The Coal Syndicate within the German Coal Market in 1900

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, German society underwent a rapid transition in its primary energy from wood and other organic materials to coal.Footnote ¹¹ In 1850, the energy composition still relied on wood and other organic items, with coal accounting for only a quarter of overall energy demand. By 1900, however, coal had almost completely replaced wood. With coal accounting for almost 90% of the nation’s energy consumption, this new energy carrier became indispensable for activities in every corner of society: it powered steam engines in factories and farms, fueled railroads and urban transportation, produced electricity and gas, and, most importantly, heated houses in winter.Footnote ¹² For these reasons, the new fossil fuel was frequently portrayed as the new “bread” of the rapidly industrializing society. As historian Franz-Josef Brüggemeier recently stated, the latter half of the nineteenth century was the period of “coal, coal, and coal (Kohle, Kohle, Kohle).”Footnote ¹³

This radical shift to fossil fuels was made possible by the expansion of domestic coal production. By the last third of the nineteenth century, large-scale mining became prevalent across all major coal-producing regions, making the industry one of the largest sectors of the German economy in terms of capital and labor input. Between 1870 and 1900, annual inland coal production quadrupled from 26 million to 109 million tons, making Germany the third-largest coal producer in the world after the United States and Britain. Among the three primary coal production regions of the Ruhr, Upper Silesia, and Saarland within Germany, the Ruhr—the focus of this study—was by far the largest production site. In 1900, the region produced nearly 60 million tons of coal versus 28 million in Upper Silesia and 9 million in Saarland.Footnote ¹⁴ As it accounted for more than half of the national output, the Ruhr coal industry was the symbol of coal producers and, as such, a frequent target of public scrutiny in Imperial Germany.

A defining feature of the Ruhr coal industry was its thorough cartelization. In 1893, almost 100 mining companies in the region established the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate as the joint sales organization. The creation of the cartel was the outcome of nearly two decades of cartelization efforts. During the 1870s and 1880s, the coal sector in the Ruhr experienced perennial price stagnation due to overproduction and excessive competition among the mines. In response, the mining companies sought repeatedly to reduce competition by entering into pricing and production agreements. As these arrangements proved to be too fragile in shifting the terms of trade in favor of the producers, they decided to collectively control not only their production and pricing but also their sales by establishing a syndicate in 1893. The Coal Syndicate was built as a single legal entity managing the sales of almost 90% of the coal produced in the Ruhr and half of the output nationwide, effectively dominating the German coal market for decades. Due to its considerable market power, it faced severe criticism whenever the coal market witnessed disruption, such as during the coal crisis of 1900.

Against the cartelized producers, a wide range of sectors stand on the other side of the market as consumers since coal played an indispensable role in nearly all industries as well as the everyday life of ordinary households. Although we do not have official statistics on the precise distribution of coal in each economic sector in the pre-1914 period, sales data compiled by the Coal Syndicate provide a rough estimate of the proportion of coal consumption by sector. Between 1904 and 1911, the proportion of the Coal Syndicate’s output across different sectors was as follows: mining industries (including the coal mines themselves) accounted for 5–10%; iron, steel, and metal industries 40–45%; railways and shipping 15%; other small and midsized industries 15–20%; and households 10–15%.Footnote ¹⁵ At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of coal produced within Germany was consumed by industries.

Based on these numbers, it might be tempting to suppose that industrial consumers were the sole driver of the public criticism of the Coal Syndicate in 1900, as the previous literature has argued. Did the problem of inflated coal prices indeed become a national concern when the prices rose so as to hit the manufacturing sector? To answer this question, we now have to unpack how the coal shortages and accompanying public responses developed in the years leading up to 1900.

The Early Phase of the Coal Crisis

By 1900, coal prices had already been rising for several years. As the macroeconomy began to pick up from 1895, ending two decades of the Long Depression, coal prices followed a similar trend as industrial demand for coal increased. Figure 1 displays the monthly wholesale prices for four major coal-providing regions in Germany—namely, Essen (Ruhr coal), Breslau (Upper Silesia coal), Saarbrücken (Saarland coal), and Hamburg (imported British coal). These prices span three years before and after 1900, with the prices in January 1897 normalized to 100. The chart shows that in all four regions, prices began to steadily climb from 1897, then witnessed a significant jump in rates varying from 10% to 50% from the end of 1899 to 1900. As evidenced by these price shifts, the surge in coal prices was already in motion during the second half of 1899.Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 1. Monthly wholesale coal prices 1897–1903 in Breslau, Essen, Saarbrücken, and Hamburg (normalized with the prices in January 1897 as 100)

Sources: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt. Vierteljahrshefte zur Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, 7–13 Jahrgänge (Berlin, 1898–1904).

