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ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION

The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION

The Ashgate Research Companions are designed to offer scholars and graduate students a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research in a particular area. The companions’ editors bring together a team of respected and experienced experts to write chapters on the key issues in their speciality, providing a comprehensive reference to the field. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Edited by Matthew Jefferies University of Manchester, UK © Matthew Jefferies 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Matthew Jefferies has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.

Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Ashgate research companion to Imperial Germany / edited by Matthew Jefferies. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3551-8 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4094-3552-5 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4724-0575-3 (epub) 1. Germany–History–1871-1918. I. Jefferies, Matthew, editor.

DD220.A84 2015 943.08’3–dc23 2014037447

ISBN 9781409435518 (hbk) ISBN 9781409435525 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472405753 (ebk – ePUB)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD contents

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1 Matthew Jefferies

PART I: STATE AND MONARCHY

1 Imperial Governance 13 Katharine Anne Lerman

2 Prussian Governance 33 Hartwin Spenkuch

3 The German Monarchies 55 Frank Lorenz Müller

PART II: POLiTiCs AND SOCiETY

4 Elections 77 Thomas Kühne

5 Liberalism 91 Eric Kurlander

6 111 Oded Heilbronner

7 Nationalism 123 Mark Hewitson

8 Antisemitism 143 Lars Fischer

9 Political Catholicism 159 Jeffrey T. Zalar

10 Socialism 177 Stefan Berger and Stefan Braun The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Part III: Culture and Identity

11 Particularism and Localism 195 Jennifer Jenkins

12 Popular Culture 209 Kaspar Maase

13 Gender 225 Ann Taylor Allen

14 Religion 245 James E. Bjork

15 Class 261 Dennis Sweeney

Part IV: Economy and Environment

16 Trade Policy and Globalization 289 Cornelius Torp

17 Agricultural Labour 303 Simon Constantine

18 The Environment and Environmentalism 317 Thomas Rohkrämer

19 Population: Demography and Mobility 333 Steve Hochstadt

Part V: International Relations, Militarism and War

20 International Relations 347 Andreas Rose

21 Militarism 367 Benjamin Ziemann

22 The Army 383 William Mulligan

23 The Navy and the Sea 399 Jan Rüger

vi contents

24 Germany and the Origins of the First World War 413 Annika Mombauer

25 Colonialism and Genocide 433 Jürgen Zimmerer

Index 453

vii For Alison, Ava and Martha

notes on contributors

Ann Taylor Allen professor of history at the University of louisville, she is the author of four books and more than 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals. her books include Women in Twentieth-Century Europe (2008), Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (1991), and Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Simplicissimus and Kladderadatsch, 1890–1914 (1984).

Stefan Berger professor of social history and Director of the institute for social movements at the Ruhr University, Bochum, he is the author and editor of numerous works on comparative labour history, nationalism and the history of historiography. his books include Friendly Enemies: Britain and the GDR, 1949–1990 (2010), Inventing the Nation: Germany (2004), and and the Working Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (2000).

Stefan Braun student assistant at the institute for social movements, Ruhr University, Bochum, he has published on the history of the Jewish workers’ movement in germany.

James Bjork senior lecturer in modern european history at King’s college london, he is the author of Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (2008) and numerous articles on the cultural, social and political history of central europe.

Simon Constantine lecturer in modern european history at the University of wolverhampton, his research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century german history, especially on its rural society, and on the treatment of migrant and minority groups. his book Social Relations in the Estate Villages of 1880–1924 was published in 2007.

Lars Fischer Teaching fellow at University college london, his research focuses predominantly on the history of antisemitism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in modern germany and, more recently, on music as an historical source. his publications include The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (2007) and numerous articles on the political, intellectual and cultural history of Jewish/non-Jewish relations.

Oded Heilbronner lecturer in history and cultural studies at the shenkar college of engineering and Design in Tel Aviv and at the hebrew University in Jerusalem, he has published numerous articles in english, hebrew and german in journals such as the Journal of Modern History, Journal of Contemporary History, the Historische Zeitschrift and Geschichte und Gesellschaft. his books include From Popular Liberalism to National Socialism (2015), Populäre Kultur, Populärer The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Liberalismus und das Bürgertum im ländlichen Deutschland (2006), and Catholicism, Political Culture and the Countryside: A Social History of the in South Germany (1998).

Mark Hewitson Professor of German History and Politics at University College London, his interests lie principally in German and European history, history of art, politics and social theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His books include History and Causality (2014), Nationalism in Germany, 1848–1866: Revolutionary Nation (2010), Germany and the Causes of the First World War (2004), and National Identity and Political Thought in Germany: Wilhelmine Depictions of the , 1890–1914 (2000), as well as the co-edited volume What is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (2006, with Timothy Baycroft).

Steve Hochstadt Professor of History at Illinois College in Jacksonville, he has published widely on both demographic history and the Holocaust. His books include Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third (2012), Sources of the Holocaust (2004), and Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820–1989 (1999).

Matthew Jefferies Professor of German History at the University of Manchester, his books include Hamburg: A Cultural and Literary History (2010), Contesting the (2008), Imperial Culture in Germany (2003), and Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (1996), as well as articles in journals such as History, German History and the Journal of Design History.

Jennifer Jenkins Canada Research Chair for Modern German History at the University of Toronto, she works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German cultural and political history, with an emphasis on nationalism, public culture and civil society. Her first book, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siécle Hamburg (2003), investigated the making of a modernist public culture in Imperial Germany. Her current projects include a book on German–Iranian relations entitled Weltpolitik on the Persian Frontier: Germany and Iran in the Age of Empire and Germany Among the Global Empires 1815 to the Present for the Wiley-Blackwell series ‘A New History of Modern Europe’.

Thomas Kühne Professor of History and the Strassler Family Chair in the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University in Massachusetts, his doctoral dissertation on Prussian electoral politics in the imperial era won the German Research Prize. His books include Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (2010), Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preußen 1867–1914. Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (1994), and Handbuch der Wahlen zum Preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus 1867–1918. Wahlergebnisse, Wahlbündnisse und Wahlkandidaten (1994).

Eric Kurlander Professor of History at Stetson University in Florida, he has written extensively on German liberalism, nationalism, and esotericism in Imperial, Weimar, and . His books include Transcultural Encounters Between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2014, with Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas McGetchin), Living with Hitler:

x Notes on Contributors

Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich, 1933–1945 (2009), and The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 (2006).

Katharine Anne Lerman Senior Lecturer in History at London Metropolitan University, she has published widely on Imperial Germany, with a particular focus on power and decision-making in . Her books include Bismarck: Profiles in Power (2004) and The Chancellor as Courtier: Bernhard von Bülow and the Governance of Germany, 1900–1909 (1990).

Kaspar Maase Formerly Professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, his research interests include popular culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the history of the protection of children in the media, and the aesthetic experience in everyday life. His books include Die Kinder der Massenkultur. Kontroversen um Schmutz und Schund seit dem Kaiserreich (2012), Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850–1970 (1997), and the co-edited collection Schund und Schönheit: Populäre Kultur um 1900 (2001, with Wolfgang Kaschuba).

Annika Mombauer Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the Open University, she has written extensively on the origins of the First World War and contributed to numerous television and radio documentaries on that subject. Her books include Die Julikrise. Europas Weg in den Ersten Weltkrieg (2014), The Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents (2013), The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (2002), and Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (2001).

Frank Lorenz Müller Professor in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, his research focuses on nationalism, liberalism and the role of monarchy in the nineteenth century. In 2011 he published an acclaimed study of Kaiser Friedrich III, Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany. His other books include Die Revolution von 1848/49 (2012) and Britain and the : Perceptions of Nationalism and Political Reform, 1830–1863 (2002).

William Mulligan Senior Lecturer in History at University College Dublin, his research focuses on international and military history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular reference to Germany and Britain. His books include The Great War for Peace (2014), The Origins of the First World War (2010), and The Creation of the Modern German Army: General and the , 1914–1930 (2005).

Thomas Rohkrämer Reader in History at the University of Lancaster, his research interests span nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history and include environmental history, the life reform movement and cultural criticism. His publications are Die fatale Attraktion des Nationalsozialismus. Über die Popularität eines Unrechtregimes (2013), A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism (2007), Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (1999), and Der Militarismus der ‘kleinen Leute’. Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (1990).

xi The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Andreas Rose Assistant Professor at the in Germany, his research focuses on international, military and naval history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2011 he published his acclaimed doctoral dissertation, Zwischen Empire und Kontinent. Britische Außenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg. His other books include Deutsche Außenpolitik in der Ära Bismarck (1862–1890) and Die Außenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs (1890–1918), both published in 2013.

Jan Rüger Reader in Modern History at Birkbeck College London, he has interests in comparative and transnational history, the cultural history of conflict, and Anglo-German relations. In The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (2007), he explored the theatre of power that unfolded between Britain and Germany in the decades before the First World War. He is currently writing a microhistory of the Anglo–German relationship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for Oxford University Press.

Hartwin Spenkuch Senior research fellow at the Berlin- Academy of Arts and Sciences, his doctoral dissertation on the Prussian Herrenhaus was published in 1998. He has edited or co-edited a number of books, including volumes in the Acta Borussica document series on the Minutes of the Prussian State Ministry 1817–1934, and the policies of the Prussian Ministry of Culture and Education. A further volume on Prussian university politics 1918–33 is to appear shortly.

Dennis Sweeney Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, Canada, he is the author of Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany (2009) and several articles on ‘the Social’ in Wilhelmine Germany. He is currently working on a book-length study of the German political right, imperialist ideology and the invention of the racial state from 1890 to 1923.

Cornelius Torp Professor of Modern History at the University of Augsburg in Germany, he is the author of Gerechtigkeit im Wohlfahrtsstaat. Alter und Alterssicherung in Deutschland und Großbritannien von 1945 bis heute (2015), The Challenges of Globalization: Economy and Politics in Germany 1860–1914 (2014), and Max Weber und die preußischen (1998), as well as articles in journals such as Central European History, German History, Economic History Yearbook and the Historische Zeitschrift.

Jeffrey Zalar Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati and holder of the Ruth J. and Robert A. Conway Endowed Chair of Catholic Studies, his research has mainly centred on religion and intellectual culture in modern Germany. He has published extensively on Catholic reading habits during the ‘long nineteenth century’, with an eye toward the meanings Catholics attached to the possession, consumption and display of books. He is also developing a project on the relationship between Catholics and German science.

Benjamin Ziemann Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield, he has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of York and a Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellow at Humboldt University Berlin. His books include Encounters with Modernity: The Catholic

xii Notes on Contributors

Church in 1945–1975 (2014), Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (2013), Gewalt im Ersten Weltkrieg (2013), and War Experiences in Rural Germany 1914–1923 (2007), as well as edited collections on Reading Primary Sources (co-edited, 2008) and Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880–1980 (co-edited, 2012).

Jürgen Zimmerer Professor of Modern History at the University of Hamburg in Germany and Founding President of the International Network of Genocide Scholars, his research interests include German colonialism, comparative genocide, colonialism and the Holocaust, critical prevention studies, and environmental violence and genocide. He is the author or editor of ten books and journal special issues, including Kein Platz an der Sonne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (2013), German Colonialism and National Identity (2011, with Michael Perraudin), Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (2011), and Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and its Aftermath (2008, with Joachim Zeller).

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introduction

Matthew Jefferies

As the last born under the Kaiser pass away – the remaining few are now in their late nineties – the Empire founded by Bismarck in 1871 can seem a very distant place indeed. As Annika Mombauer observes in her contribution to this volume, we are today as far removed from Imperial Germany and the First World War as Wilhelminer were from the Battle of Waterloo. ‘This temporal distance must surely affect how we relate tothe topic’, she suggests. Distance does not mean, however, that a stable consensus has been reached about many aspects of this crucial period of modern European history; nor does it mean that either scholarly or public interest in the era has waned. In Germany, where it regularly features in the pages of popular history magazines such as Geo Epoche, Damals, and Spiegel Geschichte, the Kaiserreich triggers conflicting responses. The long-running and widely reported controversy over the rebuilding of the royal palace in Berlin epitomises the ambivalence with which contemporary German society views a period which can be portrayed as a precursor to both the National Socialist dictatorship and today’s democratic Federal Republic.1 Internationally, the centenary of the First World War has renewed public interest in the European state system of the early twentieth century, and in particular, the new continental superpower whose emergence was to prove so destabilising. While the tidal wave of academic conferences and book publications on the war and its origins – 150 in Germany, maybe double that in France, and more than a thousand in total2 – has been largely predictable, the international success of books like the journalist Florian Illies’ 1913: The Year Before the Storm, or Charles Emmerson’s 1913: The World Before the Great War, suggests that interest goes well beyond the ‘great black tornado’ of the war itself.3 For some, the anniversary has presented an opportunity to draw parallels and attempt to learn lessons for the present. In Germany Der Spiegel ran a cover story on ‘the strange contemporary relevance of World War One’;4 the veteran historian Michael Stürmer described the of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as ‘an Austrian 9/11’;5 and, writing in Die Welt, the French international relations expert Dominique Moisi claimed that today’s superpowers lack someone of the stature of Bismarck, whose ‘coldblooded Realpolitik’ was

1 After more than a decade of fierce debate, the foundation stone for a partial reconstruction of the Prussian ’s city palace was laid on 12 June 2013, with building work expected to last until 2019. 2 Klaus Wiegrefe, ‘Die unheimliche Aktualität des Ersten Weltkriegs’, Der Spiegel, 30 December 2013, p. 29; Richard Lofthouse, ‘The Centenary Starts Here’, Oxford Today, online edition, 30 May 2014, at http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/opinion/centenary-starts-here#. 3 Florian Illies, 1913: The Year Before the Storm (London, 2013), first published in Germany in 2011, where it was the best-selling non-fiction title of 2013; Charles Emmerson,1913: The World Before the Great War (London, 2013). 4 ‘Die unheimliche Aktualität des Ersten Weltkriegs’, Der Spiegel, 1/2014. 5 Michael Stürmer, ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg bestimmt Europas Gegenwart’, Die Welt, 17 May 2013, at http://www.welt.de/116277753. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

the best way to maintain peace.6 In Britain, Sir Richard Evans was commissioned by the New Statesman to ruminate on an earlier era of ‘Old world decline, rogue empires, [and] killing for God’, in which a new rising power was asserting its claim for a ‘place in the sun’.7 Meanwhile, in an essay for the Brookings Institute, the Canadian historian Margaret Macmillan also compared ‘today’s relationship between China and the U.S. with that between Germany and England a century ago’: ‘Now, as then’, she observed, ‘the march of globalization has lulled us into a false sense of safety’.8 For others, the centenary has presented a chance to score political points. In Britain, the Eurosceptic press and politicians attacked what they saw as a concerted attempt by the European Union to portray the 1914–18 conflict as a ‘European civil war’. The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, wrote an article for the Daily Mail in which he claimed ‘Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings and misrepresentations’, for which ‘left-wing academics’ were to blame.9 British troops in 1914 were, he asserted, ‘defending the western liberal order’ and their nation’s ‘special tradition of liberty’. Mr Gove singled out Sir Richard Evans – author or editor of more than a dozen books on German history – for particular criticism. The Cambridge historian’s arguments were ‘more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate’, Gove claimed. Sir Richard was quick to respond, using the pages of The Independent to point out that ‘40 per cent of those British troops fighting in the war did not have the vote’, ‘unlike Germany where male suffrage was universal’. ‘How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade’, Evans retorted.10 Another British political heavyweight, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, also weighed in, accusing Labour’s Shadow Education spokesman Tristram Hunt of mounting ‘a kind of cock-eyed exculpation of the Kaiser and his generals’: ‘If Tristram Hunt seriously denies that German militarism was at the root of the First World War, then he is not fit to do his job’.11 Thankfully, not all the centenary coverage has sought to press the past into service on behalf of the present. Beyond the headlines and the party politics, more reflective newspaper articles, radio essays and television documentaries have focused on other aspects of Imperial Germany and its fateful war. Amongst the BBC’s 2,500 broadcast hours of documentaries, historical dramas and discussions prompted by the centenary were features on the sights and sounds of Berlin in 1914;12 wartime propaganda and the subsequent ‘war guilt’ debate in

6 Dominique Moisi, ‘Den heutigen Groβmächten fehlt ein Bismarck’, Die Welt, 2 January 2014, at http://www.welt.de/123483923. 7 Richard J. Evans, ‘Before the First World War: what can 1914 tell us about 2014’, New Statesman, 17–23 January 2014, at http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/1914-to-2014. 8 Margaret Macmillan, ‘The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War’, Brookings Institute essay, published 14 December 2013, at http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2013/rhyme-of- history. 9 Michael Gove, ‘Why does insist on belittling true British heroes?’,Daily Mail, 2 January 2014. 10 Jonathan Brown, ‘Cambridge history professor hits back at Michael Gove’s “ignorant attack”’, The Independent, 3 January 2014. 11 Boris Johnson, ‘Germany started the Great War, but the Left can’t bear to say so’, Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2014. 12 Stephen Evans, ‘Berlin: music on the brink’, and Charles Emmerson, ‘Essential Classics. Berlin’, both first broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 8 January 2014. See also the three-part series ‘1914–1918: The Cultural Front’, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between 8 and 22 March 2014.

2 Introduction

both the UK and Germany;13 and how three royal cousins ended up at war with each other.14 Not to be outdone, Channel 4 weighed in with a typically sensationalist documentary on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s disability and love-hate relationship with his English mother.15 Above all, perhaps, Neil MacGregor’s 30-part radio series, book and British Museum exhibition, ‘Germany: Memories of a Nation’, stimulated much discussion in the media and suggested a growing public interest in German history as a whole.16 What each of these contributions to popular discourse have in common, of course, is their reliance – acknowledged or otherwise – on the research of countless, often little-known, historians. Not every academic has the ability, luck or even desire to write a bestseller such as Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers,17 whose German edition alone sold more than 200,000 copies and went through twelve reprints in one year, but such sweeping magisterial histories are nevertheless dependent on insights garnered from countless sources, and indeed written in many languages. With teachers and lecturers, let alone leader-writers and politicians, finding it increasingly difficult to keep abreast of current research, the need for series such as Ashgate’s Research Companions has never been greater. Providing a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research, the series already boasts more than 60 volumes, with new titles being added every month. Few would argue against the inclusion of the German Empire in this list, since it ‘has been the focus of an extraordinary body of historical scholarship’ (Roger Chickering), whose quality and diversity stands comparison with that of any other episode in European history. Chickering made this comment in the preface to Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion, which he edited in the mid-1990s.18 That book has performed sterling service in university libraries for the best part of two decades, but many of its chapters now seem rather dated, drawing predominantly on the research of the 1970s and 1980s. More recent volumes, such as James Retallack’s admirable contribution to the Short Oxford History of Germany series, is a student-friendly introduction to the period, but its twelve chapters are inevitably constrained by the need to provide a chronological narrative as well as a summary of the critical literature.19 My own historiographical survey, Contesting the German Empire 1871–1918, examines the key schools and approaches over the past century or more, but its 240 pages can provide only a broad outline of current research agendas.20 The present volume, by way of contrast, allows 25 experts to write at length about the state of research in their own specialist fields, offering original insights as well as historiographical reflections, and rounded off with extensive suggestions for further reading. The chapters are grouped into five thematic sections, chosen to reflect the full range of research being undertaken on Imperial German history today. The contributors have been drawn not only from the UK and USA, but also from Canada, Ireland, Israel, and of course Germany itself. All are active

13 Michael Portillo, ‘The Great War of Words’, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 4 and 11 February 2014. 14 ‘Royal Cousins at War’, first broadcast on BBC2 television, 5 February 2014. 15 Jonathan Owen, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II’s unnatural love for his mother “led to a hatred of Britain”’, The Independent, 16 November 2013; ‘Queen Victoria and the crippled Kaiser’, first broadcast on Channel 4, 17 November 2013. 16 Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (London, 2014). The BBC Radio 4 series was first broadcast between 29 September and 7 November 2014. The exhibition at the British Museum ran from 16 October 2014 to 25 January 2015. 17 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012). 18 Roger Chickering, ‘Preface’, in idem (ed.), Imperial Germany. A Historiographical Companion (Westport and London, 1996), p. vii. 19 James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008). 20 Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008).

3 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

researchers and, with a few honourable exceptions, are in the early or middle stages of their careers. This is not to suggest, however, that the volume presents the views of a particular generation, and still less that its contributors share a uniform approach or outlook. On key questions – not least on Germany’s culpability for the outbreak of war in 1914 – the contributors gathered here would offer sharply divergent views. Yet for all their differences, it is not hard to find points of agreement or commonality either. Certainly, the raw tone which characterised much of the historiographical debate in the second half of the twentieth century has mellowed, allowing for more nuanced readings of Imperial German history – Thomas Nipperdey’s ‘shades of grey’ – than once seemed possible.21

Part I State and Monarchy

The book’s first section comprises three long essays on the state and monarchy inthe Kaiserreich. Katharine Lerman’s expert overview of imperial governance emphasises both the complexity of the Empire’s political arrangements and their continuing relevance for anyone attempting to make sense of Germany’s actions in 1914. Much of that complexity stemmed from the fact that accounted for two-thirds of the Empire’s population and territory, and occupied a hegemonic position in its political affairs too. It was, Lerman observes, ‘impossible for Imperial Germany to be ruled independently of Prussian interests and questionable how far there could even be an Imperial German government or administration in parallel with the Prussian government’. Prussian governance is the subject of Chapter 2, by Hartwin Spenkuch of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts and Sciences. Spenkuch argues strongly that recent attempts to ‘normalise’ Prussian history have gone too far. If, as many historians have suggested, Imperial Germany was Janus-faced, then Prussia certainly represented the backward-looking face. Of course, Prussia was only one of four kingdoms within the German Empire; there were also six grand duchies, five duchies and seven principalities. Notwithstanding the proud republican traditions of the three city- states (Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck), this was undoubtedly a highly monarchical Empire, and it is examined with characteristic deftness of touch by Frank Müller in Chapter 3.

Part II Politics and Society

Part II turns to politics and society, opening with an essay by Thomas Kühne on elections in Imperial Germany. There has been considerable scholarly interest in this field, including some sophisticated psephological research and a growing number of comparative studies, but ‘there remains no simple explanation for the intensity, direction, and quality of the “fundamental democratization” of Germany around 1900’, Kühne argues. On the eve of the Great War, he suggests, ‘Germans were still looking at many different political paths into the future’. Six of these paths – liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, antisemitism, political Catholicism and socialism – are examined here in detail. The dominant political movement at the time of the Empire’s founding was liberalism. Indeed, as Eric Kurlander suggests in Chapter 5, it ‘defined Imperial Germany’s challenges and aspirations, its successes and failures, its transformations and legacies, better than any contemporary political movement’.

21 See Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Wehlers “Kaiserreich”. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung’,Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 1 (1975), pp. 539–60.

4 Introduction

It is hardly surprising then that the historiography on liberalism in the Kaiserreich has acted as a bellwether for debates regarding the character and legacies of Imperial Germany as a whole. A ‘real alternative to the liberal worldview’, at least in the early decades of the Empire, came in the form of German, and particularly Prussian, conservatism. Oded Heilbronner, a leading Israeli scholar, argues that it ‘contributed much to the stabilization of Germany in the stormy years after 1871’. Moreover, while acknowledging the growth of the radical right in the 1890s and 1900s, he contends that the relationship between German conservatism and the roots of National Socialism is more ‘complex, problematic and multifaceted’ than was once thought. The discourse of both conservatism and liberalism became intertwined with nationalism over the lifetime of the Empire, but rather than portray this in terms of a simple shift to the right – from the ‘emancipatory’ nationalism of 1848 to the völkisch nationalism of the Wilhelmine era – Mark Hewitson’s chapter on nationalism focuses on everyday expressions of ‘banal’ nationalism. Hewitson also looks at the recent trend towards transnational history, and argues that, ‘instead of attempting to rescue history from the nation, historians would be better advised to investigate and problematize the history of the nation as the contingent product of a multiplicity of overlapping, entangled discourses, political conflicts and acts of cooperation’. Questions of definition take centre stage in Lars Fischer’s thought-provoking chapter on antisemitism.22 ‘If a lack of conceptual clarity and transparency is rarely likely to benefit historical debate’, he notes, ‘seldom does it wreak quite as much havoc quite as quickly as it does when it comes to scholarship on the prevalence and significance of antisemitism’. While antisemitism failed to establish a popular mass movement before the First World War, the last two chapters of Part II look at ideologies which were successful in mobilising vast numbers of Germans, and which were to become two pillars of the ‘’ in the post-war era. First, political Catholicism is the focus of Jeff Zalar from the University of Cincinnati; then, Germany’s large socialist milieu is examined by Stefan Berger and Stefan Braun of the Ruhr University in Bochum. The Catholic , its sub-culture, and the religious dimensions to political discourse more broadly, have been a fertile area for researchers on Imperial Germany for several decades now. Indeed, Zalar suggests it has moved from ‘a backwater neglected by professional historians on ideological grounds to one of the hottest sub-disciplines in the study of the Empire’. By contrast, interest in labour history has been in decline since its boom years of the 1960s and 1970s, with talk of a ‘crisis’ by no means confined to the UK.23 Nevertheless, as Berger and Braun show, interesting work continues to be published on both the Social Democratic Party – which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2013 – and its electorate.

Part III Culture and Identity

Since the so-called ‘cultural turn’ of the late twentieth century, one of the liveliest areas of research on Imperial Germany has been culture and identity. Part III not only looks at the major building blocks of identity – gender, religion and class – but also at the importance of particularism, localism and Heimat, one of the most resonant and contested words in the

22 On the need to remove the hyphen in ‘antisemitism’, see Shmuel Almog, ‘What’s in a Hyphen?’ SICSA Report, The Newsletter of the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism, 2 (1989), pp. 1–2; online at http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/hyphen.htm 23 As documented in Labour History Review, 60 (1995).

5 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

German language. As Jennifer Jenkins observes in Chapter 11, in recent years it has even become ‘a vehicle for the writing of oppositional and “counter-histories”’. In the Wilhelmine era, Heimat was a popular trope in German art and literature, but a planned chapter on high culture in this volume unfortunately fell by the wayside.24 Its absence is partially compensated by an excellent chapter by one of Germany’s leading scholars of popular culture, Kaspar Maase. The study of popular culture may have until recently ranked ‘among the minor fields of the historiography of the German Empire’, but this is changing quite rapidly. Gender, by contrast, has been one of the most productive areas of historical research for many years now, and in Chapter 13 Ann Taylor Allen provides a sovereign overview of a field which she cautions ‘is too diverse, varied and complex to be integrated seamlessly into any “master narrative” of German history’. The impact of religious and class divisions in Imperial Germany was not only felt in the electoral landscape. As Jim Bjork of King’s College London points out in Chapter 14, it was ‘the heavily institutionalized nature of Imperial Germany’s major religious traditions, their power to mark and shape people’s social identities from birth to death, which made religion such an important dimension of German life in this era’. Far from conforming to a once pervasive master narrative of secularisation, religious life flourished in the Kaiserreich, but it is the legacy of confessional division that has been the most prominent theme in recent historiography on religion in Imperial Germany. ‘If the legacy of confessional rivalry in Germany was ultimately less dire than a witness to the might have feared’, Bjork concludes, ‘the potential for violent exclusion of Jews from the German nation was greater than most late nineteenth-century observers could have imagined.’ Part III closes with a chapter on class, which was central to economic, cultural and political developments in Imperial Germany, as both a category of social analysis and a collective identity. Dennis Sweeney, from the University of Alberta, suggests that re-engaging with class and class analysis can help to pose new questions about German society, politics and culture in the imperial era.

Part IV Economy and Environment

Part IV begins with Cornelius Torp’s assessment of German trade policy in what is now regarded as the first era of globalisation.25 Trade, and particularly tariff policies, have long been central to debates about Imperial Germany’s political character. Protectionism was seen as a cornerstone of the ‘alliance of iron and rye’, and later of Sammlungspolitik, which historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler claimed helped to safeguard the survival of ‘pre- industrial élites’ right up to 1918. Torp’s essay argues, however, that there is little reason to label pre-1914 German policy ‘highly protectionist’. He suggests that German tariffs were not out of line with other countries, and should be thought of ‘in terms of a moderate protectionism brought about by the process … of adaptation to the impulses emanating from globalization’. As Simon Constantine comments in the following chapter on agricultural labour, the effects of these ‘impulses’ meant that, by the Wilhelmine era, ‘few communities in Germany’s countryside resembled the common stereotype of a rural backwater, bypassed by modernization and untouched by change’. Looking ahead, Constantine suggests it would

24 Readers might instead wish to consult my 2003 book, Imperial Culture in Germany 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003). 25 Torp’s essay previously appeared in German in Rainer Klump and Miloŝ Vec (eds), Völkerrecht und Weltwirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 2012), pp. 71–87.

6 Introduction

be reasonable to assume that ‘our growing awareness of humanity’s destructive impact on the planet will provoke more historical research into the relationship between humans and their environment’. That topic is tackled in Chapter 18 by Thomas Rohkrämer of Lancaster University, who acknowledges that environmental history ‘has come a long way since the early 1980s’, but argues that it ‘needs to be embedded within a more general history, and that a general history needs to incorporate an environmental dimension’. The section is rounded off by a chapter on migration and demography by the American scholar Steve Hochstadt. It has long been recognised, Hochstadt suggests, that ‘between 1871 and 1914 everything happened at once in Germany’ – a consequence of industrialisation, urbanisation and scientific progress. However, as he is quick to caution, while demography is often treated as inherent in a population or as something that happens to people, most of the demographic transformation discussed here ‘represents conscious shifts in collective German behavior, at home and at work’.

Part V International Relations, Militarism and War

Andreas Rose from the University of Bonn provides the opening chapter of the book’s final section. Diplomatic history became deeply unfashionable in the second half of the twentieth century but the study of international relations has been revitalised in recent years, with practitioners often incorporating elements of social, economic or cultural history into their approach. Rose’s chapter not only offers a well-informed analysis of the key issues in Bismarckian and Wilhelmine foreign policy, but also his interpretation of Germany’s actions in the of 1914. As such it offers a useful counterpoint to Annika Mombauer’s contribution later in the volume. In Rose’s view, historians have shifted their primary focus away from Germany and ‘its alleged aggression’, and nowadays pay more attention to the Kaiserreich’s constraints. For others, however, German aggression and militarism remain central to the events of 1914. In Chapter 21, therefore, Benjamin Ziemann from Sheffield University takes a closer look at this controversial topic. Although it is not hard to find evidence of its existence, historians today tend not to view it as a single coherent phenomenon: there were, Ziemann suggests, ‘many different militarisms’ in Imperial Germany and, importantly, none went uncontested. Turning from militarism to the military, the next two chapters examine the German army and navy in the decades before the First World War. William Mulligan, from University College Dublin, portrays the army as a ‘porous institution’, which was very much part of German society. It was, he suggests, not only the ‘school of the nation’ but also a ‘product of the nation’. Mulligan concludes that Germany’s military failures in the First World War were in part the result of reckless gambles prepared in the pre-war years, but also derived ‘from the failure of military and political leaders to ask fundamental questions of each other’. Much the same could be said of the Kaiser’s navy, which was seen as ‘a microcosm of society’ from early on. Chapter 23, by Jan Rüger of Birkbeck College London, looks not only at the navy itself, but Imperial Germany’s wider relationship with the sea. In recent years this has become a ‘vibrant field in which different historiographies intersect’, including transnational and global approaches as well as naval, diplomatic, social and cultural history. The latter, Rüger suggests, is particularly promising: Admiral von Tirpitz himself saw the sea as a Kulturgebiet, a ‘cultural space’, while ‘sea power was as much about performance and display as it was about technology and operational capabilities’. Unsurprisingly both the German army and navy continue to feature prominently in accounts of the origins of the First World War. Annika Mombauer – a frequent contributor to

7 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

television and radio documentaries about the war in its centenary year – provides a succinct and lucid history of this long-running debate in Chapter 24. As she shows, the debate has followed a somewhat cyclical path, always strongly influenced by the political context and climate of the time. If we are currently in a phase in which ‘blame-centred accounts’ have fallen out of favour, and which has seen an ‘erosion of the German paradigm’, there is no guarantee that this will remain so in perpetuity. On the contrary, if there is one thing that the history of the ‘war-guilt’ debate tells us, it is that confident assertions of self-satisfied consensus are usually a prelude to the latest radical revision. On New Year’s Day 2008, Germany’s last veteran of the First World War, Erich Kästner, died at the age of 107. In stark contrast to the deaths of the ‘Last Tommy’ or ‘Le dernier poilu’, this milestone initially passed without comment in Germany, where no database of Great War veterans was maintained, and where that conflict has long been overshadowed by the events of 1939–45.26 For many years, of course, the Wilhelmine era was itself viewed primarily through the distorting lens of the Third Reich. The questions historians posed of the period were often formulated along the lines of ‘where did it all go wrong?’, or as Ralf Dahrendorf once put it, ‘why wasn’t Germany England?’27 Lines of continuity linking the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich were vigorously sought and, unsurprisingly, often found. While few would nowadays uphold the crude notion of a German ‘special path’ (Sonderweg),28 leading inexorably to Hitler and the Holocaust, the centenary of the First World War has once again demonstrated the need to challenge clichés and misunderstandings with well- founded arguments, based on the latest scholarly research. As the final chapter in this volume shows, questions of continuity remain a vital and necessary line of historical enquiry. Its author, Jürgen Zimmerer, cautions, however, against mono-causal explanations which ignore the historical reality of either German or European colonialism. There are undoubtedly disturbing parallels between the Kaiserreich’s colonial empire – German Southwest Africa in particular – and Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe during the 1940s, but ‘the aim should not be to create a causal link or a renewed German Sonderweg’: there was no straight road from Windhoek to Auschwitz, but rather a ‘global and transnational communicative space’ in which imperial mentalities were able to develop. Historians informed by post-colonial theory nowadays tend to ask the same questions of Britain, France or any other former colonial power. This reflects a more general trend in historical research: the shift from the national to the transnational, or, in Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel’s formulation, from ‘the inside out’ to ‘the outside in’.29 Another recent trend in historical research evident in Zimmerer’s work is an interest in memory, both individual and collective. Not only has he edited a book documenting the Erinnerungsorte or ‘memory sites’ of German colonialism,30 but his chapter here identifies

26 When the story was finally picked up by news outlets, beginning with the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, many commented that Kästner belonged to a ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ generation. See, for example, the article on Spiegel Online: http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/topicalbumbackground/1280/der_leise_ tod_des_letzten_veteranen.html (accessed February 2014). However, such a characterisation hardly seems appropriate for a generation which included (born 1897), Rudolf Höss (born 1900) or Leni Riefenstahl (born 1902). 27 Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (London, 1968). 28 On the Sonderweg, see chapter one of my book, Contesting the German Empire (Oxford, 2010). 29 Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004), p. 11. 30 Jürgen Zimmerer (ed.), Kein Platz an der Sonne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (, 2013). The book follows the precedent set by the French historian and publisher Pierre Nora, whose three-volume Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York, 1996–98) documented 121 memory sites or lieux de mémoire featuring prominently in French history and culture. Another

8 Introduction

‘personal experiences, institutional memory and collective imagination’ as ways in which Germany’s colonial experience came to influence Nazi actions in Eastern Europe. Memory studies is, of course, one of the key growth areas across the humanities and social sciences today, and an important interdisciplinary research area in its own right. Its impact on German history has so far been felt primarily in the study of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, where the focus has so often been on the extent to which the past has been properly ‘mastered’. Colonialism, however, is one area where this approach has also made inroads into Wilhelmine historiography. While the relevance of memory studies to professional historians is obvious – history is ‘not only a science, but equally a form of remembrance’ (Walter Benjamin)31 – its appeal stretches well beyond the university campus, as the British public’s response to initiatives such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s casualty database, or the National Archive’s digitisation of First World War soldiers’ diaries indicates. In Germany too, numerous resources have been made available to the general public through websites such as Clio-Online or the Europeana 1914–18 portal.32 Such resources are by no means limited to commemorations of war either: as Stefan Berger notes in his chapter on the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Foundation has invested heavily in an extensive website documenting the lieux de mémoire of German socialism,33 and regional studies of memory sites have also appeared in recent years, including volumes on the Saarland, Oldenburg and Baden-Württemberg.34 The First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’, is often seen as an endpoint: the end of ‘Europe’s last summer’; or of the ‘long nineteenth century’ (which variously started in 1789, 1800 or 1815). Often this sense of an ending is largely symbolic, but for the German Empire the end was real and – continuities notwithstanding – permanent. The speed with which it collapsed in 1918, and the lack of support for a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy thereafter, might suggest that it never put down sturdy roots. The British Queen Victoria reigned longer than the three German Emperors combined. On the other hand, Germany retained the official title ofDeutsches Reich throughout the Weimar Republic and for most of the National Socialist era too, becoming the ‘Greater German Empire’ (Großdeutsches Reich) in 1943. Moreover, when the Communist regime in the German Democratic Republic began to disintegrate in 1989, it quickly became apparent that a single state covering much of the territory of the 1871 Empire was still the most popular option for Germans on both sides of the . Thus, while it may have been short-lived, the Kaiserreich remains central to modern German – and hence European – history. It will continue to be studied long after the last Wilhelminer has been laid to rest.

important collection in this vein is Etienne François and Hagen Schulze’s Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols (, 2001), with an inventory of 130 ‘sites’, including phrases, songs and people, as well as places. 31 Quoted by Steven Ostovich, ‘Epilogue: Dangerous Memories’, in Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (eds), The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana and Chicago, 2002), p. 243. 32 http://www.erster-weltkrieg.clio-online.de/; http://europeana1914-1918.eu/ 33 http://www.erinnerungsorte-der-sozialdemokratie.de/ 34 See, for instance, Kurt Bohr and Peter Winterhoff-Spurk (eds), Erinnerungsorte – Ankerpunkte saarländischer Identität (St Ingbert, 2007); Mareike Witkowski (ed.), Oldenburger Erinnerungsorte (Oldenburg, 2011); and Reinhold Weber, Peter Steinbach and Hans-Georg Wehling (eds), Baden- württembergische Erinnerungsorte (, 2012).

