Letters to America Letters to AmericaIn 1936 I had a glimpse of history in the making. I had to visit the camera factory at Wangen, Stuttgart to find the solution to a problem concerning a product they had designed. That part of the assignment was straightforward and after a stay of five days I was able to return and put matters right. It was the atmosphere of the town and factory that I found so interesting and disturbing, although the true meaning of what I saw and experienced did not fully occur to my mind, or perhaps I did not want to realise it. Hitler was firmly in Germany, but I was tolerant and amused by what I saw whereas I should have been very disturbed. The train taking me up the valley of the Rhine was a great experience, but at Cologne the Brown Shirts had combed the train with their collecting boxes, ostensibly for the unemployed although I expect it went to the Party machine. I was amused by the behaviour of one young man being seen off on a journey by an older man, perhaps his father. Before boarding the train he stood stiffly to attention and his heels banged together. Very amused I was.
After a leisurely breakfast on my first morning I took the tram to Wangen, arriving about 10. It was the lunch break that gave me my first real insight into the difference between the new world I was in and the one back in Harrow. In the first place the break was only 30 minutes and not 60, and 30 meant 30 whereas 60 was often longer. The serving of the meal was prompt because there was no choice to slow things down; everyone had the same food and all sat down in the same room. On one wall of the dining room was a huge full-size picture of Adolf Hitler. That first lunch break brought home to me the true difference in the German to any other I knew of. Once over the shock I realised the advantages of their way of working and began to note other differences. One of these, and probably the most profound, was the way in which the men and women in the factory carried out their tasks, and the clearest example was the assembly of the cameras. In any English workshop I had experienced I knew that a man's work bench was an expression of himself. Whatever tools he had lay about on the bench or in a rack at the rear, and the great majority had no connection with the particular job he had to carry out at that particular time. He took the camera from a tray of incomplete assemblies, did what he had to do and put it into another tray. The tidiness or otherwise of his bench was of little concern to others, and odd things like his lunch or a thermos flask would not be out of place. His German counterpart was allowed nothing at his workplace but the exact tools he required and these he was expected to replace after use in precisely the same place. All was order and simplicity and the cameras passed steadily down the assembly bench from hand to hand. Nobody spoke and there was a cathedral silence. I was very impressed and wished fervently to introduce at least some of the ideas and conditions I saw. But back in England I soon realised how impossible it would be. Our whole national character and training was against any such transplants.
I did learn how the labour was trained. Each year the firm took on 100 boys and trained them for two years, at the end of which they selected as many as they required and sacked the rest.