Identifying the exact causes of this surge is a challenging task for contemporary observers and historians alike. Instead, taking a cue from Olivia Nicol, a sociologist of the 2008 financial crisis, one can argue that the sheer complexity of modern economic crises renders them almost incomprehensible, thereby establishing them as a unique subject of academic inquiry. Due to the difficulty of pinpointing their causes at first glance, economic crises allow social scientists and historians to examine how contemporaries collectively attributed responsibility as crises unfolded, a process that Nicol called the “blame game.”Footnote ¹⁷ That said, several causes were already discussed as the coal crisis unfolded in 1900. Internationally, the global demand for coal increased due to the multinational expedition to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Boer Wars in South Africa. Simultaneously, supplies were further curtailed by labor shortages caused by some strikes across several countries. Indeed, Figure 1 confirms that British coal imported through Hamburg recorded the sharpest increase in prices after 1899, signaling pressure from the international market. Domestically, the market imbalance worsened due to an explosive demand for coal caused by the economic boom after 1895, combined with systematic restrictions on production by coal cartels during the same period. Shortages in railway and shipping capacity, lamented across the 1890s by owners of mines, made it also difficult to efficiently distribute coal to meet the growing demand. Furthermore, panic buying by anxious merchants and consumers to secure coal in anticipation of further supply shortages might have pushed prices even higher in the short term in 1900. Thus, the coal prices peaked in 1900 due to a multitude of factors—international and domestic, physical and psychological, and short term and long term.Footnote ¹⁸

The Ruhr coal industry quickly noticed the market strain taking place at the macrolevel affecting its own market. For instance, from March 1899, Glückauf—the weekly trade journal of the German mining industry—warned that the supply of the Ruhr coal industry failed to meet exploding demands, thereafter repeatedly releasing similar warnings in the following months.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, the Syndicate management was aware of the same trend from early 1899. In a report to a general meeting of member mines on March 27, the heads of the sales branch reported that coal demand from industrial sectors had increased so rapidly that the Coal Syndicate struggled to keep up under the current output.Footnote ²⁰ In another report circulated on September 21, the managers described that the output was completely insufficient “to meet the increasing demand in full extent” even though the mines had been producing at full capacity in the first semester of 1899 with a 10% increase from the previous year.Footnote ²¹ By the end of 1899, the managers’ concern grew to the level of describing the undersupply as a “calamity (Überlstand).”Footnote ²² Both the overarching price trend and the accounts from the Ruhr coal producers reflected a considerable imbalance materializing in the coal market by 1899.

As it entered 1900, politicians began to take notice of the tightening coal market, briefly discussing the problem in the Imperial Parliament in February. However, at this point, the issue received only limited attention and was not recognized as an urgent societal problem. Parliamentary debates focused on the miners’ strike and the accompanying coal shortages taking place in the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since the beginning of 1900, major cities in Austria-Hungary had been experiencing serious coal shortages due to a large-scale miners’ strike in Bohemia. In response, German parliamentarians discussed a potential introduction of export restrictions on domestic coal because the German coal market was closely intertwined with the Austro-Hungarian market. Although these debates briefly caught the attention of daily newspapers, they failed to materialize in sustained public awareness over the ongoing issue of coal supply in Germany. Accordingly, criticisms of the Coal Syndicate were also modest, mostly limited to the cartel’s active export policy.Footnote ²³ As Helge Nussbaum summarized in her book on antimonopoly history half a century ago, the polemic concerning the coal crisis and Coal Syndicate was rather temperate in February 1900.Footnote ²⁴

The relative lack of public attention at this phase can be explained by the fact that the shortage was seen not as a threat to ordinary household consumers but rather to coal-consuming manufacturers. As the shortage worsened in the first half of 1900, chambers of commerce, representing the interests of these manufacturers, began to publicly complain about the surge in coal prices. Across the early months of 1900, factory owners across Germany reported devastating conditions they faced due to a sudden price increase in coal.Footnote ²⁵ By the middle of 1900, manufacturers had started to address the issue in a somewhat organized manner. For example, in June, sixty representatives from chambers of commerce in the Rhineland and Westphalia convened in Cologne to discuss the coal shortage. They collectively urged the Ruhr coal industry to take measures against the misfortunes taking place in the coal market.Footnote ²⁶ In the first half of 1900, the coal crisis was primarily understood as a problem for manufacturers.

Discussions within the Coal Syndicate also confirmed the industrial character of the coal crisis in its early stage. In a general meeting of participating companies on April 9, 1900, the sales department reported that “the current coal shortage has made a number of chambers of commerce and interest associations refer to the Coal Syndicate to secure coal necessary for their members.”Footnote ²⁷ The Syndicate managers mentioned the suffering of coal-dependent manufacturers at another general meeting on June 13, this time with a tone somewhat antagonistic to the aforementioned protest by the chambers of commerce. During the meeting, the managers proclaimed that the Coal Syndicate would not officially respond to the call by factory owners to discuss and solve the coal shortage in cooperation with the chambers of commerce.Footnote ²⁸ These discussions inside and outside of the Coal Syndicate demonstrate that the tension within the coal market, which had already become calamitous by the end of 1899, was still perceived as a problem for manufacturers. The shortage was yet to be construed as a risk for the broader population. That, however, happened once daily newspapers began to explicitly report on how the souring prices might make it difficult for countless urban households to secure heating fuel for the coming winter.

