{"id":497,"date":"2024-09-16T14:06:05","date_gmt":"2024-09-16T12:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcdss-recette.mazedia.fr\/widerstand-der-weber\/"},"modified":"2025-06-27T16:49:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T14:49:06","slug":"widerstand-der-weber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/widerstand-der-weber\/","title":{"rendered":"Silesian Weavers\u2019 Uprising 1844: Resistance to Capitalist Exploitation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Beatrix Hoffmann-Ihde
BCDSS Exhibition Curator <\/h4>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Textile production has repeatedly been the driving force behind important technological, social, and, therefore, economic and political upheavals. The commissioning of the first spinning machine, Spinning Jenny, is considered the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. However, resistance to exploitation in the context of textile production, which is still characterized by asymmetrical dependency relationships today, also sparked social and even political upheavals, as the example of the Silesian Weavers’ Revolt of 1844 shows.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the end of the Middle Ages, so-called weavers\u2019 revolts have occurred in Europe again and again. They were initially directed against specific grievances in the area of \u200b\u200btextile production. As textile production became more capitalized, these weavers\u2019 revolts were caused by increased exploitation, including heavy workloads and poor payment. These resulted from the displacement of hand-made textile production by a publishing system characterized by strong asymmetrical dependency. Publishers controlled access to raw materials and determined the product range and prices for production. The producers were excluded from the profitable part of the sale because the publishers claimed it for themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Due to the colonial subjugation of non-European regions and the exploitation of their raw materials and the populations living there, cheaply produced textiles increasingly flooded the market. For Central European weavers, this led to a continuous decline in their wages. This wage dumping was further increased by the advancing industrialization of European textile production. In the newly built factories, fabrics and cloths were produced in much larger quantities, more cost-effectively, and of higher quality than on the local handlooms of the weavers dependent on the publishing industry. A surplus of labor and a lack of food due to a rapid increase in population led to a dramatic impoverishment of the rural population in some regions, such as Silesia. In the Silesian Eulengebirge, for example, the rural population had long been dependent on supplementing their meager income from agricultural production through home weaving. Lower wages for this work, therefore, represented an acute threat to their existence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Weavers\u2019 Protest in Peterswaldau and the Surrounding Area (1844)<\/strong> <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In June 1844, a protest march of cotton weavers from Peterswaldau and surrounding towns in the mountains called \u201cEulengebirge,\u201d located in what is now the Czech-Polish border area, formed to march in front of the Zwanziger brothers\u2019 factory owner\u2019s villa. There, they protested against another cut in the pay for their work as weavers. Their anger was mainly directed at the Zwanziger brothers because, as nouveau riche manufacturers, they were once weavers themselves and, therefore, climbers from their own ranks. The factory owners forcibly dispersed the protesters and handed one of the weavers over to the local police.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following day, almost all weavers in the area formed a protest march. They demanded higher wages for their work and the release of their colleague from police custody. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next day, the Prussian military intervened and reacted with disproportionate severity. The result was 11 dead people and many injured.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although state censorship measures subsequently attempted to silence the protest and the increasing impoverishment of the working population, the Silesian weavers\u2019 resistance to their exploitation received enormous media coverage. The events were also immediately received artistically by socially critical artists: Heinrich Heine wrote the poem \u201cThe Silesian Weavers\u201d in the same year and Carl Wilhelm H\u00fcbner painted the first two versions of \u201cThe Silesian Weavers\u201d (fig. 1). Karl Marx also dealt with the protest of the Silesian weavers in one of his first texts for the journal \u201cVorw\u00e4rts: Pariser deutsche Monatsschrift,\u201d founded in 1844. From this uprising, he concluded that there was a German workers\u2019 movement (Hodenberg 1997). Together with Friedrich Engels, Marx developed his class struggle theory using the example of the Silesian weaver revolt (Schmidt 2016). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fig. 1: \u201eDie schlesischen Weber\u201c, (\u201cThe Silesian Weavers\u201d) Carl Wilhelm H\u00fcbner (1844). LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn (photo: J. Vogel, n. d.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In today\u2019s historiography, the Silesian Weavers\u2019 Revolt of 1844, or at least its critical reception and broad impact, is seen as an important step toward the revolution of 1848, a milestone in the history of German democracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Further Reading<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Hodenberg, Christina von, 1997. Aufstand der Weber. Die Revolte von 1844 und ihr Aufstieg zum Mythos. Bonn: Verlag J. H. Dietz Nachfolger.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hoffrogge, Ralf, 2011. Sozialismus und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland. Von den Anf\u00e4ngen bis 1914. Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schmidt, J\u00fcrgen W., 2016. Neues zur Vorgeschichte des Schlesischen Weberaufstandes 1844. Ein Dokument aus Langenbielau vom Februar 1844. In: Schlesische Geschichtsbl\u00e4tter. Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Regionalgeschichte Schlesiens, Karlstadt (Main). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beatrix Hoffmann-IhdeBCDSS Exhibition Curator  Textile production has repeatedly been the driving force behind important technological, social, and, therefore, economic and political upheavals. The commissioning of the first spinning machine, Spinning Jenny, is considered the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. However, resistance to exploitation in the context of textile production, which is still characterized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"themenfeld":[47,44],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized-en","themenfeld-ariadnes-threads","themenfeld-resistance-resilience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2803,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions\/2803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"themenfeld","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/themenfeld?post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}