9 This page has been left blank intentionally pART i state and monarchy This page has been left blank intentionally 1 imperial governance

Katharine Anne lerman

imperial german governance has long been seen as defective and dysfunctional. while some before 1914 extolled the merits of a peculiarly german form of constitutionalism, the socialist journalist and later Reichstag deputy in the weimar Republic, friedrich stampfer, famously remarked that germany was the ‘best-administered and worst-governed country in the world’.1 To some extent the deficiencies of German governance were inherent in the nature of the imperial project itself which reflected the new power realities in the german lands and europe. The empire excluded Austria and resulted from the military and political dominance of Prussia, which also comprised three-fifths of the Empire’s geographical area and contained two-thirds of its population. it was thus impossible for imperial germany to be ruled independently of prussian interests and questionable how far there could even be an imperial german government or administration in parallel with the prussian government. The problems of governance in the Empire also reflected the complexity of the empire’s political arrangements. its nature as a federal union of states, represented in a Bundesrat (federal council) which deliberated in secret and combined legislative and executive functions, made it unique. The installation of an all- (Kaiser) suggested that the empire was a constitutional monarchy, but his title implied no territorial claim over germany and he had to accommodate the allegedly sovereign rights of the monarchs, princes and senates presiding over the 22 states and three self-governing cities. his power and prerogatives (including the right to declare war and make peace, and his role as ‘supreme war lord’) were sweeping, yet since he was simultaneously king of prussia, the Kaiser also had a major interest in upholding the federal principle and thereby preserving the more autocratic features of the prussian state. The introduction of a national german parliament or Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage, added a challenging, democratic element to the constitutional mix. While it formally had little power to influence decision-making or call those responsible for it to account, theReichstag had to pass legislation (including the budget) and served as a focus for national political debate (although it could not discuss foreign policy or those areas of policy reserved for the federal states). its regular elections and parliamentary procedures perhaps encouraged germany’s male voters and parliamentarians to ‘practise democracy’ before 1918, but germany’s rulers, who claimed to govern ‘above the parties’, could dissolve it at will and often sought to manipulate election results.2

1 mark hewitson, ‘The Kaiserreich in Question: constitutional crisis in germany Before the first world war’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (December 2001), pp. 725–80; John c.g. Röhl and nicolaus sombart (eds), Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations (cambridge, 1982), p. 16. 2 margaret lavinia Anderson, Practising Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (princeton, 2000). cf. Thomas Kühne, ‘Demokratisierung und parlamentarisierung: neue The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

One provision in the imperial constitution was deceptively simple. There was technically no German government in Berlin since a central executive would have thrown into question the nature of the federal union and Prussia’s de facto hegemony. The only responsible Imperial German minister was the Reich chancellor, whose power fluctuated over time and whose position depended on the confidence of the Kaiser who had the right to appoint and dismiss him. Below the level of the chancellor, a Reich administration developed into an increasingly elaborate quasi-governmental apparatus which by 1914 was increasingly referred to as the ‘Reich government’ (Reichsregierung). But, limited by the presence of a Prussian government in Berlin with which it was closely intertwined (not least because the Reich chancellor was nearly always simultaneously the Prussian minister-president), it could never function effectively as a national government and, despite belated efforts to create such a forum, there was no Reich cabinet or mechanism for collective decision-making in the Empire. The fortunes of the Reich state secretaries and their departments ebbed and flowed, often in inverse proportion to the power and influence of successive chancellors to whom they were technically subordinate. Hence, the significance of the so-called ‘Reich leadership’ (Reichsleitung) and its relationship with the Prussian government varied according to the personalities, policies and political priorities of the day. All this makes understanding the workings of the Imperial German political system difficult enough. If one broadens one’s gaze to encompass other crucial elements in Berlin high politics – the Prussian state ministry and government departments along with the lower and upper chambers of the Prussian legislature (); the role of the Kaiser’s court and entourage as well as his military, civil and naval cabinets; the influence of the army and naval commands who enjoyed direct access to the Kaiser in a way that civilian politicians did not; the diplomatic and dynastic networks that continued to play their part in intra-German affairs; and the ubiquitous presence of a variety of ‘irresponsible’ advisers eager to profit from their proximity to power and steer their own political course – it is perhaps not surprising that historians have largely abandoned earlier attempts to categorise the Imperial German political system or to see it as necessarily evolving in one particular direction. Our understanding of Imperial German governance has also been influenced by shifting perspectives and historical paradigms. From the 1960s many of the historiographical debates about the political system and the obstacles to reform were subsumed into wider theses of continuity in Prussian and German history. Arguments about how far Germany was an authoritarian, military monarchy and whether it was ‘parliamentarising’ or ‘democratising’ before 1914 were often conducted with a view to identifying the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic or the origins of the Third Reich. Germany’s problems have been ascribed to its ‘belated’ unification or to the fact that a parliamentary system was introduced too late; they have also been related to the ‘premature’ introduction of a democratic franchise and the early emergence of an organised socialist party. The thesis that Germany at some point in the nineteenth century (in 1848–49, 1866–67, 1870–71 or 1878–79) took a ‘special path’ (Sonderweg), which was different from that of other Western European states, proved particularly resilient as a metanarrative. Recent research has largely dismissed former assumptions about the backwardness of German society with the result that the political peculiarities of the Empire can seem even more striking. How far the Empire was capable of peaceful political adaptation, whether German democratisation retarded the development of a more parliamentary system, and how German governance might have evolved if the First World War had not intervened, are all questions inviting a degree of speculation. The

Forschungen zur politischen Entwicklungfähigkeiten Deutschlands vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2 (2005), pp. 293–318.

14 Imperial Governance

Imperial German political system is often seen as mired in crisis before 1914, but it has also been argued that, for all its shortcomings, it functioned quite adequately until 1918.3 From the defeat and collapse of the monarchy in 1918, discussion about the nature of Imperial German decision-making processes has also been closely allied to the question of German ‘war guilt’. The Fischer Controversy of the 1960s, which foregrounded Germany as the chief villain in precipitating both world wars, stimulated further research into the internal dynamics of the Empire and who was responsible for key decisions and policies. Nourished by the spate of self-exculpatory memoirs written after the war, there have been many attempts to attach the blame for the conflict on specific individuals within the ruling elite. Germany’s first chancellor, , and his nemesis, Kaiser Wilhelm II, are obviously seen as playing fateful roles in determining Germany’s political direction. But chancellors Bernhard von Bülow and Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, foreign secretaries such as Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter and Gottfried von Jagow, departmental officials such as the foreign office privy counsellor, Friedrich von Holstein, and intimate friends of Wilhelm II, notably Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld, have all drawn particular opprobrium. The continuity thesis ‘from Bismarck to Hitler’ can even today be starkly drawn. Two recent, popular biographies have portrayed Bismarck as playing a ‘demonic’ role in German history, blighting Germany’s political development in the twentieth century and even bearing significant responsibility for German antisemitism and the Holocaust.4 From a twenty-first-century perspective, there seems little doubt that the metanarratives once offered by historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Fritz Fischer no longer contain such explanatory force. Processes of ‘modernisation’ cannot be viewed as inherently progressive or rational. A new generation of researchers, influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ of the late twentieth century rather than by structural social history or traditional political history, is less interested in executive power and decision-making. Revisionist interpretations of the origins of the First World War seek to shift attention away from the determinants of Imperial German policy back to more contingent issues arising from the July Crisis and the failure to maintain peace in 1914.5 While these developments may signify that the way in which Imperial Germany was governed can be researched from a less teleological perspective, the plurality of new approaches and lack of an overarching narrative risk making the subject less accessible and stimulating for students. This would be a pity because, as the rest of this chapter will highlight, research into how Germany was governed before and during the First World War continues to be vital, stimulating and relevant to current concerns.

The Federal Union

The imperial constitution of 1871, which was largely based on the formulations of the earlier North in 1867, was deliberately couched in traditional, unthreatening

3 Mark Hewitson, ‘Wilhelmine Germany’, in James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), p. 45. On the historiography, see Roger Chickering, ‘Zwischen Dynamik und Stillstand. Gedanken zur deutschen Innenpolitik’, in Bernd Heidenreich and Sönke Neitzel (eds), Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1890–1914 (Paderborn, 2011), pp. 61–73. 4 Johannes Willms, Bismarck. Dämon der Deutschen. Anmerkungen zu einer Legende (Munich, 1997); Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford, 2011). 5 William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2010); Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012).

15 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

terms. It left considerable scope for subsequent legal debate about how far the new Empire was a constitutional monarchy, a federal state (Bundesstaat), a looser confederation of states (Staatenbund) or even a union of princes (Fürstenbund). Moreover, the genesis of the ‘eternal union’ agreed by the princes and senates created some ambiguity about whether the Empire was based on a treaty, the terms of which could be re-negotiated (as both Bismarck and Wilhelm II later threatened to do), or underpinned by constitutional law. While ensuring the pre-eminence of Prussia within the new Empire and preserving its power structure unchanged, Bismarck, as architect of the new political arrangements, sought to suggest a degree of continuity with Germany’s politically fragmented past and recognised that there was no question of establishing a unitary state ruled from Berlin. He aimed to create a framework which would facilitate the political and institutional evolution of the Empire but also wanted to preserve flexibility and fluidity, leaving power concentrated as far as possible in his own hands as Prussian minister-president, Prussian foreign minister and Reich chancellor (he was also for a period Prussian minister of trade) and those of his sovereign, the Prussian king and now Kaiser Wilhelm I. In effect, he wanted to combine the form of a confederation with the substance of a federal state.6 But the issue of where ‘sovereignty’ resided in the Empire – usually defined by jurists as the right to rule and seen as indivisible – was deliberately left unresolved and proved controversial. Dieter Grimm has highlighted how thoroughly the issue was debated in legal circles in the early years of the Empire and the relevance of these debates to current discussions about the relationship between the nation-states and the European Union.7 For reasons of political expediency, a consensus was quickly reached after 1871 that the new Germany, rather than the individual states, was sovereign, even though it voluntarily accepted limitations on its power. This has led historians to argue that formally sovereignty resided in the Bundesrat, representing the union of the states, but this was not so obvious to contemporaries. The Bundesrat, however, was never able to function as the supreme decision-making organ of the new German Empire. It was dominated by Prussia because the number of votes that each state wielded was related to the size of its population and, since its delegates were instructed how to vote by their home governments, there was only limited scope for discussion of policy. Prussia commanded 17 of the 58 votes in the Bundesrat, but also in practice the votes of its small north German client neighbours. , the later chancellor, simultaneously became Bundesrat plenipotentiary for the small principality of Waldeck and Pyrmont when he was appointed under-state secretary in the Prussian finance ministry in July 1909.8 Even with respect to its legislative role as an upper chamber, the Bundesrat proved a flawed institution. In the early years of the Empire, most of the bills it approved were drafted in the Prussian ministries and its plenipotentiaries had neither the time nor the expertise to comment on them. Bismarck, formerly scathing about the ‘sovereignty swindle’ of the lesser German states, was sensitive to the Bundesrat’s role in protecting state rights, above all those of Prussia, and he saw it as an effective block to the centralising ambitions of German liberals in theReichstag . He conceded to the right to chair a Bundesrat committee on foreign affairs which scarcely met, although, exceptionally, it was convened during the Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908. He tried to streamline the Bundesrat procedures in the 1880s, threatening to resign if he could not achieve the reform. Over the years, however, the federal governments and

6 Katharine Anne Lerman, Bismarck (London, 2004), pp. 127–34. 7 Dieter Grimm‚ ‘Was the German Empire a Sovereign State?’, in Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (eds), Imperial Germany Revisited (New York, 2013), pp. 51–65. 8 Bert Becker, Georg Michaelis. Preussischer Beamter, Reichskanzler, Christlicher Reformer 1857–1936. Eine Biografie (Paderborn, 2007), p. 227.

16 Imperial Governance

their representatives in Berlin repeatedly complained that they knew less about government policy than the Reichstag. The Bundesrat occasionally proved an obstacle to policy initiatives. The opposed courts martial reform in the 1890s, drawing threats of retaliation from Berlin; and a coalition of the middle and smaller states succeeded temporarily in blocking the repeal of part of the anti-Jesuit law in 1903–04. But by the first decade of the twentieth century, its role in German governance was becoming marginalised, certainly when contrasted with the growing self-confidence of the Reichstag. The Bundesrat masked Prussian domination of Germany, but this conclusion need not preclude further research into relations between Berlin and the federal states. The reports of the envoys from the lesser German states (who were simultaneously Bundesrat plenipotentiaries) have long been valuable sources for historians of German high politics, as are, for example, the published papers of the Grand Duke of Baden who was married to the daughter of Wilhelm I.9 On the dynastic level, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia (the later Kaiser Friedrich III) was determined to bring about a closer integration of the Empire, particularly at the expense of the three ‘German-Napoleonic kings’ of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg whom he expected to kneel before him.10 Kaiser Wilhelm II, too, had problematical relations with his princely ‘colleagues’. Focusing on the collapse of the at the end of the First World War, Lothar Machtan has painted a singularly unattractive picture of how Imperial Germany functioned as a confederation of princes, none of whom even dared intervene in the wrangling between government, Reichstag and supreme army command in the July crisis of 1917.11 By the 1890s a growing number of non-Prussians were involved in the Berlin administration (which Wilhelm II regretted). Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, a south German liberal Catholic aristocrat from a formerly mediatised ruling house, became not only chancellor but also Prussian minister-president in 1894. , another elderly former Bavarian minister- president, reluctantly became chancellor in 1917 after refusing the position earlier in the year. He was probably motivated more by the desire to prevent further centralisation and ensure that Bavaria acquired Alsace in a future peace settlement than by loyalty to the Hohenzollern Empire.12 It fell to yet another south German, Prince Max von Baden, to preside over the last, brief, parliamentary government in October 1918 and attempt to dismantle the bastions of Prussian power within the Empire. The Empire’s federal arrangements adversely affected its financial development, and regional considerations often made it difficult for political parties to come together at national level. Thosein Berlin who toyed with the idea of changing the constitution by force before the First World War were deterred not least by the uncertain implications of such a Staatsstreich for the federal union. While new work has illuminated state particularism and the shaping of a German national identity,13 the governmental links between Berlin and the states are worth further study.

9 Walther Peter Fuchs (ed.), Grossherzog Friedrich I. von Baden und die Reichspolitik 1871–1907, 4 vols (Stuttgart, 1968–80). 10 Frank Lorenz Müller, Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 95–6, 98–9. 11 Lothar Machtan, Die Abdankung. Wie Deutschlands gekrönte Häupter aus der Geschichte fielen (Berlin, 2008), especially pp. 110–14. 12 Ibid., pp. 87–92, 123–4. See also Winfried Becker, Georg von Hertling (1843–1819) (Paderborn, 1993). 13 Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2001).

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The Role of the Kaiser

The role of the Kaiser in Imperial Germany has probably attracted more debate in recent years than any other aspect of imperial governance. Yet with one or two exceptions, most obviously the recent work on Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia,14 this debate has been almost exclusively conducted with reference to the personality of Kaiser Wilhelm II rather than that of his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I.15 A modern, scholarly biography of Wilhelm I is highly desirable, as is a better understanding of the influence of the Prussian court during his reign. Wilhelm’s comments that it was hard to be a Kaiser under Bismarck, or that Bismarck was more necessary than he was, need further exploration, as does the widespread assumption that Bismarck was adept at manipulating a ‘decent, kindly, old man’.16 Clearly Wilhelm I did not insist on exercising his prerogatives as Prussian king and German Kaiser in the same way as his grandson later did, but he was far from being a quantité négligeable in German decision-making. Bismarck bemoaned the monarch’s ‘power-mania’ in 1873 and the fact that he ‘wants to have the last word about everything’.17 In 1876 the head of the Reich chancellor’s office, Rudolph Delbrück, deliberately bypassed the chancellor, asserting his independence by submitting his resignation directly to Wilhelm I.18 Even in 1887, Hohenlohe, as governor (Statthalter) of Alsace-, thwarted the drastic plans of Bismarck and the Prussian state ministry to break up the Reichsland by skilfully mobilising the 90-year-old Kaiser.19 We need an analysis of how Wilhelm conceived of his constitutional role, how the ‘kingship mechanism’ functioned before 1888, and how far a more imperial monarchy began to develop during his reign. The two assassination attempts on his life in 1878, which Bismarck used to enact anti-socialist legislation, were obviously important in the evolution of his public persona. It is difficult to imagine that much more significant primary evidence can cometo light about the character and political role of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The massive quantity of material presented in John Röhl’s monumental three-volume biography of Germany’s last Kaiser may take years to be fully assimilated, but the impact of his reign on German governance and society is now much more sharply in focus.20 Not least as a consequence of Röhl’s persistent efforts since the 1960s, interpretations of the nature of Wilhelm’s ‘personal

14 Müller, Our Fritz; Patricia Kollander, Friedrich III, Germany’s Liberal Emperor (Westport, 1995). 15 Röhl and Sombart (eds), Kaiser Wilhelm II; John C.G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court (Cambridge, 1994); Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (eds), The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2003); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, War der Kaiser an allem schuld? Wilhelm II und die preussisch-deutschen Machteliten (Berlin and Munich, 2002); Alexander König, Wie mächtig war der Kaiser? Kaiser Wilhelm II zwischen Königsmechanismus und Polykratie von 1908 bis 1914 (Stuttgart, 2009). For Kaiser Wilhelm I, see Karl Heinz Börner, Kaiser Wilhelm I. 1797 bis 1888. Deutscher Kaiser und König von Preuβen. Eine Biographie (, 1984); and Jürgen Angelow, ‘Wilhelm I (1861–1888)’, in Frank-Lothar Kroll (ed.), Preuβische Herrscher. Von den ersten Hohenzollern bis Wilhelm II. (Munich, 2000), pp. 242–64. 16 Steinberg, Bismarck, p. 480. Cf. Konrad Canis, ‘Bismarck und die Monarchen’, in Lothar Gall (ed.), Otto von Bismarck und die Parteien (Paderborn, 2001), pp. 137–54; Lerman, Bismarck, pp. 64–73. 17 Lerman, Bismarck, p. 182. 18 Rudolf Morsey, ‘Rudolph Delbrück (1817–1903)’, in Lothar Gall and Ulrich Lappenküper (eds), Bismarcks Mitarbeiter (Paderborn, 2009), p. 83. 19 Volker Stalmann, Fürst Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst 1819–1901. Ein deutscher Reichskanzler (Paderborn, 2009), pp. 178–81. 20 John C.G. Röhl, Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser’s Early Life 1859–1888 (Cambridge, 1993); idem, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004); idem, Wilhelm II. Der Weg in den Abgrund 1900–1941 (Munich, 2008). For a succinct summary of his research, see now John C.G. Röhl, Wilhelm II (Nördlingen, 2013). I am grateful to John Röhl for letting me read the manuscript prior to publication. An English translation is forthcoming (Cambridge).

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regime’ in Imperial Germany have become increasingly sophisticated. Wilhelm II was never a dictator and his direct interference in the work of the Reich executive fluctuated over time. He took the fateful decision to dismiss Bismarck in 1890 and clashed repeatedly with his ministers in the 1890s during the chancellorships of General (1890–94) and especially Hohenlohe (1894–1900). At his most autocratic between 1897 and 1900, Wilhelm was at the zenith of his power after the turn of the century when he was confident that Bülow, his obsequious fourth chancellor (1900–09) would always dohis bidding. His trust in Bülow diminished after the crises of 1905–06 and he became convinced of his treachery after the Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908, the most serious crisis of Wilhelm’s reign, when there were calls for his abdication. But he recovered quickly and continued to determine the parameters of foreign and military policy under Bülow’s successor, Bethmann Hollweg (1909–17). Wilhelm was sometimes manipulated and deceived by his military and political advisers, and he proved irresolute in July 1914. During the war, he was deprived of information, prone to nervous indecision and eventually eclipsed by the supreme army command. But his prerogatives remained intact and he retained the final word, for example, with respect to the conduct of the war at sea. Wilhelm’s control of personnel appointments in the Reich and Prussian administrations (as well as the higher echelons of the army and navy) underpinned his power throughout his reign, ensuring he wielded a decisive influence over the composition and political culture of the executive. His inadequacies and failures – for example, to coordinate foreign and defence policy and subject the strategic plans of the army and navy to civilian scrutiny – also had momentous consequences for Imperial German decision-making. Finally, Wilhelm’s exceptional energy and versatility made him an extraordinary force. His complex character, shaped by the exacting expectations of his family and entourage as well as by his political and public role, presented significant difficulties for all those who had to work with him over his 30-year reign.

The Chancellorship Under Bismarck

While the Kaiser was at the apex of the political, military and social apparatus of Imperial Germany, the position of the chancellor, who was appointed by the monarch, was central to Reich governance. Bismarck originally did not envisage that he would assume the role in the North German Confederation. He likened it to a minor post, seeing the chancellor as subordinate to the Prussian foreign minister and mainly responsible for casting the Prussian votes in the Bundesrat. But once it was agreed (largely as the result of parliamentary pressure) that the chancellor would have the right to counter-sign the ordinances and decrees of the federal president (or later Kaiser) and that he would thereby assume ‘constitutional responsibility’ for them (it was never specified how or to whom), Bismarck realised that he should occupy the position alongside his Prussian offices. The role of the Reich chancellor was not well-defined from 1871 and evolved significantly over the course of the Empire. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to credit that Bismarck and Hohenlohe (or Michaelis, who survived in office for 14 weeks in 1917) formally occupied the same position. Bismarck is frequently seen as having established a ‘chancellor dictatorship’ between 1871 and 1890, while Hohenlohe was almost completely irrelevant to the processes of government by 1900. If the first chancellor determined foreign and domestic policy, often exercising command over issues of detail as well, the third (who was 81 years old when he left office) was scarcely initiated into policies that significantly affected the country’s future. Hohenlohe was eclipsed in the conduct of foreign policy

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from 1897 by his highly ambitious state secretary of the foreign office, Bülow; and by 1900 the deputy president of the Prussian state ministry, Johannes von Miquel, did not even bother to send him documents for counter-signature.21 Despite three multi-volume biographies of Bismarck and several shorter interpretations since the 1980s, there is still scope for research into how Bismarck governed.22 It is far from clear that he exercised ‘charismatic rule’ (Wehler) or that he established a kind of dictatorship. Such interpretations tend to ignore the constraints under which he operated, the sources of opposition that he faced during his 19 years as chancellor and the evidence of organisational disarray at times in the administration. Bismarck clearly set the standard for subsequent chancellors (and none of them was able, literally or metaphorically, to fill his shoes) but his position was never as secure as it appeared in retrospect. Moreover, despite his reputation as ‘the iron chancellor’ and the testimony of some of those who worked with him, there are reasons to doubt the extent and reach of his autocracy within the executive, especially with respect to domestic issues and when his extended absences from Berlin are taken into account. Frequently there is an assumption that the Imperial German political system functioned well, or as was intended, under Bismarck but that things fell apart after his departure. Such an interpretation highlights the caesura of 1890, when Bismarck was brusquely dismissed by Wilhelm II, and the political instability of the 1890s, but it can distort the nature of Bismarck’s chancellorship and disregard the Empire’s political problems in the 1880s. Even in foreign policy, which he considered his special sphere, Bismarck struggled to establish unity and his leadership was challenged. Bismarck was never satisfied with the political arrangements in the Empire and constantly improvised as chancellor, experimenting with institutional forms and adjusting the balance between Prussian and Reich agencies, first one way and then the other. In the 1870s he relied on Delbrück who presided over a large Reich chancellor’s office and oversaw much of the legislation that consolidated the new national state. But, irritated by Delbrück’s accumulation of power and his resistance to the ‘mediatisation’ of Prussia (since in the 1870s Bismarck wanted to expand the Reich administration), Bismarck dismantled this arrangement in 1876 and created a series of Reich offices under secretaries of state to relieve his burden of work, as well as a smaller Reich chancellery to communicate with them and support him personally. How the chancellor interacted with his subordinates (and his less biddable Prussian ministerial colleagues), how far he relied on the advice of others outside the Berlin civil service, and the extent to which he was prepared to delegate work to his officials clearly varied over time and according to particular personalities and policies. New work has begun to explore Bismarck’s relationships with his subordinates but the impression created is quite mixed. For a time Delbrück was Bismarck’s deputy, but he was not ambitious for political office (he later rejected Prussian ministerial posts) and was not initiated into all aspects of affairs.23 Another official, Theodor Lohmann, who worked in the Reich office of interior in the early 1880s and drafted the sickness insurance legislation, has been described as a ‘statesman in disguise’ (Hennock) and ‘one of the few officials in

21 Stalmann, Hohenlohe, p. 342. 22 Lothar Gall, Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, 2 vols (London, 1986); Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Modern Germany, 3 vols (Princeton, 1990); , Bismarck. Urpreusse und Reichsgründer (Berlin, 1985); idem, Bismarck. Das Reich in der Mitte Europas (Berlin, 1990); Lerman, Bismarck; Edgar Feuchtwanger, Bismarck (London, 2002); Rainer F. Schmidt, Otto von Bismarck (1815– 1898). Realpolitik und Revolution (Stuttgart, 2004). 23 Morsey, ‘Delbrück’.

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the Kaiserreich who made history’.24 An expert in social policy, Lohmann was in some ways Bismarck’s opponent since he found aspects of his plans misconceived and impractical. But the chancellor’s cursorily written instructions gave him the opportunity to leave his mark on German social welfare provision. Lohmann only had four personal conversations with Bismarck, which illustrates how far governance in the late nineteenth century relied on written communications (and why it is consequently such a rich and rewarding area of study for historians). It is important to etch in Bismarck’s relationships with the men he has traditionally overshadowed, not just to rescue him from historical isolation but also to cut him down to human size. With respect to policy, too, Bismarck’s personal responsibility for political initiatives and the degree to which he controlled their execution needs to be established. Memoirs, diaries and private papers can mythologise Bismarck, so it remains crucially important to engage with the official and parliamentary record.25

From Bismarck to Hohenlohe

With regards to Bismarck’s successors, recent work has deepened our understanding of the chancellorships of Hohenlohe, Bülow and Michaelis.26 By contrast, with the significant exception of Röhl’s biography of Wilhelm II, there has been little new interpretative work on the chancellorships of Caprivi or Bethmann, although important new sources provide insights into the four wartime chancellors.27 None of the chancellors – whether former diplomats (Hohenlohe and Bülow), bureaucrats (Bethmann and Michaelis), a general (Caprivi), a party politician and Bavarian minister-president (Georg von Hertling) or a liberal aristocrat (Prince Max von Baden) – enjoyed Bismarck’s stature as ‘founder of the Reich’ or distinguished themselves in the chancellor’s role. How some of them came to be appointed to the highest political office in the Empire would contain elements of comedy if the consequences had not been so fateful. Neither the Kaiser nor his wife wanted Bethmann in 1909, but Wilhelm changed his mind while dressing for a tennis match. When Bethmann

24 Florian Tennstedt, ‘Theodor Lohmann. Gesetzgebungskunst im politischen Prozess’, in Gall and Lappenküper (eds), Bismarcks Mitarbeiter, pp. 91–121; Renate Zitt, Zwischen Innerer Mission und staatlicher Sozialpolitik. Der protestantische Sozialreformer Theodor Lohmann (1831–1905) (Heidelberg, 1997); Ernest Peter Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2007). 25 The Reichstag debates are now available online at http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de, as are the protocols of the Prussian state ministry at http://www.bbaw.de. Important recently published sources include: Konrad Canis, Lothar Gall, Klaus Hildebrand and Eberhard Kolb (eds), Otto von Bismarck. Gesammelte Werke. Neue Friedrichsruher Ausgabe. Abteilung III: 1871–1898. Schriften and Abteilung 4. Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Paderborn, 2004–12); and Karl Erich Born, Hansjoachim Henning and Florian Tennstedt (eds), Quellensammlung zur Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik 1867 bis 1914, 33 vols, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur (Mainz, 1993–2008). 26 Stalmann, Hohenlohe; Olav Zachau, Die Kanzlerschaft des Fürsten Hohenlohe 1894–1900. Politik unter dem ‘Stempel der Beruhigung’ im Zeitalter der Nervosität (Hamburg, 2007); Katharine Anne Lerman, The Chancellor as Courtier: Bernhard von Bülow and the Governance of Germany 1900–1909 (Cambridge, 1990); Gerd Fesser, Reichskanzler Bernhard Fürst von Bülow (Berlin, 1991); idem, Reichskanzler Fürst von Bülow. Architekt der deutschen Weltpolitik (, 2003); Bert Becker, Michaelis; Christoph Regulski, Die Reichskanzlerschaft von Georg Michaelis 1917: Deutschlands Entwicklung zur parlamentarisch-demokratischen Monarchie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Marburg, 2003). 27 Michael Epkenhans (ed.), Albert Hopman. Das ereignisreiche Leben eines ‘Wilhelminers’. Tagebücher, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen 1901 bis 1920 (Munich, 2004); Holger Afflerbach (ed.),Kaiser Wilhelm II als Oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg. Quellen aus der militärischen Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1918 (Munich, 2005).

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was forced to resign in 1917 after losing the confidence of the supreme army command and members of the Reichstag (but not the Kaiser), at least nine candidates were mooted. Wilhelm’s advisers were reduced to leafing through names of the nobility in the Almanach de Gotha before Michaelis, the only commoner to hold the position, was suggested and approved, first by the generals, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and subsequently bythe Kaiser.28 Caprivi, who never married, had no independent means and left few personal papers, still lacks a modern biographer. Often regarded as the most honourable and decent of Bismarck’s successors, he can be seen as a man who in some ways appreciated Germany’s transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society in the 1890s and whose ‘New Course’ attempted to accommodate these changes, for example, by concluding commercial treaties favourable to industrial interests.29 Yet his simple military outlook, lack of political and diplomatic experience, and isolation from court and society circles (despite sympathy from the Kaiserin) left him singularly ill-equipped to deal with Berlin high politics. In 1892 he naively gave up the Prussian minister-presidency in the wake of the defeat of the clerical Prussian school bill and his authority as chancellor was irreparably damaged. In 1894 he further chose to surrender some of the formal powers of the Prussian foreign minister, a post that he had reluctantly retained, which meant that none of his successors could aspire to have the same degree of control over relations between the Reich and Prussia as Bismarck had once had. Hohenlohe’s chancellorship has long been identified with some of the worst aspects of Imperial German governance, whether defined as Wilhelm II’s autocratic ‘personal rule’, departmental polycracy or ‘government by procrastination’.30 His weaknesses of leadership, especially after 1897, exposed the chancellorship to scorn and ridicule: a Simplicissimus cartoon depicted a Prussian state ministry meeting at which a minister stood up to ask if anyone was sitting on the Reich chancellor.31 By 1900 Hohenlohe, who had always been seen as an interim chancellor, had little more than a decorative role. Volker Stalmann’s new study of Hohenlohe highlights the advantages of a modern biographical approach since he places his chancellorship in the context of his family life, aristocratic social status and a long career in which he served as a parliamentarian, Bavarian minister- president, German ambassador to Paris and Statthalter of Alsace and Lorraine, before he became chancellor at the age of 75. While only able to make minor adjustments to the familiar, negative picture of German governance between 1894 and 1900, he makes intelligible how Hohenlohe approached the task of being Reich chancellor and how it was possible for him to preside over such a crumbling of his authority. Hohenlohe’s experience of dealing with Ludwig II of Bavaria, for example, conditioned how he responded to the more pathological traits in Wilhelm II’s personality; and as Statthalter he developed a patient, ‘wait and see’ style of governance which later reaped some small rewards, for example, in the courts martial reform and law of association of 1900. But he proved unable to stand up to the Kaiser or capitalise on the rare, fleeting display of governmental unity in the Köller crisis of 1895. He represented bills in the Reichstag which he clearly did not

28 Röhl, Wilhelm II. Der Weg in den Abgrund, pp. 1222–3; Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg. Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler, 2nd edn (Munich, 2009) pp. 283, 313. 29 Alden J. Nicholls, Germany After Bismarck: The Caprivi Era 1890–1894 (Cambridge, MA, 1958); Klaus-Rüdiger Metze, ‘Leo von Caprivi (1831–1899)’, in Wilhelm von Sternberg (ed.), Die deutschen Reichskanzler. Von Bismarck zu Schmidt (Königstein, 1985) pp. 39–54. 30 Jonathan David Fraley, ‘Government by Procrastination: Chancellor Hohenlohe and Kaiser William II, 1894–1900’, Central European History, 7 (1974), pp. 159–83. 31 Stalmann, Hohenlohe, p. 356.