Reframing the Coal Shortage as a Public Crisis

Around August 1900, the Coal Syndicate’s management suddenly started to view the nature of public debates surrounding the coal crisis differently. Instead of organized complaints from manufacturers in the preceding months, the management began to recognize a much broader and media-driven panic about the energy supply. In a business report submitted to the general meeting of mine owners on August 16, the heads of the sales branch highlighted mounting popular concerns about the coal crisis. They claimed that consumers were now paying “exorbitantly high prices” to secure coal and, by doing so, contributing to the escalation of price increases.Footnote ²⁹ One month later, the Syndicate managers again acknowledged the intense media coverage of the coal issue, describing the hysteria found in the press as “the scream of the coal crisis (Geschrei über Kohlennoth).”Footnote ³⁰ In addition, they also expressed grave concern on how “in all newspaper articles, the whole responsibility for grievances in the coal markets is attributed” to the Coal Syndicate.Footnote ³¹ By the end of the summer of 1900, the Ruhr coal industry found itself in hot water as the coal shortage was politicized in various media outlets.

In fact, such debates within the Coal Syndicate reflected a broader shift in the way the coal crisis was being handled in the public sphere during this period. Starting in August 1900, the price surge and the shortage of coal began to receive focused and sustained media coverage, reinterpreted in daily newspapers as a nationwide fuel crisis for the general public. I argue that the questions of how and why the press started to report the coal crisis as a matter of general concern are critical. For it was through this mediatized process that the existing undersupply in the coal market was turned into a “perceived crisis.”Footnote ³²

A decisive element within this process was the change in how newspapers weighed the news value of the coal crisis. In the months leading up to August 1900, newspapers—outside of those specializing in economic affairs—barely reported on the coal crisis. On average, each newspaper reported the topic only once a month from April to July.Footnote ³³ Even when they took up the problem, they mostly treated it as niche news in economy and commerce sections that were of interest only to a handful of merchants and factory owners. Starting in mid-August, however, daily newspapers began featuring the coal crisis as top news on their front pages. For instance, the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts and the Catholic Kölnische Volkszeitung, whose coverage of the coal crisis will be discussed in detail later, began publishing articles that treated the crisis in detail for the first time in mid-August. These newspapers started to devote a large portion of the front pages to articles on the coal shortage, warning readers of a national fuel crisis that steadily threatened the interests of the general public.Footnote ³⁴ By highlighting the coal crisis news in a space that captured readers’ attention, daily newspapers started to signal the importance of the issue in the public sphere in mid-August.

Another newspaper went further in bringing the coal crisis to the forefront. Breslau-based conservative Schlesische Zeitung started publishing a regular series of articles on the topic, reporting the matter in detail on a daily basis. As one of the major newspapers in the eastern part of the country, the newspaper initiated a series of articles, entitled “On the Relief of the Coal Crisis (Zur Abhülfe von Kohlennoth),” in mid-August, covering the developments in the coal market almost every day. According to the article published on September 2, the series received a much stronger reaction from its readership than initially expected.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, its consistent and highly informative chain of articles was not just read by its regular readers but also frequently cited by other major newspapers.Footnote ³⁶ Schlesische Zeitung interpreted the enthusiastic reaction to the series as an embodiment of the dispersed interests of countless consumers against a handful of monopolistic producers and merchants.Footnote ³⁷ By late August, daily newspapers were already discussing the potential threat of the coal crisis in an intensive and systematic manner.

The growing attention on the coal crisis was also recorded in media outlets employed as public relations channels by the coal industry, further confirming the changing public attitude toward the coal crisis during this period. The weekly industrial magazine Deutsche Industrie-Zeitung is one such example. Deutsche Industrie-Zeitung revealed how the industrialists recognized and addressed ever-increasing public concerns about coal provision in September because the magazine was controlled by Centralverband deutscher Industrieller (Central Association of German Industrialists), an interest group representing the voices of the coal and other heavy industries.Footnote ³⁸ As briefly mentioned in the previous section, the Deutsche Industrie-Zeitung had already been covering the impacts of coal shortage on manufacturing prior to the summer. Initially, such articles were sidelined to the margins of the magazine, often appearing in a small segment reporting on local industrial news. However, in response to the intensifying debates in daily newspapers after August, the way the magazine handled the coal problem changed in September. Starting on September 13, 1900, the magazine began thematizing the coal crisis in featured articles in four consecutive issues up to October 4.Footnote ³⁹ These articles attempted to shift the focus of the scrutiny away from the Ruhr coal industry toward other parties, such as coal merchants and anxious consumers, holding them responsible for exacerbating the crisis. In reality, these public rebuttals only served to intensify accusations by other newspapers. While this backlash will be discussed in more detail later in this paper, the key point to recognize here is that these articles reveal how the public’s stake in the coal crisis rose during this time when viewed from the perspective of the coal industrialists.

