on a new, much broader basis. In what other environment are habits formed more easily, where else are they more ingrained, where do they include whole groups more intensely, than in the workplace? This behaviorism inherently contrasts with the psychology of the individual, which attempts to understand the behavior of the individual essentially through his nature. To the contrary, nature is important to behaviorism only in its malleability. Behaviorism is interested in the profoundly transformative, profoundly invasive effects of the work process on character.
We have just received a book that is a significant and gratifying indication that the science of business is recognized everywhere. It is German Occupational Studies, published by the Bibliographic Institute in Leipzig.6 You can get an idea of the scope of the work, on which a number of specialists collaborated, when you consider that it surveys all German jobs in their incalculable specializations. Its vibrancy can best be illustrated with an example. I will not pick one out at random. What the newest efforts in this field have in common is that they capture the attitude represented in each job in terms of gesture, affinity, and ability, independent of and detached from the material of work. Thus, in a way, they put the example to the test by describing personality types, for which certain jobs would have to be invented if they did not yet exist. Thus I present to you, from German Occupational Studies, the description of a cobbler who is actually a journalist type. The author of the following pages is Peter Suhrkamp.
The particular nature of the journalistic person can be discovered in places where this person can still live without contact with newspapers. One can still find such people today in villages where no newspapers are published. In my hometown there was a shoemaker; but the last thing one could ask from him was that he make shoes. He could not stay in his workshop. Instead, he was on the go and worked wherever an opportunity beckoned, whatever it might be. He cleaned and repaired clocks. And when one of the cattle or a child was sick on a farm, he turned up. If a threshing machine was out of order at a farm, there he was. You didn’t go fetch him (because no one counted on him) but he was everywhere where anything happened, where “something was going on,” as if he could sense it. He came as if by coincidence, stood around for a while and chatted, and then he got to work. And if help was needed with anything, there was nothing that he could not fix. Things he could have no knowledge of — the mowing machines, for example, were then completely new — he adjusted; after a short time looking at a machine, he would have a better understanding of it than the blacksmith. When I saw him for the last time, just before the war, an airplane flew over the village. He shook his head and said, “That thing is not right. Something’s not right with the motor, anyone can see that.” He tried to explain to me then that there are birds that can’t fly, that fly wrong, sparrows, for example. In the village he was considered a drinker, although he was never drunk, because one could meet him in any one of the village’s three pubs; one could find him there late at night disputing with the teacher or with a traveler. I will never forget one rainy day when we waited together, pressed into a haystack, for the weather to clear up, and he developed for me, the young boy, his theory of starry space; it was as beautiful as a fairy tale.
It was said that he visited the pastor and argued with him. His reputation was not good. He had his celebratory days, certainly! If he was successful at doing something the experts had failed to do (and, by the way, he never accepted payment for his work, and so lived, as one can imagine, in poverty), then he made a celebration of it and as many people as possible had to participate; he sat in a circle then and told stories tirelessly. But in general he was not respected. He was described to us children as a wastrel. (Our parents were people with Bismarck’s morals.) But when the cobbler came, people were friendly; they were afraid of him because of his witty, barbed remarks and because of the little ditties he made up about the villagers, which persisted among the people as if they were carved in stone. On the evening of an election day, he surprised the village with a caricature of Friedrich Naumann; it was stretched over a wooden box, and in the box a carbide lamp burned.7 This poster was the first illuminated advertisement to appear in a village (it was not long after 1900).
This cobbler was the finest person and the cleverest mind in the village — although he would never be influential, as he could never fill a certain spot in the village — and he was the poorest and therefore weakest man in the village. But that was all due to himself. When he was alone, he did not live. Inside, in his workshop, he was full of agitation and quite incapable; one had to stay with him so that he would finish anything at all. Shoes! Were shoes anything worthy of work! And did objects even deserve the labor of making them! He had to be where things were happening, even if the events were negligible! He had to have faces and conversations around him! If he ever wrote anything down, then it was surely not a chronicle of the place but rather his views on machines and people, preferably observations about the great events of the time — which for the most part only penetrated the village as rumors — stories, anecdotes, and projects (such as how the meadows in the Hunte valley should be irrigated). He was a journalist without a newspaper. All that was missing were newspapers: and then this person would have begun to write and become great. And all that was missing was a certain tendency toward the practical in order for the newspaper to have emerged.8
This description epitomizes the modern attempts to illustrate the attitude, the language of gestures, the lifestyle, the views of a professional class in depth, and not merely on the surface by describing the object; rather it is done, either, as with this cobbler-journalist, without connection to the actual object (in this case the newspaper), or — and this will be the rule here — by presenting a very precise examination of all the elements that make up daily professional life. In Suhrkamp’s characterization of a journalist, one can observe exactly how he starts from an assumption at one point about the material of work — that is, the word — and at another point about the “feeling for work”—namely the will to get published — then again about the workplace — namely the editorial office or the hustle and bustle of an external news agency — or about the perception of one’s standing in society — the journalist as the expression of public opinion. Again and again it all depends on describing the constitutive, formative, restructuring influence of these external circumstances on the existence of the members of a profession, and with such clarity that what we previously described as the paramount task of career counseling is achieved: for the biologically meaningful unity of the private person with the professional person to emerge in the member of or aspirant to a profession.