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support, and his readiness to accept material assistance from Wilhelm II (who promised to augment his salary and interceded with the Tsar to protect his landed interests in Russia) further compromised the independence of his position. Hohenlohe moved in completely different social circles from a Prussian Junker like Bismarck (he was on Du terms with the Kaiser who famously called him ‘Uncle Chlodwig’). Although he frequently considered resignation, he clung to office, not least because he was arrogant enough to believe that he remained the best man for the job.

The State Secretaries and the Executive

Hohenlohe’s chancellorship highlights the growing power of the Kaiser and his interventions in Imperial German decision-making in the 1890s, but it also underscores how a weak chancellor exacerbated centrifugal tendencies within the executive, encouraging departmental in-fighting and bureaucratic or ministerial particularism. Even Bülow, who ostensibly restored the authority of the chancellorship because he was known to enjoy the Kaiser’s complete confidence, could not ultimately reverse this trend towards polycracy in the Berlin administration. In the 1890s there were seven Reich offices alongside eight Prussian ministries, most of which were headed by conscientious higher civil servants who had worked their way up through the hierarchy and were trained to execute orders. Mindful about issues of seniority and achieving recognition of their work in the form of honours and titles, they regarded themselves as servants of the crown, but they did not necessarily share similar political views. Even in the face of the pressing problems in 1918, ‘their excellencies’ exuded a strong sense of their own self-importance. State secretaries who had political skills and were able to speak effectively in theReichstag were increasingly desirable by the 1890s. Adolf von Marschall-Bieberstein, a south German who was a novice in foreign affairs when he took over as state secretary of the foreign office in 1890, was heavily reliant on Holstein, who ran its political department, but cut a good figure in theReichstag . Bülow, too, as secretary of state, eclipsed Hohenlohe not only because he had Wilhelm II’s confidence, but also because he assiduously cultivated his public image. His polished, debut speech in the Reichstag, which he delivered by heart and used to assert Germany’s claim to ‘a place in the sun’, contrasted with the short, often inaudible written statements read out by his aging, shrunken chief. The most significant state secretary during Wilhelm II’s reign was Alfred Tirpitz, who headed the Reich navy office from 1897 to 1916. Tirpitz was ennobled in 1900 (andthus able to use the prefix ‘von’). He was also appointed a Prussian minister without portfolio, a significant way in which the power of state secretaries could be enhanced within the Berlin administration (although Tirpitz’s promotion was resisted by Prussian ministers onthe grounds that the navy was an imperial, not a Prussian, matter). The lack of a biography of Tirpitz has now been rectified and a focus on his career highlights how a talented and skilful technocrat effectively built his own bureaucratic empire.32 Of course Tirpitz was a special case since he profited from Wilhelm II’s enormous interest in the construction of a navy. Unlike most state secretaries, he had regular, direct access to the Kaiser, and he used a combination of tact, defiance and resignation threats to achieve his aims. Tirpitz played a

32 Patrick J. Kelly, Tirpitz and the (Bloomington, 2011); Michael Epkenhans, Tirpitz: Architect of the German High Seas Fleet (Washington, DC, 2008); Franz Uhle-Wettler, in seiner Zeit (Hamburg, 1998); Raffael Scheck, Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right-Wing Politics, 1914–1930 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1998).

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key role in undermining the power and influence of the Reich navy office before he himself was appointed its state secretary in 1897. But, advised that the state secretaryship would best serve his ambitions, he thereafter efficiently destroyed the power of the naval command, ensuring that there were no rivals to his influence in this sphere until war broke out in 1914. With a small team of dedicated staff, he manufactured enthusiasm for the fleet by means of new forms of political campaigning, not least through the Navy League and the navy office’s elaborate news bureau. Tirpitz further bolstered his position by being ready to work closely with Reichstag deputies (for reasons of expediency) to ensure the passage of the navy laws, taking even socialists on tours of the docks and shipyards, and convincing the parliamentarians that he had put an end to the Kaiser’s ‘boundless naval plans’. All this made Tirpitz a different kind of politician from most of the state secretaries in Imperial Germany and one who was particularly effective at getting his own way, at least until 1912 when some of the weaknesses in his strategic assumptions were exposed. Other intelligent and capable state secretaries were: Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner, who headed the treasury (1893–97) and Reich office of the interior (1897–1907); Adolf Wermuth, also at the treasury (1909–12); and Kiderlen, who was widely regarded as having the best brain in the diplomatic service before he was appointed to the foreign office (1910–12). Like Tirpitz, Posadowsky was a Prussian minister without portfolio and worked closely with the parties in the Reichstag, especially the Centre (which was also a crucial support for the navy). But, for all his diligence, he lacked the personal authority within the executive which only the known support of the Kaiser could bestow. Bülow destroyed his position after the so-called ‘Hottentot elections’ of 1907 in which the government campaigned against the Centre and Social Democratic Party (SPD). The personal biographies of the small group of men who executed Reich policy can be instructive, providing insights into the internal workings of government across a variety of agencies and institutions, organisational culture in Berlin and the obstacles to reform.33

Eulenburg and Bülow

The instability of German governance in the Empire arose from many factors – the unfinished nature of the constitution; the clash between monarchical authority and parliamentary pretensions; the inadequate machinery for coordination; the abrupt removal of Bismarck in 1890; the difficulties arising from Wilhelm II’s personality; the mentality (or myopia) of those who held high office – as well as from more fundamental pressures arising from a rapidly changing society. Especially in the 1890s, both the Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag inflicted humiliating parliamentary defeats on the government, precipitating successive ministerial crises. But the Reich leadership also had to contend with other forms of opposition, some more insidious than hostile deputies in the parliaments. From 1890 the Bismarck family, along with their sympathisers and supporters, criticised government policy from the sidelines and struck terror in the minds of all those in Berlin who had most to fear from the former chancellor’s return to power. The conduct of foreign policy was complicated and often undermined by the Kaiser’s correspondence with foreign dynasties and his use of his military and naval attachés abroad (who reported directly to him as supreme warlord) as an informal diplomatic service. Furthermore, from 1888

33 See Katharine A. Lerman, ‘The Kaiser’s Elite? Wilhelm II and the Berlin Administration 1890– 1914’, in Mombauer and Deist (eds), The Kaiser, pp. 63–90.

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the ‘irresponsible advisors’ around the Kaiser proliferated, basking in the knowledge that they enjoyed the young monarch’s confidence. The influence of the Kaiser’s ‘best friend’, Eulenburg, was particularly significant in shaping the course and direction of Reich high politics in the 1890s. He played a key role as intermediary between the Berlin administration and the Kaiser; he also intrigued to secure the promotion of his friends to important political, military and diplomatic posts, above all engineering the appointment of his confidant, Bülow, as state secretary of the foreign office in 1897. Eulenburg’s influence was never benign but he justified his actions on the grounds that he prevented much worse things from happening as a result of the Kaiser’s impulsive personality (a defence that was also mounted by Hohenlohe, Bülow and Bethmann). New research has enriched our understanding of his relationship with Bülow, their machinations in the 1890s and the fourth chancellor’s role in his eventual downfall in the scandals of 1907–09.34 Peter Winzen has argued that by 1900 Eulenburg no longer supported Bülow’s candidacy for the chancellorship but coveted the role for himself.35 Eulenburg, Bülow and Tirpitz were all highly ambitious men who, in their own ways, projected the idea of a ‘personal regime’ on to the young and impressionable Wilhelm II in the 1890s. They encouraged his aspirations to rule personally, not least because it was the most effective way of securing their own power and influence. Once he was securely in power as chancellor, Bülow was determined to marginalise and destroy Eulenburg’s influence on Wilhelm II. He helped to engineer the favourite’s removal from his position as ambassador to Vienna in 1902; and, fearing his political comeback from 1905, he provided the journalist, Maximilian Harden, with incriminating evidence about Eulenburg’s homosexuality, contributing to the exposure and disgrace of the so-called ‘Liebenberg Circle’ (named after Eulenburg’s country house) in the Moltke-Harden and Eulenburg trials of 1907–09. Bülow, whose nickname was ‘the eel’, was undoubtedly Imperial Germany’s most duplicitous, vain and shallow chancellor, concerned above all to stay in office and eliminate potential rivals. He was not the sole instigator of Harden’s campaigns and it is a moot point whether he was prepared to feign his own dramatic collapse in the Reichstag in April 1906 (as Winzen argues) because it served his political purposes.36 But he certainly used every opportunity to further his own career and reputation. He utilised his convalescence in 1906 to have Holstein removed from the foreign office without personally incurring any blame. He also lied about his role in the Daily Telegraph Affair, re-writing its history after November 1908 by destroying official documents and fabricating new ones, with the aim of deflecting criticism from himself.37 Bülow cultivated a nonchalant approach to governance which dismayed his colleagues and contributed to a sense of drift within the Berlin executive. He restored the authority of the Reich chancellor but only by identifying himself completely with the Kaiser’s will. Fixated on the scandal trials throughout 1908, he increasingly left political matters to his subordinates and behaved ‘like a viceroy’ in theBundesrat .38 His urbane and

34 Peter Winzen, Im Schatten Wilhelms II. Bülows und Eulenburgs Poker um die Macht im Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 2011); idem, Das Ende der Kaiserherrlichkeit. Die Skandalprozesse um die homosexuellen Berater Wilhelms II. 1907–1909 (Cologne, 2010); idem, Freundesliebe am Hof Kaiser Wilhelms II (Norderstedt, 2010). 35 Winzen, Im Schatten Wilhelms II, pp. 337–46. 36 Ibid., pp. 430–32. 37 Peter Winzen, Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund. Die Daily-Telegraph-Affäre und das Hale-Interview von 1908. Darstellung und Dokumentation (Wiesbaden, 2002). 38 Lerman, Chancellor as Courtier, p. 218. See now also Peter Winzen, Reichskanzler Bernhard von Bülow. Mit Weltmachtphantasien in den Ersten Weltkrieg. Eine politische Biographie (Regensburg, 2013). Winzen sees Bülow as fully responsible for German policy between 1898 and 1909 and argues that he bears the historical responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914.

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cosmopolitan style masked a ruthless determination to go down in the history books as Wilhelm II’s Bismarck.

Informal Networks and Political Culture

The relationship between Eulenburg and Bülow and the latter’s wiles as chancellor are good examples of how Imperial German governance often relied as much on informal social, diplomatic and dynastic networks as on formal political structures. The homosexual and homoerotic bonds within the Kaiser’s entourage were politically significant because they exposed men in high positions to blackmail, destroyed confidence in the Kaiser’s judgement and tarnished the whole political system in the eyes of an outraged public.39 Bülow, too, was probably a homosexual (which was not a criminal offence in Germany, although sodomy was). When he assumed high office in Berlin, he installed Max Scheefer, reputedly his partner when he was ambassador in Rome (where homosexual acts were not criminalised), as his private secretary in his official residence.40 Scheefer’s extensive personal files indicate how he was promoted far beyond his capabilities and given special rewards, attracting adverse comment within the administration. When the campaigner for homosexual rights, Adolf Brand, attempted to expose the chancellor in 1907, both Bülow and Scheefer denied their relationship and probably committed perjury. Thereafter Scheefer was removed from Berlin and Bülow dismantled his personal secretariat. The chancellor also relied on other homosexuals within the administration, including his ‘civil adjutant’, Paul von Below-Schlatau, distinguished for his singing rather than his diplomatic ability; and Felix von Müller, the foreign office official blamed for the Daily Telegraph crisis who committed suicide in 1918.41 Family relationships were also significant within a ruling elite in which trust and integrity were often in short supply. Nepotism was rife and generally accepted. Bismarck and Hohenlohe relied heavily on their sons (as did Hertling) and also promoted their sons- in-law. Herbert von Bismarck was in effect his father’s private secretary for over 20 years, undertaking special missions for him before he was finally installed as state secretary of the foreign office in 1886. As his father’s deputy, he was indispensable, writing to Bismarck every day when he was not in Berlin and charged (very ill-advisedly) with maintaining close links to the prince and later Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Alexander von Hohenlohe was promoted alongside his father, eventually becoming a district president in upper Alsace, which aroused controversy because he never passed the second civil service examination.42 Bülow was childless but used his homosexual younger brothers, Alfred (a member of the Liebenberg Circle) and Karl, to carry out secret commissions for him, including handing over foreign office files to Harden.43 Eulenburg, too, exploited his family connections. His uncle was one of Bismarck’s ministers, a cousin was Wilhelm II’s influential court chamberlain and house minister, and another was Prussian minister-president between 1892 and 1894. Strategically placed relatives were important sources of information, and the private correspondence

39 Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse. Skandale, Politik und die Medien in Deutschland und Groβbritannien 1880–1914 (Munich, 2009) pp. 43–158; Martin Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal. Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin, 2005). 40 Lerman, Chancellor as Courtier, pp. 198–9; Winzen, Im Schatten Wilhelms II, pp. 442–74. 41 Winzen, Im Schatten Wilhelms II, pp. 385–404. 42 Stalmann, Hohenlohe, p. 197. 43 Winzen, Im Schatten Wilhelms II, pp. 405–42.

26 Imperial Governance

generated by such informal networks is very valuable for historians of high politics.44 These relationships also merit exploration in their own right. A recent study of social and political networks before 1914 has argued that members of the German ruling elite were disadvantaged relative to their counterparts in Britain and the United States because they proved less able to develop transnational links.45 Especially given the importance of male friendships in the ruling elite, it is also desirable to conduct research into women in political circles.46 It has been traditional to see women as largely excluded from a peculiarly masculine and militaristic society and culture. But it is self-evident that the behaviour of the men responsible for Germany’s political direction before 1918 cannot be understood in isolation from their family, social and sexual relationships. Women were not passive outsiders in German high politics. Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe (née Sayn-Wittgenstein), who inherited one of the largest private estates in Europe, repeatedly urged her husband not to resign as chancellor; his compliant behaviour towards her dated from 1869 when she attended a debate in the Bavarian parliament to prevent the clerical opposition exposing his relationship with his mistress of nearly 40 years, Alexandra von Hedemann, who bore him two children.47 Lily von Elbe’s testimony in court about her former husband, Kuno von Moltke, struck a devastating blow against the Liebenberg Circle.48 Bismarck’s most powerful opponents were royal women: Augusta, the wife of Wilhelm I, and Vicky, the wife of Friedrich III, both threatened his position and were openly critical of his policies. Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria, often dismissed for her pious conservatism, along with the three ‘hallelujah aunts’ who waited on her at the Prussian court, also exerted political influence, especially after the crisis of the monarchy in 1908. During the war she consistently defended the rights of the crown, admonishing Wilhelm to fulfil his duties, preserve external appearances and be responsible to no one. Personal relationships through marriage, so often overlooked, need to be disentangled, especially when marriage could make and break political careers. Bismarck’s suspicion of ‘petticoat’ influence was not merely a product of his misogyny, and he exploited his right to approve marriages (and sometimes insist on divorce) within the diplomatic service. Bülow evoked horror among some of his friends in 1886 when he married an Italian-born, Catholic divorcee, nine months his senior, who was an intimate friend of the crown princess and with whom the young prince Wilhelm had also been infatuated. An accomplished pianist, Marie von Bülow hosted superior musical soirées that attracted young men with a particular kind of aesthetic sensibility. The diary of the intelligent and well-placed Baroness Spitzemberg is an exceptional commentary on Berlin high politics, but women’s memoirs, diaries and personal correspondence illuminate assumptions, perceptions and codes of behaviour within the ruling elite.49 When Wilhelm II distinguished Tirpitz’s wife by sitting her next to him at a court dinner in 1906, he expected his navy secretary

44 John C.G. Röhl (ed.), Philipp Eulenburgs politische Korrespondenz, 3 vols (Boppard, 1976–83); N. Rich and M.H. Fisher (eds), The Holstein Papers, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1955–63); W. Buβmann (ed.), Graf Herbert von Bismarck. Aus seiner politischen Privatkorrespondenz (Göttingen, 1964). 45 Magnus Brechtken, Scharnierzeit 1895–1907. Persönlichkeitsnetze und internationale Politik in den deutsch-britisch-amerikanischen Beziehungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Mainz, 2006). 46 The author is currently working on such a study. 47 Stalmann, Hohenlohe, pp. 132–4, 366. 48 Winzen, Das Ende der Kaiserherrlichkeit, pp. 122–8. 49 Rudolf Vierhaus (ed.), Das Tagebuch der Baronin Spitzemberg. Aufzeichnungen aus der Hofgesellschaft des Hohenzollernreiches (Göttingen, 1960).

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to understand it as a gesture of reconciliation and was particularly aggrieved when he subsequently submitted his resignation.50

Bethmann and Parliamentarisation

When Bethmann succeeded Bülow as chancellor in the summer of 1909, the worst crises of the scandal-ridden Hohenzollern monarchy appeared to be over. The new chancellor was a colourless and didactic bureaucrat compared to his predecessor, but also, as Wilhelm II appreciated in the of 1913, a far more reliable defender of the crown. With support from Kiderlen and Wermuth, Bethmann endeavoured to loosen Tirpitz’s grip on the Empire’s foreign and military policies, improve its financial situation and reach an agreement with Britain over naval armaments. But, especially in the face of increasing public pressure and the refusal of the Kaiser (and crown prince) to concede any changes to the existing power structure (or suffrage) in Prussia, the Reich leadership was scarcely in a position to set the domestic political agenda. Bethmann’s approach to issues was reactive and bureaucratic. Moreover, he had no diplomatic experience before he became chancellor, insisting on Kiderlen’s appointment in 1910, and in March 1912 he submitted his resignation (but was persuaded to stay) when he was effectively excluded from the conduct of foreign policy by the Kaiser.51 His role in the July Crisis of 1914, when he risked continental war, quashed mediation attempts and disregarded the Kaiser’s ‘halt in Belgrade’ telegram of 28 July, remains highly controversial. The constraints under which Bethmann operated as chancellor increased markedly after the Reichstag elections of 1912 when the SPD became the largest party. With no parties of their own to furnish support, previous chancellors had tried with varying degrees of success to forge stable parliamentary coalitions. Bismarck worked with the National Liberals in the 1870s, shifting from policies of national consolidation and the anticlerical Kulturkampf to a more conservative, protectionist and anti-socialist course from 1878 to 1879. Frustrated by the oppositional stance of the political parties, he threatened repeated Reichstag dissolutions in an effort to fracture their resolve. In the elections of 1887, he sponsored a Kartell of the Conservative and National Liberal parties, a combination he deliberately wrecked in 1890 as part of his strategy to remain in power. Caprivi tried to conciliate the Catholic Centre, paying for his efforts with the sacrifice of the Prussian minister-presidency, but the Centre increasingly became a ‘government party’ after 1890. Bülow experimented without it between 1907 and 1909, identifying himself with a conservative-liberal bloc which collapsed over imperial financial reform. Bethmann, even more than his predecessors, was obliged to scratch together majorities on each issue from wherever he could find them. A ‘blue-black bloc’ of conservatives and Centre concluded the financial reform but was no longer feasible after 1912. The chancellor adopted ‘a strategy of diagonal’ between opposing political forces, securing the big army bill of 1913 and the taxes that covered it with different parliamentary majorities. Unlike the Kaiser, chancellors and state secretaries sometimes spoke the language of conciliation, signalling reforms they were reluctant or unable to deliver. But they, too, resisted any significant parliamentary encroachment on executive power right up to 1917 when the Reich leadership was effectively squeezed between a newly assertive Reichstag and the third

50 Rohl, Wilhelm II. Der Weg in den Abgrund, pp. 530–31. 51 Ibid., pp. 911–13.

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supreme army command. Hohenlohe was confident in the 1890s that the German people would eventually turn their backs on the ‘parliamentary filth’; Bülow made minimal, specific concessions (such as a polling booth law and parliamentary allowances) to the Reichstag but calculated that the best strategy was to leave it to stew in its own juice; Bethmann, too, equated democracy with the ‘brutalising and diluting of public morals’ before 1914, hoping to reform the franchise in the Empire as well as Prussia, and he reassured the Kaiser in January 1914 that the nation was ‘thank God not identical with the parties’.52 Despite his manipulative strategies and campaigns against ‘internal enemies’, it was perhaps Bismarck who best understood the Reichstag’s power as a symbol of national integration. He used it to address the press and nation, and his duels with parliamentary adversaries and soirées for Reichstag deputies were significant political events. The symbolic role the Reichstag enjoyed before 1890 was eclipsed by the development of an imperial monarchy under Wilhelm II.53 The predicament of the Empire’s civilian government became fully apparent during the First World War. In 1914, with the declaration of a state of siege, many of the functions of the civilian administration came under the command of the deputy commanding generals. The Bundesrat was empowered by the Reichstag to issue emergency legislation but the Berlin administration had little control over its execution. The conduct of the war strained civil–military relations and threw the Kaiser’s inadequacies as political leader and supreme warlord into sharp relief. By 1916 the power of Hindenburg and Ludendorff was in the ascendant and Bethmann, presiding over an increasingly exposed Reich leadership, struggled to maintain civilian influence. When a concatenation of circumstances – food shortages, accumulated military losses, revolution in Russia, declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, American entry into the war and a split within the SPD – belatedly galvanised the centre-left majority parties in the Reichstag to formulate a peace resolution in July 1917, the chancellor’s fate was effectively sealed. The threatened resignations of Hindenburg and Ludendorff led him to acknowledge his own dispensability and he departed on 13 July. Thereafter the Reich leadership consistently worked to prevent the introduction of parliamentary democracy in Germany. Neither Michaelis nor Hertling nor Prince Max von Baden wished to preside over significant structural reforms. Michaelis (who lacked parliamentary experience) and Hertling (who was appointed after consultation with the majority parties in October 1917 but tried to rule against the SPD) were both propped up by the supreme command. They recognised the need to give the existing constitutional arrangements a more parliamentary appearance; and the appointment of Reichstag deputies to high office without portfolio can perhaps be interpreted as a ‘semi-parliamentarisation’ or a distinctively ‘German parliamentarism’.54 But the significance of the concession was limited because until October 1918 deputies were still constitutionally required to give up their Reichstag seats in order to sit in the Bundesrat. The imperviousness of the federal council to parliamentarisation was rightly seen by the majority parties in the joint party committee (as well as by the sociologist Max Weber) as a major obstacle to reform.55 Ultimately the ‘new orientation’ which led to Hertling’s resignation at the end of September 1918 was initiated by the army leadership and only contemplated in the face of imminent defeat. After a year

52 Stalmann, Hohenlohe, pp. 239–40; Katharine Lerman, ‘The Decisive Relationship: Kaiser Wilhelm II and Bernhard von Bülow 1900–1905’, in Röhl and Sombart (eds), Kaiser Wilhelm II, pp. 238–9; Konrad Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven, 1973), p. 111; and Röhl, Wilhelm II. Der Weg in den Abgrund, p. 1023. 53 Andreas Biefang, Die andere Seite der Macht. Reichstag und Öffentlichkeit im ‘System Bismarcks’ 1871–1890 (Düsseldorf, 2009); Machtan, Abdankung, pp. 62–3. 54 Machtan, Abdankung, p. 123. 55 Regulski, Reichskanzlerschaft, pp. 43 (footnote 117), 102.

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of political stagnation, during which Imperial German governance combined elements of constitutional, monarchical, parliamentary, bureaucratic, military and dictatorial rule, and the Berlin administration often appeared rudderless, reform came too late to save the Empire. It is impossible to judge how the constitutional changes introduced at the very end of October 1918, including the full responsibility of the chancellor to the Reichstag, might have worked out in practice if circumstances had been different. The Kaiser missed the opportunity to abdicate voluntarily and perhaps save the Hohenzollern monarchy. Without a fundamental change of personnel in the executive, higher civil service, army leadership and at court, the chances of a successful transition to a parliamentary monarchy were slim. A desire to preserve the existing system was always stronger in Berlin political circles than a readiness to embrace change. But certainly if Germany’s government had been made accountable to its people before 1914, the horrors of industrial war and genocide in the twentieth century might have been avoided. In conclusion, governance in Imperial Germany was always opaque and subject to fluctuating influences and pressures. The empire’s constitutional arrangements were grafted on to pre-existing political structures with the result that monarchical, federal and democratic features were combined in a unique way which changed over time. In recent years historians have moved away from traditional political history, often centred on a narrow definition of official decision-making or the significance of caesurae such as Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890 and the outbreak of war in 1914. Cultural approaches, capable of utilising a wide variety of non-conventional sources, promise fresh perspectives on institutions and the more symbolic and ceremonial aspects of the regime. Detailed analyses of specific events, policies, crises or scandals can illuminate the actions and responses of different government agencies, how German governance was experienced by insiders and perceived by wider publics. Historians’ interest in ‘total biography’ also promises to breathe new life into older debates about the nature of the ruling elite, mentalités and political culture in Berlin, helping to balance a former preoccupation with key personalities such as Bismarck and Wilhelm II. Finally, as attention shifts from the origins of the First World War to the war itself, there is the prospect that these years, too, can be fully integrated into the history of the Empire. A better understanding of the dissolution of governmental processes during the war is essential if historians are to assess accurately the strengths and weaknesses of Imperial German governance and its legacy.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Afflerbach, Holger (ed.) Kaiser Wilhelm II als Oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg. Quellen aus der militärischen Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1918 (Munich, 2005). Becker, Bert. Georg Michaelis. Preussischer Beamter, Reichskanzler, Christlicher Reformer 1857– 1936. Eine Biografie (Paderborn, 2007). Biefang, Andreas. Die andere Seite der Macht. Reichstag und Öffentlichkeit im ‘System Bismarcks’ 1871–1890 (Düsseldorf, 2009). Cecil, Lamar. Wilhelm II: Prince and Emperor 1859–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1989). —. Wilhelm II: Emperor and Exile, 1900–1941 (Chapel Hill, 1996). Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998). Clark, Christopher. Kaiser Wilhelm II (London, 2000). —. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012).

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Domeier, Norman. Der Eulenburg-Skandal. Eine politische Kulturgeschichte des Kaiserreichs (Frankfurt, 2010). Engelberg, Ernst. Bismarck. 2 vols, I: Urpreusse und Reichsgründer, II: Das Reich in der Mitte Europas (Berlin, 1985 and 1990). Epkenhans, Michael (ed.) Albert Hopman. Das ereignisreiche Leben eines ‘Wilhelminers’. Tagebücher, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen 1901 bis 1920 (Munich, 2004). Fesser, Gerd. Reichskanzler Fürst von Bülow. Architekt der deutschen Weltpolitik (Leipzig, 2003). Forsbach, Ralf. Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter (1852–1912). Ein Diplomatenleben im Kaiserreich, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1997). Fuchs, Walther Peter (ed.) Grossherzog Friedrich I von Baden und die Reichspolitik 1871–1907, 4 vols (Stuttgart, 1968–80). Gall, Lothar. Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, 2 vols, I: 1815–1871, II: 1871–1898 (London, 1986). — (ed.) Otto von Bismarck und die Parteien (Paderborn, 2001). — and Lappenküper, Ulrich (eds). Bismarcks Mitarbeiter (Paderborn, 2009). Hewitson, Mark. ‘The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany Before the First World War’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (December 2001): pp. 725–80. Jarausch, Konrad. The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven, 1973). Kelly, Patrick J. Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy (Bloomington, 2011). Kohlrausch, Martin. Der Monarch im Skandal. Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin, 2005). König, Alexander. Wie mächtig war der Kaiser? Kaiser Wilhelm II Zwischen Königsmechanismus und Polykratie von 1908 bis 1914 (Stuttgart, 2009). Lerman, Katharine Anne. The Chancellor as Courtier: Bernhard von Bulow and the Governance of Germany, 1900–1909 (Cambridge, 1990). —. Bismarck (London, 2004). Machtan, Lothar. Die Abdankung. Wie Deutschlands gekrönte Häupter aus der Geschichte fielen. (Berlin, 2008). Mombauer, Annika and Deist, Wilhelm (eds). The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2003). Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Imperial Germany 1867–1918: Politics, Culture and Society in an Authoritarian State (London, 1995). —. War der Kaiser an allem schuld? Wilhelm II und die preussisch-deutschen Machteliten (Berlin and Munich, 2002). Müller, Frank Lorenz. Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Pflanze, Otto. Bismarck and the Development of Modern Germany, 3 vols, I: The Period of Unification 1815–1871, II: The Period of Consolidation 1871–1880, III: The Period of Fortification 1880–1898 (Princeton, 1990). Pyta, Wolfram. Hindenburg. Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich, 2007). Rauh, Manfred. Die Parlamentarisierung des deutschen (Düsseldorf, 1977). Regulski, Christoph. Die Reichskanzlerschaft von Georg Michaelis 1917. Deutschlands Entwicklung zur parlamentarisch-demokratischen Monarchie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Marburg, 2003). Röhl, John C.G. Germany Without Bismarck: The Crisis of Government in the Second Reich, 1890– 1909 (London, 1967). —. The Kaiser and his Court (Cambridge, 1994). —. Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859–1888 (Cambridge, 1998). —. Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004). —. Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941 (Cambridge, 2013).

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—. Wilhelm II (Nördlingen, 2013). — (ed.) Der Ort Kaiser Wilhelms II. in der deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 1991). — and Sombart, Nicolaus (eds). Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations (Cambridge, 1982). Stalmann, Volker. Fürst Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst 1819–1901. Eine deutscher Reichskanzler (Paderborn, 2009). Steinberg, Jonathan. Bismarck: A Life (Oxford, 2011). Vietsch, Eberhard von. Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Staatsmann zwischen Macht und Ethos (Boppard, 1969). Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985). —. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995). Winzen, Peter. Das Kaiserreich am Abgrund: Die Daily-Telegraph-Affäre und das Hale-Interview von 1908. Darstellung und Dokumentation (Wiesbaden, 2002). —. Bernhard Fürst von Bülow. Weltmachtstratege ohne Fortune – Wegbereiter der grossen Katastrophe (Göttingen, 2003). —. Das Ende der Kaiserherrlichkeit. Die Skandalprozesse um die homosexuellen Berater Wilhelms II. 1907–1909 (Cologne, 2010). —. Im Schatten Wilhelms II. Bülows und Eulenburgs Poker um die Macht im Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 2011). —. Reichskanzler Bernhard von Bülow. Mit Weltmachtphantasien in den Ersten Weltkrieg. Eine politische Biographie (Regensburg, 2013). Witt, Peter-Christian. Die Finanzpolitik des deutschen Reiches von 1903–1913 (Lübeck, 1970). Wollstein, Günter. Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Letzter Erbe Bismarcks, erstes Opfer der Dolchstosslegende (Göttingen, 1995). Zmarzlik, Hans-Günther. Bethmann Hollweg als Reichskanzler, 1909–1914 (Düsseldorf, 1957).

32 2

prussian governance1

hartwin spenkuch

why was prussia so important for the development of the german empire? The answer to this question is to be found in its imprint on the formation of the empire, and its continuing influence on key political questions. Reason enough, therefore, to takea closer look. Indeed, the historian James Retallack has written that ‘the survival of Prussia constituted one of Imperial Germany’s most important peculiarities’. He summed up the two most striking, albeit contradictory, tendencies of recent historiography about both the Empire and Prussia in a single phrase: ‘Both stories – the triumph of modernity and the long shadow cast by authoritarianism – are true’.2 The main thrust of research since the 1980s has been to stress processes of mobilization or even democratization rather than the survival of pre-modern elites, but recently it has also been pointed out that the authoritarian essence of the Empire persisted. If Germany was Janus-faced, then Prussia was the rear side of this face. And Prussia covered 65 per cent of Germany’s surface, albeit with great regional diversity. how did the political system in prussia work and how is its legislative record to be assessed? What was Prussia’s political role in the Empire? Did Prussia shape Germany’s political system and political culture in its own image or, conversely, did Germany infiltrate and change prussia? christopher clark, author of the prize-winning study Iron Kingdom, clearly prefers the latter explanation: ‘Germany was not Prussia’s fulfilment … butits undoing’, he argues. In the wake of this book, following a change of political climate and as a consequence of new comparative studies, prussia appears to have become normalized; it is no longer demonized or celebrated as a model state. For the present author, some of these revisions have gone too far. Prussia is neatly portrayed in light grey, with clear contours blurred. Comparative historians in particular, however, must delineate precisely which differences can be upheld, which continuities remained and which changes took place. New interpretations and approaches do not devalue well-known evidence or established opinions about prussian governance completely, and currently fashionable cultural approaches which centre on discourses, representations and other hitherto unexplored questions must

1 In memoriam Emil Spenkuch (1917–2013). 2 James Retallack, ‘Looking Forward’, in idem (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 271–2. David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century. A History of Germany 1780–1918 (Oxford, 1997), p. 418, agreed: ‘The central pillars of the Prusso-German constitutional system remained untouched, including the prerogatives of the Kaiser’. Research is treated by Brett Fairbairn, ‘Political Mobilization’, in Roger Chickering (ed.), Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion (Westport, 1996), pp. 303–42; and Thomas Kühne, ‘Die Jahrhundertwende, die “lange” Bismarckzeit und die Demokratisierung der politischen Kultur’, in Lothar Gall (ed.), Otto von Bismarck und Wilhelm II. (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 85–118. Arguments in this essay follow my review article ‘Vergleichsweise besonders? Politisches System und Strukturen Preussens als Kern des “deutschen Sonderwegs”’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003), pp. 263–92. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

not lose sight of the specific political context in Prussia. The abundance of literature should not end in general uncertainties.3 The term ‘governance’ refers to the use of the structures of government, the socio-political make-up of its personnel and the legislative record over time. A research companion should delineate recent historiographical trends or controversies as well as indicate possible future research topics. In view of the limited space available, this chapter will concentrate on four specific areas. It will begin with Prussia’s constitution and formal role as the hegemonic state in the Empire, before looking at the profile of its leading personnel. A third part will look at its legislative record, the achievements and failures of an early interventionist state, while a fourth section will deal with those aspects of the political system and culture which have been the focus of much recent historiography. Some proposals for possible future research conclude the essay.