In addition to the Deutsche Industrie-Zeitung, the newsletter Deutsche Volkswirtschaftliche Correspondenz also attests to the importance attached by the Ruhr coal industry to the increasing public salience of the coal price problem. The Deutsche Volkswirtschaftliche Correspondenz, whose editorship had a close relationship with the Ruhr coal industrialists, was a two-page newsletter printed in Berlin and delivered twice a week to major newspaper offices across Germany.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the first half of 1900, the newsletter did not extensively cover the coal crisis. However, it published an article entitled “About the Problem of the Coal Prices” on August 7 and subsequently ran articles concerning the coal problem in every two to three issues throughout August and September. With these articles, the newsletter strove to inform editors of daily newspapers about the efforts made by the Ruhr coal industry to solve the supply bottleneck and to debunk criticism directed against it.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, to the issue published on August 21, the paper attached a supplemental issue titled “The Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate and its Relationships to the General Economic and Social Conditions.” This supplemental article, spanning two full pages, attempted to refute the mounting public criticism that attributed the cause of the crisis to the Coal Syndicate.Footnote ⁴² This newsletter’s message was then disseminated three days later by Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, an Essen-based daily newspaper with strong ties to the Ruhr coal sector.Footnote ⁴³ The newspaper cited the additional issue of the Deutsche Volkswirtschaftliche Correspondenz in favor of the Coal Syndicate to resolve the situation where “the specter of the coal crisis is recently haunting around in the organs of all political tendencies” and “the readers made anxious there find a same melody: the Coal Syndicate in Essen is the only one who is guilty.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The handling of the coal crisis by these media platforms—the weekly magazine, information newsletter, and daily newspaper close to the Ruhr industrialists—further demonstrate that the fuel problem was steadily becoming a serious publicity concern that required an immediate response by the industry through its public relations channels.

The sudden increase in media attention recorded in daily newspapers and the industrial publicity channels from mid-August onwards raises a critical yet previously unanswered question: Why did the coal crisis become the center of public debate at this particular moment? The mere existence of a shortage and price surge in the coal market alone was not enough to turn the situation into a crisis. Instead, the undersupply needed to be collectively perceived and discussed as a crisis. As we have seen, the coal price surge had been taking place at least since early 1899 but did not elicit a strong public response until August 1900. The question of why the ongoing coal shortage suddenly attracted public attention at this particular historical moment is a question to be answered based on empirical evidence.

To comprehend the reasons behind it, we can examine contemporary media observations on the timing of the coal crisis. During the crisis, daily newspapers not only followed the actual development of coal scarcity but also discussed why they began to pay attention to the problem at this specific time. Berliner Zeitung, one of the several major mass newspapers issued in Berlin during the turn of the century, provides an apt example. On September 6, 1900, it explained the turning of the shortage into a crisis for the general public:

Here, the newspaper made it clear that the approaching winter jeopardized the welfare of the entire population. It portrayed the anticipated struggle of poor households in a highly symbolic way, highlighting the injustice of exploitation faced by hard-working families living paycheck to paycheck as they faced a cold winter without adequate heating fuel.

The impact of the coal shortage on urban households becomes further evident by looking at the structure of household expenditure in early twentieth-century Germany. According to one of the earliest national surveys on urban household expenditure in 1907, as summarized in Table 1, heating and lighting expenses accounted for 4–6% of total annual expenditure for lower-income urban households. The energy expenditure even amounted to one-third of yearly rent expenses for lower-class urban families. On top of that, a significant portion of energy expenses was concentrated in the winter months for heating. It is therefore not difficult to imagine the high presence of coal expenses for urban populations during the cold season. In addition to price levels, the availability of coal itself was of critical importance. A lack of coal would have paralyzed vital city infrastructures, such as building heating, public transportation, and the supply of gas and electricity. This heavy reliance of private households on coal was what turned the coal shortage and price surge of 1900 into a public crisis.

Table 1. Annual household expenditures by category in 1907 (in marks)

^a Classes are categorized by amounts of total annual expenditure in marks.

^b Average annual expenditure in marks by expense category within each class.

^c Numbers within parentheses indicate shares of an expense category within annual total expenditure in percentages.

Sources: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Erhebung von Wirtschaftsrechnungen minderbemittelter Familien im Deutschen Reiche (Berlin, 1909), 60–61.

The situation looks even more daunting if we juxtapose increases in coal prices versus wages during the period. As shown in Figure 1, by the summer of 1900, coal prices in the wholesale markets had risen by 20% to 60% since the start of 1897. As these are the prices in the upstream wholesale markets, it can be reasonably assumed that the final prices consumers faced, after passing through layers of resale and retail merchandising, were much higher. In contrast, growth in household incomes between 1897 and 1900 lagged. Average annual wages for workers in industry, transport, and distribution sectors rose by 6% in nominal terms in the same period, from 738 marks in 1897 to 784 marks in 1900. Even when we use 1895 as a reference point, when wages began to pick up thanks to recovering macroeconomic conditions, the picture does not get much different. Workers’ pay increased only by about 18% between 1895 and 1900.Footnote ⁴⁶ Working-class households, therefore, already witnessed a steep rise in energy expenditure in relative terms before the winter of 1900, leading to speculation and fear about what the coming winter months would bring. These figures illustrate the devastating impact that fuel price increases would have had on ordinary household consumers at the turn of the century.Footnote ⁴⁷

While the aforementioned Berliner Zeitung captured the changing nature of the coal problem as a threat to ordinary consumers, another newspaper went one step further in explicitly linking such a shift to the growing reactions from the daily press. In an article published on September 25, Allgemeine Zeitung based in Munich, one of several newspapers read transregionally in Germany around this time, portrayed the sudden media attention on the coal crisis as a natural consequence of the expanding stake of the shortage:

Thus, it was only when the possible shortage of heating fuel in the coming winter threatened the household budgets of ordinary consumers—the primary readers and subscribers of daily newspapers—that the media started to reframe the coal shortage as a perceived public crisis. The desperate manner in which daily newspapers such as Berliner Zeitung and Allgemeine Zeitung described the threats to household consumers were due in part to increasing competition among newspapers. The more sensational their language when warning of fuel shortages, the more likely they were to win the hearts of a wider readership, thus further boosting circulation. In this regard, the press was bringing its own logic and dynamics into the public interpretation of the coal crisis. With this aggravating media atmosphere in mind, we take a closer look at how specific newspapers developed their narratives of critiques against the Coal Syndicate.

