In 1914, after trying for almost a century, German engineers had achieved only modest gains in their pursuit of professional standing. In fact, as a group the engineers probably were further from their goal on the eve of World War I than they had been thirty or forty years earlier. In the throes of a deep crisis, the profession was wracked by internal conflict, fragmented into numerous subspecialties and class positions, separated by wide differences in formal education, and locked in bitter combat with industrial employers, social reformers, and the incumbents of the civil-service bureaucracy. In addition, engineers suffered from a debilitating oversupply, and their various projects for legal reform, creation of new career opportunities, and restriction of access to the profession were getting nowhere. The frustrations attendant upon this state of affairs, which carried over into the Weimar Republic, go a long way toward explaining the Utopian politics and the double-edged hostility for Germany's established elites and the proletarian left that the overwhelmingly middle-class engineering profession developed.

The massive discontent of the middle classes after World War I was arguably the single most important problem of German society between 1918 and 1933. Historians continue to debate whether this disaffection and the political crisis it produced can ultimately be explained only with reference to a long history of German exceptionalism and the survival of preindustrial traditions or whether it should be accounted for primarily in terms of industrial capitalism.