THE UNPOLITICAL ASSOCIATION

I. The Journey

On Whit Monday in the year 1856, twenty-three young men rode decorated horse-drawn wagons from Halberstadt into the Harz Mountains. They were engineers — graduates of the Royal Trade Institute in Berlin, members of the Academic Association Hütte. Their destination was the spa hotel in Alexisbad, where they planned to celebrate their founding anniversary. The celebration became a founding: the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure — the Association of German Engineers.

The founders were convinced that German industry would fall behind France and England unless something fundamental changed in the cooperation between engineers and in technical education. The goal was written into the statutes: "To unite all intellectual forces of technology in common endeavour."

The statutes contained a second principle too, one that would become the keynote for the next 170 years: the association would pursue no professional or class-political aims. It would be factual. Technical. Above the fray. Unpolitical.

It was the first great lie.

II. The Fight for the Title

Anyone who reads the history of the VDI as pure technological history does not understand it. The history of the VDI is the history of a political struggle — disguised as expert work.

The struggle began immediately. German engineers of the mid-nineteenth century were second-class citizens. The universities belonged to the lawyers, the theologians, the philologists. The technical colleges were regarded as glorified trade schools. An engineer was not permitted to call himself "Doctor." He could hold no academic degree. In the eyes of the educated bourgeoisie, he was a craftsman with a slide rule.

The VDI fought for forty-three years against this demotion. In 1899, it achieved the right of technical universities to confer doctorates and the introduction of the academic degree "Diplom-Ingenieur." It was a victory that changed everything — and that betrayed everything. For this struggle was not a technical struggle. It was a conflict over social standing: the engineer wanted to be placed on equal footing with the lawyer and the professor. He wanted status, recognition, power.

That was deeply political. But the VDI called it "factual."

III. The Steam Boiler and the Guideline

The early success story of the VDI reads like a catalogue of self-evident institutions that did not previously exist. In 1866, the VDI initiated the founding of the steam boiler inspection associations — forerunners of today's TÜV. In 1877, it decisively influenced Germany's first patent law. In 1884, it published the first VDI guideline on the testing of steam boilers and engines. In 1917, it was among the co-founders of the German standards committee — today's DIN.

Today the VDI has published over 2,000 active guidelines, making it the third-largest body of technical standards in Germany. Every year, approximately 10,000 volunteer experts work on new or revised guidelines. That is an impressive achievement.

It is also a political achievement. For whoever writes the rules by which technology operates determines which technology is permitted to operate. Whoever defines what constitutes the "state of the art" determines what can be built and what cannot. Whoever writes the guideline writes the law — only without a parliament.

That was never unpolitical. It was the most efficient form of politics: rule-setting without democratic oversight, legitimised by expertise.

IV. Rationalisation

On 10 June 1921, the Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit — the Reich Board for Industrial Efficiency — was founded in the VDI's own building in Berlin. The initiators: the Reich Economics Ministry, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, and the VDI itself. It was the institutional birth of the German rationalisation movement.

The RKW was Germany's response to an American idea. Thorstein Veblen had demanded his "Soviet of Technicians" in 1921 — a council of engineers who could manage the economy better than politicians and capitalists. Frederick Winslow Taylor had supplied the method with his "Scientific Management": every human activity is measurable, optimisable, standardisable. Henry Ford had demonstrated the practice: assembly line, standardisation, mass production.

Carl Köttgen, managing director at Siemens, later VDI chairman and leader of the second World Power Conference in Berlin in 1930, made a pilgrimage to Ford's factories in Detroit in 1925. His travel report, "The Economical America," became the RKW's manifesto. The German rationalisers wanted American efficiency — but without American wages. Ford paid his workers enough to afford his cars. German industrialists found this notion preposterous.

The RKW was not a technocracy movement in the American sense — it demanded no overthrow, no engineer-rule, no energy certificates in place of money. It was the German variant: quieter, more thorough, more institutional. Instead of toppling democracy, it systematically permeated the economy with engineering methods. The overlap between VDI leadership and RKW management was direct. The ideological foundation was the same: engineers understand the machines, therefore engineers should govern the machines — and through the machines, society.