Toward the Criticism of the Coal Syndicate

The intensive coverage of the coal crisis issue by news outlets was surprisingly short lived. Although it had begun to intensify in August 1900, peaking in ferocity during September, it gradually subsided after October. Despite this brevity, the media attention provided an excellent opportunity for daily newspapers to blame the Coal Syndicate for the crisis, exposing its years of monopolistic practices to the public. Newspapers with popular political orientations interrogated the legitimacy of the Coal Syndicate, forging and disseminating narratives that attributed the hardship of ordinary households to the fuel cartel. This was the criticism that marked the beginning of the politicization of the Coal Syndicate’s economic power and, more broadly, the market domination by cartels. It paved the way toward parliamentary debates in December 1900 discussing the coal crisis, which in turn inaugurated broader scrutiny against industrial cartels in the next decade. Journalistic muckraking against the Coal Syndicate played a pivotal role in raising the salience of the cartel problem to levels unimaginable a decade earlier, a period when the monopoly of the Coal Syndicate received little public attention within the German society.

The successful politicization of the Coal Syndicate’s monopoly is striking especially because a fuel shortfall anticipated at the end of the summer did not materialize in the winter.Footnote ⁴⁹ Tensions in the coal market began to ease toward the end of the year as a result of a milder winter and a considerable reduction in coal consumption as the iron and steel industry, the largest purchaser of coal, gradually moved into recession. Neither a further price spike nor a large-scale outage of coal was inflicted on urban households. In retrospect, the media-fueled panic and subsequent public scrutiny of the Coal Syndicate were motivated more by the anticipated fear of a fuel shortage than by the realized market conditions during the winter. Despite this discrepancy between expectation and reality, the crisis fundamentally altered the political landscape surrounding the Coal Syndicate. In his recent theoretical reflection on the temporalities of historical events, Theo Jung has urged historians to study the impact of unrealized future events and peoples’ expectations behind them. According to Jung, events expected to happen in the future from specific historical vantage points constitute critical objects of historical scholarship on their own because, to quote his words, “events often already elicit effects before they come to pass, and even if they never do.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Jung’s claim neatly applies to what happened during the 1900 coal crisis in Germany. The widespread anticipation of a fuel shortage during the approaching winter indeed prompted daily newspapers to highlight and politicize the market power of the Coal Syndicate.Footnote ⁵¹

The blame against the Coal Syndicate was primarily led by media outlets of the Social Democratic and Catholic milieu. As mouthpieces of emerging mass political fractions against the established conservative and liberal parties, daily newspapers of Social Democratic and Catholic orientations launched an uncompromising critique of the suffering inflicted upon urban consumers. A striking feature of their coverage was their focus on the moral critique of the Coal Syndicate’s monopolistic practices. These newspapers argued that the Coal Syndicate had been intentionally manipulating the coal market to create a shortage, leaving consumers with no other choice but to pay exorbitant prices or suffer from fuel deficiency during a cold winter. Analyzing how these newspapers singled out the Coal Syndicate allows for the uncovering of the moral economy of household energy consumers that operated behind the monopoly criticism in 1900.

We can reconstruct media criticism against the Coal Syndicate from these political factions by focusing on two representative newspapers: the Social Democratic Vorwärts and the Catholic Kölnische Volkszeitung. Vorwärts, published in Berlin as the organ daily of the Social Democratic Party, served as the central communication channel for urban workers and consumers around 1900. Not only did it have a wide circulation—with an estimated daily circulation of 52,000 in 1900—but also it influenced the tone of reporting in numerous local Social Democratic newspapers.Footnote ⁵² As a result, it played a pivotal role in shaping media debates within the Social Democratic milieu. In contrast, the equivalent to Vorwärts among the Catholic milieu was Kölnische Volkszeitung. Although its daily circulation of 17,500 was somewhat lower compared to Vorwärts, it was considered one of the leading news outlets for the Catholic population. Unlike Vorwärts, its readership included not only wage earners but also a wide range of handworkers and owners of small businesses as urban coal consumers, reflecting the nature of the Catholic milieu as a group founded on a confessional identity rather than social class.Footnote ⁵³

The first article of Kölnische Volkszeitung that covered the coal crisis as a matter of great importance came out relatively early in an issue on August 9, 1900. Its front-page article, entitled “What Shall Coal Consumer Do? (Was soll der Kohlenverbraucher thun?),” warned of an anticipated surge in coal prices toward the winter and attributed this trend to the malinfluence of the Coal Syndicate. The article first claimed that coal consumers were already rushing to secure coal in expectation of the price increases in the coming winter. The article then mentioned the Coal Syndicate and the government’s inaction against its market power as the main cause of the price increase:

Although the contrast between the struggling consumers and the monopolistic Coal Syndicate was not yet clearly articulated, this first article already set the narrative that identified the Coal Syndicate as the cause of soaring prices.

