This paper explores the history of the curriculum vitae (CV) as a medium of job application in the Prussian technical bureaucracy around 1800. A document that so far has not received much attention in historiographical works, appeared as a major tool for bureaucratic innovation at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on primary archival sources, this paper will raise three major points. First, the curriculum vitae facilitated the depiction of 'careers': linear sequences of professional formation pointing toward certain positions. It helped applicants stylize their education and employment history as a time of continuous progress and merit, i.e. a veritable career. Second, the CV enabled the organization and control of personnel in a large-scale administrative body. Administrators used the CV as a tool to familiarize themselves with unknown persons and place them to positions according to their past professional trajectory. Finally, the lives recounted in CVs did not correspond to the contemporary concept of self-reflexive Bildung but were embedded in a utilitarian discourse of usefulness. In this vein, only those biographical events mattered for a CV that were useful for the state and pertained to the professional formation of the subject.
This article analyses curricula vitae (CVs) submitted in the context of applications in the Prussian civil service in the Rhineland after 1815. The rhetoric of the CVs was multivalent. First, candidates presented their claims to a post via a narrative of their fate during the long period of Napoleonic rule. Secondly, applicants stylised their willingness to make sacrifices during the ‘wars of liberation’ as a sacred dedication to the ‘fatherland’. Thirdly and finally, there were applicants who had not taken part in the ‘wars of liberation' and tried to make up for this lack of patriotic engagement through substitute services.
ZusammenfassungDieser Beitrag verfolgt die Spur des tabellarischen Lebenslaufs in das Preußendes ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts zurück. Dort begann die reformierte preußischeVerwaltung, damit, das Leben ihrer Beamten in Personalverzeichnissen zu systematisiereen. Das proto-formularische Projekt eines durch Fragebögen abgefragtenPersonalverzeichnisses zeigt, dass in Preußen bereits früh analytische Kategorien auf die Entität „Leben“ angewendet wurden. Die Analyse des Lebens erfolgte entsprechend einzelner Dienst- und Lebensdaten, die in ein tabellarisch angelegtesFormular übertragen wurden. Mit dem durch das Formular erzwungenen analytischen Schema wurde der Dienst der Beamten neu perspektiviert. Die kontinuierliche Geschichte einer bestimmten Biographie machte einem ent-narrativierten Darstellungsverfahren Platz. Dieses Verfahren dividierte die Kohärenz der Lebenszeit auseinander und zerlegte den Beamten in ein Bündel diskreter Fähigkeiten, Erfahrungen und Prüfungen. Letztlich ging es um die administrative Bearbeitbarkeit des Lebensverlaufs, mit der Vorgesetztefortan rechnen konnten.
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