The German Mittelstand: A 500-Year-Old Family Firm's Journey from Guild to Global
This essay traces the history of the German Mittelstand through the stories of two family firms: Gebrüder Thonet, the inventor of the bentwood chair, and The Coatinc Company, a Siegerland ironworks now in its 17th generation. It explores how medieval guilds evolved into today's hidden champions, the impact of industrialization and war, and the enduring values of craftsmanship and community that define these businesses.
The same town, the same factory, the same people—just a different name.
- lz400
re: the crisis of the Mittelstand in competing VS China, I'm reminded of this tweet. It's a fictitious illustrative case not a serious study but I think it describes some of the root challenges of western industrial culture when it comes to competing against China
- jonstewart
> Advancing the precedent set by Alfred, generations of Krupps would continue to develop the region through various private and public works, for almost a century into the 1920s.
>
> With their basic needs addressed and the workforce inculcated with the “Kruppianer spirit,” the firm crossed the fifth ring. They forged an empire that, by the late 1950s,
<insert Goose meme> “What did Krupp make in the 1930s?”
This was kind of an interesting article but could have been a great deal shorter and wasn’t particularly insightful.
- keybored
Reads like capitalist romanticization to me.
The point about concentric circles (of care) is true e.g. for workers. If you have ownership. Not corporate-speak ownership like you feel like you are invested in outcomes but real, legal ownership.
Maybe these are capitalist cooperative enterprises. Then you really have concentric circles.
- camillomiller
I was enjoying this until this signature sentence by Claude:
>>Slowly but surely, it did, once again becoming a world-renowned brand, now separate from that of Thonet. The same town, the same factory, the same people—just a different name
The moment I see this, the piece loses all of its credibility. I cannot take any of the factual informations I was enjoying as implicitly correct now, I just can’t.
Authors should edit LLM help in a much stricter way.
As a writer, LLMs should only be research helpers and used to check for typos and syntax mistakes.
Authors, please, do better
- gyulai
the article was a bit long for me to read, but when i hear "mittelstand", i think "inherited wealth", regulatory capture leading to gatekeepting of access to the trades and crafts, and employees that are getting paid less than they would in larger industries in exchange for lofty blah blah about family friendliness (sitting in a weird contrast with crazy levels of bean counting when it comes to, e.g., flexible working time and vacation entitlements).