Within a week, Vorwärts also published its first front-page article on the coal matter on August 15, employing a tone much more critical of the Coal Syndicate than the Catholic counterpart. Entitled “The Coal Crisis (Die Kohlennot)”, the article invested more than half of the front page in emphasizing that “the crisis today exists not simply in coal for industrial usage but also in coal for home heating, and thus laboring families are increasingly brought into the suffering.” The article then located the primary responsibility of the calamity on the Coal Syndicate’s years of intentional production control:

Here, Vorwärts singled out the Coal Syndicate and criticized its years of market manipulation as something that created avoidable suffering among consumers. While Kölnische Volkszeitung at this point did not go beyond associating the Coal Syndicate with a further price increase, the socialist newspaper already took a step further to mobilize a clear and highly moralized language of responsibility against the Ruhr coal industry.

The management of the Coal Syndicate promptly responded by denying these “completely unjustified attacks” headed against them. At a monthly managers’ meeting on August 16, the sales department refuted the claim that the Coal Syndicate “would have intentionally caused the coal scarcity through artificial (künstliche) hoarding or other manipulations to obtain profiteering prices.” The report seemed to be echoing the accusation in the Social Democratic press by using exact the same term “artificial.” According to the report, baseless accusations such as these simply demonstrated either a lack of knowledge of coal mining’s operation or malicious intent against the industry. The report highlighted the Coal Syndicate’s sincere efforts to meet the swelling coal demand and the impossibility of creating the shortage on purpose, completely rejecting the public discourse that placed the primary responsibility for triggering the coal crisis on its business practices.Footnote ⁵⁶

To an extent, the coal industry’s rebuttal was legitimate. In the years leading up to 1900, the coal mines belonging to the Coal Syndicate were producing at their full capacity, trying to keep up with the swelling demand. Besides that, the Syndicate’s pricing policy was known to be exceedingly modest. Since its establishment in 1893, the Coal Syndicate upheld the well-known principle of “moderateness (Mäßigkeit)” in terms of pricing, which aimed for long-term market stabilization at a sensible price level instead of short-term profiteering.Footnote ⁵⁷ As seen in the set of wholesale prices in Figure 1, the price of cartelized Ruhr coal exhibited the lowest volatility compared to other production sites throughout the crisis. Of course, this by no means excused the fact that years of production capacity control concerted by the Coal Syndicate drove the coal prices structurally higher. After all, the very purpose of establishing the cartel was to enforce long-term capacity control among individual mines, thereby accumulating market power. In addition, the picture is further complicated when we consider the fact that Syndicate-affiliated coal producers were yielding profits somewhat in a subterranean manner afterward, namely in lucrative resale markets that channeled the upstream wholesale market to downstream consumers. By 1900, the Ruhr coal mines were heavily involved in the resale and transportation of Ruhr coal, shifting their profit center from sales at the cartel headquarter to second-hand coal merchandising, whose main players were in many cases organizationally separate from but contractually subordinate to the coal mines under the Coal Syndicate.Footnote ⁵⁸ That said, it is not entirely unreasonable to partially accept the cartel’s argument that it did not manipulate the market to engineer the shortage.

Despite the counterargument by the management, media criticism against the Coal Syndicate intensified as it entered September. To give an overall picture, Vorwärts published twelve articles relating to the coal crisis within the month, with five of them directly addressing the responsibility of the Coal Syndicate. Likewise, Kölnische Volkszeitung released fourteen articles on the coal crisis, explicitly blaming the Coal Syndicate in six of these.Footnote ⁵⁹ Throughout the month, both newspapers consistently covered the coal crisis, directing the readers’ minds toward the negative impact of the Coal Syndicate.

In accelerating the criticism, Vorwärts began to treat the Coal Syndicate as a symbolic and paradigmatic example of excess monopoly. For example, in an article on September 5, entitled “Under the Coal Profiteering (Unter dem Kohlenwucher),” the newspaper used a highly evocative language to emphasize the moral responsibility of the Coal Syndicate in harming household consumers:

The use of the term Wucher is significant because it had a strong moral connotation. The concept had been traditionally used to stigmatize usury. Yet, by the late nineteenth century, it was widely appropriated to denounce the exploitation of those in the weaker positions in the market of a wide range of essential goods.Footnote ⁶¹ In particular, the Social Democratic Party utilized the concept to bring together the interests of consumers against producers of food and daily necessities, an attempt to expand its votership beyond traditional industrial workers toward urban consumers broadly conceived.Footnote ⁶² In essence, the symbolic term Wucher was rhetorically weaponized as a way to highlight the inherent immorality and greediness of profit-making by the cartelized coal industry.Footnote ⁶³

The Catholic Kölnische Volkszeitung also followed in becoming no less aggressive in its criticism of the Coal Syndicate. Across September, the newspaper repeatedly attacked the years of cartel activity by the Ruhr coal industry as the primary cause of the present crisis. Going beyond merely accusing the cartel, the newspaper capitalized on the coal crisis to problematize the market power of the Coal Syndicate and, more broadly, cartels in general. In an article on September 28, it marked the rising attention on the coal crisis as a turning point in the broader opposition toward the Coal Syndicate. The article claimed that, thanks to the crisis, “the wider circle of the society has finally recognized the serious dark sides of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, and thereby probably, that of other syndicates as well.” According to the article, the public had long underestimated the negative influence of the Coal Syndicate since its establishment in 1893, despite the years of efforts by Kölnische Volkszeitung to expose the danger posed by this cartel.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Catholic newspaper now came to view the coal crisis as marking a breakthrough in the struggle against the Coal Syndicate and other monopolistic cartels. The newspaper concluded the article by implying the possibility of bringing the cartel problem to the Imperial Parliament, which would later be fulfilled by some parliamentarians of the Catholic Center Party in December.

