This wonderful new biography of Werner [von] Siemens, published in time to mark the bicentenary of his birth, provides a detailed and illuminating depiction of a towering figure in nineteenth-century German society. Unlike a number of earlier biographies, Johannes Bähr's account is no mere celebration of Siemens's many and varied achievements as an inventor, entrepreneur, and patriot. It is a comprehensive and balanced reevaluation of a life thoroughly enmeshed in the social and political twists and turns of the age, from the development of telegraphic communication to the emergence of organized liberalism and the rise of German industrial power.
As Bähr explains in his introduction, a “national commemorative culture” (9) crystallized around Werner Siemens immediately after his death in 1892. Eager not to abandon his image and legacy to the whims of posterity, the “Father of Electrical Engineering” had already set the terms of his public representation in the memoirs he published toward the end of his life. Lebenserinnerungen (1892) foregrounded the thirst for scientific knowledge that had led this son of an educated but impoverished tenant farmer (Gutspächter) from Hanover to seek out an education in the Prussian army, and then to apply the knowledge he gained there to revolutionizing the fields of telegraphy and electrical engineering. The earliest biographies similarly emphasized Siemens's achievements as an inventor and engineer, with the focus later shifting to his success as a self-made man and international entrepreneur.
Bähr, by contrast, sets out to retrace Werner Siemens's life “in all its facets and without idealization” (9), and he does so with subtlety and to great effect. Drawing upon the existing literature on Siemens's business ventures, as well as on a wealth of extant correspondence between him and his many familial, social, and professional contacts, the author revisits the different narratives that have come to frame his persona, and resituates the man firmly within the proper historical context. Indeed, given Werner Siemens's enduring reputation and that of his eponymous (now global) firm, readers will no doubt be familiar with individual aspects of his multifaceted and prolific career. In recounting them, however, Bähr tactfully seeks to separate myth from reality, tracing the various factors that promoted and hindered his success.
We thus discover the ambition and precarity that led the young Prussian lieutenant, based in Berlin during the 1840s, to try his hand at a number of inventions, until he eventually developed a new telegraph apparatus that provided the basis for a new business—the firm of Siemens & Halske, established in 1847. But we are also introduced to the many figures from different walks of life who helped him along the way, from his brother-in-law, the chemistry professor Carl Himly, to the young physicist Hermann Helmholtz, the clockmaker Ferdinand Leonhardt, and a wealthy cousin, Johann Georg Siemens. Bähr also relativizes the company's prospects of success in its early years. Much of Siemens's early business was generated by his connections in the Prussian state telegraph administration, and he struggled to gain a foothold in other, more competitive markets such as France and Britain.
Throughout the book, the author places great emphasis on the close relationship between Werner and his siblings and on their role in the development of his business. This is perhaps his most original—and a very welcome—contribution to the literature. In this respect, the biography also neatly complements the recent, well-researched biography of his younger brother Carl by Martin Lutz (Carl von Siemens, 1829–1906: Ein Leben zwischen Familie und Weltfirma [2013]). During the 1850s, Carl moved to St. Petersburg to coordinate the firm's construction of a telegraph network across the Russian Empire. Another brother, Wilhelm, was based in Britain and gained access to the increasingly global market in communications technologies that developed in the 1860s. Wilhelm—later Sir William—headed the London branch that became Siemens Brothers, with which Werner undertook a number of major ventures, in particular the laying of the Indo-European telegraph line connecting London and Calcutta in 1870. The reader is presented not only with the triumphs but also the trials and tribulations that accompanied this fraternal collaboration. From the diplomatic complications of the company's contracts to build telegraph lines during the Crimean War (1853–1856), through the debacles of Siemens's early attempts at laying submarine cables, to his struggle to compete with major new Anglo-American cable corporations, it becomes clear just how closely connected the technical, political, and economic facets of this new field of business were.
The final chapters of the book trace the role that Siemens played in the development of the electrical industry, which came to reflect Germany's growing industrial power in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. During this period, new techniques in the generation and distribution of electricity were derived from Werner's dynamo, which he had developed in the 1860s. A new field of business thereby emerged—one in which Siemens & Halske was rivalled, and eventually superseded, by Emil Rathenau's Allgemeine Electricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). Bähr investigates the competition between the two firms, revealing the obstacles that resulted from Werner's stubborn refusal to modernize the financing and management of his enterprise. Through this example, we are given clear insight into the generational nature of business practices, as well as the clash of ideologies and strategies that accompanied this transformation of the German economy.
The narrative of Siemens's life is thus inevitably and inextricably tied to the development of his firm. But the account is also punctuated by sections in which the author tentatively seeks to illuminate the nature of the man's character, as well as the previously neglected domain of his private life. Bähr highlights the importance that Siemens placed on family, his deep sorrow upon the death of his wife Mathilde in 1865, and his concern for the establishment of an entrepreneurial dynasty “à la Rothschild” (253), which caused disagreements with his brothers Carl and Wilhelm.
The author is careful not to attribute too clear a political stance to Werner Siemens. As he points out, Werner played an active role in founding the liberal Fortschrittspartei in 1861, but was soon won over to the conservative policies pursued by Otto von Bismarck. Using Siemens's letters and various encounters, the author explores the mentality of the upper middle class during the period—the widespread unease regarding the rise of socialism, the occasional display of antisemitism, as well as the signs of the much-debated “feudalization” of the bourgeoisie—for which Siemens's ennoblement in 1888 appears at first blush to provide further evidence. Yet, Bähr paints a subtle, complex picture of this particular bourgeois industrialist. Siemens's interests were always determined by multiple factors. For instance, he placed considerably more value on his membership in the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften than on the title of nobility, which, it seems, he would have gladly turned down. This latter example also demonstrates, moreover, the care that Siemens took to project his own image as a man of science—a fact confirmed by his cultivation of connections within the academic establishment, as well as with his friends Hermann Helmholtz and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, and by his efforts to establish the Physikalish-Technische Reichsanstalt in 1887.
This biography thus fruitfully engages with the wide range of events, subjects, and developments in which Werner Siemens was involved, and should therefore be of interest to historians of modern Germany, science, technology, and business. The text is written in a clear and elegant style, and is supplemented with a number of photos and facsimiles, which make for thoroughly enjoyable reading. Through this exemplary investigation into the life of a central figure in the development of German industry, Bähr reveals the connections between society, scientific culture, business, and politics during an agitated phase in German history.