That was technocracy in German: not as revolution, but as guideline.

V. Thomas Mann's Reflections

In 1918 — the same year the Weimar Republic was founded, the same year Walther Rathenau and Wichard von Moellendorff sought to implement their planned-economy ideas in the Reich Economics Office — Thomas Mann published his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.

Mann's book was the attempt to defend a position that could not be defended: that German culture stood "above" politics. That depth, inwardness, and spirit were something other than the superficial Western "civilisation" with its parliaments and parties. That one could be unpolitical — and that this unpolitical stance was a higher form of culture.

Mann later recanted this position. He recognised that the "unpolitical" was a fiction — and a dangerous one. For whoever declares himself unpolitical does not withdraw from politics. He surrenders it to others.

The VDI never learned this lesson. Or it learned it and immediately forgot. Its statutes remained "unpolitical." Its work remained "factual." While it simultaneously wrote the standards by which industry operated, drove rationalisation forward, reformed education, and helped shape the technical infrastructure of an entire nation.

Moellendorff, the AEG engineer who suggested the wartime raw materials agency to Rathenau and wrote his "Deutsche Gemeinwirtschaft" in 1916 — a programme for steering the entire national economy through technical experts — called his concept a "conservative socialism." He believed the engineer stood beyond class conflicts, beyond parties, beyond politics. He could manage the social machine objectively.

It was the primal self-deception of the German engineer: to believe that expertise equals neutrality.

VI. The Alignment

On 30 January 1933, history ran the test. It tested what happens when an "unpolitical" association meets a very political power.

The result came swiftly. Within days, VDI employees appeared at work in party uniforms. Gottfried Feder, co-founder of the Combat League of German Architects and Engineers, demanded the VDI chairmanship. The sitting chairman Adolf Krauß and five board members resigned. Heinrich Schult, an AEG director and NSDAP member since 1931, took over — not to prevent the regime's takeover of the association, but to manage it in orderly fashion.

In May 1933, the general assembly formulated the "Commitment of German Engineers to the New State Leadership." In October, the Führerprinzip was introduced. The board retained only advisory functions. In June 1933, the VDI was absorbed into the Reich Association for Technical-Scientific Work. By 1937, all VDI members were transferred to the National Socialist League of German Technology.

And then the darkest point: Jewish applicants were denied membership. Existing Jewish members were expelled.

The RKW, the rationalisation machine co-founded by the VDI, was reorganised in 1934 under the Führerprinzip and subordinated to the Reich Economics Ministry. In 1938, it was responsible for the "rationalisation" of the Austrian economy — and for the liquidation of Jewish businesses. In 1941, it delivered an expert report on the "economic balance of the Jewish residential district in Warsaw" — a technically objective document on the Warsaw Ghetto. The experts concluded that the ghetto could not cover its costs through its own production. As a solution, "allowing undersupply without regard for the resulting consequences" was discussed.

The language was factual. The result was murder.

In 1937, the "Defence Technology Working Group" was established. After Stalingrad, the VDI board was briefed on "Total War." A touring exhibition on "Performance Enhancement" was shown in 97 locations. As late as early 1945, VDI director Hans Ude wrote that "higher efficiency" must counter the enemy's material superiority.

Higher efficiency. That was VDI language. Factual to the last shot.

The technocratic faith in a "good technology" standing above politics was refuted by war and annihilation. The "objectively correct solution" had proven itself an instrument of totalitarian rule. The "unpolitical" association had shown itself to be entirely politicisable — precisely because it considered itself unpolitical. Whoever has no political compass follows someone else's.

VII. Reconstruction and Forgetting

In November 1945, the Berlin Magistrate banned all VDI activities. Reason: membership in the National Socialist League of German Technology. Files were confiscated, premises closed.

On 12 September 1946, the VDI was re-founded, its office relocated from Berlin to Düsseldorf. In the Soviet occupation zone, the VDI was absorbed into the Chamber of Technology. In the West, reconstruction began — and with it, forgetting.

