Daniel Trabalski's monograph Weg vom Fenster, which appeared as supplement volume 258 of the Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, represents his dissertation in modern history—under the supervision of Professor Constantin Goschler at Ruhr University Bochum, which has been turned into a book. The author profitably uses his experiences and insights as a curator and research associate with the Documentation and Research Centre of the Social Insurance Institutions in Bochum for the historical analyses provided by Staying Away from the Window. The Silicosis of the Ruhr Miners between Scientific Discovery, Operational Regulation, and Social Amnesia in the Federal Republic of Germany, as the book's title could be translated into English. As the author relates in both his Acknowledgements and Introduction chapter of the book, the research topic was partially motivated by his family's life experiences and through growing up in the West German Ruhr region, as it went through transformative industrial and energy transitions during the past half century. The book aims at exploring socially visible yet still under-reflected labor phenomena in the scholarly literature: “In the collective memory of old mining regions, such as the Ruhr region, silicosis is still very much present. It was only a few decades ago that former miners, who were diagnosed as ‘ruined’ by social security officers—that is, former miners who were declared disabled by these clerks, could only continue taking part in social life by leaning in large numbers on their own home windowsills, until they literally stayed, at some point, ‘away from their window’” (9; author's translation).
Trabalski's book is organized into five content chapters when examining the marginalization of silicosis in Ruhr miners both in public awareness as well as in scholarly discourse: “The physical drama of this lung disease seems to have taken place mainly in the quiet of the mines and the colliery towns. How could the deadliest occupational disease in history rage for years in the centre of a key industry of the Federal Republic's ‘economic miracle’ [Wirtschaftswunder], without leading to any prominent eulogy conceptualising the high rates of human suffering, which would reverberate until our own times?” (9; author's translation). Trabalski follows three analytic perspectives in the book, viz. addressing, firstly, the epistemic question of how new knowledge about silicosis came to circulate in public discourses and social communities during the early Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). It thereby examines the changing representations of expert and mining groups that were particularly relevant for this work from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s. Secondly, the issue is raised whether the conditions under which silicosis knowledge arose were tied to the mining processes and to the ongoing company routines. The FRG's welfare state's laws and policies created the normative framework under which insurance policies could function. The specific modalities of their day-to-day implementation were transferred to individual organizations and stakeholders, especially the social insurance providers, who by themselves held intrinsic economic, labor-related, and power interests. Thirdly, the author focuses also on the very motivations, which the miners displayed as autonomous subjects, while they were threatened and personally affected by the acute dangers and long-term effects of silicosis (24–25). These temporal challenges have become ever clearer in their medical, social, and economic dimensions, through the consideration of multiple biographical cases and family settings.
In the first content chapter (26–81), Trabalski addresses the epistemic conditions regarding the scientific identification of the etiological causes and pathophysiological disease processes of silicosis (“Staublunge”) since the latter part of the Second World War. At the same time, the chapter delves into the conditions of the social amnesia (“soziales Vergessen”) in the FRG throughout the late 1940s and 1950s (28), yet the causes of which are not fully worked out. The Federal Law on the Reconstruction of the Self-Administration of the Social Insurance Corporations was inaugurated on February 22nd, 1951, and it ignited growing interest in occupational diseases as well as in silicosis effects. The following chapter (82–141) examines the hierarchies and reciprocal relationships between the generation of knowledge in the professional association's research institute – as it leaned toward the interests of corporate owners and entrepreneurs, and the social miners' and mining employee's union initiatives. The miners' associations' public health programs “from below” reflected forms of knowledge transfer between experts, occupational therapists, public health activists, and union leaders vis-à-vis mining administrators and management authorities.
Company- and colliery-based prevention programs and their practical implications are taken on in the next chapter (142–184). It focuses on the commercial regulations of the mining authorities that were often far removed from miners' and colliery workers' daily work practices (e.g., masks that compromised breathing, respirators that were too big to fit into the mining pit, long-term stays in natural brine rooms that took away so much time from miners, that they could hardly see their families anymore, etc.). The comprehensively maintained statistics regarding local dust pollution often remained mere snapshots of data. Instead, specific practical backgrounds from the underground hard-rock mines tended to transcend the rigid managerial regulations and programs. Ultimately, there emerged a challenging divide between the medical and administrative ideals of technical dust neutralisation and medical silicosis prevention, as it was propagated in lecture events and occupational safety exhibitions.
The author's final content chapter reviews medical and insurance assessment practices regarding miners' compensation claims, which are compared with their subjective and personal experiences of sickness, death, and dying after years and decades of struggles with employers, insurance institutions, as well as health care providers (185–224). This is a chapter that would have definitely benefited from placing the FRG situation into a broader pan-German context—while a comparison with the silicosis situation in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) remains limited to a few pages of the whole book, despite Cold War context's extending to miner organizations and union relations in both Germanies (220–222). Also, the situation in Austria and Switzerland is not really mentioned in this book (apart from one reference on page 36). Unfortunately, the international history of medicine literature on the broader topic of silicosis and mining-related diseases is surprisingly absent from the very short bibliography (236–241).
Taken together, Trabalski addresses an important social history topic of West Germany's post-war history, with long-lasting medical and health-care implications. The strengths of this detailed case study lie in the examination of extensive archival sources related to the Documentation and Research Centre of the Social Insurance Institutions in Bochum. Yet its major weakness is the almost complete absence of findings from the specialized medical history literature on international matters of silicosis, occupational medicine, and the development of sanatoria in the fledgling FRG. Despite such shortcomings, however, the book is a valuable contribution to the history of industrial diseases and the emergence of the public health care system in the FRG during the post-war period.