The highly critical and moralized language deployed by the Social Democratic and Catholic press can be better understood in the context of broader ideological shifts that took place in the years around 1900 within these two social groups—namely, the growing concerns for the living standard of the urban population. On one hand, the Social Democrats were trying to redefine their role as representing a broader group of urban wage earners and consumers instead of one narrowly restricted to industrial laborers. During the turn of the century, they became increasingly outspoken in denouncing price surges of all kinds of daily necessities, be it bread, milk, or meat.Footnote ⁶⁵ Criticism of the coal crisis and the Coal Syndicate happened precisely in this context as another symbol of greedy producers exploiting petty urban households. On the other hand, albeit with a somewhat different dynamic, Catholic circles also went through a comparable turn toward the interests of poorer households after 1895. The traditional Catholic elites—a mixture of powerful clergymen, industrialists, and large-scale landowners—were increasingly challenged by Catholic workers, artisans, and farmers, who began to articulate their own needs in the last few years of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁶ Such internal rebalancing of power pressured the overall Catholic political movement to press for higher living standards for less wealthy consumers, especially given the strong tradition of Catholic social teaching that centered on the harmony of different social statuses.Footnote ⁶⁷ It was precisely against this backdrop of turn-of-the-century call for social betterment that the Social Democratic and Catholic outlets presented the ills of the coal market in highly sensational terms.

Of course, the coal producers did not leave public criticism unchallenged. In fact, the coal industry countered these debates by claiming that agitations by newspapers were fueling consumer anxiety and contributing to aggravate the crisis. On October 4, Deutsche-Industrie Zeitung published an opinion article written by Henry Axel Bueck, the director of Centralverband deutscher Industrieller, in support of the Coal Syndicate.Footnote ⁶⁸ The article was reprinted and disseminated in the following morning by Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, a Berlin daily newspaper owned by the heavy industry interests.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bueck’s article aimed “to join other newspapers that are striving to run down the topic” of the coal crisis and “to repudiate attacks on the coal industry and especially on the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate.” According to Bueck, the Coal Syndicate had been expanding its production to keep up with the growing demand for years and should not be held responsible for intentionally causing the crisis. He argued that the shortage in the coal market had already been alleviated, and, if there was any price gouging still going on, it was happening between intermediary merchants and consumers. “The anxiety of the coal crisis is solely enabling the merchants,” Bueck stated, “to drive up prices so excessively.” More than that, Bueck not only supported the Coal Syndicate but also blamed newspapers for tirelessly exaggerating the threat of the coal crisis instead of reassuring consumers. He dismissively concluded the article by stating that the crisis would immediately come to an end if newspapers stopped using the problem of the coal crisis as “filling material (Füllmaterial)” for their pages.Footnote ⁷⁰

Bueck himself was the director of an interest group, and not a member of the Ruhr coal industry in the precise sense. Therefore, his statement cannot be taken as an official response by the Ruhr coal industry. However, his interpretation of the coal crisis as something driven by consumer anxiety was consistent with the understanding cultivated within the Coal Syndicate’s management since the early phase of the crisis. For example, during the general meeting on August 16, immediately following the intensification of media coverage, the Coal Syndicate management already acknowledged the role of consumer anxiety in driving the crisis. The sales department reported that “in many cases, the consumers themselves are responsible for price surges because they are offering exorbitant high prices to the merchants under the anxiety of not being able to cover their needs.”Footnote ⁷¹ Since then, the Ruhr coal industrialists maintained this position throughout the second half of 1900, consistently using the word “anxiety (Angst)” to label the concurrent crisis in both internal meetings and public debates. Even in a report in January 1901 that overviewed the business year of 1900, they reconfirmed that the substantial coal shortage only persisted until the late summer of 1900. The report argued that the coal crisis after this was a mere “product of anxiety (Angstproduct)” resulting from misrepresentations of the actual market condition.Footnote ⁷² Thus, Bueck’s public statement neatly echoed how the Ruhr coal industry observed the nature of the coal crisis.