The Prussian Constitution and Prussian Hegemony in the German Empire

The Prussian Constitution of 1850, a royal imposition in the era of reaction, and unchanged in its politically important parts until 1918, set the tone. Although it guaranteed personal liberties and the rule of law, promising further constitutional progress via laws on such things as ministerial responsibility, it also accorded great power to the monarch. His prerogatives included all executive acts and appointments (article 44), foreign policy, Protestant church affairs, the supreme military command, and an absolute veto on all legislation. Thediet (Landtag) had to approve the annual budget and all state laws, but executive decrees and the declaration of states of emergency or war were exempted (articles 63 and 111). Further restrictions resulted from a second chamber of appointed members, the Herrenhaus, 75 per cent of whom were conservative aristocrats. Had the liberal majority in the Landtag during the constitutional conflict of 1862–66 succeeded, Prussia would have taken a great leap towards parliamentary government. However, the foul compromise arrived at in 1866, Bismarck’s violent success in forging national unity, and the right-wing majorities produced by the three-class franchise, left the dominance of Prussia’s monarchy intact. The historian Martin Kirsch has argued that the Prusso-German case was normal when compared to most European countries, but his thesis is flawed for three reasons.4 By ending his study around 1880, Kirsch does not consider the dominance which parliamentary majorities in many countries gained by 1914; by looking mainly at the text of constitutions, actual political practice is not scrutinized; the big societal quest for participation, the political mass market and the harsh exclusion of the Social Democratic part of the population are neglected. Prussia remained a constitutional state, but it did not proceed to a parliamentary system.5

3 Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom (London, 2006), p. xxi. Matthew Jefferies,Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 3–4, also warns against rash revisionism resulting from the neglect of past research. 4 My arguments contra Martin Kirsch, Monarch und Parlament im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1999) are detailed in Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders?’, pp. 271–3. 5 On the Prussian constitution with a pro-state and apologetic bias, see Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 54–128. More critical are Günther Grünthal, Parlamentarismus in Preussen 1848/49–1857/58 (Düsseldorf, 1982); and Hartwin Spenkuch, Das Preussische Herrenhaus 1854–1918. Adel und Bürgertum in der Ersten Kammer des Landtages (Düsseldorf, 1998). The constitutional conflict is examined by Hans Boldt, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 2 (Munich, 1990), pp. 106–19; and Rainer Wahl, ‘Der preussische Verfassungskonflikt und das

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The Prussian constitutional system prefigured the political constellation of the German Empire: any quest for parliamentary government was deterred, ridiculed and hindered by constitutional barriers. Professors of constitutional law even accorded complete state power to the monarch as the bearer of sovereignty. The few dissenting progressives were excluded from university chairs (Ordinariaten) in public law or history in Prussia. Most public leaders and scholars such as Gustav Schmoller and internalized the view of the benign superiority of the Prussian Beamtenstaat. C.H. Becker, in the 1920s a famous liberal minister of culture, in a 1913 letter declared his preference for ‘enlightened despotism’ – because parliament ‘usually converts well-informed governmental policies into dilettante splits’.6 As Mark Hewitson has shown, Western parliamentary systems were denounced as ‘majority despotism’; corrupt regimes with poor records on social policy and slower economic progress. Prussia was the celebrated leader of German power, its administration was declared to be removed from special interests and objective (sachlich), and its constitution was seen to be dignified by success.7 In 1912 Professor Gustav Roethe vehemently denied that Prussia could merge into Germany, as it was the eminent rock resisting the flood of democracy.8 The German Empire of 1871 was of Prussian descent and imprint, yet at the same time marked a compromise with the National Liberal movement and the federal states. The constitution allowed for the development of a gradually more powerful parliament, the Reichstag, although the chancellor and the imperial secretaries did not need a vote of confidence there. Based on an equal male franchise and the evolving political mass market, this national parliament gradually dwarfed state parliaments. But on the national level, too, sovereignty rested with the monarchs and their governments assembled in the secret federal council (Bundesrat). This institution was meant to mobilize states against centralization or the dominance of government through parliament. It could block every Reichstag initiative and sometimes did. Prussia commanded 17 out of 58 votes; usually supported by the smaller states, Prussia very rarely failed to win majorities. The Bavarian delegate, Count Lerchenfeld, recalled a de facto Prussian veto in military, tariff and tax questions. The Bundesrat had no bureaucratic staff. At first Prussian ministries prepared the laws, but as the imperial offices expanded they took over, and Prussia’s direct grip on national regulations loosened.9 The Reichstag gained influence in three areas of legislation: codification reaching from economic matters to civil law; social policy; and the expenses incurred from army or naval expansion and colonialism. Yet the larger role for imperial secretaries of state (Reichsstaatssekretäre) depended on the assent of the chancellors who, except for three short periods (1873, 1892–94, 1918), also acted as Prussian minister-presidents. On the whole, the German constitutional system remained a dualistic arrangement of mutual veto powers: parliaments could block laws and executive expenditure, but governments could not be ousted by parliamentary censure. Very occasionally ministers were dismissed after defeats on the floor. The German emperor was to be the Prussian king. Formally only a primus inter pares and chairman of the federal council, the emperor depended on his Prussian power base. konstitutionelle System des Kaiserreichs’, in Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (ed.), Moderne deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte 1815–1914 (Königstein, 1981), pp. 208–31. 6 Geh. Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, C.H. Becker papers, file nb. 327 (letter 6/12/1913). 7 Mark Hewitson, ‘The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany Before the First World War’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp. 725–80. 8 Gustav Roethe, in Preussen. Deutschlands Vergangenheit und Deutschlands Zukunft. Vier Vorträge (Berlin, 1913), p. 112. 9 Hans Fenske, ‘Reich, Bundesrat und Einzelstaaten 1867 bis 1914’, Der Staat, 13 (1974), pp. 265–79 (review article); Manfred Rauh, Die Parlamentarisierung des Deutschen Reiches (Düsseldorf, 1977); Heiko Holste, Der deutsche Bundesstaat im Wandel (1867–1933) (Berlin, 2002), pp. 206–23.

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Based on their legal rights and even more on their prestige as creators of German unity, the Prussian rulers Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II defended the prerogatives of monarchy. Rulers in Baden, Bavaria, Hesse or Württemberg in the latter years of the Empire abandoned political interference and appointed ministers with affinity to Landtag majorities. The Prussian kings in their role as German emperors did not follow this trend, although after 1898 Wilhelm II had to give up the reactionary idea of abolishing the equal Reichstag franchise via a coup. The extra-constitutional status of the Prussian military and its dominance in Germany via the Prussian minister of war, commanding generals, and the central General Staff are a separate topic, but Prussia’s specific military tradition and culture undoubtedly left their imprint on Germany, from the now cherished institution of reserve officer to the highly risky Schlieffen plan.10

The Personnel of the Prussian Administration

Prussia was a constitutional monarchy with the rule of law (restricted in notable exceptions) and public political debates, yet it was characterized by a strong bureaucracy with a high proportion of nobles and a decidedly conservative outlook. Thomas Nipperdey characterized it as ‘status-quo conservative’ as opposed to ‘reform-conservative’ in the imperial sphere. As there was no government by parties, the administration took the place of government; nearly all ministers had a bureaucratic background. The Prussian state ministry (Staatsministerium) acted up to the late 1890s quasi as the imperial cabinet, since secretaries of state met only twice under Bismarck and only a few times after 1900. It was not until 1896 that a decision of the state ministry allowed the secretaries to be present at topics dealing with imperial affairs. In 1914 Vice-Chancellor Clemens Delbrück proposed formal meetings of the state secretaries in order to end the lengthy exchange of written statements. By this time, several imperial secretaries had gained the right to be present and vote at the meetings of the Prussian state ministry. This was permanently established for the secretaries of the interior (1869), foreign affairs (1876), naval affairs (1898) and financial affairs (1908/14). It was the chancellor-minister-president who replenished the state ministry with imperial secretaries (Staatssekretarisierung).11 The eight ministers were legally independent of the minister-president and controversial matters were decided by a majority vote in the state ministry. Between 1871 and1890 Bismarck was the dominant figure and he pushed through the turn from a mildly liberal to a conservative course in 1876–79. This was accompanied by the dismissal of several ministers. From then on, Bismarck remarked, his capacity to have any minister dismissed by the emperor-king brought firm discipline into the cabinet. To Lady Emily Russell, wife of the British ambassador, the cabinet appeared as a ‘ministry of clerks … who do as they are told’. The authority of the minister-presidents after 1890 was smaller and crises over leadership, policies and individual personalities shattered the state ministry in 1892, 1894–95, 1897 and 1899–1900. In 1901 a Badenese diplomat noted the resurgence of an earlier endemic split

10 Hartwin Spenkuch, ‘Introduction’ to Acta Borussica, N.F., Die Protokolle des Preussischen Staatsministeriums 1817–1934/38, vol. 8: 1890–1900 (Hildesheim, 2003), p. 12, lists the relevant literature on the idea of a coup. On the Prussian military, see Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders?’, pp. 283– 90. Hans Ehlert et al. (eds), Der Schlieffen-Plan. Analysen und Dokumente (Paderborn, 2006), pp. 117–60 (Gerhard P. Groß). 11 Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. 2 (Munich, 1992), p. 487. Clemens Delbrück’s memo of 1914 is cited by Rauh, Parlamentarisierung, pp. 38–43. Hans Goldschmidt, Das Reich und Preussen im Kampf um die Führung. Von Bismarck bis 1918 (Berlin, 1931) provides relevant documents.

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(Zweiseelenwirtschaft) in the state ministry. Indeed the division between reformist figures and a highly conservative faction ranged from the stressful duos Caprivi–Eulenburg in 1892–94 and Hohenlohe–Miquel between 1894 and 1900, down to the ministers refusing franchise reform in 1910 (Arnim, Rheinbaben, Moltke) and political reorientation in 1917 (Schorlemer, Loebell, Trott zu Solz). The ministries can be grouped roughly in two camps. Moderately pro-modern were the trade, public works and justice administrations, as were, depending on the ministers, in some periods the administrations of finance and education. The interior and agricultural ministries were always highly conservative.12 According to the constitution, the king appointed and dismissed all state officials upon ministerial proposal. Bismarck proposed only reliable conservatives; in the 1890s Wilhelm II took an active role in selection, promoting Bernhard von Bülow and refusing various men. Thus, the state ministry remained a conservative council. Many highly placed officials were convinced that their position demanded complete loyalty to the monarch. This attitude, combined with a specific concept of (male) honour, made the ousting of ministers easier. In 1909 the long-term finance minister, von Rheinbaben, was insulted because Minister- President Bethmann Hollweg denied him the vice-presidency of the state ministry, and he submitted his resignation. He noted that this refusal had diminished his authority and thrown a shadow of distrust upon him. Bethmann had indeed deliberately overlooked this staunch conservative, but he convinced him to stay. Generally, a minister’s resignation after the defeat of an important bill was publicly camouflaged as being due to health problems or overwork. As compensation, the ex-minister received orders and honorary titles. For decades, only a handful of active party politicians were appointed to ministerial office, or as provincial governors. The reform conservatives Achenbach and Friedenthal and the National Liberals Falk and Hobrecht had been active deputies when they took office in the 1870s. In 1887 the National Liberal party chairman Bennigsen was appointed governor, a compensation for his party’s entry into the alliance with the conservatives (the Bismarck Kartell). In 1890 the National Liberal deputy Miquel became finance minister, but he had cut his party links. Similarly, ex-deputy Möller headed the ministry of trade between 1901 and 1905. It was not until 1917 that the National Liberal caucus chairman Friedberg entered the state ministry as vice-president, and was joined by members of the Centre Party and the Progressives. The practice of appointing state officials of conservative hue as Prussian ministers meant a dissociation of parliamentary and administrative elites and, as observers around 1900 noted, it curtailed the need for political parties to act responsibly in the expectation of joining a future government.13

12 On the governmental crisis, see John C.G. Röhl, Germany Without Bismarck (London, 1967); and Spenkuch, ‘Introduction’ to Die Protokolle, vol. 8: 1890–1900, pp. 26–29. Idem, ‘Introduction’ to Acta Borussica, N.F., Die Protokolle des Preussischen Staatsministeriums, vol. 7: 1879–1890 (Hildesheim, 1999), p. 22 (Bismarck quote); and Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany (Oxford, 2004), p. 111 (Russell). Spenkuch, Herrenhaus, p. 458 (Zweiseelenwirtschaft). Differences between Prussian bureaucrats and imperial officials are described by Gary Bonham, Ideology and Interests in the German State (New York, 1991), pp. 361 ff.; and Marie Vincent, Serviteurs de l’État. Les élites administratives en Prusse de 1871 à 1933 (Paris, 2006), pp. 186 ff. 13 Katherine A. Lerman, ‘The Kaiser’s Elite? Wilhelm II and the Berlin Administration, 1890– 1914’, in Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (eds), The Kaiser (Cambridge, 2003) pp. 63–90, 80 f. (Rheinbaben). Heinrich Best, ‘Politische Modernisierung und parlamentarische Führungsgruppen in Deutschland 1867–1918’, Historical Social Research, 13 (1988), pp. 5–74, 46, 51 (dissociation). My observations are based on Acta Borussica, N.F., Die Protokolle des Preussischen Staatsministeriums 1817– 1934/38, vol. 6: 1867–1878, edited by Rainer Paetau and Hartwin Spenkuch (Hildesheim, 2004), as well as vol. 9: 1900–1909 (Hildesheim, 2001) and vol. 10: 1909–1918 (Hildesheim, 1999), both edited by Reinhold Zilch. John A.R. Marriott and C.G. Robertson, The Evolution of Prussia: The Making of an Empire (Oxford, 1915), pp. 434–35.

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In 1929, the young historian Eckart Kehr argued that, after 1879, the minister of the interior, Puttkamer, had given the Prussian administration a decidedly conservative outlook (the so-called Puttkamer Purge), thus blocking the way to liberal democracy. An influential article by Margaret L. Anderson and Kenneth Barkin in 1982 contested this interpretation.14 They were right in stressing the decade-long discrimination against Catholic officials, culminating in dozens of dismissals during the Kulturkampf, which were applauded by many National Liberals. But they overlooked the anti-liberal turn initiated by Bismarck as early as 1876 when he approved the founding of the German Conservative Party. After 1881 Puttkamer was the main protagonist of change in Prussia: liberal officials were not generally dismissed, but important positions were increasingly given to staunch conservatives only. In 1881–82, Bismarck designated four moderate provincial governors for replacement, and several district governors were relocated. Of paramount importance was the method of selection for young jurists entering the state service as Regierungsreferendare. Since applicants were accepted by the district governors without any public or court control, this amounted to co-optation. Thus, in the 1880s the socio-political basis of men eligible for state service was restricted to certain social backgrounds. Connections – family, fraternities, reserve officer status – were important. Historians and contemporaries alike have called this procedure a system of pure . Moreover, advocates of as well as liberal-leaning landowners in the eastern provinces were no longer acceptable for state office; elected liberal mayors in towns and councillors in bodies of self-administration were denied confirmation by the ministry of the interior; judges had to be conservative. The government resumed massive pro-conservative electioneering and encouraged National Liberals to join electoral compromises with right-wing parties, while branding all others as enemies of the Reich. Through a plethora of measures the political climate changed in the 1880s. The staunch conservative outlook of the Prussian state bureaucracy, encouraged by Puttkamer, was largely preserved thereafter. Proof of this is to be found in the protocol of a state ministry meeting in 1917: Minister-President Bethmann Hollweg urged his colleagues to stop appointing only conservatives to high offices and to choose more moderate National Liberals.15 Right-wing National Liberals could come close to conservative officials, but the German Conservative Party should not be equated with its British equivalent. Its steering committee was dominated by East Elbian nobles, the infamous Junker. They and their party clung to the idea of an authoritarian state and disdained liberalism, democracy and parliamentary government. They resented commerce and industry, cities and modern culture; from the 1860s they were open to antisemitism and after 1893 to radical nationalist or völkisch ideas. In sum, Prussian Conservatism meant the iron-clad preservation of the God-given hierarchies of monarchy, state, and social order. In the 1920s, the völkisch outlook functioned as a bridge to middle-class National Socialism. After 1867 there was also a moderate conservative party, the Free Conservatives. Many bureaucrats, including Bismarck, sided with this group. But endorsing repressive laws since 1878, staying elitist, governmental and pro-employer, this

14 Margaret L. Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, ‘The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf: Some Reflections on the Recent Historiography of Imperial Germany’, Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), pp. 647–86. 15 See Thomas Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen 1867–1914. Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf, 1994), pp. 60–77, 410 f.; and Spenkuch, ‘Introduction’ to Protokolle, vol. 7, pp. 6–7, 88, 94, note 2; and Spenkuch, Herrenhaus, pp. 315–27. On political cleansing and the fight against liberal landowners in East Prussia, see Patrick , Bauern, Junker und Beamte. lokaler Herrschaft und Partizipation im Ostelbien des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2005), pp. 511–26. Achim Mehrlein, ‘Die Zweiteilung der Juristenausbildung als systemstabilisierender Faktor in Preussen im 19. Jahrhundert’, Jur. Diss. (Frankfurt, 1976), pp. 69–94 (recruitment). Zilch (ed.), Protokolle, vol. 10, p. 187 (20/03/1917).

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group lost popular support. The party’s championship of colonialism and imperialism did not stop its electoral decline.16 The chimera of governmental non-partisanship, rightly called the ‘grand delusion’ (Lebenslüge) of monarchical Prussia by Gustav Radbruch in 1930, becomes apparent when we scrutinize the administration. Statistics from 1910 reveal that the proportion of nobles amongst higher officials amounted to seven out of eleven ministers, eleven out of twelve provincial governors (Oberpräsidenten), 23 of 36 district governors (Regierungspräsidenten) and 55 per cent of county sheriffs (Landräte), concentrated in the eastern provinces. In military service as well as in the diplomatic corps, aristocrats had a near monopoly on the highest ranks such as senior general or first-class ambassador. There was only a 14 to 22 per cent share of aristocrats in the middle ranks of privy counsellors (Ministerialräte) and government counsellors (Regierungsräte), and less so in technical branches or the judiciary. Here Prussia came closer to the picture in the southern German states with markedly more non-noble and mildly liberal officials. A second important piece of information in the 1910 statistics concerns the social background of the 1,858 officials surveyed: 70 per cent came from families of officials, officers and big landowners; only 18 per cent had fathers working in commerce or industry; and 12 per cent in the professions. With some fluctuations, nobles played a large role in the administration throughout the nineteenth century; this was secured by monarchical patronage and opinionated co- optation. From 1815 to 1918 over 70 per cent of the 120 Prussian ministers of state were old aristocrats or newly created nobles. Of 116 provincial governors in the same period, 61 per cent were old aristocrats, 10 per cent newly created nobles and 29 per cent of bourgeois origin. The fact that only eight Catholics and two men of Jewish origin who had converted to Protestantism served as Oberpräsidenten reflects the restricted nature of the juste milieu in the higher echelons. With regard to the proportion of nobles, their social outlook and conservative affiliations, an east–west division in Prussia existed. Moreover there were marked differences between Prussia and the southern German states. Here there were more Catholic and moderately liberal high officials. The exclusion of Progressives, Social Democrats and Jews from office was less harsh and the political culture less divisive. Constitutional reforms after 1900 succeeded. South German governments at least internally cautioned against illiberal measures proposed by Prussia.17 The state’s influence was enormously increased by the growth of public sector employment during the rise of the interventionist state. An estimated 2.7 million

16 On Prussian conservatism, see James Retallack, Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (London, 1988), and idem, The German Right, 1860– 1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto, 2006), p. 20. Moderate conservatism is explored in Volker Stalmann, Die Partei Bismarcks. Die Deutsche Reichs- und Freikonservative Partei 1866– 1890 (Düsseldorf, 2000); and Matthias Alexander, Die Freikonservative Partei 1890–1918. Gemässigter Konservatismus in der konstitutionellen Monarchie (Düsseldorf, 2000). 17 1910 statistic explained by Tibor Süle, Preussische Bürokratietradition. Zur Entwicklung von Verwaltung und Beamtenschaft in Deutschland 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 1988), pp. 193–6. Lysbeth W. Muncy, The Junker in the Prussian Administration Under William II, 1888–1914 (1944; reprint, New York, 1970), pp. 202 ff.; Hansjoachim Henning, Die deutsche Beamtenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 43 ff.; Bernhard vom Brocke, ‘Die preussischen Oberpräsidenten 1815 bis 1945. Sozialprofil einer Verwaltungselite’, in Klaus Schwabe (ed.), Die preussischen Oberpräsidenten 1815 bis 1945 (Boppard, 1985), pp. 249–76. For comparisons with other German states, see Klaus Schwabe (ed.), Die Regierungen der deutschen Mittel- und Kleinstaaten (Boppard 1983), especially pp. 15–80; and the summary provided by Bernd Wunder, ‘Prüfungsgrundsatz und Adelsprivilegien: Das Scheitern eines Elitenwandels in der deutschen Verwaltung 1806–1914’, Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte, 17 (2005), pp. 51–83. On judges, see Thomas Ormond, Richterwürde und Regierungstreue. Dienstrecht, politische Betätigung und Disziplinierung der Richter in Preussen, Baden und Hessen 1866–1918 (Frankfurt, 1994), pp. 407–48. On the SPD, see Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.),Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Munich, 1990), pp. xiii–xix.

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government employees in 1907 included about 300,000 in the postal service and almost 600,000 in transportation, mainly for the state railways, of whom two-thirds were based in Prussia. At around 11 per cent of the total labour force, this was double that of Britain or the United States. And the state as the employer of these men and (rarely) women tended towards political regimentation. This could be achieved by controls of conduct and public voting for the Landtag, much less so in secret voting for the Reichstag after 1903. Numerous decrees admonishing public servants to support the governmental stance illustrate the desire for political regimentation, but also its incomplete success. Loyalty had to be gained by material rewards, and governmental employees, especially civil servants (Beamte), enjoyed comparatively large salaries and significant benefits. Their demands were pressed by active associations. The anti-republican stance of many higher officials during the turbulent Weimar years mirrored their comfortable well-off position before 1914 and their fear of loss of status.18 The contrast to conservative state administration was municipal government. A law of 1853 intentionally formed it in the dualistic manner of constitutionalism (with a mayor above the council of representatives), instituted extensive state interference and limited the sphere of actions for the distrusted ‘communal republics’. Restricted local franchises – later occasionally intensified against Social Democratic or Catholic gains – assured the dominance of liberals. In their urban strongholds, liberal experts developed poor relief into welfare and social policies ranging from public health to labour exchanges and vocational education, thereby attempting to take the edge off social conflict. Social Democrats often went along with such reforms because of the beneficial effects for the population. After 1900, liberal-run cities and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) both endorsed urban consumer interests against the state administration and producers’ lobbies. The problems of industrialization and the big political controversies could not be remedied at a municipal level, but mayors and city administrations were often comparatively conciliatory. A city like Frankfurt am Main – with a local equal franchise and dominated by Progressives – was even monitored and admonished by state officials for its efforts to integrate Social Democratic organisations. Amongst the many foreign admirers of Prussian municipal administration, the renowned British author William H. Dawson felt urged to write: ‘that the state jealously guards its powers is to put the matter mildly’.19 The socio-political composition of the Prussian administration has been documented by a host of regional biographical handbooks since the late 1980s. The same is true for the 433 (443 after 1906) deputies of the Landtag and the 397 seats of the Reichstag, of which 236 were

18 John P. Cullity, ‘The Growth of Governmental Employment in Germany’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1964, appendix A, pp. 77–9. Beamte in the strict sense amounted to a million: see Süle, Bürokratietradition, p. 29; for their material well-being, see pp. 107 ff. On political conduct controls, see Hans-Jürgen Rejewski, Die Pflicht zur politischen Treue im preussischen Beamtenrecht 1850–1918 (Berlin, 1973), pp. 83–154. 19 Wolfgang R. Krabbe, Die deutsche Stadt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1989), pp. 42 ff., 54 ff., 143 ff. Hermann Beckstein, Städtische Interessenpolitik (Düsseldorf, 1991) treats the limited radius of action for cities’ associations. Spenkuch, Herrenhaus, pp. 315 ff., stresses conflicts about state confirmation of elected municipal officials. Important case studies are Manfred Hettling, Politische Bürgerlichkeit. Der Bürger zwischen Individualität und Vergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918 (Göttingen, 1999); and Jürgen Schmidt, Begrenzte Spielräume. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte von Arbeiterschaft und Bürgertum am Beispiel Erfurts 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2005). William H. Dawson, Municipal Life and Government in Germany (London, 1914), p. 49. Dawson admired the German economy and German social policy but criticized the Prussian political system in an early iteration of the Sonderweg: see Stefan Berger, ‘W.H. Dawson: The Career and Politics of an Historian of Germany’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), pp. 76–113, 83–91.

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Prussian. The handbooks contain data on thousands of individuals.20 Social composition influences the outcome, but a noble–non-noble positional analysis or statistics on the social origins of high-ranking officials are not fully sufficient to generalize about the performance of the Prussian administration. Further detailed studies of bills and administrative behaviour are desirable. Three basic assumptions seem generally accepted. First, Prussian administrations remained authoritarian, but managed infrastructural modernization. Its limits became evident during the war, although left liberals – and in 1913 the Centre Party politician Erzberger21 –criticized the administration as being paralyzing, petty and causing unnecessary conflicts. Secondly, during the imperial decades the conservative administration did not integrate the Social Democratic working class or ethnic minorities. Thirdly, people experienced an active paternalistic state, but were bereft of civic political education, which led to political despair when the democratic republic experienced a serious crisis after 1929.

The Legislative Record: Achievements and Shortcomings

The imperial period in Prussia was characterized by important early reform successes in self-government and public and private law, but setbacks and a block on reforms later on. Legislative achievements include the reform of county and provincial self-government (Kreisordnung, 1872; Provinzialordnung, 1875; Landgemeindeordnung, 1891), and laws on the administrative courts and competences (Landesverwaltungsgesetz, 1875/83). Minister Miquel’s tax and financial reform of 1891–93 was also a success, as it lessened direct taxes for the poor and produced (via four per cent maximum tax!) higher revenues. But as a corollary, budget control of the Landtag was weakened, and the interdependence of tax and voting classes strengthened the three-class franchise. On the other hand, there were several failures: a liberal bill on municipal administrative reform (Städteordnung) failed because of dissent between the two Landtag chambers (1875); a codification of primary school law, the Volksschulgesetz, could not be agreed on because of liberal–Catholic divisions (1892) and only an imperfect Schulunterhaltungsgesetz (1906) materialized. The imperial finance bill of 1909 (Reichsfinanzreform) was obstructed by Prussian conservatives because of a planned inheritance tax. In social policy and labour law, the leading role of the Prussian ministry of trade in the era of Theodor Lohmann and Minister Berlepsch up to 1896 was taken over by the Imperial Office of the Interior, led by Posadowsky-Wehner and Clemens Delbrück.22

20 Data collections with analytic introductions include: Dietrich Wegmann, Die leitenden staatlichen Verwaltungsbeamten der Provinz Westfalen 1815–1918 (Münster, 1969); Thomas Klein, Leitende Beamte der allgemeinen Verwaltung in der preussischen Provinz Hessen-Nassau und in Waldeck 1867–1945 ( and Marburg, 1988); Horst Romeyk, Die leitenden staatlichen und kommunalen Verwaltungsbeamten der Rheinprovinz 1816–1945 (Düsseldorf, 1994); Bernhard Mann et al., Biographisches Handbuch für das Preussische Abgeordnetenhaus 1867–1918 (Düsseldorf, 1988); Bernd Haunfelder, Die Reichstagsfraktion des Zentrums von 1871 bis 1933 (Düsseldorf, 1999); idem, Die liberalen Abgeordneten des Deutschen Reichstags 1871–1918 (Münster, 2004); idem, Die konservativen Abgeordneten des Deutschen Reichstags 1871–1918 (Münster, 2010). 21 Christian Leitzbach, (Frankfurt, 1998), p. 38. 22 Spenkuch, Herrenhaus, pp. 519–37 (self-government); Andreas Thier, Steuergesetzgebung und Verfassung in der konstitutionellen Monarchie (Frankfurt, 1999); Marjorie Lamberti, State, Society and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (Oxford, 1989); Michael Stolleis, ‘Historische Grundlagen. Sozialpolitik in Deutschland bis 1945’, in Geschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945, vol. 1 (Baden- Baden, 2001), pp. 223–67; Volker Hentschel, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialpolitik 1880–1980 (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 9–54.

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In the 1890s Prussia – or rather Wilhelm II, on the advice of reactionary court and military circles – attempted to push through repressive bills intended as anersatz anti-socialist law, but a Reichstag majority could not be found for either the Sedition Bill (Umsturzvorlage, 1894–95) or the Hard Labour Bill (Zuchthausvorlage, 1899). Similarly, neither the Centre nor the National Liberal parties in the Prussian Landtag agreed to arbitrary paragraphs in the association law (Novelle zum Vereinsgesetz, 1897). These failures show that, even in Prussia, reactionary restrictions of civil liberties could not obtain parliamentary assent. Conversely, several relics of codification from the mid-nineteenth century dragged on for decades: the association law from 1850 to 1908; the ‘state of siege’ (Belagerungszustand) law from 1851 to 1918; the military penal code from 1845 to 1898; the regulations for domestic servants and rural workers (Gesindeordnung) from 1810/1854 to 1918; and separate rural estates (Gutsbezirke) existed as long as 1927. The citizenship law (Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht), effective from 1842 to 1913, facilitated discrimination against Poles and Danes andthe expulsion of immigrant Jews. All these laws were most strictly executed in Prussia which pressed other German states to follow its example. In other areas, Prussia also defended its regulations against Reich interference: for example, regulations for associations and noble privilege (such as entailed estates) were exempted from the Civil Code of 1900 through its Introductory Act. The constitutional and socio-political status quo in Prussia was fiercely guarded and in these areas the responsiveness to societal demands was generally low.23 Three large conflicts in Germany originated in Bismarckian Prussia, with its strong state tradition and record of repression against political dissenters: the Kulturkampf of the 1870s; the anti-socialist law of 1878; and the intensification of anti-Polish policies after 1886/95. To attribute them to unspecified side-effects of the Empire misreads their genesis.24 Culture wars – controversies over school inspection, civil marriage and ecclesiastical orders between state and church, or liberals and Catholic organizations – were common in nineteenth-century Europe. But in Prussia it was Bismarck who decided to resort to state force in 1871–72, and he alone gave this up when entertaining new political priorities in 1878. He spoke of a joint Catholic and Polish rebellion against Prussia, a perception founded on a specific idea of state authority and his lifelong stance of fighting political opponents as deadly enemies of his Reich. Both attitudes formed part of Prussian political culture. In 1851 the provincial governor in Posen wrote about the eradication of Polish culture and in 1863 Bismarck called for full Germanization in the eastern provinces. The state ministry discussed measures in 1882–83, and in 1885 32,000 Poles and Jews without Prussian citizenship were expelled; in 1886 a colonization commission was established. Both steps were strongly criticized in the Reichstag. The Polish language was to be removed from schools, churches and cultural institutions. In 1895–96 the state ministry initiated further discriminatory anti-Polish measures leading up to the 1908 expropriation law against Polish lands, the high point of Germanization. Even in the age of nationalism, less brutal options existed, but Prussia’s governments did not choose them. Inadvertently such state actions encouraged the mobilization of Poles, Catholics and Social Democrats – but equally it contributed to their political pillarization and fostered confrontational features in Germany’s political culture. Prussia’s leaders were in need of political allies and sought an accommodation with right-wing nationalist groups. As these radicalized

23 Nathans, Politics of Citizenship, pp. 111–84; Michael John, Politics and the Law in Late Nineteenth- Century Germany: The Origins of the Civil Code (Oxford, 1989), pp. 165 ff. (Prussian vs.Reich bureaucracy). 24 Clark, Iron Kingdom, pp. 575 f., 579, 582 f., contends that tolerant Prussian policies shifted mainly due to the nation-state after 1870. See also Wolfgang Pack, Das parlamentarische Ringen um das Sozialistengesetz Bismarcks 1878–1890 (Düsseldorf, 1961), pp. 76 ff.

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and pushed for Germanization or even pre-emptive war, some ministers felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, unable to curb the forces they had summoned up.25 More positively, Prussian policies in the area of science and education were generally successful, and today’s UNESCO World Heritage Site of Berlin’s museum island (Museumsinsel) took shape in this period, although it was as much the product of social forces as government policy. The multitude of actors in the cultural sphere could not be fully controlled by decrees, but in Prussia the Imperial Press Law of 1874 did not prevent censorship measures, numerous trials for lèse majesté, or attempts to curb naturalist theatre or impressionism and expressionism in the fine arts. After 1900 these efforts weakened or were counter-productive; market forces, cities and bourgeois patrons provided numerous niches for modern culture to take root. Convictions of journalists for lèse majesté decreased (1894: 720; 1908: 34). While Wilhelm II, most Prussian ministries and large parts of the public favoured historicism in the fine arts, the Prussian ministry of trade, imperial offices and municipal authorities often championed modernism.26 Scandals originating in Prussia (the Leckert-Lützow-Tausch scandal, 1896–97; colonial misdemeanours 1906–07; the Daily Telegraph Affair and Eulenburg scandal, 1907–08; the Zabern affair, 1913) undermined the prestige of the government and the monarchy. Some counter measures were taken, but the basic structures remained and the subsequent learning processes were not as unequivocal as to lead clearly toward democratization. On the other hand, governmental press offices like those organized by Puttkamer in 1882, and revived in 1894–98, lost out against a pluralistic press and could not effectively guide public opinion.27 In short, one can conclude that Prussia’s legislative record in the imperial era was decidedly mixed, and any judgement of it must remain ambivalent.