In 1956, the VDI founded the Working Group for Nuclear Technology. In 1957, the Commission for Air Purity. In 1964, the Commission for Noise Reduction. The VDI accompanied the economic miracle with technical standards and specialist conferences. It did what it did best: write guidelines, set norms, organise expertise.

The self-description remained the same: factual, technical, unpolitical. Above the fray. This time, however, under democratic auspices. The lesson drawn from the Nazi era seemed to be: not that "objectivity" was a fiction, but that it had been hijacked by the wrong people. The idea itself — that engineers should stay out of politics — survived intact.

In the 1970s, a cautious opening began. Specialist societies were introduced, the "Women in Engineering" network emerged, technology assessment became a topic. The VDI recognised, slowly, that technology has social consequences — and that these consequences are not "unpolitical."

But the basic structure remained: an association of engineers that writes technical rules and bundles expertise without exposing itself politically. Still the guideline instead of the manifesto. Still expertise instead of position-taking.

VIII. Reunification and the Peak

On 29 March 1990, the "VDI Branch DDR" was founded in Leipzig. Within two years, regional chapters were established in Halle, Magdeburg, Chemnitz, and Dresden. The last — Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — was not founded until 1995, because the economic situation in the north was too dire to sustain an engineering association.

Over the following two decades, the VDI grew to its all-time high: more than 150,000 members around 2013. More than during the forced Nazi-era absorptions. These were genuine, voluntary memberships.

But the peak was also the turning point. From 2010 onward, a debate began that accompanies the VDI to this day: the skills-shortage controversy. The VDI regularly published figures documenting a massive shortage of engineers — and on this basis called for easier immigration and lower barriers to the engineering profession.

Critics — including the VDI's own members — accused the association of thereby serving employer interests rather than representing employed engineers. Emphasising the shortage depressed wages. The demand for more skilled workers served companies, not engineers. In 2010, a special-interest group was even founded to oppose the VDI's lobbying. The 2011 member survey yielded such poor results that it was no longer published.

It was the old story in new clothing: the VDI, which considered itself "unpolitical," was conducting labour-market policy — without calling it that.

IX. The Descent

Today the VDI has 130,679 members. In ten years it has lost more than 20,000. The Dresden regional chapter speaks openly of a "downward trend" and asks "how we can reverse the downward trend."

The labour market for engineers presents a paradoxical picture: unemployment in IT and engineering professions rose by 17.6 per cent in Q3 2025. At the same time, there were 306 open positions per 100 unemployed in civil engineering — still a massive shortage. Student enrolment in engineering declined by over eleven per cent between 2016 and 2023.

The paradox is no paradox. It is the result of 170 years of "objectivity." The VDI has written guidelines, set norms, defined standards — but it has never answered the question of whom it works for. For engineers? For industry? For society? For technology itself?

The answer was always: for technology. Factual. Neutral. Above the fray. But technology is not a subject. It has no interests. Whoever says he works "for technology" is concealing whom he actually works for.

X. The Courage for Bigger Moves

On 4 December 2025, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lutz Eckstein, head of the Institute for Automotive Engineering at RWTH Aachen, was unanimously re-elected as VDI president for a further three years. One hundred per cent of votes. Standing ovations.

Eckstein's motto: "Courage for bigger moves." His demand: a long-term technology and innovation strategy for Germany that extends beyond electoral cycles. His image: a chess game in which Germany must move its pieces more boldly. For his second term, he announced that artificial intelligence would become a major focus.

The initiative is called "Future Germany 2050" and works with four "Topic Forces" on energy, qualification, health, and mobility. There are future dialogues, impulse papers, panel discussions. At the German Engineers' Day 2025 in Düsseldorf, NRW Minister President Hendrik Wüst spoke about the "innovative power" of engineers.

It is all correct. It is all reasonable. It is all — factual.

And it misses the point.

