genossenschaft oder working-class hero

H and I took a weekend trip to the town of Delitzsch, not far from Leipzig, and while it was a very casual, relaxing trip and we even stayed indoors, rather than caravaning (it was a curious feeling to be in a hotel) , and took in some of the sites (the Altstadt was well preserved and dominated in close-quarters, the entire town surrounded by a moat with this high defensive tower and Baroque palace built as a retirement home for dowager-princesses and later used as a women’s correctional facility), there are certain quirks of history that have shaped this region, which are not always apparent by what has been curated.
Though always rich in natural resources, arable land and industrious people, it was not until the Saxon province was ceded to the Prussian empire by a mandate of the Congress of Vienna that administratively recreated Europe after the defeat of the armies of Napoleon.
Production, which formerly had not risen above the levels of cottage-industries, were suddenly objects of interest for Prussian robber-barons (the entrepreneurial geniuses who ended the Chinese monopoly on china through sheer determination and alchemy and the manufacture of textile and the growing of tobacco and sundry became more and more organised. Of course, wage, life-style and handicraft itself became diluted in the process. In response, a generation, some forty years into this new relationship native son Hermann Schultze (nee Schultze-Delitzch) founded many charitable organisations to look after the families who found themselves conscripted into this corporate entity, including hospitals and survivors' pensions—however, his most enduring and helpful establishment was a concept now known as the credit-union, a financial institution by and for its members. Such organic means were invaluable ways for workers to better understand the environment that they had become part of, and I wonder if going forward, similar community institutions by trial and error might prove instructive.