Continuities and Conflicts: Prussian Politics and Political Culture in Recent Research

In recent decades attention has been directed in particular at the following areasof political development in Prussia: the electoral and party system; rural government and regional variety; central government, conservative rule and Prussia’s role in the Empire. The predominant view is that Prussia mainly acted like a giant anchor, slowing down the intermittently moving imperial ship.28 Thomas Kühne has written the definitive study of the

25 Baske, Praxis und Prinzipien der preussischen Polenpolitik. Vom Beginn der Reaktionszeit bis zur Gründung des Deutschen Reiches (Berlin, 1963), pp. 191 f., 226 f. (documents of 1851/63); William Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East 1772–1914 (Chicago, 1980), pp. 106 ff. 26 Acta Borussica N.F., Preussen als Kulturstaat, W. Neugebauer (general ed.), vol. 2/1: Das Kultusministerium auf seinen Wirkungsfeldern Schule, Wissenschaft, Kirchen, Künste und Medizinalwesen (Berlin, 2010), especially my summaries on pp. 89–92 and 266–70; Gary D. Stark, Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2009); Matthew Jefferies,Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 26 ff., 77 ff., 183 ff.; Hartwin Spenkuch, ‘Preussen als Kulturstaat – Begriff, realhistorische Ausprägung und Akteure (1815–1914)’, in Philipp Ther (ed.), Kulturpolitik und Theater (Vienna, 2012), pp. 99–126, 115–20. 27 Frank Bösch, ‘Grenzen des “Obrigkeitsstaates”. Medien, Politik und Skandale im Kaiserreich’, in Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (eds), Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Kontroverse (Göttingen, 2009), pp. 121–35. Gunda Stöber, Pressepolitik als Notwendigkeit. Zum Verhältnis von Staat und Öffentlichkeit im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914 (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 32 ff., 218 ff. 28 Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, pp. 488, 610 f.; Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 575, 582; Hans- Peter Ullmann, Politik im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918, 2nd edn (Munich, 2005), p.76.

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ignominious three-class franchise and has meticulously documented the electoral processes for the 443 Prussian constituencies. He found that public, indirect voting in non-urban areas differed from the urban, secret ballot: dependency on the locally powerful notables was widespread, political loyalty was given and material rewards were expected. A specific corporate outlook (Wahlkultur) characterized rural areas for long periods. The future deputy was not seen as a party politician, but rather as the agent of local interests in the Landtag. For the local opposition it was often difficult to campaign and find men willing to show their political allegiance as members of the electoral colleges. Turnouts remained low (18–32 per cent) and competition decreased (40 per cent of the constituencies in 1913 were uncontested and over 50 per cent of them were loyal to one party over decades). For Kühne, these facts suggest that the political mass market was contained and sedated. Even so, the run-off system often forced the parties to build electoral alliances. This frequent co-operation between parties influenced their parliamentary behaviour too. For Kühne, three phases stand out: the all-liberal alliances rendering liberal majorities in the Landtag up to 1879; the Conservative–National Liberal cartel dominating from 1882 to 1898 over the informal anti-cartel of the Centre Party, Poles and Progressives; and the resurgence of the all-liberal alliances after 1898, now competing with the Conservative Party (dominant in the rural east) and the Centre Party (in Catholic areas). These trends contrasted with numerous regional variations: all German parties against Poles in Posen; cartels surviving in Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony; and local party leaders elsewhere building alliances on their own. There were persistent cleavages between the Centre Party and the National Liberals in the west, and left liberals and conservatives in Brandenburg, , East Prussia and Lower . This is why the ‘three camps’ model of the late Karl Rohe – a ‘national’ camp of conservatives and liberals, a Social Democratic and a Catholic camp – cannot be applied to Prussia, at least until 1918. Generally, Progressives and Prussian conservatives were opponents. Social Democrats remained outlaws, even Prussian Progressives denying them their support in run-offs. Kühne’s innovative findings show that the political process was not just top-down. Nevertheless, Bismarck’s turn to the right and the governments’ pro- conservative stance thereafter, the sustained efforts to keep National Liberals in the cartel, and occasional governmental attempts at political realignment, all remain important.29 The three-class franchise was the cornerstone of conservative dominance in the Landtag and thereby the basis for their political power in the Empire. Liberal discontent led Chancellor Bülow to promise a franchise reform in 1908 at the height of the ‘Bülow Bloc’ nationally. After two years of postponements – due to the financial reform, Prussian bureaucratic obstruction and the unwillingness of Wilhelm II – Bülow’s successor, Bethmann Hollweg, finally faced up to the task. His rather restricted premises were, however, no substantial gains for Social Democrats, Poles or Progressives; assent of the conservatives; and to preserve the feasibility of both Conservative/Catholic and Conservative/National Liberal majorities in the Landtag. He rejected outright modernization via a direct and secret ballot as the Centre Party, National Liberals and Progressives preferred, but proposed a direct public ballot instead. In order to soften ‘plutocratic excesses’ – in 1903, 94 per cent of the electorate in Cologne, including the

29 Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht; see also idem, ‘Die Liberalen bei den preussischen Landtagswahlen im Kaiserreich’, in Lothar Gall and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Liberalismus und Region (Munich, 1995), pp. 277–305; Karl Rohe (ed.), Elections, Parties, and Political Traditions: Social Foundations of German Parties and Party Systems, 1867–1987 (New York, 1990), pp. 114 f.; and idem, Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1992), pp. 92 ff. Margaret L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy (Princeton, 2000) sees increasingly fair procedures in the Reichstag elections but also recognizes the enduring power of conservatives and Junkers in the rural east (pp. 152–98). Anderson’s assumption of democratization has been challenged by Robert Arsenschek, Der Kampf um die Wahlfreiheit im Kaiserreich. Zur parlamentarischen Wahlprüfung und politischen Realität der Reichstagswahlen 1871–1914 (Düsseldorf, 2003).

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district president, had voted in the third class – educated men were now to be placed in a higher class. However, the Centre Party formed an alliance with the Conservatives to limit the reform to the introduction of a secret ballot. This informal ‘blue-black’ alliance had existed in the Landtag since the 1890s and was based on both parties’ concern for rural interests, confessional schools and church rights. Ceding to a blue-black solution was unacceptable to Bethmann Hollweg, who aimed at the revival of a Conservative–National Liberal cartel. Unable to achieve this aim, the government withdrew the bill altogether and abstained from further initiatives for fear of renewed quarrels amongst the parties. In the same vein, the upper chamber (Herrenhaus), a bastion of conservative Junker, remained unreformed. Underlying all of this were deep socio-political cleavages. The need to avoid gains for the SPD and Poles prevented the long-overdue redistribution of constituencies first established in 1860. In 1903 there were eight million inhabitants in 161 rural constituencies, while eight million urban voters lived in only 41 districts. Social Democrats boycotted Landtag elections until 1908 and in 1913 gained just ten of 443 seats, despite commanding a 28.4 per cent share of the votes (776,000). The two conservative parties won 200 seats on the basis of 16.8 per cent or 460,000 cast ballots, not least because roughly two million out of 2.7 million voters were crammed into the third class.30 Another instructive example for the immobility of the Prussian political system is the attempt to reform procedures in the regional administration between 1910 and 1914. Many political writers and some officials agreed in theory that the complicated administrative structures and slow procedures would benefit from decentralization. Urban liberals, moreover, wanted to diminish the rights of control and confirmation held by district governors and county sheriffs (Landräte) vis-à-vis the cities and towns. But a royal commission of high-ranking bureaucrats and professors was convened in vain, and the staunchly conservative minister of the interior, von Dallwitz, and high officials opted for no change. The immobility, even paralysis, in Prussia’s constitutional and administrative matters was not the result of deference from the people or perennial stasis. Rather it was the result of virulent antagonisms between separate active forces pulling in different directions. It was mobilization and divisive interaction that led to stalemate.31 One further characteristic aspect of Prussian administration which has recently been scrutinized is county administration by the Landräte. Using original documents, Patrick Wagner reveals an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, the local administrative monopoly of Junker power waned as farmers were admitted to the county council (Kreistag) and its executive committee (Kreisausschuss) after the 1872 reforms (Kreisordnung). The Landräte, often young men starting their bureaucratic careers, had the dual role of ‘developmental aide’ and ‘broker’, reporting local concerns to the state administration. The social basis of county administration was broadened and Landräte had to win over the rural elites; if the Landrat failed at this he was replaced. On the other hand, while the Landrat may have given the state a local presence, the Junker remained masters on their estates and to a large extent were awarded local offices, thus surviving on leased state power. Secondly, Landräte were invariably conservative and often noble, exerting influence over military recruitment, tax assessment and the distribution of permits, as well as engineering election victories for the conservatives. For, contrary to liberal

30 Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 461–6, 529–69; Spenkuch, Herrenhaus, pp. 542–8. Liberal resentment against Catholics is displayed in Politisches Handbuch der Nationalliberalen Partei (Berlin, 1907), pp. 1143–80. 31 Hartwin Spenkuch, ‘“Es wird zuviel regiert”. Die preussische Verwaltungsreform 1908–1918 zwischen Ausbau der Selbstverwaltung und Bewahrung bürokratischer Staatsmacht’, in B. Holtz and H. Spenkuch (eds), Preussens Weg in die politische Moderne (Berlin, 2001), pp. 321–56. The historiographical conceptualization of stasis, reform and skirted decisions is discussed by James Retallack, ‘Meanings of Stasis’, in idem, German Right, pp. 108–34.

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hopes, farmers and poor villagers did not support them, but voted conservative instead, motivated by a mixture of pro-tariff agricultural egoism, localism and social pressure from local notables. Similar examples of local state-building in alliance with large landowners can be found in other peripheral regions of Europe, such as Andalucía in Spain and southern Italy. In spite of incremental changes, Wagner concludes that a real democratization of rural Germany east of the River Elbe only arrived after 1918, with universal suffrage, the abolition of legal tutelage of employers over rural workers, and a Social Democratic government in Berlin. Nevertheless, the experience of tutelage and post-war economic problems led many politically inexperienced rural voters to turn to the radical right in the 1920s.32 This situation of simultaneous change and stasis in the rural east contrasted sharply with the situation in the densely populated western areas, where towns dominated and, of course, in the culturally vibrant big city, Berlin. The east–west division of Prussia is a fact recognized by contemporaries and historians alike. The Rhineland, Westphalia and Berlin were the industrial powerhouses of Prussia, yet political power was wielded by representatives of the rural areas. Traditional Prussian historiography dismissed all too quickly the animus, resentments and hidden resistance that persisted in the conquered provinces of 1815 (the Province, Westphalia and parts of Saxony-Thuringia) and 1866 (, Schleswig-Holstein, Hesse-Nassau) well into the imperial era. Their population – forcefully incorporated Muss-Preussen – could skip Prussian identity with the rise of a German Empire. These painful processes of integration still deserve further exploration. Even in the east, traces of separate regional identity can be detected, the more so if Catholicism, tradition, political quarrels and language differences coincided.33 Returning to the central government and the Landtag in Berlin, we have to start with Bismarck. He used Prussia as a counterweight to the unbending Reichstag, thus he predestined Prussia to a conservative course after 1879. Monarchy and constitution, franchise and administration were the prerequisites. After 1885 the two conservative parties regularly won over 200 of 433 (443) seats. The two liberal factions – in the 1870s majority parties – were stuck at about 120 deputies thereafter and, equally important, remained divided for decades. Though the moderate Centre Party after 1879 consistently gained over 100 seats, a liberal–Catholic majority was improbable in view of the confessional divide between lower middle class Catholics and elite Protestant liberals, and also because of fierce electoral competition between them in western regions.34 In any case, if such a coalition had existed it would have been unable to effect laws against the government, the king and the upper chamber. In Prussia, successive governments after Bismarck wanted to be supported by an alliance of the two conservative parties with the National Liberals as junior partner.

32 Wagner, Bauern, esp. pp. 579–92; idem, ‘Gutsherren–Bauern–Broker. Die ostelbische Agrargesellschaft in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Journal of Modern European History, 2 (2004), pp. 254–78. 33 Karl Teppe (ed.), Westfalen und Preussen (Münster, 1991); Georg Mölich (ed.), Rheinland, Westfalen und Preussen. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte (Münster, 2011); Hans-Georg Aschoff, Welfische Bewegung und politischer Katholizismus 1866–1918 (Düsseldorf, 1987); Ernst Schubert, ‘Verdeckte Opposition in der Provinz Hannover. Der Kampf der “Welfen” um die regionale Identität während des Kaiserreichs’, Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte, 134 (1998), pp. 211–72; Ingmar Arne Burmeister, Annexion, politische Integration und regionale Nationsbildung. Preussens “neuerworbene” Provinzen: Kurhessen in der Reichsgründungszeit 1866–1881 (Darmstadt and Marburg, 2012); Thüringer Landtag (ed.), Das preussische Thüringen (Rudolstadt, 2001); Hans Schultz Hansen, ‘Demokratie oder Nationalismus’, in U. Lange (ed.), Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins (Neumünster, 1996), pp. 427–85; Michael B. Klein, Zwischen Reich und Region. Identitätsstrukturen im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Stuttgart, 2005). 34 Thomas Kühne, Handbuch der Wahlen zum preussischen Abgeordnetenhaus 1867–1918. Wahlergebnisse, Wahlbündnisse und Wahlkandidaten (Düsseldorf, 1995), pp. 54 f. This volume is an extremely valuable reference.

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When the Centre Party agreed to increased tariffs in 1879/1885 it was brought in from the cold by the government. From then on, the Centre took on the position formerly held by the National Liberals of helping to deliver government majorities for important bills. Even so, it was mainly the two conservative parties which were courted by the government. Neither the Centre nor the National Liberals were constantly close allies of the government; the middle classes did not rule in Prussia. In the Reichstag the Centre Party held a crucial position as long as the government wished to avoid a left-wing majority of SPD, left liberals and minorities. In the Landtag a three- sided game was played. Here, Prussian governments had two types of majorities at their disposal: conservatives and (some) National Liberals; or conservatives and the Centre. By co-operating in this way, both of these parties had a bargaining position and could achieve concessions or rewards. These quid pro quo transactions between the parties were largely overseen by a government that profited from a deferentialLandtag . Parliamentary questions were common here, but virtually no complete bills originated in the Landtag, and all party groupings tended to be less active than in the Reichstag. After 1900, the conservative faction leader Ernst von Heydebrand considered a blue-black alliance to be the best safeguard for the status quo. This combination left the conservatives’ bastions in the eastern countryside and the Centre Party’s strongholds in Catholic areas untouched and could stave off any constitutional change. Nevertheless, Margaret Anderson’s description of the constellation in Prussia’s Landtag before 1914 as crypto-parliamentary is wrong for two reasons: first, this contention overlooks the fact that the conservative seats were achieved on just 28 per cent (1893) or even 17 per cent (1913) of actual voters and much less of the eligible electorate; secondly, the system worked smoothly only as long as the government was conservative itself. A different majority could have led to constitutional crisis.35 Tensions between conservatives and the government were evident in four periods: in the formative years of the Empire, 1866–74; during Caprivi’s chancellorship, 1891–94; over the bill for the construction of the controversial Mittelland Canal in 1899; and in the aftermath of the imperial finance reform, 1909–14. Caprivi was ousted by conservatives and, despite their rejection of the canal, the government and Wilhelm II refrained from staging an electoral campaign against them. Several Reichstag elections from the 1870s to 1912 led to anti-conservative majorities, thus demonstrating the mutual dependency of government and the conservatives. The challenges and threats for Prussian conservatives increased after 1890. Migration to cities in the west and the decline of agriculture relative to industry undermined their economic basis; a bad public image fuelled by their authoritarian stance and rural egoism persisted; popular movements like the Agrarian League and antisemitic groups became electoral competitors; Social Democracy and the trade unions were growing threats; so over time their number of seats decreased. After 1911–12 the leftward shift of the National Liberals and the Centre Party in the Reichstag isolated the Conservative Party. This helps explain why they defended their bastions in Prussia so fiercely; James Retallack has described it asa ‘siege mentality’. In the Landtag, however, Catholics and National Liberals did not take a similar turn to the left. Their respective right wings narrowly defeated the Progressives’ motion in favour of direct and secret franchise in May 1912 through abstention. It was not unusual for Prussia’s conservative elites to take a stance against the Empire: this occurred during the 1890s, for instance, through the obstruction of several bills in the Bundesrat, and in 1914 with Count Heinrich Yorck von Wartenburg’s motion in the upper

35 Anderson, Practicing Democracy, p. 193. Taking this view, the Herrenhaus would have displayed full parliamentary rule, as governmental majorities generally prevailed. But this chamber was appointed, not elected.

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chamber calling for an end to imperial interference in Prussian affairs. Conservatives had to rely on the five Prussian pillars which their party leader, Ernst von Heydebrand, referred to as a pentagram (1913): the two chambers of the Landtag, the army, the central bureaucracy and the Landräte. On many questions, the Prussian monarchy and the state ministry could be added to make a seven-pointed star.36 Germany could not be governed against Prussia, and after 1900 Prussia was politically backward when compared to southern German and many Western European states. In 1898 Minister-President Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe- Schillingsfürst confided in his diary that southern liberalism could not overcome the rule of the strong Junker caste in Prussia, whose underpinnings were the monarch and the army. The National Liberal leader Ernst Bassermann, from Baden, complained in 1913 in a private letter how badly liberals had fared with decorations. For him the exclusion of deputies for ‘political impartiality’ meant that most decorations went to conservatives through their various administrative or court functions. He thought that political discrimination of this sort was unknown in southern Germany. And in retrospect the historians Gerhard Ritter (1922) and Fritz Hartung (1933) contrasted the class-ridden and divisive political culture in the north-east of the Empire with the casual ease with which social and political life was conducted in the south. Almost all of the twelve peculiarities of the German socio-political system put forward by Hans-Ulrich Wehler originated in Prussia.37 Prussia remained a conservative bastion against parliamentarization and democratization for as long as the Prussian monarchy, military, three-class franchise and Conservative Party existed. It took war and revolution to remove them in 1918. New horizons were then opened up, yet the Prussian imprint on German political mentalities lingered on, with fatal effects.

Further Research Possibilities

With regard to sources, much has been done, but material worth editing can still be found. The papers of Minister of State Clemens Delbrück, recently discovered in Jena, will, for instance, be a basis for publication. Unpublished memoirs like those of district president Count Robert Keyserlingk (1866–1959), kept in a family archive, or deputy Alfred von Gossler (1867–1946), in the Bundesarchiv at Freiburg, would be worthwhile too. On the other hand, the correspondence of the Conservative Party leaders Heydebrand and Westarp, used by scholars such as James Retallack, seems to have been exhausted. The Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin contains still unexplored sources, government files as well as private papers. The published records of Prussian parliamentary sittings (Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Preussischen Abgeordnetenhauses) are indispensable; the corresponding minutes of the Reichstag are now accessible online.38 The view from outside is documented richly in dispatches of German and foreign envoys to Prussia. A ground-breaking edition covering the British reports between 1816 and 1866

36 Wilfried Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984), pp. 205–20; Retallack, Notables of the Right, pp. 177 ff. (siege mentality); Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, p. 572 (abstention of Centre/National Liberals); Rauh, Parlamentarisierung, p. 51 (obstruction); Spenkuch, Herrenhaus, p. 507 f. (Yorck motion); Retallack, German Right, p. 396 (pentagram). 37 Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders?’, p. 276 (Hohenlohe); Spenkuch, Herrenhaus, p. 118 (Bassermann); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich, 1995), pp. 1284–95. 38 Larry E. Jones and Wolfram Pyta (eds), ‘Ich bin der letzte Preusse’. Der politische Lebensweg des konservativen Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp (1864–1945) (Cologne, 2006), pp. 33–60. See www. reichstagsprotokolle.de

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will be continued into the imperial era. These reports generally cover not just diplomatic matters, but themes such as cultural transfers and mentalities.39 A different kind of external view is provided by the books and articles in which foreign travellers wrote about their perceptions of the Prussian polity; some of them are well known, but a systematic treatment is still lacking.40 German diplomats from Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, Hesse, Thuringia and Lübeck also observed imperial and Prussian politics in Berlin. Their reports – though differing in quality and already a cherished source for scholars in the past – still deserve selective publication, since only small parts currently exist in print. Conversely, the Prussian reports from other German capitals are a potential source for the interplay of the smaller federal states with Prussia, which remains an under-researched topic.41 In political history, the volume analyzing the Prussian parliamentary system for the years 1867–1918, planned decades ago in the series Handbuch der Geschichte des deutschen Parlamentarismus, seems to need an energetic author; the volume for the years 1858–66 by Günther Grünthal will appear shortly.42 It would also be worthwhile to examine a shorter period, such as the years 1907–14. Such an analysis could offer a synthesis of domestic issues in Prussia and the Empire and be based on governmental documents, private papers and parliamentary transactions. Still missing are histories of two big parties. First, the labour movement in Prussia’s east (where the SPD had more than 100,000 members by 1914) is worth a book. Smaller local studies – along the lines of Raymond C. Sun’s dissertation on Catholic workers – are also desirable. Secondly, we need a detailed treatment of the National Liberal Party in Prussia for the years 1890–1914, following the examples of Wilfried Loth for the Centre Party and Alastair Thompson for the Progressives. For the nationally mixed eastern regions of Prussia, political history also has to develop a transnational perspective, as recently attempted by Mark Tilse.43 Cultural approaches to political processes loom large on the current research agenda. An exploration of Prussian court society and politics under Wilhelm I – building on the distinguished work of John Röhl on Wilhelm II – would be rewarding. The scope should be widened to include the monarchy’s interaction with the population at large. Eva Giloi has focused on gifts to members of the royal family as one indicator of monarchical loyalty, discovering that they came overwhelmingly from the old provinces of Prussia, with the nobility and the professions being the most frequent donors. Public ceremonies such as monarchical jubilees, the state opening of parliament, funerals or national festivals can also

39 M. Mösslang et al. (eds), British Envoys to Germany, 1816–1866, 4 vols (Cambridge, 2000–2010). See www.ghil.ac.uk/publications/british_envoys_to_germany/kaiserreich.html. 40 Eminent examples include Charles Sarolea, The Anglo-German Problem (London, 1912); L. Price Collier, Germany and the Germans (London, 1913); Norman Angell, Prussianism and its Destruction (London, 1914); John A.R. Marriott and C.G. Robertson,The Evolution of Prussia: The Making of an Empire (Oxford, 1915). 41 Frank Zimmer (ed.), Vom Norddeutschen Bund ins Deutsche Reich. Gesandtschaftsberichte und Briefe des hessischen Gesandten Karl Hofmann aus Berlin 1866–1872 (Darmstadt, 2001); Hans-Jürgen Kremer (ed.), Das Grossherzogtum Baden in der politischen Berichterstattung der preussischen Gesandten 1871–1918, 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1990–92). 42 Bernhard Mann, ‘Zwischen Hegemonie und Partikularismus. Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis von Regierung, Bürokratie und Parlament in Preussen 1867–1918’, in G.A. Ritter (ed.), Regierung, Bürokratie und Parlament in Preussen und Deutschland von 1848 bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf, 1983), pp. 76–89. 43 Raymond C. Sun, Before the Enemy is Within our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne 1885–1912 (Boston, MA, 1999); Loth, Katholiken; Alastair Thompson, Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 2000); Mark Tilse, Transnationalism in the Prussian East: From National Conflict to Synthesis, 1871–1914 (Basingstoke, 2011): on Social Democrats, see pp. 155–75.

49 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

be explored further; a volume edited by Andreas Biefang demonstrated the potential of this approach.44 The interior administration vis-à-vis the governed population and their everyday interaction could be examined on the basis of governmental documents and newspapers. Here the narrow juridical viewpoint of traditional administrative history (Verwaltungsgeschichte) has to be transcended, to include popular responses and mentalities. Generally, the cultural approach to political and administrative history is promising, although a careful conceptualization is necessary.45 Regions or provinces have been covered widely in essay collections and monographs, but their systematic treatment would still offer new insights. The western provinces – Rhineland, Westphalia, Hanover, Hesse, but also Prussian Saxony (Thuringia) and Schleswig-Holstein – are much better researched than those in the east. Here studies based on archival sources have been rather scarce, but things started to change following the political upheavals of 1989–91. One potentially fruitful line of research concentrates on questions of nationality; in this vein important studies for East Prussia and Upper Silesia already exist. A second focus could be on state building and societal modernization, so far examined in Pomerania alone.46 For this approach a comparative European perspective would be useful. Additionally, it would make sense to look across the divides of 1871 and 1918. Fortunately, the provinces east of the River Oder can nowadays be explored in co-operation with Polish historians. More generally, all areas of Prussian history could benefit from a transnational perspective, looking at issues such as: migration in all its forms; global economic interdependence; exchanges in education, the arts and sciences; and international networks, from the women’s movement to nature conservation. In this way the picture of Prussia may be diversified and revised. This is legitimate and only to be expected: the questions asked of the past, and the source base to be used, change with the generations. However, future researchers would do well to remember the famous remark of Karl Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past.’47 In this sense the picture of Prussian governance is not as uncertain as some might suggest.

44 John Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge, 1994); idem, Wilhelm II, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1999, 2004, 2014); Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2011); Andreas Biefang et al. (eds), Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Düsseldorf, 2008). 45 Thomas Mergel, ‘Kulturgeschichte der Politik’, in Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte 11/2/2010, online at http://docupedia.de/zg/Kulturgeschichte_der_Politik?oldid=75525. For a trenchant critique of Stefan Haas, Die Kultur der Verwaltung (2005), see Bernd Wunder, ‘Verwaltung als Grottenolm? Ein Zwischenruf zur kulturhistorischen Verwaltungsgeschichtsschreibung’, Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte, 19 (2007), pp. 333–44. 46 For the western provinces, see note 32. Andreas Kossert, Preussen, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des ethnischen Nationalismus 1870–1956 (Wiesbaden, 2001); Robert Traba, Ostpreussen – die Konstruktion einer deutschen Provinz (Osnabrück, 2010); James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008); Christian Myschior, ‘Dienen in “Preußisch-Sibirien”. Zu sozialer Stellung, Funktion und Kontakten der höheren Beamten in der Provinz Posen 1871–1918’, Jahrbuch des Bundesinstituts für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa, 21 (2013), pp. 243–68; Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann (ed.), Pommern im 19. Jahrhundert. Staatliche und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung in vergleichender Perspektive (Cologne, 2007); Dirk Mellies, Modernisierung in der preussischen Provinz? Der Regierungsbezirk Stettin im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2012): desiderata for Pomerania listed on p. 351. 47 Karl Marx and , ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Werke, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1960), p. 115.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Acta Borussica N.F. Die Protokolle des Preussischen Staatsministeriums 1817–1934/38, J. Kocka and W. Neugebauer (general eds). Vol. 6: 1867–1878, bearbeitet von Rainer Paetau and Hartwin Spenkuch (Hildesheim, 2004). Vol. 7: 1879–1890, bearbeitet von Hartwin Spenkuch (Hildesheim, 1999). Vol. 8: 1890–1900, bearbeitet von Hartwin Spenkuch (Hildesheim, 2003). Vol. 9: 1900–1909, bearbeitet von Reinhold Zilch (Hildesheim, 2001). Vol. 10: 1909–1918, bearbeitet von Reinhold Zilch (Hildesheim, 1999). Online: http://preussenprotokolle.bbaw.de/editionsbaende-im-Internet Acta Borussica N.F. Preussen als Kulturstaat, W. Neugebauer (general ed.), vol. 2/1: Bärbel Holtz, Christina Rathgeber, Hartwin Spenkuch and Reinhold Zilch, Das Kultusministerium auf seinen Wirkungsfeldern Schule, Wissenschaft, Kirchen, Künste und Medizinalwesen (Berlin, 2010). Alexander, Matthias. Die Freikonservative Partei 1890–1918. Gemässigter Konservatismus in der konstitutionellen Monarchie (Düsseldorf, 2000). Biefang, Andreas et al. (eds). Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Düsseldorf, 2008). Bitter, Rudolf von (ed.) Handwörterbuch der preussischen Verwaltung, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Berlin and Leipzig, 1911). Bjork, James E. Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008). Goldschmidt, Hans. Das Reich und Preussen im Kampf um die Führung. Von Bismarck bis 1918 (Berlin, 1931). Hagen, William. Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East 1772– 1914 (Chicago, 1980). Haunfelder, Bernd. Die Reichstagsfraktion des Zentrums von 1871 bis 1933 (Düsseldorf, 1999). —. Die liberalen Abgeordneten des Deutschen Reichstags 1871–1918 (Münster, 2004). —. Die konservativen Abgeordneten des Deutschen Reichstags 1871–1918 (Münster, 2010). Henning, Hansjoachim. Die deutsche Beamtenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1984). Hettling, Manfred. Politische Bürgerlichkeit. Der Bürger zwischen Individualität und Vergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918 (Göttingen, 1999). Hewitson, Mark. ‘The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany Before the First World War’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp. 725–80. Hubatsch, Walther (general ed.) Grundriss zur deutschen Verwaltungsgeschichte 1815–1945, Reihe A, 12 vols (Marburg, 1975–81). Hué de Grais, Robert Graf. Handbuch der Verfassung und Verwaltung in Preussen und dem Deutschen Reiche, 1st edn (1882); 22nd edn (Berlin, 1914). Jefferies, Matthew.Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008). Jones, Larry E. and Pyta, Wolfram (eds). ‘Ich bin der letzte Preusse’. Der politische Lebensweg des konservativen Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp (1864–1945) (Cologne, 2006). Kirsch, Martin. Monarch und Parlament im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1999). Klein, Thomas. Leitende Beamte der allgemeinen Verwaltung in der preussischen Provinz Hessen- Nassau und in Waldeck 1867–1945 (Darmstadt and Marburg, 1988). Kossert, Andreas. Preussen, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des ethnischen Nationalismus 1870–1956 (Wiesbaden, 2001). Kühne, Thomas. Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen 1867–1914. Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf, 1994). —. Handbuch der Wahlen zum preussischen Abgeordnetenhaus 1867–1918. Wahlergebnisse, Wahlbündnisse und Wahlkandidaten (Düsseldorf, 1995).

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—.‘Die Liberalen bei den preussischen Landtagswahlen im Kaiserreich’, in Lothar Gall and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Liberalismus und Region (Munich, 1995), pp. 277–305. Lamberti, Marjorie. State, Society and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (Oxford, 1989). Loth, Wilfried. Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984). Mann, Bernhard et al. Biographisches Handbuch für das Preussische Abgeordnetenhaus 1867–1918 (Düsseldorf, 1988). Marriott, John A.R. and Robertson, C.G. The Evolution of Prussia: The Making of an Empire (Oxford, 1915). Mellies, Dirk. Modernisierung in der preussischen Provinz? Der Regierungsbezirk Stettin im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2012). Mölich, Georg (ed.) Rheinland, Westfalen und Preussen. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte (Münster, 2011). Müller, Sven Oliver and Torp, Cornelius (eds). Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (Oxford, 2011). Muncy, Lysbeth W. The Junker in the Prussian Administration Under William II, 1888–1914 (1944; reprint, New York, 1970). Myschior, Christian. ‘Dienen in “Preußisch-Sibirien”. Zu sozialer Stellung, Funktion und Kontakten der höheren Beamten in der Provinz Posen 1871–1918’, Jahrbuch des Bundesinstituts für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa, 21 (2013), pp. 243–68. Ormond, Thomas. Richterwürde und Regierungstreue. Dienstrecht, politische Betätigung und Disziplinierung der Richter in Preussen, Baden und Hessen 1866–1918 (Frankfurt, 1994). Rejewski, Hans-Jürgen. Die Pflicht zur politischen Treue im preussischen Beamtenrecht 1850– 1918 (Berlin, 1973). Retallack, James. Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (London, 1988). —. The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto 2006). Ritter, Gerhard A. (ed.) Regierung, Bürokratie und Parlament in Preussen und Deutschland von 1848 bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf, 1983). —. Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Munich, 1990). Rohe, Karl. Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1992). Röhl, John C.G. Germany Without Bismarck (London, 1967). —. The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge, 1994). —. Wilhelm II, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1999, 2004, 2014). Romeyk, Horst. Die leitenden staatlichen und kommunalen Verwaltungsbeamten der Rheinprovinz 1816–1945 (Düsseldorf, 1994). Schmidt, Jürgen. Begrenzte Spielräume. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte von Arbeiterschaft und Bürgertum am Beispiel Erfurts 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2005). Spenkuch, Hartwin. Das Preussische Herrenhaus 1854–1918. Adel und Bürgertum in der Ersten Kammer des Landtages (Düsseldorf, 1998). —. ‘“Es wird zuviel regiert”. Die preussische Verwaltungsreform 1908–1918 zwischen Ausbau der Selbstverwaltung und Bewahrung bürokratischer Staatsmacht’, in B. Holtz and H. Spenkuch (eds), Preussens Weg in die politische Moderne (Berlin, 2001), pp. 321–56. —. ‘Vergleichsweise besonders? Politisches System und Strukturen Preussens als Kern des “deutschen Sonderwegs”’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003), pp. 263–92. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Preussischen Abgeordnetenhauses, c. 200 vols (Berlin, 1870–1918).

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Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstages (1867–1942), online: http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de Stöber, Gunda. Pressepolitik als Notwendigkeit. Zum Verhältnis von Staat und Öffentlichkeit im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914 (Stuttgart, 2000). Süle, Tibor. Preussische Bürokratietradition. Zur Entwicklung von Verwaltung und Beamtenschaft in Deutschland 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 1988). Thier, Andreas. Steuergesetzgebung und Verfassung in der konstitutionellen Monarchie(Frankfurt, 1999). Thompson, Alastair. Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 2000). Tilse, Mark. Transnationalism in the Prussian East: From National Conflict to Synthesis, 1871– 1914 (Basingstoke, 2011). Ullmann, Hans-Peter. Politik im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918, 2nd edn (Munich, 2005). Wagner, Patrick. Bauern, Junker und Beamte. Der Wandel lokaler Herrschaft und Partizipation im Ostelbien des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2005). Wegmann, Dietrich. Die leitenden staatlichen Verwaltungsbeamten der Provinz Westfalen 1815– 1918 (Münster, 1969). Wunder, Bernd. ‘Prüfungsgrundsatz und Adelsprivilegien: Das Scheitern eines Elitenwandels in der deutschen Verwaltung 1806–1914’, Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte, 17 (2005), pp. 51–83.

