The Development of Municipal Slaughterhouses in the Ruhr Area and the Allgäu: A Comparative Regional Analysis, 1945-1990

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Nina Kleinöder
• Subject Area: Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558734425

The livestock and meat industry in West Germany underwent a profound transformation between 1945 and 1990. While commercial slaughtering more than doubled from approximately 1.5 to 5 mio. tons, the number of municipal slaughterhouses, which had dominated meat production since the last third of the 19th century, decreased from 400 to 105. As described by Karl Christian Führer, this numerical change reflects a process of displacement by vertically integrated private and cooperative slaughterhouses, which, driven by market rationalization and concentration processes across all stages of livestock and meat market processing, became the dominating meat producers. The project focuses on the internal decision-making processes and strategies of municipal slaughterhouses in the face of extensive market changes, which have hitherto been portrayed as passive actors. Specifically, the project examines three aspects that arise from the historical genesis of municipal slaughterhouses and their character as public-law entities, which, as hypothesized, significantly influenced the decision-making processes and market behavior of municipal slaughterhouses from 1945 to 1990. (1) Since municipal slaughterhouses were widespread throughout the Federal Republic of Germany, the study aims via an urban-rural comparison (Ruhr area, Allgäu) to uncover location-specific conditions and to assess their impact on decision-making processes and business strategies within municipal slaughterhouses. (2) The integration of municipal slaughterhouses into the financial and administrative structures of cities limited their autonomy in business strategy. Therefore, an analysis of the resulting scopes of action and the internal functional logics is required. (3) As service facilities primarily used by local butchers, who were granted usage rights in line under the slaughterhouse obligation, municipal slaughterhouses operated within a complex web of legal and social interactions. This necessitates an analysis of this enforced partnership between craft businesses and the municipality, particularly to what extent artisanal mentalities and adherence to traditional working practices of butchers restricted the actions of municipal slaughterhouses. Methodologically, the project draws on approaches from New Institutional Economics, the rational-choice model, and oral history. By combining these approaches, path dependencies and the ability of municipal slaughterhouses to act in the face of selected institutional shocks are to be analyzed, ultimately substantiating management and business strategies. The corpus of source consists of eight slaughterhouses: four from the Ruhr area and four from the Allgäu. To do justice to the rational-choice model and the habitual and physically demanding manual work in the butcher trade, guided interviews with contemporary butchers will be conducted.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants