Like no other profession engineers represent (industrial) modernity. In the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, however, the enormous numerical expansion of the profession was contrasted by comparatively unfavorable working conditions and incomes. This is particularly true for the graduate engineers, whose academization partially failed to meet industrial requirements. Can the völkisch, right-wing political radicalization of many technical experts on the eve of the 'Third Reich' actually be fully explained by these professional-social frictions?Data on social situation, consumption, leisure time and political behaviour of engineers, other employees and academic professions, which is made available for the first time, finally reveals contours of new social milieus and the beginning of a late-modern society. This requires more complex explanatory approaches and enables general insights into the dynamics of social crises.This study of professions, inequality, and political sociology is published in English for the first time.The authorProf. Dr. Tobias Sander is full Professor of Sociology at the HAWK Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaft und Kunst - University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen.This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.