For the point is not that Germany needs more innovation. Everyone knows that. The point is that the VDI itself is part of the system that prevents innovation. Not through ill will, but through structure. An association that writes 2,000 guidelines defines the "state of the art" — and every guideline is also a wall against what is not yet standard. An association whose specialist societies tend to the established technologies has a structural disinterest in technologies that challenge the established. An association that considers itself "unpolitical" cannot make a political demand that truly hurts.

"Courage for bigger moves" is a chess metaphor. But the problem is not the chess game. The problem is that for 170 years, the VDI has believed there is a chessboard — an objective, neutral order on which one can play "factually." No such board exists. There are only interests, power, and the question of whose side one stands on.

XI. The Polygon Question

A concrete example. In every textbook on machine elements, the same sentence has appeared for decades: polygon connections are technically superior but too expensive to manufacture. Generations of engineering students have learned this. So they design with keyways and splined profiles — because that is "economical." So says the textbook. So says the VDI guideline.

Since 1985, a manufacturing process has existed that produces polygon profiles more cheaply than conventional methods — in a single operation, with no additional manufacturing steps. But nobody knows it. Because nobody teaches it. Because nobody applies it. Because the guideline does not provide for it.

That is the cycle: no demand because no experience. No experience because no teaching. No teaching because no standard. No standard because no demand. The guideline measures what exists. It does not measure what could be.

In November 2026, the VDI Special Day on "Design and Dimensioning of Polygon Shaft-Hub Connections" will take place in Munich — the day before the major VDI conference on "Shaft-Hub Connections." Germany's leading expert on polygon connections will present the two-spindle polygon turning process — a manufacturing method that produces polygon profiles in a single operation and has refuted the textbook premise of "technically superior but too expensive" for four decades. Whether the inventor of the process himself will be given the floor remains to be seen.

And the textbooks will stay as they are. Until someone breaks the cycle. Not through a guideline, but through a decision.

XII. The Diagnosis

In 170 years, the VDI has achieved remarkable things. It gave rise to the TÜV, influenced Germany's patent law, established the "Diplom-Ingenieur" degree, co-founded DIN, built a body of over 2,000 technical guidelines, organises five thousand events a year, and with 130,000 members has created one of the largest engineering associations in the world.

And in 170 years, it has never answered a single question: what is the political responsibility of the engineer?

Not the technical responsibility — every guideline answers that. Not the economic one — every workforce monitor answers that. But the political one: what do we stand for? Not as experts, but as citizens?

The VDI was founded by men who were convinced they could change the world for the better. That conviction was political. It was a judgement about the state of the world and a programme for its alteration. The VDI translated that political conviction into a technical charter — and thereby made it invisible. It turned a will to shape the world into a guideline.

Thomas Mann recognised in 1918 that the position of the "unpolitical man" was untenable. It took him years to admit it. The VDI has had 170 years — and still has not come that far.

The engineers of Alexisbad wanted to transform German industry. The rationalisers of the 1920s wanted to rebuild the economy on the American model. The aligned engineers of the 1930s submitted to the regime because they believed expertise stood above politics. The nuclear engineers of the 1950s believed in progress through technology. The skills-shortage lobbyists of the 2010s conducted labour-market policy in the name of objectivity.

Every generation believed itself unpolitical. Every generation was wrong.

In December 2025, Lutz Eckstein said: "Innovation begins with attitude." That is correct. But attitude is the opposite of objectivity. Attitude is a position. A judgement. A decision about whose side one stands on. Attitude is — political.

As long as the VDI considers itself unpolitical, it will not see this. It will keep writing guidelines. It will keep organising expertise. It will keep hovering above the fray — while others make the decisions.

And when the next alignment comes — in whatever form — the unpolitical association will be surprised once more. Because it never learned that objectivity without attitude does not exist. That guidelines without a compass are merely instructions. And that an engineer who considers himself unpolitical does not stand above things — he disappears beneath them.

The twenty-three men who rode their wagons to Alexisbad in 1856 still knew this. They had an attitude. They wanted to change something. They just didn't call it politics.

170 years later, it would help to finally call it that.