As a public relations strategy, Bueck’s article turned out to be counterproductive. It provoked a backlash from several daily newspapers and sullied the reputation of the Coal Syndicate even further, as his statement gave the impression that the industry was trying to deflect the accusations by blaming the consumers and the newspapers. Unsurprisingly, Vorwärts was among the newspapers that reacted negatively. The day after Bueck’s article was published, Vorwärts released a piece entitled “Coal Crisis and Coal Profiteering,” rejecting Bueck’s defense as nothing more than “a justification for outrageous robbery by the Coal Syndicate.” The newspaper maintained its previous position that the coal shortage was artificially created by years of production restrictions implemented by the Coal Syndicate. To substantiate this argument, the article listed concrete numbers of exceptionally high profit-margins by major mining companies in the Ruhr region as evidence of “the scandalous lootings of consumers by the syndicated coal barons.”Footnote ⁷³

More than that, Bueck’s statement invited negative reactions even from those newspapers whose criticism of the Coal Syndicate had been previously moderate. Schlesische Zeitung, a newspaper that had been continuously reporting on the coal problem but had not been overtly critical of the Ruhr coal industry, shifted toward disparaging Bueck’s positioning. Reversing Bueck’s attack on newspapers, the conservative paper claimed that, for Bueck, “the affliction of the industries and the people, the agony of the free competition in coal merchandise, and the entire economic and social misery that we have discovered” are all “merely filling material (Füllmaterial) for newspapers.” Schlesische Zeitung thereby declared that it would continue to fight against monopolies in the coal market by any means necessary.Footnote ⁷⁴ The conservative Neue Preußische Zeitung, which had previously been moderate in blaming the Coal Syndicate, also came firmly to reject Bueck’s argument. According to its article on October 5, it was not acceptable to reduce the ongoing coal crisis to the “scream of the coal crisis” and to blame newspapers for writing about a coal shortage that did not exist in reality.Footnote ⁷⁵ These responses demonstrate how Bueck’s communication strategy, which denied the existence of a supply shortage and depicted the coal crisis as an unnecessary panic driven by the press, provoked further public criticism instead of appeasing it.

Despite the industry’s attempts to deflect critical voices, the Imperial Parliament brought the coal crisis and the role of the Coal Syndicate behind it to its agenda in early December, as the parliament resumed its sessions. During three full-day sessions exclusively dedicated to the coal issue, representatives from across the political spectrum singled out and blamed the Coal Syndicate for the crisis. For our purposes here, it is important to note that this parliamentary engagement is best understood not so much as the beginning as a climax of the politicization of the coal problem by daily newspapers in the preceding months. The debates were initiated when several representatives of the Catholic Center Party submitted a formal question regarding the coal crisis to the parliament. One of the Catholic politicians opened the sessions and justified the interpellation by claiming that the Imperial Parliament had been too slow to address the coal crisis. At the very beginning of his opening speech, this Catholic parliamentarian proclaimed thus: “it has been vigorously mourned over the grievances in the coal market by newspapers of all political camps without differences in the past weeks.”Footnote ⁷⁶ During the ensuing debates, representatives from the Catholic Center Party and Social Democratic Party directed criticism toward the Coal Syndicate, reiterating narratives that had previously been forged and disseminated via their respective media outlets. If we are to view the three-day parliamentary debates in December 1900 as the dawn of a lasting struggle for cartel regulation in Germany, what triggered it was the hefty newspaper coverage we just saw in the summer of 1900. The mass media lay, so the main argument goes, at the core of German cartel politics in its very nascent phase.

To be sure, this first serious parliamentary engagement with the cartel problem did not immediately translate to legislative control of cartels. It was only after World War I that cartel regulation was formally introduced with the establishment of the “Cartel Decree (Kartellverordnung)” in 1923.Footnote ⁷⁷ Thus, we should not be tempted to overstate the significance of the story outlined above. It was more a milestone than a radical breakthrough in the history of cartel regulation in Germany. Furthermore, it did not amount to a full-blown form of antimonopoly program as emerged in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. While the American antitrust, at least in theory, aimed to wipe out industrial cartels and crush the power of big business, the one in Germany was concerned primarily with controlling abuses of market power by such organizations rather than with outlawing them. After all, the Social Democratic and Catholic elites—who were among the most antagonistic to the Coal Syndicate in Imperial Germany—never called for an outright ban of cartels as an economic institution. In this regard, the coal crisis and media-driven cartel criticism represented at best the first turning point for decades-long efforts to tame the monopolistic practices of cartels in Germany.

Still, as this paper argues, the public outcry against the Coal Syndicate in 1900 merits greater scholarly appreciation as part of the broader movement to combat cartels and economic concentration. It was as an immediate response to the coal crisis that the Imperial Office of the Interior (Reichsamt des Innern) organized a series of official hearings on cartels in major industrial sectors, which in turn paved the way for the first resolution in the Imperial Parliament in 1908 on the establishment of a cartel office.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even more, the impacts of public suspicion against the Coal Syndicate extended well beyond its long-term consequences for cartel legislation; the critical media landscape constituted the Ruhr coal industry’s managerial environments on both product and labor markets. Confronted with popular disaffection toward soaring coal prices, the management of the Coal Syndicate came to recognize media criticism as an unavoidable political variable to factor in when setting prices.Footnote ⁷⁹ In labor politics, the unpopularity of the Coal Syndicate’s market domination undoubtedly contributed to widespread pro-labor mood during the historic miners’ strike in early 1905. This was because the oppression of workers was viewed as indicative of the disproportionate economic power the Ruhr coal industrialists enjoyed. Although the exact magnitude of these immediate impacts of public distrust is yet to be fully examined, the story in this paper testifies to a variety of mechanisms with which German society grappled with cartelization and economic concentration via the public sphere in the decades prior to World War I.