Review by Choice Review
In this scholarly study, the first focused on the German automobile industry, Bellon has made extensive use of governmental archives, the Daimler-Benz records, and standard monographs to analyze work, workers, and the labor movement in Germany. This book, a "history from below," offers an excellent example of the fusion of social history and national politics. Bellon has explored this auto company, which functioned through peace, wars, and revolution, to become part of the SS system of labor exploitation. Bellon has described the men and women who worked in Daimler as well as how they worked, struggled, and lived. The tension between the company as part of the military industrial complex, on the one hand, and its social being and the political activity of labor on the other forms the analytical framework for this study. Bellon has very carefully revealed the management-labor relationship, which can be characterized as an increasingly instrumental attitude toward the Daimler workers, ending almost logically in the brutal acts perpetrated against Jewish slaves during WW II. An excellent book for college libraries. -D. J. Dietrich, Boston College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
