Poems in Steel: National Socialism and the Politics of Inventing from Weimar to Bonn

The role of National Socialism in the development of German society remains a central question of historical inquiry. This study presents original answers by examining the politics of inventing, a crucial but long ignored problem at the intersection of the history of technology, legal, political, and business history. The analysis of conflicts over the rights of inventors and the meaning of inventing from the 1920s to the 1950s reveals a deep chasm, reaching back to the late nineteenth century, between the forces of capital and big business on one hand and the exponents of intellectual capital - inventors, engineers, industrial scientists - on the other.

Kees Gispen is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of New Profession, Old Order: Engineers in German Society, 1815-1914 (1989) and many articles on the relationship between technology and society on modern Germany.