53 This page has been left blank intentionally 3 The german monarchies

frank lorenz müller

on 19 January 1903 Bernhard von Bülow rose to address the Reichstag to discharge what was becoming a tediously regular duty: defending Kaiser wilhelm ii against criticism triggered by one or other of His Majesty’s ill-advised actions or utterances.1 This time the chancellor had to respond to a tirade by the Centre Party deputy Dr Franz Xaver Schaedler. The proverbially cantankerous dean of Bamberg cathedral had just reminded the chamber that – according to a south german newspaper – wilhelm ii was now the ‘best-hated man’ in the Reich. The reason for the clergyman’s fury was a telegram the Kaiser had sent to the Bavarian Prince- Luitpold five months earlier. Promptly published by Wolff’s Agency, this communication expressed his majesty’s ‘deepest revulsion’ at the news that the Bavarian parliament had docked the cultural budget by 100,000 marks. To signal how shocked he was by the deputies’ ‘base ingratitude’ against Bavaria’s Wittelsbach as a whole and against the prince-regent personally, the Kaiser offered to open his wallet. he asked luitpold to accept as an imperial gift the sum he needed to realise his artistic plans.2 wilhelm ii may have meant well, but ‘the impression made by this intermezzo was deplorable’, Bülow recalled, ‘not only in Bavaria but in the whole Empire’. Many commentators resented this high-handed intervention in the internal affairs of another german monarchy and wilhelm’s public accusation that the Bavarian parliament lacked dynastic loyalty. The Kaiser’s behaviour, Schaedler quoted from another newspaper, was ‘not without hazard for the monarchical principle’. At the time the situation had been de- escalated by luitpold’s gracious reply and the generosity of the Bavarian count ernst von moy, whose gift of 100,000 marks obviated the need for wilhelm’s subvention, but Bülow still had his work cut out several months later. This was merely ‘a personal exchange of opinion amongst two sovereigns, not to be characterised as a formal act (Staatsakt)’, the chancellor insisted; ‘it was a word from a prince to a prince, from a friend to a friend, an exclusively personal affair between the two federal princes involved’. It is a moot point to speculate whether Bülow had said enough to ensure that nothing more should now be done to cast doubt on ‘the close unity of the Reich, on the nation’s dedication and love for the Imperial idea’.3 But this episode encapsulates several aspects of the continuing political and cultural importance of the multi-monarchical structure of the german empire in the early twentieth century: the sensitivities generated by a complex federalism that combined

1 i gratefully acknowledge the AhRc’s support of my research for this chapter, as well as the helpful advice of Dominik Geppert and Heidi Mehrkens. 2 Verhandlungen des Reichstages, 10. Legislaturperiode, II. Session, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1903), pp. 7404–10. 3 Bernhard prince von Bülow, Memoirs 1897–1903 (London, 1931), p. 574; Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1969), pp. 392–4; Alois Beckenbauer,Ludwig III. von Bayern 1845–1921. Ein König auf der Suche nach seinem Volk (Regensburg, 1987), pp. 93–6; Verhandlungen (1903), pp. 7409–10. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Prussian hegemony with regional loyalties; the precariousness of the monarchical principle and its connection with the imperial idea; the activities of monarchies and dynasties in fields such as public culture and art; and the agency of individual monarchs.

The Reich and its Monarchical Federalism

In a speech he gave on 9 December 1870, the socialist deputy Wilhelm Liebknecht bade the Reich a notoriously acerbic welcome. The country was heading for ‘the crassest form of absolutism’, he predicted, ‘and the new federation will be, in the crassest form, what it is designed to be: a princely insurance company against democracy’. Though a more different comment on the same process can hardly be imagined, Anton von Werner’s painting ‘The Proclamation of the German Empire’ (finished in 1877) tells a similarly monarchical story: the elevation by his royal peers of the venerable King Wilhelm I of Prussia to the rank of Kaiser amid a sea of uniforms and against the splendour of the . Even the preamble of its constitution made the newly founded Reich sound like a princely league. It read: ‘His Majesty the King of Prussia in the name of the North German Federation, His Majesty the , His Majesty the King of Württemberg, His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Baden and His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Hesse and bei Rhine … conclude an everlasting Federation.’ The document then proceeded to list the 25 member states of the Reich: three ‘Free Cities’ and 22 monarchies – ranging from the kingdoms of Prussia and Bavaria to the tiny principalities of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt and Schaumburg-Lippe.4 While the ‘legend of the Reich as a “league of princes” (Fürstenbund)’5 distorted the complex constitutional compromise between the forces of monarchy, liberalism, nationalism and the public, it contained more than a kernel of truth. Nor was the story accidentally told like this. As the statesman masterminding the foundation of the German Empire and the architect of its constitution, Otto von Bismarck provided for both the reality of the monarchical element of the new nation-state and the exaggeration of its princely federalism. The frantic politics of unification in 1870 – pursued amid the fog of war and complicated by a stubbornly disinclined Prussian king – required a conciliatory attitude to south German demands for an essentially federal constitution and specific concessions. Without the chancellor’s readiness to grant certain legal exemptions (Reservatrechte) – such as Württemberg’s control over its own postal service or the Bavarian king’s command of his troops in peace-time – it would have been hard to bring the negotiations to a timely conclusion. And Bismarck could never have pulled off the neat trick of having King Ludwig II of Bavaria formally invite Wilhelm I of Prussia, on behalf of the German princes, to accept the imperial title. It is also worth remembering that Bismarck transferred substantial amounts of money into the private coffers of the chronically overspent Bavarian king. This financial lifeline helped to secure the Wittelsbach’s co-operation in 1870 and sustained an almost amicable relationship between the two men until Ludwig’s death in 1886.6

4 Verhandlungen des Reichstages des Norddeutschen Bundes, vol. 15 (Berlin, 1870), p. 154; Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 44–53; German constitution (1871): http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1826 (accessed 15 December 2012). 5 Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1963), pp. 788–9. 6 Dieter Albrecht, ‘König Ludwig II. von Bayern und Bismarck’, Historische Zeitschrift, 270 (2000), pp. 39–64; Huber, Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 3, pp. 724–41; Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1990), pp. 490–506. 56 The German Monarchies

The chancellor’s commitment to monarchical diversity was rooted more deeply, though, than in the pragmatism of 1870. An instructive passage in his memoirs, penned after his fall from power, suggests that Bismarck’s consistently pro-federal tone after 1871 sprung from his doubts about German nationalism. ‘[T]o become active and effective, German patriotism needed to be communicated through dynastic attachment’, the ex-chancellor maintained. The Germans’ love of the fatherland, Bismarck explained, required ‘a prince, on whom their loyalty can be focused’, and if all their dynasties were removed, then the Germans would ‘fall prey to nations who are more tightly forged together’.7 In line with these convictions and fully aware of the anti-parliamentary effect of the Reich’s federalism, the chancellor respected the constitutional rights and cultural sensitivities of the non-Prussian monarchies.8 He did so against the will of the likes of the German crown prince and the National Liberals, who favoured a more centralised Reich.9 The artfully constructed mechanism of central and federal, Prussian and non-Prussian balances and counter-balances in government, legislation and administration laid down by the 1871 constitution ensured, in the words of Thomas Nipperdey, that ‘the Reich was not a Greater Prussia – merely with federal and democratic occlusions’. Rather, as Alon Confino has argued, it was a distinctive feature that the united German nation-state was created as ‘a conglomeration of regional states’ which ensured that ‘German nationhood continued to exist as … a mosaic of divergent historical and cultural heritages sanctioned by the nation-state’s federal system’.10 There was also, however, substantial discontinuity. Notwithstanding the official doctrine that the 25 ‘allied governments’ formed the Reich’s ‘collective sovereign’11 and governed jointly through the federal council (Bundesrat), the restrictions placed upon the separate states and their rulers marked a sea change. By forming the , its members lost important elements of their sovereignty – most obviously in the fields of foreign and military policy – and this change hit no one harder than the non-Prussian sovereigns. According to Hans Boldt, there was only one ruler in the Reich who was a monarch ‘in the full meaning of the word’: the German Kaiser.12 For the other crowned heads, the most Bismarck’s tact, constitutional prestidigitation and murky sources of money could achieve was to sweeten the bitter pill of a fundamental shift from a federation of states (Staatenbund) to a Prussian-dominated federal state (Bundesstaat).13

7 Otto von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, ed. M. Epkenhans and E. Kolb, Neue Friedrichsruher Ausgabe, Abt. IV (Paderborn, 2011), pp. 173–7. 8 Axel T.G. Riehl, Der ‘Tanz um den Äquator’. Bismarcks antienglische Kolonialpolitik und die Erwartung des Thronwechsels in Deutschland 1883–1885 (Berlin, 1993), pp. 260–85. 9 Frank Lorenz Müller, Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 54–5, 95–9. 10 Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. 2 (Munich, 1992), p. 97; Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National History 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997) p. 14; Helmut Reichold, Bismarcks Zaunkönige. Duodez im 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 1977), pp. 15–44. 11 Tim Ostermann, Die verfassungsrechtliche Stellung des Deutschen Kaisers nach der Reichsverfassung von 1871 (Frankfurt, 2009), p. 234. 12 Hans Boldt, ‘Der Föderalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich als Verfassungsproblem’, in Helmut Rumpler (ed.), Innere Staatsbildung und gesellschaftliche Modernisierung in Österreich und Deutschland 1867/71–1914 (Vienna and Munich, 1991), p. 34; Dieter Albrecht, ‘Von der Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1871–1918)’, in Handbuch der Bayerischen Geschichte, vol. 4/1 (Munich, 2003), pp. 319–29; Karl Möckl, Die Prinzregentenzeit. Gesellschaft und Politik während der Ära des Prinzregenten Luitpold in Bayern (Munich and Vienna, 1972), pp. 39–40. 13 Richard Dietrich, ‘Foederalismus, Unitarismus oder Hegemonialstaat?’, in Oswald Hauser (ed.), Zur Problematik ‘Preußen und das Reich’ (Cologne and Vienna, 1984), pp. 49–81.

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Even though they had all accepted the arrangements of 1870–71, some of the monarchs and members of their families never reconciled themselves to their dynasties’ relegation to the second rank. A sense of demotion contributed to King Ludwig II’s irrational escape into an illusionary world of private seclusion, and it turned Prince Heinrich XXII of Reuss – ruler over some 69,000 Thuringians – into a pathological enemy of anything to do with the Reich. In 1878, for instance, Heinrich opposed Reich laws on both the protection of birds and the persecution of Social Democrats; later he would refuse to have his tiny realm adorned with a monument of the late Emperor Wilhelm I.14 Such tensions heightened after Bismarck and the reticent Wilhelm I had been replaced by the pompous Wilhelm II, whose slight regard for the other German princes echoed his father’s haughty outlook.15 Bavarian hackles were already raised when, in 1891, the Kaiser wrote ‘regis voluntas suprema lex’ (‘The king’s wish is the highest law’) into the Golden Book of the city of Munich. It did not take very much to trigger an outburst from the cranky Prince Ludwig, heir to the Bavarian throne. In June 1896 a hapless functionary hosting a party for the dignitaries attending the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II offered a carelessly worded toast. He raised his glass to honour Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the Kaiser’s brother, ‘and the German princes who have appeared in his entourage’. Ludwig angrily thundered that the German princes were not ‘vassals of the German Kaiser, but his allies’. Even though the prince was subsequently forced to apologise for this éclat, the Hohenzollern–Wittelsbach rift proved beyond healing. A marginal comment scribbled by the Kaiser in 1900 after he had learned that no flags would be flying in Bavaria to mark his birthday neatly encapsulated Wilhelm’s attitude: ‘Just you wait, Wittelsbach! You will learn to respect and know the Reich!’16 The sniping between the Hohenzollerns’ imperial monarchy and the Bavarian dynasty, or the regular spats with ‘Heinrich the Ill-Behaved’ of Reuss, were, it must be said, affairs fraught with uncommonly large helpings of mutual antipathy – exceptions that proved the rule of the other monarchies’ less truculent acceptance of Berlin’s tutelage. The gradual rise of the Kaiser to the public rank of an all-German monarch and the expansion of the Reich into areas of social, economic and legal policy – at the expense of the political authority of the separate states and the Bundesrat – affected all German monarchies, though.17 Contributing, as they did, to the further diminution of the competence of Germany’s monarchs, the foundation and internal growth of the Reich of 1871 were thus important factors in the development of the German monarchies in the age of Konstitutionalismus.

Monarchical Konstitutionalismus

The theory, practice and rhetoric of nineteenth-century German politics were dominated by Konstitutionalismus, a specific form of constitutional monarchy. At its heart lay the fiercely defended notion of the ‘monarchical principle’, a phrase made famous by the conservative

14 Christof Botzenhart, ‘Ein Schattenkönig ohne Macht will ich nicht sein’. Die Regierungstätigkeit König Ludwigs II. von Bayern (Munich, 2004), pp. 197–9; Ludwig Hüttl, Ludwig II. König von Bayern. Eine Biographie (Munich and Augsburg, 1986), pp. 210–15; Reichold, Zaunkönige, pp. 84–5, 170–71. 15 Müller, Our Fritz, pp. 94–9. 16 Möckl, Prinzregentenzeit, pp. 377–8, 393–7; Hans-Michael Körner, ‘Na warte Wittelsbach. Kaiser Wilhelm II. und das Königreich Bayern’, in Hans Wilderotter (ed.), Der letzte Kaiser. Wilhelm II. im Exil (Gütersloh and Munich, 1991), pp. 31–42; Fehrenbach, Wandlungen des deutschen Kaisergedankens 1871–1918 (Munich, 1969), pp. 143–57. 17 Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, pp. 485–97.

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jurist Friedrich Julius Stahl in 1845. It was essential, he argued, that ‘the authority of the prince must stand, without any legal perforation, above the representation of the people and that the prince actually remains the centre of gravity of the constitution, the positively creating force, the leader of the development’. This was not a new claim. Its key features had already been encapsulated in the Bavarian constitution of 1818: ‘The king is the head of the state, unites within himself all the rights of the power of the state and exercises them within the rules laid down in the current constitutional document granted by him.’ The monarchical principle thus held that – unlike in the Belgian case – the constitution emanated from royal authority, and not vice versa, with the monarch retaining the right not merely to symbolise but to exercise the executive power of the state. The maxim, ‘Le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas’, coined with regard to the French July Monarchy, did not apply to the German case.18 ‘Born of the French Revolution and overcoming it at the same time’, German Konstitutionalismus amounted to an act of carefully controlled constitutional reform from above. It achieved a lasting stabilization of monarchical rule and did so by adopting and taming the revolutionary spirit through sovereign self-restriction and the granting of parliamentary institutions.19 With the exception of the two pre-constitutional Mecklenburgian grand duchies, all German monarchies introduced constitutional systems along these lines at various points in the nineteenth century and kept them largely unchanged until 1918. The Saxon constitution of 1831, for instance, secured ‘all the rights of the powers of the state’ for the king, who ‘exercises them within the limits set by the constitution’ and formally remained at the head of the government. Prussia entered the constitutional age late, but also stuck to the conventional model. According to its revised charter of 1850, ‘the monarch’s rule was based on his own right, whereas the people and their representation derived their rights from the constitutional document’.20 In spite of its longevity, symptoms of the precariousness of Konstitutionalismus could be made out along much of the path travelled by nineteenth-century German monarchies. The very phrase ‘the Monarchical Principle’ smacked of protesting too much. The notion remained politically charged – especially after the dramatic events of 1848–49 and 1867–71. Otto Hintze’s famous description of ‘the monarchical-constitutional system of government – as opposed to the parliamentary one’ as the ‘characteristically Prusso-German system’21 has a similarly over-assertive ring about it. The debates between Carl Schmitt, Ernst Rudolf Huber and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde further reinforce the sense of a system on the defensive:

18 Friedrich Julius Stahl, Das monarchische Princip: eine staatsrechtlich-politische Abhandlung (Heidelberg, 1845), p. 12; Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, ‘Der deutsche Typ der konstitutionellen Monarchie im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Werner Conze (ed.), Beiträge zur deutschen und belgischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1967), pp. 70–92; Huber, Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 3, pp. 3–26. 19 Carola Schulze, ‘Die Abdankung in den rechtlichen Ordnungsvorstellungen vom Gottesgnadentum bis zum deutschen Konstitutionalismus’, in Susan Richter and Dirk Dirbach (eds), Thronverzicht. Die Abdankung in Monarchien vom Mittelalter bis in die Neuzeit (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2010), pp. 62–3; Dieter Langewiesche, ‘Die Monarchie im Europa des bürgerlichen Jahrhunderts. Das Königreich Württemberg’, in Das Königreich Württemberg 1806–1918 (Stuttgart, 2006), p. 26; Martin Kirsch, Monarch und Parlament im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1999). 20 Hellmut Kretzschmar, ‘Das sächsische Königtum im 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Typologie der Monarchie in Deutschland’, Historische Zeitschrift, 170 (1950), pp. 475–7; Karlheinz Blaschke, Beiträge zur Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte Sachsens (Leipzig, 2002), p. 529; Hagen Schulze, ‘Preußen von 1850–1871. Verfassungsstaat und Reichsgründung’, in Otto Büsch (ed.), Handbuch der preußischen Geschichte, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1992), p. 304. 21 Otto Hintze, ‘Das monarchische Prinzip und die konstitutionelle Verfassung’, Preussische Jahrbücher, 144 (1911), p. 381.

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did Konstitutionalismus ever achieve the status of a fully formed constitutional type? Or did it merely constitute a protracted monarchical rearguard action against the march of popular sovereignty, a passing phenomenon caused by the transition from absolutism to parliamentary democracy?22 There was one central source of weakness for the monarchies facing the popular demands for greater political participation which arose after 1789 and peaked again in 1848–49: the waning of the belief that monarchical rule was endowed with the grace of God. Already corroded by Enlightenment rationality and ‘disenchanted’ by the meritocratic ideals of ‘Enlightened Absolutism’, divine ordination of kingship was all but negated when, however guardedly, the monarch was integrated into a constitutional context. This step essentially desacralised the royal office and turned kings into organs of the state. There remained some romantic adherence to notions of divine kingship in sections of the population and even among a few monarchs and their coteries, Frederick William IV of Prussia and the Gerlach circle, for instance, or Ludwig II of Bavaria. But overall the ‘monarchical principle’ lacked a broadly accepted intrinsically spiritual justification. The much-reduced religious protection that monarchy still enjoyed accrued to it indirectly, as a beneficiary of the Christian principle of ascribing godliness to legitimate secular authority. This was not the same, though, as believing that monarchs themselves were invested with divine grace. ‘The people as a whole’, Heinz Gollwitzer laconically observed, ‘did not really believe this anymore.’23 As old ligatures between rulers and ruled weakened, monarchy needed to justify itself in different ways. The monarchs’ right to dispose of the modern state’s formidable sources of power – armed forces, civil service, police, taxes, cultural and educational institutions – as well as the payment of civil lists now needed to be legitimised afresh. Demands for strengthening elected assemblies at the expense of the ‘monarchical principle’ had to be countered. The way to achieve this was through effective government that could stand up to parliamentary and public scrutiny. Since the application of such criteria of capability brought considerable risks – after all, the price of failure could be a forced abdication or the installation of a regent – monarchs needed allies. They found them not amongst the new parliamentary bodies, but amongst the administrative machinery of the modern state, amongst the ministers they appointed. In the constitutional system, the monarch was no longer the principal statesman or the leader in battle. These functions were now fulfilled by the prince’s chief minister and his most senior general. Monarchical rule in the age of Konstitutionalismus was based on, contained by and dependent on ministerial government.24 Kaiser Wilhelm I’s admission that ‘Bismarck is more necessary than me’ only highlighted the most notorious case of royal dependence on ministerial government, but the phenomenon was widespread. The four Saxon kings who reigned between 1870 and 1918 barely engaged in any governmental activity. Upon their respective accessions in 1854, 1873, 1902 and 1904,

22 Ewald Grothe, Zwischen Geschichte und Recht. Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichtsschreibung 1900–1970 (Munich, 2005), pp. 270–86, 380–84. 23 Otto Brunner, ‘Vom Gottesgnadentum zum monarchischen Prinzip. Der Weg der europäischen Monarchie seit dem hohen Mittelalter’, in Das Königtum. Seine geistigen und rechtlichen Grundlagen (Lindau and Konstanz, 1956), pp. 293–303; Katharina Weigand, ‘Die konstitutionelle Monarchie im 19. Jahrhundert im Spannungsfeld von Krone und Staat, Macht und Amt’, in Wolfgang Wiese and Katrin Rössler (eds), Repräsentation im Wandel (Ostfildern, 2008), pp. 36–7; Heinz Gollwitzer, ‘Die Endphase der Monarchie in Deutschland’, in idem, Weltpolitik und deutsche Geschichte, ed. Hans-Christof Kraus (Göttingen, 2008), pp. 367–9. 24 Weigand, ‘Die konstitutionelle Monarchie’, pp. 37–8; Hans-Michael Körner, ‘Die Monarchie im 19. Jahrhundert. Zwischen Nostalgie und wissenschaftlichem Diskurs’, in W. Müller and M. Schattkowsky (eds), Zwischen Tradition und Modernität. König Johann von Sachsen 1801–1873 (Leipzig, 2004), pp. 26–7; Huber, Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 3, pp. 20–22.

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Johann, Albert, Georg and Friedrich August III did not even change the make-up of the ministries, but simply continued with the men in post. In Bavaria the incapacity of King Ludwig II and his brother King Otto led to the regency of the venerable Prince Luitpold, the brothers’ uncle, between 1886 and 1912. The vacuum caused by the crown’s lack of initiative was filled by the executive, which formed a ‘non-responsible ministerial oligarchy’ (Karl Möckl) led by mandarins such as Johann von Lutz, the leading light in Bavarian politics from 1871 until his death in 1890. His Württembergian colleague Hermann von Mittnacht played, if anything, an even more dominant role. As minister-president from 1876 until 1900, Mittnacht compensated for King Karl I’s growing detachment and continued as the strong man in the small kingdom’s politics under Karl’s successor, Wilhelm II.25 As has already been mentioned, the monarchs’ withdrawal from the day-to-day business of government and their heavy reliance on ministers, many of whom held moderately liberal views, did not mean that Konstitutionalismus was being led in the direction of a parliamentary system. Neither the ministers nor the monarchs ever wished to redress the balance between monarchical authority and the representation of the people.26 In spite of growing pressures from a politically active population, the significant royal prerogatives in the fields of military command, executive government, legislation, dissolution and prorogation of parliament – normally exercised by ministers responsible only to the monarch – were not offered up for renegotiation. They were staunchly defended in the name of the constitutionally embedded monarchical principle. In many places this defence of the status quo was facilitated by electoral rules like the Prussian three-class franchise, which were much more restrictive than the universal, equal and direct male franchise for the German Reichstag and tended to produce pliable parliaments. Moreover, when this seemed opportune – like in Bavaria in 1875 or in Saxony in 1896 – electoral rules were gerrymandered in favour of the ministry.27 Constitutionally speaking, Germany’s separate monarchies thus remained authoritarian states right until 1918. The left-liberal writer Ludwig Thoma, for instance, angrily rejected Bavaria’s democratic element as little more than sham-parliamentarianism (Scheinparlamentarismus). The blockade to which Thomas Nipperdey has pointed with reference to the all-German monarchical system of the Reich – of the authoritarian state facing a society of citizens and grinding to a halt at the cusp of democracy – also applied to Imperial Germany’s separate monarchies: perhaps even more so.28 While this blockade may have locked the ‘imperial idea’ and the Prussian monarchy into a ‘stable crisis’, it confronted Wilhelm II’s monarchical allies in the Reich with even more troubling questions. The relentless ‘Reich-ification’ of German politics, the transformation of the Kaiser into a ‘Reich-monarch’ and the growth of an all-German national identity

25 Konrad Canis, ‘Bismarck und die Monarchen’, in Lothar Gall (ed.), Otto von Bismarck und die Parteien (Paderborn, 2001), pp. 137–54; Karlheinz Blaschke, ‘Grundzüge sächsischer Geschichte zwischen Reichsgründung und dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in S. Lässig and K.-H. Pohl (eds), Sachsen im Kaiserreich (, 1997), pp. 14–16; Möckl, Prinzregentenzeit, pp. 39–40, 550, 559; Friedrich Prinz, ‘Anmerkungen zur Prinzregentenzeit’, in Pankraz Fried and Walter Ziegler (eds), Festschrift für Andreas Kraus zum 60. Geburtstag (Kallmünz, 1982), pp. 418–21; Hans Philippi, Das Königreich Württemberg im Spiegel der preußischen Gesandtschaftsberichte 1871–1914 (Stuttgart, 1971); Eberhard Naujoks, ‘Württemberg 1864– 1918’, in Handbuch der baden-württembergischen Geschichte, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 362–3. 26 Peter Sauer, Württembergs letzter König. Das Leben Wilhelms II. (Stuttgart, 1994), pp. 139–140; Wilhelm Liebhart, Bayerns Könige. Königtum und Politik in Bayern (Frankfurt, 1997), pp. 220, 241; Uwe A. Oster, Die Großherzöge von Baden 1806–1918 (Regensburg, 2007), pp. 204–6. 27 Thomas Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preußen 1867–1914 (Düsseldorf, 1994); Liebhart, Bayerns Könige, pp. 153, 241; G.A. Ritter, ‘Wahlen und Wahlpolitik im Königreich Sachsen, 1867–1914’, in Lässig and Pohl (eds), Sachsen, pp. 29–86. 28 Liebhart, Bayerns Könige, p. 241; Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, pp. 748–57, 892–3.

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accelerated the diminution of the other German monarchs in the sphere of actual politics. The imbalances within the Reich’s federalism discredited the monarchical element, Heinz Gollwitzer has observed, since every intelligent citizen wondered whether there was still a case ‘for the maintenance of a constitutionally legitimised claim of sovereignty by small and miniscule dynasts’. As Bismarck’s pessimism about the cohesiveness of German nationalism was proving less and less well founded, the many separate dynastic lynchpins, once deemed crucial, now appeared dispensable. While still attracting the opprobrium associated with their alleged subservience to the increasingly unpopular Kaiser, the German monarchs thus threatened to ‘grow forlorn from the outside’ and drift towards ‘an ossification of ceremony and detachment’ (H. Kretzschmar).29 By 1909, when Thomas Mann published his novel ‘Royal Highness’ about the fictional Grand Duchy of Grimmburg, a lethal mix of ridicule and pity was already liberally applied to Germany’s crowned heads. ‘In his daily life he had nothing to do’, we learn about His Highness, Prince Klaus Heinrich; ‘it was important and decisive whether a greeting or a gracious word had gone well, whether a gesture had appeared winning yet dignified … Sometimes he thought that it would be good to have a proper surname, to be called Dr Fischer and have a serious profession.’30

‘A piece of Heimat’: Delivering Monarchical Culture to the Public

Exploring the dilemmas faced by the German monarchies of the Wilhelmine era in the fields of constitutional politics and democratic reform produces a bleak picture. While it sets the scene for their swift removal in November 1918, it grates with another simultaneous phenomenon: the popularity enjoyed by many German monarchs and the absence of any serious republican challenge until the revolutionary sea change in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the Great War. For a long time this issue remained emphatically under-studied. Karl Ferdinand Werner still wondered in the early 1980s if German historians were actually embarrassed by the loyalty Germans had shown to their monarchs until their overthrow – and in some cases beyond.31 Since then, however, much valuable work has been completed. It provides a better understanding of the mechanisms which ensured the lasting success of the monarchical wares in the political mass market of the half-century before the First World War. As is to be expected in view of the formidable difficulties associated with analysing and reconstructing the attitudes of the monarchs’ subjects – the consumers of these wares – the bulk of these studies have thrown light on aspects of the kings’ successful salesmanship.32

29 Boldt, ‘Föderalismus’, pp. 36–40; Kretzschmar, ‘Königtum’, p. 490; Gollwitzer, ‘Endphase’, p. 366; Bernhard Löffler, ‘Wie funktioniert das Königreich Bayern? Zur politisch-sozialen Verfassung Bayerns in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Peter Wolf et al. (eds), Götterdämmerung. König Ludwig II. und seine Zeit (Augsburg, 2011), pp. 22–33. 30 Thomas Mann, Königliche Hoheit (Berlin, 1909): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35328/35328- h/35328-h.htm, para. 235 (accessed 20 December 2012). 31 Karl Ferdinand Werner, ‘Fürst und Hof im 19. Jahrhundert: Abgesang oder Spätblüte?’, in idem (ed.), Hof, Kultur und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1985), p. 11. 32 Hubertus Büschel, Untertanenliebe. Der Kult um deutsche Monarchen 1770–1830 (Göttingen, 2006). An illuminating effort to reconstruct subjects’ attitudes through an exploration of gifts is Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2011). See also Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, 2005), pp. 113–44.

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Efforts to popularise and legitimise nineteenth-century Germany’s crowns and dynasties started long before the foundation of the German Reich. Growing out of the dramatic redesign forced on the mosaic-like states system of the by France’s military might, and with German nationalism breathing down their necks, most of the separate German monarchies had to work hard to turn themselves into distinct and credible ‘Fatherlands’. In this enterprise strong local identities – the famous notion of Heimat – and regional monarchies were tied into a symbiotic relationship.33 The probably provides the most striking example of a concerted long-term attempt to generate a public culture characterised by cosy monarchical loyalty and regional belonging. ‘Everyone had to feel that this old man had become one with land and people, with mountain and forest’, Fritz Endres wrote about Prince-Regent Luitpold in 1916. He was ‘a piece of Heimat … wise, experienced and dutiful, and yet simple and quiet; venerable and yet young of heart; of touching, noble humanity’.34 Such collective mentalities and images are artefacts; they are the result of careful cultivation. Ever since its elevation to royal rank, Bavaria’s Wittelsbach dynasty had worked hard to legitimise and popularise its position. A demonstrative concern for the needs of the simple people, especially of the peasantry; monumental public building projects; patronage of the arts; the conscious use of a politics of memory (Geschichtspolitik) to assert and entrench through teaching, scholarship and museums the notion of the dynasty’s centuries-old record of excellence; and frequent royal travel across the realm: all that and more was employed for the best of ‘Fürst und Vaterland’. As a Prussian-led German unification appeared ominously on the horizon, the need for this kind of monarchical wooing of the population became even more pressing. In late autumn of 1866, for instance, the young King Ludwig II was persuaded to spend a month on a carefully planned tour of Franconia. This northern part of the Bavarian kingdom, a somewhat reluctant addition after 1803, had been the scene of fighting with Prussian troops only a few months earlier.35 King Ludwig’s eccentric and eventually pathological behaviour, though, soon posed a challenge to the project of popularising monarchy. His shyness deteriorated to the point where he abhorred conventional forms of human interaction. Concerns about the king’s tendencies to eschew company were raised as early as 1865 when the Munich Police Commissioner deplored Ludwig’s isolation. It caused ‘love and respect to wane, without which no regent can rule effectively’. Complaints about the king’s invisibility continued, as did ministerial pressure on the monarch to make himself available, but to no avail. Ludwig’s absence nearly spoilt the large-scale celebrations organised in schools, churches, military institutions and town halls across the country to mark the 700th anniversary of Wittelsbach rule. Designed as a ‘high-point in the communication of and patriotism’, the jubilee was only just salvaged by the active participation of other senior members of the dynasty – especially of Prince Luitpold, the king’s uncle.36

33 Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2001); Confino,N ation; Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of ‘Heimat’ (Berkeley, 1990); Dieter Langewiesche and Georg Schmidt (eds), Föderative Nation (Munich, 2000). 34 Fritz Endres, Prinzegent Luitpold und die Entwicklung des modernen Bayern (Munich, 1916), p. 90. 35 Heinz Gollwitzer, ‘Fürst und Volk. Betrachtungen zur Selbstbehauptung des bayerischen Herrscherhauses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 50 (1987), pp. 723– 47; Manfred Hanisch, Für Fürst und Vaterland: Legitimitätsstiftung in Bayern zwischen Revolution 1848 und Reichsgründung (Munich, 1991); Hans-Michael Dörner, Staat und Geschichte in Bayern im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1992); Erich Adami and Sandra Borkowsky, Triumphale Reise durch Franken – Ludwig II. König von Bayern, 10. November bis 10. Dezember 1866 (Kleinwallstadt, 2003). 36 Barbara Kink, ‘Die Volksstimmung in Bayern im Spiegel der Berichte der Regierungspräsidenten 1866–1886’, in Wolf et al. (eds), Götterdämmerung, pp. 139–40; Dörner, Staat, pp. 297–322; Simone Mergen,

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Ludwig II still made some positive contributions to maintaining and creating the ‘cult of monarchy’: anecdotes made the rounds illustrating his affability during some rare encounters with simple mountain folk, and his -building programme constituted patronage on a gargantuan scale. Yet along with the financial catastrophe caused by the king’s spending habits and rumours of his deranged and morally unacceptable behaviour, his isolation became a political problem, for ‘in his day the symbolism of royal representation was probably as important as executing governmental power’.37 The lavish celebrations to commemorate the 100th birthday of King Ludwig I that went ahead in July 1888 reflected a dramatic change. At the culmination of the ceremonies, the bust of Ludwig I was unveiled by the kingdom’s new monarchical head: 67-year-old Prince- Regent Luitpold. He did so in front of 10,000 spectators, accompanied by the thunder of cannons, fireworks and the massed choirs’ patriotic singing.38 Even though the removal of King Ludwig II on grounds of insanity on 9 June 1886 and his death by drowning four days later were traumatic events that earned the new regent a fair deal of hostility, Luitpold never shied away from showing himself to his people. The campaign that would, by the time of his 90th birthday, earn the prince-regent epithets like ‘Father Luitpold’ or ‘The Blessing of his House’ and the warm praise even of the Bavarian Social Democrats began soon after the commencement of the regency.39 Luitpold immediately set out to travel the length and breadth of the country. He visited and Franconia, returned to Munich to hand out prizes at the Oktoberfest – thenceforth an annual ritual – and showed a real talent for striking the right note when engaging with his people. Patient, modest and approachable, but with an innate dignity, Luitpold gradually, over years and decades, morphed into a revered figure. Cigars shared with huntsmen endeared him to the simple folk. His habit of wearing local costume – leather shorts, Loden-jackets and the Gamsbart hat – also struck a chord with the Bürgertum. The regent’s passion for hunting and his well-known love of swimming – even when the ponds in needed to be cleared of ice – were testament to his physical vigour. His regular participation in Munich’s Corpus Christi and his strict observance of a Maundy Thursday ritual, whereby Luitpold and his son washed the feet of elderly paupers, spoke of the depth of his Christian faith. These were soothing gestures at a time when his anti-clerical ministry steered a rather different course. Finally, as Katharina Weigand observes, the regent’s old-fashioned courtesy and healthy old age turned Luitpold into the calm centre of a frantically changing world, made him the ‘palliative against the problems of modernity’. Just as Stefan Zweig would wistfully remember for the similar case of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, the prince-regent seemed a guarantor that ‘nothing would change in the well-regulated order’.40 The Bavarian recipe for popularising monarchy – whether conceived by the monarch himself or by his ministers – included ingredients used all over the Reich. Leutseligkeit and Volkstümlichkeit, easy-going affability and popular appeal, were the preferred styles of

Monarchiejubiläen im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Entdeckung des historischen Jubiläums für den monarchischen Kult in Sachsen und Bayern (Leipzig, 2005), pp. 279–86. 37 Heinz Häfner, Ein König wird beseitigt. Ludwig II. von Bayern (Munich, 2008), p. 147. 38 Mergen, Monarchiejubiläen, pp. 204–19. 39 Katharina Weigand, ‘Prinzregent Luitpold. Die Inszenierung der Volkstümlichkeit’, in Alois Schmid and Katharina Weigand (eds), Die Herrscher Bayerns (Munich, 2001), pp. 367–75; Ernst Ursel, Die bayerischen Herrscher von Ludwig I. bis Ludwig III. im Urteil der Presse nach ihrem Tod (Berlin, 1974), pp. 148–9. 40 Weigand, ‘Prinzregent’, p. 370; Karl Möckl, ‘Hof und Hofgesellschaft in Bayern in der Prinzregentenzeit’, in Werner (ed.), Hof, p. 193; Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Nebraska, 1964 [1943]), p. 2.

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deportment of monarchical figures up and down the country. Kaiser Wilhelm I patiently strolled along the promenades at spa resorts or appeared daily at his study window during the changing of the guard. His son, Kaiser Friedrich III – ‘Our Fritz’ – splashed around with youths in public baths and hosted children’s garden parties.41 Luitpold’s son, King Ludwig III, joined the good people of Munich at the Pschorr Beer Hall for his weekly evening of skittles. The last king of Württemberg, Wilhelm II, walked his dogs around Stuttgart and invited artisans to join him for dinner, while nature-loving, sporty Friedrich August III of Saxony spoke with a broad local dialect and was, according to a recent biographer, perhaps the best-loved sovereign in Europe.42 Like the Wittelsbachs, Prussia’s Hohenzollerns pursued a dynastic Geschichtspolitik to impress a suitably monarchical version of the past upon their subjects.43 As is demonstrated by the public celebrations of the Golden and Silver Wedding Anniversaries of King Johann and King Albert of Saxony in 1872 and 1878, and by the dynasty’s 800-year jubilee in 1889, the Saxon knew how to utilise anniversaries every bit as expertly as their Wittelsbach neighbours to the south.44 As monuments of royal paragons were ceremoniously unveiled all over the German Fatherlands,45 as royal birthdays were celebrated and deaths marked with respect, with photographs collected in their millions and patriotic trinkets advertised in every newspaper, the age witnessed the staging of a colourful spectacle accompanied by the sound of military bands and choreographed shouts of ‘vivat’: the very public production and performance of monarchical culture in a media age.46 Against the background of this eye-catching tapestry, two spheres can be singled out in which the monarchs’ influence remained particularly strong: the court and the cultural domain. The court and its society was the institution most directly associated with and controlled by the monarch, the ‘immediate architectural and personal environment of the

41 Giloi, Monarchy, pp. 157–85; Alexa Geisthövel, ‘Den Monarchen im Blick. Wilhelm I. in der illustrierten Familienpresse’, in Habbo Knoch and Daniel Morat (eds), Kommunikation als Beobachtung (Munich, 2003), pp. 59–80; Alexa Geisthövel, ‘Wilhelm I. am “historischen Eckfenster”. Zur Sichtbarkeit des Monarchen in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Jan Andres, Alexa Geisthövel and Matthias Schwengelbeck (eds),Die Sinnlichkeit der Macht (Frankfurt, 2005), pp. 163–85; Müller, Our Fritz, pp. 105–39. 42 Ursel, Herrscher, p. 155; Beckenbauer, Ludwig III., pp. 54–55; Sauer, Württembergs letzter König, pp. 171–82; Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Friedrich August III. (1902–1918)’, in idem (ed.), Die Herrscher Sachsens (Munich, 2004), pp. 306–19; for the wider meaning of ‘bourgeois’ kingship, see Heinz Dollinger, ‘Das Leitbild des Bürgerkönigs in der europäischen Monarchie des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Werner (ed.), Hof, pp. 325–64. 43 Frank Lorenz Müller, ‘The Prince, the Crypt, and the Historians: Emperor Frederick III and the Continuity of Monarchical Geschichtspolitik in Imperial Germany’, German Studies Review, 35 (2012), pp. 521–40; Jürgen Luh, ‘Eine Erbschaft der Monarchie: Das Hohenzollern Museum’, in Thomas Biskup and Martin Kohlrausch (eds), Das Erbe der Monarchie (Frankfurt, 2008), pp. 200–16. 44 Mergen, Monarchiejubiläen. 45 Simone Mergen, ‘Die Enthüllung des König-Johann-Denkmals in Dresden anlässlich der Wettin-Feier 1889. Jubiläum und Denkmal im monarchischen Kult des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Müller and Schattkowsky (eds), Tradition, pp. 425–48 (with the key literature on monuments and the monarchical cult). 46 Andreas Biefang, Michael Epkenhans and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Düsseldorf, 2008); Franziska Windt, Jürgen Luh and Carsten Dilba, Die Kaiser und die Macht der Medien (Berlin, 2005); Giloi, Monarchy, pp. 186–265; Jaap van Osta, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Reappearance of the Performing Monarchy in Europe, c. 1870–1914’, in Jeroen Deploige and Gita Deneckere (eds), Mystifying the Monarch: Studies on Discourse, Power, and History (, 2006) pp. 181–92; Martin Kohlrausch, ‘Chance und Gefährdung – Wilhelm II. und Ludwig II. als Medienmonarchen’, in Wolf et al. (eds), Götterdämmerung, pp. 34–43; Martin Kohlrausch, ‘Wilhelm II as Media Emperor’, in Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (eds), Constructing Charisma (New York, 2010), pp. 52–66.

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prince’. Financially secured through civil lists, the German courts continued to exist more or less lavishly and provided the monarchies with a powerful means of disseminating their message. Available research on the courts of Imperial Germany reveals diverse developments reflecting regional contexts. The courts in Hesse-Darmstadt, Saxony and Württemberg, for instance, made some efforts to adapt to a changing social order and admit new groups. Sometimes, though – as in Württemberg – this happened with surprising formal rigidity; and in other cases – such as Saxe-Coburg or Bavaria – the courts remained emphatically traditional, exclusive and almost wholly aristocratic. The plain, almost frugal Luitpold, Karl Alexander von Müller recalled, ‘maintained at his court all the cult-like, defensive taboo of the Spanish-Burgundian etiquette, so that it was considered harder to be received at court in Munich than at Berlin’.47 The reference to the Imperial-cum-Prussian court, especially during the Wilhelmine era, raises another important issue: its political power. The situation in Saxony, where the court appears to have had no significant clout, stood in marked contrast to developments in the German capital, where court-based institutions – such as the various military and civilian ‘cabinets’ – were assuming important governmental functions. Moreover, the dramatic expansion of the Wilhelmine court, the changes to its structure and especially its militarisation have been associated with a profoundly political agenda. According to John Röhl, the ‘efflorescence of a sumptuous neo-absolutist court culture’ demonstrated unmistakably that ‘the Hohenzollern court continued to be the focus of political and social life in Germany down to the outbreak of war in 1914’. Röhl associates three political functions with the ‘monstrous flowering of court culture in the Wilhelmine Reich’: endowing the Hohenzollern dynasty with charisma; ensuring the ‘integration and hierarchisation’ of the ruling elite – including the upper middle class; and demonstrating the power of the Reich to foreign observers.48 The degree to which the politics of the court were calculated to dominate state and society has remained a matter for debate, though, and there is even less consensus on whether these aims were actually realised. After all, Dresden was not Munich; Stuttgart was not Berlin; and even in the German capital, Karl Möckl’s observation applies that in a bourgeois world the court was the ‘vanishing point’ of society, ‘but no longer its sole centre’.49 There is less controversy about the significance of monarchs’ activities in the fields of arts and culture. It was here that Germany’s crowned heads still wielded considerable influence. Like his Wittelsbach predecessors, Luitpold actively supported the arts, both financially and by seeking the company of artists. The famed cultural lustre of the Bavarian capital during these decades was widely associated with the court and the regent. In this Luitpold was yet

47 Eckhart Franz, ‘Hof und Hofgesellschaft im Großherzogtum Hessen’, in Karl Möckl (ed.), Hof und Hofgesellschaft in den deutschen Staaten im 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert (Boppard, 1990), pp. 170–73; Sauer, Württembergs letzter König, pp. 122–4; Blaschke, Beiträge, pp. 560–64; Eberhard Fritz, ‘Knecht, Kutscher, Koch, Kammerdiener, König. Zur Sozialgeschichte des königlichen Hofes in Württemberg (1806–1918)’,Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte, 66 (2007), pp. 249–89; Klaus von Andrian-Werburg, ‘Hof und Hofgesellschaft in Coburg im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Möckl (ed.), Hof, pp. 214–22; Möckl, ‘Hof und Hofgesellschaft in Bayern’; Karl Alexander von Müller, Aus den Gärten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungen 1882–1914 (Stuttgart, 1952), p. 123. 48 Blaschke, Beiträge, p. 566; John C.G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 70– 71, 103–6; see also Martin Kohlrausch, ‘Zwischen Tradition und Innovation. Das Hofzeremoniell der wilhelminischen Monarchie’, in Biefang, Epkenhans and Tenfelde (eds), Zeremoniell, pp. 31–51; Hans Philippi, ‘Der Hof Kaiser Wilhelms II.’, in Möckl (ed.), Hof, pp. 361–94. 49 Karl Möckl, ‘Einleitende Bemerkungen’, in idem (ed.), Hof, p. 10.

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again a representative of a common contemporary phenomenon: ‘Cultural Kingship’.50 Even monarchs with little innate artistic interests – like Friedrich August III of Saxony – lavished resources on the arts. Others made cultural policies the centrepiece of their activities: Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, himself more artist, writer and composer than statesman or soldier, was a key benefactor of the Darmstadt stage and supported local publishing ventures as well as various forms of scholarship. In 1899 he founded the artists’ colony Mathildenhöhe, an innovative joint venture of artists and craftsmen. According to his motto – ‘May my Hessen flourish and the Arts in Hessen, too!’ – the grand duke attracted progressive artists to his little capital. While not every monarch had Ernst Ludwig’s talents and not every capital achieved the luminous quality bestowed on Munich by the likes of Lenbach, Slevogt and Kandinsky, the cultural record of Germany’s princely houses nevertheless remains impressive. Whether reflective of local traditions or expressive of great European trends, the theatres, , art collections and gardens of the German monarchies and their traditions of patronage for painters, sculptors, musicians and writers created lasting cultural treasures.51 The whole glittering edifice of monarchical culture made no difference, though, when the revolution engulfed the war-weary country in 1918, and it was the most artistically gifted of the German monarchs, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, who passed the harshest verdict on his fellow performers. Many of them, he remembered, ‘had no idea how to go with the times … They were swept away without leaving anything behind, for they were, after all, complete nonentities, even though their intentions were decent.’52

Monarchical Biography: Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Squandering of ‘Royalist Capital’

It will come as no surprise that some of these ‘nonentities’ preferred a different explanation for the fate that befell them. Grand Duke Friedrich August of Oldenburg, for instance, made no bones about where he thought the blame should lie. ‘We are entirely clear that the Kaiser has ruined the Reich, that he will be chased away and that we will share his fate’, he declared in October 1918.53 Friedrich August’s despondent claim that the actions of the last German Kaiser – and only his – were crucial appears to be confirmed by sampling the biographical approach to the monarchies of Imperial Germany. Only a small number of monarchical figures have attracted serious biographical attention, and there are surprising omissions. A few studies have examined Kaiser Friedrich III and his wife Victoria. They throw light on the limits of monarchical liberalism and on the creation of royal myths designed to popularise and update monarchy, as well as on the transnational

50 Weigand, ‘Prinzregent’, p. 373; Möckl, ‘Hof und Hofgesellschaft’, pp. 220–25; Brigitte Heck, ‘Die Folklorisierung der Macht? Karlsruher Hof und Residenz im Mittelpunkt öffentlicher Feiern’, in Wiese and Rössler (eds), Repräsentation, p. 107. 51 Eckhart Franz, ‘Der erste und der letzte Großherzog von Hessen: Fürstliche Kunstförderung in Darmstadt’, in Möckl (ed.), Hof, pp. 301–10; Golo Mann, ‘Der letzte Großherzog’, in Eckhart G. Franz (ed.), Erinnertes. Aufzeichnungen des letzten Großherzogs Ernst Ludwig von Hessen und bei Rhein (Darmstadt, 1983), pp. 13–14; Gollwitzer, ‘Endphase’, pp. 366–7. 52 Franz (ed.), Erinnertes, p. 8. 53 Michael Horn, ‘Zwischen Abdankung und Absetzung. Das Ende der Herrschaft der Bundesfürsten des Deutschen Reiches im November 1918’, in Richter and Dirbach (eds), Thronverzicht, p. 277.

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linkages of Europe’s dynasties.54 A scholarly life of Kaiser Wilhelm I remains a desideratum, though, and for the non-Prussian German monarchs there are only a handful of mainly narrative biographies.55 Two men ensure, however, that the shelves in the biography section of the Imperial German bookshop are well stocked: Bavaria’s ‘Fairy-Tale-King’ Ludwig II and Kaiser Wilhelm II. These monarchs are linked by more than their appeal to biographers. The Kaiser’s behaviour unfortunately evoked the image of Ludwig II, Friedrich von Holstein wrote to Philipp zu Eulenburg in 1895, and pointed gloomily to the ‘conclusions the German people would draw from this’.56 The Bavarian king who built the palaces of and Neuschwanstein has always enjoyed the historiographical limelight. A bibliography compiled to mark the centenary of the king’s death already listed 2,781 Ludwig-related publications. Since then, several further major biographical studies – amongst them the works by Hüttl, Botzenhart, Häfner and Hilmes – have appeared, culminating in a lavish multi-authored volume published to accompany the grand Ludwig II exhibition in 2011.57 While interest in the life and death of this unhappy ruler is still fuelled by the romanticism of his doomed existence and the mystery surrounding his watery death, recent interrogations of Ludwig’s life have enhanced our understanding of the conditions of nineteenth-century monarchy. Christof Botzenhart carefully charts the response to Bavaria’s mediatisation in 1871 by a king with pronounced views on his personal sovereignty. He interprets key aspects of Ludwig’s eccentric behaviour as reactions to this political dilemma and – by pointing to the king’s attention to governmental paperwork – invites a reconsideration of what constituted a monarch’s incapacity to rule. Through his refutation of the psychiatric case for Ludwig’s removal in 1886, Heinz Häfner also puts the political issue centre stage. The question that emerges is one of raison d’état, the power of the ministry and the intentions of Ludwig’s successor, Prince Luitpold. Building on earlier work – such as the studies edited by Katharina Sykora – the 2011 volume Götterdämmerung emphasises the dimension of royal myths: their creation, dissemination and impact. Ludwig II’s strong mythical presence proved a double-edged sword for the Wittelsbachs. While keeping its followers firmly in a romantic-monarchical orbit, the legend of the ‘Swan King’ often fuelled a rejection of Bavaria’s post-1886 reality.58 Serious biographical research on Wilhelm II began in earnest after a decades-long period of neglect following the publication in 1926 of Emil Ludwig’s pioneering study.59 In 1989 Lamar Cecil finished the first of two volumes of a life of the Kaiser, which wasfollowed, four years later, by the first instalment of John Röhl’s monumental three-volume biography.

54 Patricia Kollander, Frederick III: Germany’s Liberal Emperor (Westport, 1995); Müller, Our Fritz; Reiner von Hessen (ed.), Victoria Kaiserin Friedrich, 1840–1901 (Frankfurt, 2002). 55 Sauer, Württembergs letzter König; Beckenbauer, Ludwig III.; Walter Fellmann, Sachsens letzter König. Friedrich August III. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1992); see also Silke Marburg, Europäischer Hochadel. König Johann von Sachsen (1801–1873) und die Binnenkommunikation einer Sozialformation (Berlin, 2008); Bernhard Post and Dietrich Werner, Herrscher in der Zeitenwende. Wilhelm-Ernst von Sachsen-Weimar- Eisenach 1876–1923 (Jena, 2006); Dieter J. Weiß, Kronprinz Rupprecht von Bayern. Eine politische Biographie (Regensburg, 2007). 56 John G.C. Röhl, ‘Monarchistische Kritik am Kaisertum Wilhelms II.’, Majestas, 10 (2002), p. 187. 57 Eduard Hanslik and Jürgen Wagner, Ludwig II., König von Bayern 1845–1886. Internationale Bibliographie zu Leben und Wirkung (Frankfurt, 1986); Franz Merta, ‘König Ludwig II. im Spiegel der Neuerscheinungen zum 100. Todestag’, Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 44 (1986), pp. 719–43; Hüttl, Ludwig II.; Botzenhart, Schattenkönig; Häfner, König wird beseitigt; Oliver Hilmes, Ludwig II.: Der unzeitgemäße König (Munich, 2013); Wolf et al. (eds), Götterdämmerung (with an exhaustive bibliography). 58 Katharina Sykora (ed.), Ein Bild von einem Mann. Ludwig II. von Bayern. Konstruktion und Rezeption eines Mythos (Frankfurt, 2004); Ludwig Schneider, Die populäre Kritik an Staat und Gesellschaft in München, 1886–1914 (Munich, 1975), p. 389. 59 Emil Ludwig, Wilhelm der Zweite (Berlin, 1926).

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Since then the remaining volumes and other notable biographies by Thomas Kohut and Christopher Clark have appeared, as well as a wealth of Wilhelm-focused monographs and edited volumes.60 There is now an embarrassment of riches, with studies exploring, amongst other issues, the Kaiser’s relationship with the media, his attitude to technological modernity, his religiosity and his oratory.61 The situation has changed dramatically since 1990 when John Röhl deplored Wilhelm’s ‘blanking out of German history’.62 If anything, the pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction, with the Imperial-Prussian and Wilhelmine dimensions outshining earlier and non-Prussian topics within the history of the Reich’s monarchies. Notwithstanding the variety of issues explored by historians of the Wilhelmine monarchy, one topic has remained firmly at the centre of the debate: Wilhelm II’s claim that ‘the Reich only ha[d] one ruler and I am he’ – an echo of Ludwig II’s ill-fated ‘epigonic absolutism’63 – and the question to what extent he turned this into a reality. The issue of the Kaiser’s alleged ‘Personal Regiment’ touches on three elements at the heart of nineteenth-century German monarchy: (i) Wilhelm II’s personality and his ability to rise to the challenges of personal rule; (ii) the willingness of the monarch to accept the restrictions that Konstitutionalismus placed on the exercise of monarchical sovereignty (that is, the relationship with his ministers, the constitutional rights of parliament and the federal sensitivities within the Reich); and (iii) the ability of the crown to create a culture of public approval of the monarchical system. While the issue of the reality or otherwise of Wilhelm’s ‘Personal Regiment’ has remained controversial,64 there is consensus concerning the Kaiser’s significant shortcomings in all three respects. His desire to exercise great power personally, often formulated in crass language and coupled with his inability to work in an effective and coherent fashion, caused widespread alienation. Most of his ministers found serving this immature monarch a frustrating chore which lessened their political clout. Moreover, Wilhelm II never established a constructive, mutually respectful relationship with the Reichstag, but indulged in decades of inappropriate denigration of the German parliament. Finally, the Kaiser’s gaffe-prone and frequently charmless performances, usually delivered in the full glare of publicity, invited ridicule and hostility. He thus eroded the foundation of monarchical goodwill which should have supported the Hohenzollern crown. Holstein’s worries about the dynasty dated back to 1895. ‘His Majesty lives off royalist capital’, he observed, and would, in a few years’ time, badly miss ‘what he is thoughtlessly squandering today’.65 The old privy councillor’s

60 Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II: Prince and Emperor 1859–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1989); idem, Wilhelm II: Emperor and Exile (Chapel Hill, 1996); John C.G. Röhl, Young William: The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859–1888 (Cambridge, 1998 [orig. 1993]); idem, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004 [orig. 2001]); idem, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941 (Cambridge, 2013 [orig. 2008]); Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership (New York, 1991); Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power (London, 2009); Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 79–89. 61 Martin Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal. Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin, 2005); Wolfgang König, Wilhelm II. und die Moderne: Der Kaiser und die technisch-industrielle Welt (Paderborn, 2007); Benjamin Hasselhorn, Politische Theologie Wilhelms II. (Berlin, 2012); Michael A. Obst, Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche. Kaiser Wilhelm II. als politischer Redner (Paderborn, 2010). 62 John C.G. Röhl (ed.), Der Ort Kaiser Wilhelms II. in der deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 1991), p. vii. 63 Botzenhart, Schattenkönig, p. 201. 64 Alexander König, Wie mächtig war der Kaiser? Kaiser Wilhelm II. zwischen Königsmechanismus und Polykratie von 1908 bis 1914 (Stuttgart, 2009); Jefferies,C ontesting, pp. 84–9; Wolfgang Mommsen, War der Kaiser an allem schuld? Wilhelm II. und die preußisch-deutschen Machteliten (Berlin, 2002); Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court, pp. 107–30; Geoff Eley, ‘The View from the Throne: The Personal Rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 469–85. 65 John C.G. Röhl (ed.), Philip Eulenburgs Politische Korrespondenz, vol. II (Boppard, 1979), p. 1440.

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warning went unheeded, though, and by 1913 the stock of royalist capital had all but gone. The emphatically monarchical celebrations staged in that year to commemorate the victory at Leipzig in 1813 and the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser’s accession did little more than ‘exacerbate the political tensions in Wilhelmine Germany’. Unimpressed by the monarchic pageantry, the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, the mouthpiece of the largest caucus in the Reichstag, offered its very own greeting: ‘Long live the Republic!’66 The outbreak of war in 1914 provided Germany’s monarchs with an opportunity to benefit from the upsurge in patriotic zeal and the sense of national togetherness, or Burgfrieden, agreed when the fighting began. This was missed, though. Rather than assuming the glorious position suggested by his claims of untrammelled Kommandogewalt (‘Power of Command’), Wilhelm II proved psychologically and intellectually incapable of discharging the duties of the ‘Supreme Warlord’. Senior commanders soon relegated the Kaiser to a position of enforced inactivity, making him appear exactly like what Bülow had once insisted the German people did not want: a ‘Shadow Emperor’. While Wilhelm’s position was not quite as powerless as this catchphrase might suggest, he nevertheless cut an unimpressive public figure and ended up dwarfed by the potent phenomenon of the Hindenburg myth.67 An analysis of the overall military performance of the German dynasties yields a mixed picture. While some members of the ruling houses – for instance, Prince Oskar of Prussia, Duke Ernst II of Saxony-Altenburg and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria – served with distinction, many others did little to justify their high military ranks.68 The contributions made by some of the German monarchies – above all Ludwig III’s Bavaria, but also Württemberg and Saxony – to the war aims debate were wholly unedifying, though. Their demands for territorial gains after the German victory may have had a valid constitutional basis, but they were ill-timed. According to Karl-Heinz Janßen, the princes’ attempts to ‘use warlike conquests to enhance the prestige of their houses’ was immediately perceived as ‘anachronistic, fantastical and grotesque’.69 Just as Friedrich August of Oldenburg had predicted, Germany’s monarchies were sucked into the vortex created by the ‘decomposition of the imperial idea during the First World War’. Any chance of securing a monarchical future – both for the states and at Reich level – using the parliamentary systems so hastily introduced in the autumn of 1918 was ruined by the now toxically unpopular Kaiser, who refused to abdicate in time. Held responsible for the defeat and perceived as delaying a benign peace settlement, Wilhelm II gave the revolutionary movement spreading across Germany in November 1918 its anti- monarchical edge. The sudden strength of this feeling and the peculiar resignation of the ruling houses and their erstwhile supporters led to Germany’s almost instantaneous ‘de- crowning’. Confronted with fairly small groups of revolutionaries acting on behalf of newly founded workers’ and soldiers’ councils, Germany’s monarchs simply called it a day and abdicated. Not a single lieutenant gave his life for the King of Prussia. Between Kurt Eisner’s proclamation of the Bavarian Free State on the night of 7 November and Prince Günther of

66 Jeffrey R. Smith, ‘The Monarchy Versus the Nation: The “Festive Year” 1913 in Wilhelmine Germany’, German Studies Review, 23 (2000), p. 270; Lothar Machtan, Die Abdankung. Wie Deutschlands gekrönte Häupter aus der Geschichte fielen (Berlin, 2008), p. 30; John C.G. Röhl, Wilhelm II. Der Weg in den Abgrund 1900–1941 (Munich, 2008), pp. 1013–18. 67 Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court, p. 130; Holger Afflerbach, ‘Wilhelm II as Supreme Warlord in the First World War’, in Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (eds), The Kaiser (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 195–216; Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2009). 68 Machtan, Abdankung, pp. 92–107. 69 Karl-Heinz Janßen, ‘Der Untergang der Monarchie in Deutschland’, in Hellmuth Rößler (ed.), Weltwende 1917 (Göttingen, 1965), p. 92; and Karl-Heinz Janßen, Macht und Verblendung. Kriegszielpolitik der deutschen Bundesstaaten 1914/1918 (Göttingen, 1963), p. 11.

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Schwarzburg-Sondershausen’s abdication on 25 November, 22 German monarchies ceased to be. The Kaiser’s abdication was announced prematurely on 9 November, but Wilhelm chose not to dispute it and slipped into exile the following day.70 The overthrow of the monarchical regime was a non-violent affair. Often, the monarchs’ refusal to use force was matched by the revolutionaries’ lack of resentment against the individual princes. The spokesman of the workers’ and soldiers’ council in Darmstadt, for instance, assured Ernst Ludwig that ‘the people’s anger was not directed against the duke’. When, on 8 November, Arthur Crispien, a leader of the Independent Social Democrats in Württemberg, bumped into a group of workers noisily demonstrating outside King Wilhelm’s palace, he snarled at them to leave the old man, who had done nobody any harm, in peace, whereupon they dispersed. The most famous scene took place in Dresden where King Friedrich August III abdicated during a telephone conversation with the provisional government. Having agreed to release all the civil servants from their oath, the king asked if this meant that he was now no longer in charge. When this was confirmed, the ex-monarch replied: ‘Aha, well, look after your own rubbish, then.’71 The German monarchies thus came to a sudden end. Ernst‑Wolfgang Böckenförde is right to point out that – with the benefit of hindsight – this outcome appears like the culmination of long-term processes of delegitimisation.72 Both within the separate states and at Reich level, Konstitutionalismus, still guided by the increasingly pale lodestar of the ‘monarchical principle’, had failed to take the step that separated it from a parliamentary- democratic system, and even the limited restrictions imposed by the Konstitutionalismus of the Reich’s federal monarchy proved too much for the febrile ambitions of the last Kaiser. Wilhelm II thus ended up denuding himself and his fellow monarchs of ‘royalist capital’ and undermining his and their claim to be the dynastic guardians of Germany’s federal diversity. And yet, on top of all of these erosive processes it took nothing less than Germany’s defeat in a total war to trigger the removal of the monarchical system. Even then there were still some surprising supporters of the status quo. ‘I am in favour of keeping the German monarchy’, Friedrich Ebert declared on 31 October 1918. ‘Germany is not ready for the republic.’73 That the Reich did not split up after 1918 demonstrated the erroneousness of both Bismarck’s belief that national unity required the many German dynasties and Bülow’s claim about the central importance of the ‘imperial idea’. The Iron Chancellor may have been nearer the mark, though, when he worried about the future of the monarchy. It was uncertain, he once claimed, ‘not because we will run out of royalists, but perhaps we will run out of kings. You need a hare to make jugged hare, and for a monarchy you need a king.’ Lack of a suitable crowned head might well turn the next generation republican. As Wilhelm II would show, the wrong king could render the monarchical dish just as unpalatable as no king at all.74

70 Bernd Sösemann, ‘Der Verfall des Kaisergedankens im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Röhl (ed.), Der Ort Kaiser Wilhelms II., pp. 145–70; Wolfram Pyta, ‘Die Kunst des rechtzeitigen Thronverzichts. Neue Einsichten zur Überlebenschance der parlamentarischen Monarchie in Deutschland im Herbst 1918’, in Patrick Merziger et al. (eds), Geschichte, Öffentlichkeit. Kommunikation. Festschrift für Bernd Sösemann (Stuttgart, 2010), pp. 363–81; Janßen, ‘Untergang’; Machtan,Abdankung , pp. 131–350; Horn, ‘Abdankung’; Helmut Neuhaus, ‘Das Ende der Monarchien in Deutschland 1918’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 111 (1991), pp. 102–36. 71 Fritz Wecker, Unsere Landesväter. Wie sie gingen, wo sie blieben (Berlin, 1928); Tobias Haren, Der Volksstaat Hessen 1918/1919 (Berlin, 2003), p. 80; Sauer, Württembergs letzter König, p. 295; Machtan, Abdankung, p. 311. 72 Ernst‑Wolfgang Böckenförde, ‘Staat und Gesellschaft’, in Kurt Jeserich et al. (eds), Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 2–9. 73 Pyta, ‘Kunst’, p. 367. 74 Bismarck, Gedanken, p. 95.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of ‘Heimat’ (Berkeley, 1990). Biefang, Andreas, Epkenhans, Michael and Tenfelde, Klaus (eds). Das politische Zeremoniell im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Düsseldorf, 2008). Biskup, Thomas and Kohlrausch, Martin (eds). Das Erbe der Monarchie (Frankfurt, 2008). Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. ‘Der deutsche Typ der konstitutionellen Monarchie im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Werner Conze (ed.), Beiträge zur deutschen und belgischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1967), pp. 70–92. Boldt, Hans. ‘Der Föderalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich als Verfassungsproblem’, in Helmut Rumpler (ed.), Innere Staatsbildung und gesellschaftliche Modernisierung in Österreich und Deutschland 1867/71–1914 (Vienna and Munich, 1991), pp. 31–40. Botzenhart, Christof. ‘Ein Schattenkönig ohne Macht will ich nicht sein’. Die Regierungstätigkeit König Ludwigs II. von Bayern (Munich, 2004). Brunner, Otto. ‘Vom Gottesgnadentum zum monarchischen Prinzip. Der Weg der europäischen Monarchie seit dem hohen Mittelalter’, inDas Königtum. Seine geistigen und rechtlichen Grundlagen (Lindau and Konstanz, 1956), pp. 279–305. Büschel, Hubertus. Untertanenliebe. Der Kult um deutsche Monarchen 1770–1830 (Göttingen, 2006). Cecil, Lamar. Wilhelm II: Prince and Emperor 1859–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1989). —. Wilhelm II: Emperor and Exile (Chapel Hill, 1996). Clark, Christopher. Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power (London, 2009). Confino, Alon. The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National History 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997). Dörner, Hans-Michael. Staat und Geschichte in Bayern im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1992). Fetting, Martina.Zum Selbstverständnis der letzten deutschen Monarchen. Normverletzungen und Legitimationsstrategien der Bundesfürsten zwischen Gottesgnadentum und Medienrevolution (Frankfurt, 2013). Giloi, Eva. Monarchy, Myth and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2011). Gollwitzer, Heinz. ‘Die Endphase der Monarchie in Deutschland’, in idem, Weltpolitik und deutsche Geschichte, ed. Hans-Christof Kraus (Göttingen, 2008), pp. 363–83. Green, Abigail. Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, 2001). Hilmes, Oliver. Ludwig II.: Der unzeitgemäße König (Munich, 2013). Kohlrausch, Martin. Der Monarch im Skandal. Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin, 2005). König, Alexander. Wie mächtig war der Kaiser? Kaiser Wilhelm II. Zwischen Königsmechanismus und Polykratie von 1908 bis 1914 (Stuttgart, 2009). Leutheusser, Ulrike and Rumschöttel, Hermann (eds). Prinzregent Luitpold von Bayern. Ein Wittelsbacher zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Munich, 2012). Machtan, Lothar. Die Abdankung. Wie Deutschlands gekrönte Häupter aus der Geschichte fielen (Berlin, 2008). März, Stefan. Das Haus Wittelsbach im Ersten Weltkrieg. Chance und Zusammenbruch monarchischer Herrschaft (Regensburg, 2013). Mergen, Simone. Monarchiejubiläen im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Entdeckung des historischen Jubiläums für den monarchischen Kult in Sachsen und Bayern (Leipzig, 2005). Möckl, Karl. Die Prinzregentenzeit. Gesellschaft und Politik während der Ära des Prinzregenten Luitpold in Bayern (Munich and Vienna, 1972). — (ed.) Hof und Hofgesellschaft in den deutschen Staaten im 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert (Boppard, 1990).

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Mommsen, Wolfgang. War der Kaiser an allem schuld? Wilhelm II. und die preußisch-deutschen Machteliten (Berlin, 2002). Müller, Frank Lorenz. Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Post, Bernhard and Werner, Dietrich. Herrscher in der Zeitenwende. Wilhelm-Ernst von Sachsen- Weimar-Eisenach 1876–1923 (Jena, 2006). Reichold, Helmut. Bismarcks Zaunkönige. Duodez im 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 1977). Röhl, John C.G. The Kaiser and His Court (Cambridge, 1994). —. Young William: The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859–1888 (Cambridge, 1998). —. Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004). —. Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941 (Cambridge, 2013). Schmoll, Friedemann. Verewigte Nation. Studien zur Erinnerungskultur von Reich und Einzelstaat im württembergischen Denkmalkult des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1995). Sykora, Katharina (ed.) Ein Bild von einem Mann. Ludwig II. von Bayern. Konstruktion und Rezeption eines Mythos (Frankfurt, 2004). Weiß, Dieter J. Kronprinz Rupprecht von Bayern. Eine politische Biographie (Regensburg, 2007). Werner, Karl Ferdinand (ed.) Hof, Kultur und Politik im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1985). Wolf, Peter et al. (eds). Götterdämmerung. König Ludwig II. und seine Zeit (Augsburg, 2011).

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Thomas Kühne

since its downfall in 1918, historians have wondered whether the german empire would not have lasted longer—and granted Germans a better future than the one that waited for them and for europe in the following decades—if the great war had not interrupted an otherwise peaceful and prosperous development. from the early 1960s, when the debate gained new momentum through the historian Fritz Fischer’s argument about Germany’s aggressive military objectives before and during the war, historians engaged in a counter- factual debate about whether or not the constitutional monarchy could have developed into a parliamentary monarchy as the British had done long before, and in controversies about the meaning of the enormous and rapid political mobilization of german society from 1871 to 1914, the “fundamental democratization,” as the sociologist Karl famously called it in 1935.1 Historians in the 1960s adopted a deliberately critical attitude and wanted to show that in the Kaiserreich, thanks to a “crypto-absolutist” constitution (hans-Ulrich wehler) and an authoritarian political culture, there was no chance for reform or development toward a parliamentary regime and true democracy along western european lines.2 Rather, the german-American historian hans Rosenberg said that what looked like “democratisation”— the high turnouts for Reichstag elections and the plethora of political associations—was in fact nothing but a “pseudo-democratization,” fuelled by antidemocratic, antisemitic and imperialist ideas.3 Since the 1980s, however, historians such as David Blackbourn, Geoff Eley, and, more recently, margaret lavinia Anderson, have argued that pre-1914 germany did not follow a “special path,” a Sonderweg, into modernity, but was in fact as democratic, liberal and authoritarian as other western countries.4 other historians, including James Retallack, Andreas Gawatz, and Thomas Kühne, have drawn attention to the federal structure of the Kaiserreich and the impact of regional political settings, which in many cases countered or undermined seemingly straightforward developments on the national level.5 over time the debate has calmed down and today permits a more balanced, nuanced and complex picture

1 Karl mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (new york, 1940), p. 449. 2 hans-Ulrich wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen, 1973). 3 Hans Rosenberg, “Die Pseudodemokratisierung der Rittergutsbesitzerklasse,” in idem, Machteliten und Wirtschaftskonjunkturen (first published, 1958; Göttingen, 1978), pp. 83–101. 4 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984); Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (princeton, 2000). 5 James Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Basingstoke, 1996); idem, “Liberals, Conservatives, and the Modernizing State: The Kaiserreich in Regional Perspective,” in Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 221–56; Simone Lässig, Karl heinrich pohl and James Retallack (eds), Modernisierung und Region. Studien zu Wahlen, Wahlrecht und Politischer Kultur im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Bielefeld, 1995); Andreas Gawatz, Wahlkämpfe in Württemberg. - und Reichstagswahlen beim Übergang zum politischen Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf, The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

of Germany’s “democratization” around 1900, highlighting the interrelation between democratic and authoritarian practices and ideas; between change and stasis.6 Perceiving elections as the link between society and governance, this chapter outlines the main tensions, compromises and dynamics in the Kaiserreich’s political culture. It starts with a brief look at the constitutional framework of the elections, the juxtaposition of democratic and elitist suffrages, and arguments in favor of both further democratization and new restrictions. This debate came in response to the dramatic political mobilization of German society, most visible in the continuous increase in voter turnout at Reichstag elections and in the rise of modern mass parties, especially the Social Democrats. The second and more substantial section analyzes the reasons for, and the effects of, this political mobilization. This process was inextricably linked to the socio-cultural pillarization of Germany: from the early 1870s, the German electorate can be divided into four separate socio-political milieus, which governed simultaneously the daily life, the social identities, and the political attitudes of most Germans, and constrained negotiations between the rival parties in parliament. However, as strong as the boundaries between the social milieus were, they were nevertheless crossed on occasion by voters, parties, and governments. The third section therefore zeroes in on cracks and fissures in Germany’s allegedly “frozen” political landscape.

Political Mobilization and Suffrage Reform

In the beginning was Bismarck; or so many historians have argued when trying to understand why Germany’s electoral culture—the set of formal and informal rules, patterns, and experiences that enable and restrain choices, goals, and actions ofvoters, canvassers, and politicians—changed from the politics of notables to mass politics. And it did change. Nationwide party machines, relying on centralized mass propaganda and anonymous bureaucracies, more and more superseded an old-fashioned style of electoral decision-making dependent on the reputations and agreements of a few local notables, the Honoratioren. Looking for popular support for the and trying to break the left-liberal dominance in the Prussian parliament, Bismarck laid the constitutional ground for this change by implementing an extremely progressive suffrage, first to the North German Confederation in 1867, and then to the German Reichstag in 1871. This suffrage granted direct, secret, and equal elections for all adult males. While the tactical part of this calculation may have worked—the liberals split in two and one faction, the National Liberals, gave him their support—the strategic part of Bismarck’s calculation turned out a disaster. Rooted in the paternalist culture of his rural upbringing, and relying on statistical evidence indicating a middle-class bias in favor of the liberals but predominantly conservative attitudes amongst the lower classes, Bismarck believed this suffrage would provide him with loyal majorities in parliament. He was wrong.To be sure, some rural areas, especially those dominated by aristocratic estate owners, the Rittergutsbesitzer, voted conservative, even under secret and equal suffrage. However, it soon

2001); Thomas Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preußen 1867–1914. Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf, 1994). 6 The debate is excellently reviewed in Matthew Jefferies,Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Malden, MA, 2008), pp. 90–125; see also Thomas Kühne, “Demokratisierung und Parlamentarisierung: Neue Forschungen zur politischen Entwicklungsfähigkeit Deutschlands vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 31 (2005), pp. 293–316; and, as a synthesizing essay, Thomas Kühne, “Political Culture and Democratization,” in James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871–1918: The Short Oxford History of Germany (Oxford, 2008), pp. 174–95.

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became obvious that equal suffrage posed the most serious threat to exactly those parties which supported Bismarck most loyally: the National Liberals and the moderate “free conservative” or Imperial Party (Reichspartei). A prominent liberal, Leopold von Hoverbeck, had observed as early as 1865 why his party might view universal suffrage with dismay: “We, who are working for the people’s freedom, are not provided with a solid social basis.”7 Hoverbeck was right. Universal and equal male suffrage initiated and fuelled the mobilization of voters all over the country, and at the same time encouraged more and more parties to compete against each other. In rough terms, turnout rose from 50 percent in 1871 to about 60 percent in the following decade, then to about 70 percent and more from the mid-1880s to the mid-1900s, and finally to 85 percent in the last two general elections before the war, 1907 and 1912. At the same time, the German party spectrum broadened out. Although five major political ideologies had emerged earlier in the nineteenth century and were even apparent in the factions of the Frankfurt National Assembly of 1848, they had not gained any stable institutional ground before 1871. Especially at a local level, political rivalries had remained confined to the clash of liberalism and conservatism, and so it was still in most of the 382 Reichstag constituencies in 1871: in 221 of these districts, only two candidates campaigned; in 110, three candidates; amongst the rest there were many with only one candidate. On average, two candidates competed for every Reichstag seat in 1871, but by 1881 it was already three, and in 1893, about four. In 1903, only 19 districts saw two- way contests, while in 169 constituencies (out of 397, since 1874) four candidates competed for the absolute majority of the popular vote. Moreover, while in 1871 only one in eight districts needed to schedule a second run-off ballot to establish an absolute majority, the increasing competition required almost half of them to do so in 1893. The liberals profited most from the run-off system: between 1871 and 1912, the National Liberals participated in 677 run-off elections and won 357; left-liberal parties won 430 of the 541 run-offs they contested. The conservative parties fared a little worse, but it was the Social Democrats who were most significantly disadvantaged by the run-off system, securing victories in only 186 out of their 679 second ballots. At the same time, the one-man-one-vote principle revealed the political mood of Germans in a most dramatic way. The socialists’ share of the popular vote rose from 3.2 percent in 1871 to 6.8 in 1874 and 9.1 in 1877, and stagnated between these latter percentages in the 1880s. In 1890, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) landed a spectacular success, when almost 20 percent of German voters demonstrated their support for the Umsturzpartei, or “party of subversion,” as their enemies called them. After 1900, almost one-third of the German electorate supported the Social Democrats. Taken together, this data reflects the liberals’ continual dependence on the politics of notables throughout the four decades before 1914 (during the First World War, general elections were put on hold in order to not undermine the idea of a Burgfrieden, or domestic peace) and their failure to adjust to the necessities of what Hans Rosenberg called the “political mass market.”8 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that liberals as well as conservatives pondered how to get rid of a suffrage that “promoted in the masses a fantastic overestimation of their own power and worth,” as Heinrich von Treitschke, history professor in Berlin and right-

7 In a letter to a friend, 30 July 1865, quoted in Ludolf Parisius, Leopold von Hoverbeck, 2 vols (Berlin, 1900), vol. II/2, p. 55. 8 Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in (Berlin, 1967). Data on the Reichstag elections are drawn from Gerhard A. Ritter and Merrit Niehuss, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch. Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918 (Munich, 1980), pp. 23–131. Still indispensable is Gerhard A. Ritter, Die deutschen Parteien 1830–1914 (Göttingen, 1985).

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wing liberal, noted in 1874, after the Reichstag elections had resulted in as yet modest gains for the Social Democrats. Treitschke expressed a widely shared middle-class resentment: “Universal suffrage amounts to organized licentiousness; to the recognized arrogance of superior foolishness; to the superciliousness of the soldier towards the officer, or the journeyman towards the master, and of the worker towards the entrepreneur.”9 While Treitschke left it at arrogant invective, numerous National Liberals and conservatives, not least in the Prussian and Reich administrations, thought feverishly about how to revise or even abolish universal suffrage. In the course of the 1890s, various scenarios came up, including the idea that the Kaiser and the German princes would unleash a Staatsstreich, or coup d’état, dissolve the Reichstag and abolish universal suffrage. None of these fantasies ever materialized. But they guaranteed a climate of fear and uncertainty that kept all progressive ambitions and requests for further constitutional reforms under rigid control. It was only in 1898 that such ideas were finally quashed. In the midst of that year’s Reichstag election campaign, some Social Democrats and left- leaning Centre Party politicians spread the rumor that the government planned to abolish the Reichstag suffrage. Remarkably, this maneuver forced the reactionary groups onto the defensive. Even conservatives, at least those holding office, recognized the enormous popularity of universal suffrage. Any attempt to crush it ran the risk of unleashing some sort of civil war. The government publicly renounced any ideas of revising the Reichstag franchise and never again seriously reactivated them, even in internal debates.10 Historians in the 1970s put much weight on the Staatsstreich fantasies of the 1880s and 1890s and assumed that they ruled the political climate after 1900, thus indicating the overall reactionary character of the Kaiserreich. But this view is wrong. In fact, reactionary constitutional policies were marginalized after 1898. Yet it would be equally wrong to overemphasize democratic or progressive tendencies before 1914. This is what some historians since the 1980s have done by focusing exclusively on the national level of politics, that is, the Reichstag and its elections. In truth, the “practiced” democracy based on universal suffrage remained countered, challenged, and eventually controlled by un-, or less than, democratic sub-national, regional, and local suffrages, with their respective electoral cultures. Imperial Germany’s federal structure allocated those areas of politics that shaped the material and cultural basis of people’s daily lives to the states. In contrast to the federal organization of the United States or present-day Germany, the Kaiserreich’s federalism was dominated by one state, Prussia, which accounted for about three-fifths of German territory, economy capacity, voters, and Reichstag seats. The Prussian administration intervened in Reich politics through various formal and informal channels, and Prussia’s legislature (the Landtag) remained a bastion of conservatism. The upper chamber, the Herrenhaus, relied on hereditary, mostly aristocratic, members, and on nominees of the Prussian king. The lower chamber, the Abgeordnetenhaus, was based on the infamous indirect and public three-class franchise. It meant that workers submitted their votes publicly under the supervision of their employers, and that on average the richest 20 percent of all voters (more precisely those who paid two-thirds of the income tax in their district) controlled about two-thirds of the seats. The result was a stable conservative majority until 1918.

9 Heinrich von Treitschke, “Der Sozialismus und seine Gönner” (1874), in idem, Zehn Jahre Deutscher Kämpfe, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1879), pp. 500–1; a longer excerpt is translated in http:// germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=590&language=english (accessed 27 February 2013). 10 Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 455–8.

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While the two conservative parties collected less than 16 percent of the popular Reichstag vote in 1912, and about 15 percent of the seats assigned to Prussian constituencies, their 17 percent share of the popular vote in the Prussian state elections of 1913 was translated into 46 percent of the seats. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, received 28 percent of the popular vote but only ten out of 443 seats, that is, 2.3 percent. Furthermore, the Prussian suffrage ensured that Landtag elections had little of the drama of Reichstag elections: less than one-third of eligible Prussians made use of their vote in the 1913 state elections, while 85 percent had done so in the Reichstag election the year before. And while more and more candidates competed for a Reichstag seat—almost four per seat on average in 1912—the opposite was the case in Prussian state elections. These had also started out with an average of two candidates per constituency in the 1870s, but this pattern showed little change throughout the 1890s, and by 1913 only 1.7 candidates were competing for each seat in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus. Two out of every five seats were not contested at all.11 It comes as no surprise that the conservatives in Prussia rigorously opposed all efforts to democratize the three-class suffrage. They were supported by the National Liberals, who profited from it too. But this intransigence faced increasing opposition, both in and outside Prussia. The Social Democrats succeeded in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the three-class franchise after the turn of the century, and turned its authoritarian principle upside down by boycotting, or threatening to boycott, shop owners and merchants who controlled the first and second electoral classes. While this tactic exposed the anachronism of the three-class suffrage, it could not shake the conservatives’ control over Prussian politics. It was on the periphery of Germany where the movement toward democratizing old- fashioned, elitist, and authoritarian suffrages recorded its most significant results. In 1896, conservative groups and the National Liberals in the had successfully carried out the kind of constitutional roll-back that was not possible in national politics. Intimidated by Social Democrat victories in state elections, the Saxon Landtag replaced its hitherto relatively liberal suffrage with a three-class system similar to Prussia. But this act of disenfranchisement, which de facto barred the Social Democrats from the Landtag, backfired. In the Reichstag elections of 1903, the Social Democrats, spurred by popular outrage about the reactionary coup, won 22 of the 23 seats in Saxony, twice as many as before.12 From 1900 onwards, political discourse in Germany no longer centered on rolling back universal suffrage, but on further democratizing constitutions and political cultures. Suffrage reform was now on the agenda of most German states. Their governments knew they could no longer ignore Germans’ embrace of democratic ideas and practices. And this change did not only affect men: the movement for women’s suffrage—while never copying the spectacular performance of its British counterpart—gained substantial momentum in 1900s Germany as well.13

11 Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, p. 244; Ritter and Niehuss, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, pp. 83 and 146. 12 James Retallack, “Anti-Socialism and Electoral Politics in Regional Perspective: The Kingdom of Saxony,” in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds), Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 49–91; James Retallack, “‘What Is to Be Done?’ The Red Specter, Franchise Questions, and the Crisis of Conservative Hegemony in Saxony, 1896–1909,” Central European History, 23 (1990), pp. 271–312. 13 For more details and the literature, see Thomas Kühne, “Die Jahrhundertwende, die ‘lange’ Bismarckzeit und die Demokratisierung der politischen Kultur,” in Lothar Gall (ed.), Otto von Bismarck und Wilhelm II. Repräsentanten eines Epochenwechsels? (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 92–101.

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The Social Pillarization of Politics and the Many Spirits of Democracy

Why, then, did the Kaiserreich not switch to a more democratic political system before the Great War broke out; one that took up the British model of a government responsible to parliament rather than the monarch? Part of the answer has already been given: the impact of Prussian conservatism on national politics, and the block on reform instigated by Prussian conservatives at various levels, can hardly be exaggerated. An exploration of the social basis of electoral politics in Imperial Germany reveals the other half of the answer. The top-down, Bismarck-centric view of German politics requires a bottom-up complement, along the lines first suggested by the sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius in 1966.14 Looking at the German national elections from the foundation of the Empire in 1871 to the dissolution of the Weimar Republic around 1930, Lepsius detected a socio-cultural “pillarization” of party politics in Germany, which could help to explain the parties’ inability to compromise—a factor often cited in the failure of the Weimar Republic. According to Lepsius, German society was divided into four “socio-moral milieus,” each with their own values, interests, networks, and organizations. Like subcultures, they ruled the daily life of their members, and served as their political agencies. Each milieu had its own party or group of parties. The party leaders, especially members of parliament, considered themselves primarily as agents of their respective milieus, pursued only sectional interests, and proved unwilling or unable to cut deals with rival parties; in other words, to engage in a culture of compromise which any parliamentary system needs to function. Lepsius may have overstressed the intensity of pillarization (and underestimated forays into that culture of compromise), yet his model remains tremendously helpful in explaining the asynchronous and inconsistent nature of democratization in Germany. For, beneath the dramatic national picture of political mobilization and pluralization, strong regional and socio-cultural disparities remained. Sensitized by the long-term conflict between secularism and religiosity—and provoked by the Kulturkampf—which the Bismarck administration and liberal-conservative majorities in parliament waged against the from the late 1860s, Catholics all over Germany established a powerful subculture in order to defend their values, rituals, and ways of life. And the Catholics mattered. They made up roughly one-third of the entire population, including substantial Polish minorities in the eastern provinces of Prussia. Their subculture was welded together by priests as the born local leaders, and was represented by politicians, journalists, and lawyers. They developed a rich associational life and networking system, and used party politics to protect their religious interests. The strength of the milieu secured for the Centre Party, together with its Polish allies, an extremely stable presence in local, regional, and national elections. About 20 percent of Reichstag voters (a little more in the Bismarck era, a little less after 1900) supported Centre candidates and granted the party about a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, with more long-term strongholds than any other party. Moreover, unlike the Social Democrats, the Centre thrived under the three-class suffrage as well: both rich and poor Catholics were eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the Catholic cause.15

14 M. Rainer Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: zum Problen der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Wilhelm Abel et al. (eds), Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 371–93. 15 On the genesis and workings of the Catholic milieu, see Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Princeton, 1984); Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1981); idem, “Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany,” American Historical Review, 98 (1993), pp. 1448–74; Margaret Lavinia Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, “The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf,”

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In the Catholic milieu, however, voting was not only a way of securing influence in the legislature. For Catholics, voting was a form of popular protest at being labeled “enemies of the Empire” and being accused of following the papal, “ultramontane” authority in Rome, rather than the Kaiser in Berlin. Catholics, whether German- or Polish-speaking, went to the polls to demonstrate the strength and cohesion of their milieu. A Catholic priest told his Polish parish in a village near Gdansk in 1885 that in Berlin they (he meant the Prussian government) “count each voter and would be happy to announce that the Polish movement is in the process of dissolution,” if turnout decreased.16 During the hot phase of the Kulturkampf between 1874 and 1884, about 80 percent of the eligible Catholics (that is, not only those who voted) cast their ballots for the Centre. Later this share dropped slowly to 64 percent in 1907, and 55 percent in 1912, reflecting the cooling down of the Kulturkampf. Even so, results remained impressive, especially in Polish areas: Poles were not only stigmatized as a religious minority, but also as an ethnic minority, especially since the Prussian government launched its policy of Germanization.17 In other words, the more they felt discriminated against, and the more their cultural, religious or ethnic identity was threatened, the more likely Catholics were to vote. This pattern of “affirmative voting,” as the Canadian historian Stanley Suval termed it, powered political mobilization in Imperial Germany.18 Articulating protest and affirming group solidarities by going to the polls, it outpaced the more familiar pattern of “pragmatic voting.” Under an electoral system that ties parliamentary seats to absolute majorities, the pragmatic voter abstains from voting if his favorite candidate or party has little chance of winning, as is the case in many US states or British parliamentary constituencies today. Voting patterns in Imperial Germany depended on the experience of political discrimination: the social bases of the liberal and conservative parties, consisting of loyal “friends” of the German Empire (Reichsfreunde), continued to follow the pragmatic pattern.19 In the 1870s, Catholics spearheaded the subcultural pillarization of German politics and used affirmative voting as a strategy of collective identity-building. From the 1880s, the SPD followed and perfected the same method. Bismarck’s attempt to crush the rising labor movement by prohibiting the party’s organizations under the 1878 “Law against the Publicly Dangerous Endeavors of Social Democracy”20 provoked a similar reaction in the growing Protestant or agnostic blue-collar working class as the Kulturkampf had done among Catholics. They expressed their solidarity and their resistance to the authoritarian state by “affirmatively” voting for SPD candidates, while the party created a subcultural network that operated in part covertly and in part openly, exploiting loopholes in the legislation, including the right of socialist candidates to participate in elections. In the spring of 1890, still oppressed by the Anti-Socialist Law, the SPD celebrated its most successful election yet, doubling its number of voters and trebling its total of Reichstag seats. This victory was only the first in a long series: in 1890 one out of every five Germans voted for the party; by the end

Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), pp. 647–86; Anderson, Practicing Democracy, pp. 69–151; Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 331–75; Wilfried Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984); David Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party Before 1914 (New Haven, 1980). 16 Quoted in Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, p. 171. 17 See the calculations in Johannes Schauff, Die deutschen Katholiken und die Zentrumspartei. Eine politisch-statistische Untersuchung der Reichtagswahlen seit 1871 (Cologne, 1928). 18 Stanley Suval, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, 1985). 19 Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 165–206 (where I use the term “economic” instead of “pragmatic”). 20 For an accurate translation, see http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document. cfm?document_id=1843&language=english (accessed 1 March 2013).

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of the 1890s it was one in four; and in the 1900s one in three. This impressive improvement was not least because of a new electoral tactic which saw the Social Democrats nominate candidates in virtually all Reichstag constituencies, even in those which the party had no chance of winning. These token candidates (Zählkandidaten) allowed any voter in Germany to demonstrate his sympathy with the socialists simply by casting an anonymous ballot, and at the same time it allowed the party to monitor its regionally diverse support, as well as to boast of its increasing strength.21 By the 1890s almost half of the German electorate was more or less tied into a milieu that defined itself through opposition to state discrimination.22 The remaining two social milieus and their parties tried to catch up, but they did so in rather different ways and with much less success. The third milieu to follow the paradigm of mobilization and “practical” democratization was not the urban middle classes, but Protestant rural society. Like its Catholic equivalent, it made for a heterogeneous mix. In the south of the Empire, in Baden, Wurttemberg, and Bavaria, many farmers owned only small parcels of land, yet were as independent as the large estate owners of Lower Saxony in the north. Rural Germany east of the River Elbe was dominated by a special type of large estate owners, the Rittergutsbesitzer, who in the Kaiserreich still ruled in traditional paternalistic fashion over a huge number of impoverished and often illiterate farm workers, the Landarbeiter. For most of the nineteenth century the diversity of rural society had led to a variety of political outcomes: in the 1870s, some large estate owners in East Prussia had voted for the Progressives, before becoming staunchly conservative; independent farmers in Lower Saxony provided the National Liberals with some of the safest seats into the 1890s; and small farmers in Schleswig-Holstein continued to support left-liberal candidates into the twentieth century. In the 1890s, however, a fundamental change began: the political homogenization of Protestant rural society under the banner of a new type of populist radical conservatism, claiming to be the only legitimate representation of landed interests. New statistical evidence spurred a lively public debate about Germany’s transition from an agrarian to an industrialized society and the seemingly unstoppable economic marginalization of rural society. As the urban-industrial sector challenged the previously unquestioned influence of large landowners, especially the Junker, on German politics, the agrarians fought back. The fuse was lit by the liberal trade policies of the Caprivi government (1890–94), which sought to remove some of the tariff protection enjoyed by German agriculture against low-cost imports. While Bismarck’s tariff policy had catered to landed interests, the new government sought to strengthen the growing export industry, which stood to gain from lower tariffs and cheaper food costs for the urban working class. In 1893 the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte, BdL) was founded as a popular protest movement against anything that seemed to threaten the economic, social, and political welfare of rural society. Crucially, this association made a conscious break from the politics of notables which had until then prevailed in the countryside. “I am suggesting no more and no less,” announced a hitherto unknown multi-estate tenant and broker, Ruprecht-Ransern, in December 1892, “than that we go with the Social Democrats and earnestly form a front against the government.” Instead of “being and voting liberal, ultramontane, or conservative,” he suggested creating a “huge agrarian party.” And he demanded rigorous lobbying and public protest: “We must

21 Gerhard A. Ritter, “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive,” Historische Zeitschrift, 249 (1989), pp. 295–362; Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich: 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn, 1992). 22 The Centre Party, the SPD and the Poles, together with some minor parties, received a combined 44 percent of the Reichstag vote in 1890, 48 percent in 1893, and 55 percent in 1898; see data in Ritter and Niehuss, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch, pp. 40–41.

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scream until we are heard in the halls of parliaments and ministries. We must scream until we are heard on the steps of the Throne. […] But at the same time, we need to take action. […] We need to do politics, politics in our interest, […] unvarnished and ruthless […], if we want to save the existence of farmers today.”23 While the “huge agrarian party” never came into being, the Agrarian League proved enormously successful in lobbying and intervening in elections: first by financing and administering campaigns for candidates who committed themselves publicly to the League’s program; then by mobilizing the countryside through modern mass agitation and rallies; and finally by uniting major parts of Protestant rural society under its banner, not least by offering aid and advice to small farmers. In other words, the BdL helped to run the farmers’ lives, their businesses, and their politics. A year after being established, the League already boasted 200,000 members, and by 1913 it had 330,000, almost all of them belonging to the rural middle or lower classes: only 1 percent owned large estates. It was the latter, however, who dominated the League’s leadership and were largely responsible for its radical, populist, anti-governmental and antisemitic agenda. It was for this reason that historians such as Hans Rosenberg and Hans-Jürgen Puhle, writing in the 1960s or earlier, suggested that the BdL offered only a “pseudo-democratization” of rural political culture, manipulating small farmers and rural artisans “from above.”24 For good reasons, later historians such as Geoff Eley have questioned this “manipulation” theory and pointed instead to the grassroots politics that energized the success of the BdL and other pressure groups.25 Traditionally, local officials—especially the Landräte (county sheriffs) in Prussia—controlled the style, content and conduct of elections in rural areas. Often they ended up getting elected themselves. This heavy-handed authoritarianism guaranteed low turnouts, minimal campaigning, and conservative (or at least pro- government) representatives in parliament. To be sure, liberal groups did occasionally challenge the authorities, but even the Reichstag suffrage did not always help the liberals, as for a long time the secret ballot existed only on paper. Large landowners, major employers and the authorities themselves commanded a wide range of techniques to undermine the confidentiality of the ballot box, and the voters knew it. Things began tochange around the turn of the century, as historians such as Brett Fairbairn and most powerfully Margaret Lavinia Anderson have shown. It became increasingly clear that electoral fraud, intimidation and gerrymandering would be exposed, scandalized, and ruled illegal; just like the Kulturkampf and the Anti-Socialist Laws, it would prove counter-productive.26 At the same time, the BdL started a campaign to challenge the nomination and election of Landräte as local deputies. The League demanded that rural districts should be represented by men rooted in and tied to the local environment, through birth, education, business, and residency; the less time they had spent outside the constituency, the better. While rural society had previously felt comfortable being represented by political professionals, such as Landräte, these were now suspected of focusing too much on national or state affairs,

23 Landwirtschaftliche Tierzucht, 21 December 1892, front page. 24 Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich (1893–1914) (Hanover, 1966). 25 Geoff Eley, “Anti-Semitism, Agrarian Mobilization, and the Conservative Party: Radicalism and Containment in the Founding of the Agrarian League, 1890–1893,” in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Providence, 1993), pp. 187–228. See also James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto, 2006). 26 Brett Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The German Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903 (Toronto, 1997); Anderson, Practicing Democracy, pp. 35–66, 241–305; Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 77–95.

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and were consequently replaced by political amateurs.27 After the turn of the century, approximately 90 percent of conservative members of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus could provide local credentials, compared to 60 percent of Centre members and 50 percent of Polish representatives. This indicates what democratization meant in the context of Wilhelmine rural society: the sealing-off of a rural conservative social milieu from the bottom up.28 Around 1900, therefore, the democratization of Germany—driven, as we have seen, by three separate socio-political milieus—threatened to marginalize precisely that political movement which had spearheaded political modernization in the nineteenth century: the liberals. The left-liberal Progressives had settled down to about 10 percent of the popular vote and of the Reichstag seats, which was more or less where they had been in the 1870s. The National Liberals, however, had suffered heavily from the loss of former rural strongholds in Lower Saxony and other western regions of Germany. Since 1890, they had collected only 13–16 percent of the popular Reichstag vote and 11–13 percent of the seats. Increasingly, both liberal factions were driven from the land and were becoming solely dependent on urban middle-class voters. They had little option but to attempt “to adapt their social models to a dynamic industrial society,” as Dieter Langewiesche has put it.29 Neither of the liberal factions, however, made serious efforts to catch up with the requirements of a democratic electoral culture as the Catholics, the Social Democrats, and eventually even the conservatives had done. They jumped on the train of democratization not so much by modernizing their party machines or campaigning strategies, but by allying themselves with associations such as the German Navy League, which boasted more than one million members, or the highly respected Society for Social Reform, which sought to redress the failed integration of the socialist working class into the German nation.30

Electoral Bargaining and the Permeability of the Milieus

Lepsius’ milieu model does not pay much attention to the manifold changes that affected all parts of Imperial Germany’s electoral culture. In the early 1990s, therefore, the political scientist Karl Rohe argued that “closed” milieus such as the Catholics and socialists differed fundamentally from the more “open” milieus of liberals and conservatives. While Lepsius had considered the parties as mere executive organs of the respective milieus, Rohe stressed that voters had choices. He suggested that voter–party relations should be viewed as alliances, which could be sustained, terminated or neglected by either side. In his view,

27 Thomas Kühne, “Professionalization or ‘Amateurization’, Homogenization or Segmentation? The Parliamentary Elite in Germany 1815–1918,” in Les familles politiques en Europe occidentale au XIXe siècle (Rome, 1997), pp. 391–408; idem, “From Electoral Campaigning to the Politics of Togetherness: Localism and Democracy in Imperial Germany,” in David Blackbourn and James Retallack (eds), Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 (Toronto, 2007), pp. 101–23. 28 Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 305–30. 29 Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany (Princeton, 2000), p. 234. 30 Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, 1980); Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984); Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and : Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, 1986), esp. pp. 91–106; Axel Grießmer, Massenverbände und Massenparteien im wilhelminischen Reich. Zum Wandel der Wahlkultur 1903–1912 (Düsseldorf, 2000); Frank Bösch, Das konservative Milieu. Vereinskultur und lokale Versammlungspolitik in ost- und westdeutschen Regionen (1900–1960) (Göttingen, 2002).

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elections in Imperial Germany (and beyond) were not structured by four social milieus but three political camps: the Catholic, the socialist, and the “national” camp, with the latter including both conservatives and liberals in their various factions, rural as well as urban. The ties that kept this latter camp together, for Rohe, were their self-image as the true defenders of the German nation-state and monarchy, and their demonizing of the allegedly subversive ambitions of Catholics and socialists. It can be argued, however, that as an expert on the political culture in the Rhine-Ruhr area, Rohe simply generalized the political alignments and conflicts of his particular region and applied them to the Empire as a whole. While it is true that Protestant liberals and conservatives in this urban, industrial, and denominationally deeply divided region did indeed often cooperate, most of the eastern and southern territories of the Empire do not fit Rohe’s three-camp model. Here, conflict between urban liberals and rural conservatives tended to dominate elections. Indeed, from the late 1890s onwards, this became the major national divide.31 Yet Rohe was certainly right to draw attention to the fluidity of the boundaries between the milieus. The historian Jonathan Sperber has done so even more decisively, basing his analysis on a sophisticated statistical analysis. Most strikingly, Sperber claimed that “social class did not play a major role in the SPD vote” after 1900. Rather, the SPD attracted middle-class voters as well and thus was about to change from a workers’ or milieu party to a people’s party, or Volkspartei. Usually, this change is not dated until the 1950s, when the Godesberg platform of the SPD abandoned any lingering attachment to . Sperber may have exaggerated his results, but he is certainly right to point to fissures in the allegedly “frozen” milieus in the years before 1914.32 These fissures become even clearer if one studies party alignments locally. The fact that a candidate in Reichstag and many state elections needed an absolute majority of the constituency’s popular vote or its electors in order to win a seat forced local party committees to seek compromises with competing parties. Such agreements sometimes materialized in time for the first ballot (or even before the campaign started); by the run-offs, they were almost unavoidable. They took various forms: in the selection of a moderate candidate who could appeal across party lines, for instance. In Prussian state elections, where there were multi-seat constituencies in which two or three deputies were elected simultaneously, deals could always be done: in 1876, electoral alliances can be found in two out of every five districts; in 1888 in every other constituency; and in 1908 in almost three out of five. This increase reflects the pluralization of the local party systems and is perhaps not surprising. What is remarkable, however, is how the party alliances themselves changed over time. In the 1870s, local constituencies had not yet fully adapted to the split between Progressives and National Liberals in parliament. The climate after the foundation of the Reich and the Kulturkampf therefore led to alliances between the two liberal factions in many districts. In the 1880s and 1890s, alliances between the National Liberals and either or both conservative parties prevailed, reflecting the deep conflict between this camp—which shared a dedication to Bismarck, demanded high tax tariffs to protect domestic agriculture and heavy industry from foreign competition, demonized the socialist working class, and resisted against any further constitutional reform—and the oppositional, allegedly anti- national Progressive, Centre, Polish, and Social Democratic parties on the other. In the late 1890s, this alignment changed again: the National Liberals abandoned their alliances with

31 Karl Rohe, Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland. Kulturelle Grundlagen deutscher Parteien und Parteisysteme im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1992); idem, Vom Revier zum Ruhrgebiete: Wahlen, Parteien, politische Kulture (Essen, 1986). 32 Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Wilhelmine Germany (Cambridge, 1997), p. 72.

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the conservatives and stood shoulder to shoulder again with their Progressive counterparts, brought together by a mutual interest in constitutional reform, but even more by a re- orientation towards the needs of urban society and a common front against landed interests. Electoral alliances between the two liberal parties and the SPD remained rare, but were no longer as rigidly despised as before. On the opposite side, conservatives allied more than ever with the Centre, forming a “Blue-Black Bloc,” sharing a traditional, anti-secular, anti- liberal, anti-socialist and anti-urban agenda.33 These changes indicate general trends; many local peculiarities and exceptions persisted. In Imperial Germany’s parliaments, five clearly distinguished party groupings (conservatives, National Liberals, Progressives, Centre, SPD) competed, deeply rooted in four separate social milieus or pillars; however, in the constituencies, these parties cooperated, compromised, even merged in manifold ways, and worked on transgressing the boundaries of these milieus. Elections as well as parties in Imperial Germany mark a field of research that has been intensely and extensively studied since the 1950s, as scholars have tried to detect long-term continuities that led to the disaster of 1933 and beyond. This interest has centered for a long time on changes in the decades before and after 1900, but despite comparative studies with other countries, there remains no simple explanation for the intensity, direction, and quality of the “fundamental democratisation” of Germany around 1900. Elections in Imperial Germany reflected the ambivalences, ambiguities, and contradictions that shaped Wilhelmine society at large. On the eve of the Great War, Germans were still looking at many different political paths into the future.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1981). —. “Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany,” American Historical Review, 98 (1993), pp. 1448–74. —. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). Blackbourn, David. Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party Before 1914 (New Haven, 1980). Chickering, Roger. We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984). Eley, Geoff.Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, 1980). —. “Anti-Semitism, Agrarian Mobilization, and the Conservative Party: Radicalism and Containment in the Founding of the Agrarian League, 1890–1893,” in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Providence, 1993), pp. 187–228. Fairbairn, Brett. Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The German Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903 (Toronto, 1997). Gall, Lothar and Langewiesche, Dieter (eds). Liberalismus und Region. Zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1995).

33 Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht, pp. 207–304. See Gawatz, Wahlkämpfe in Württemberg, and Carl- Wilhelm Reibel, Handbuch der Reichstagswahlen 1890–1918. Bündnisse, Ergebnisse, Kandidaten, 2 vols (Düsseldorf, 2007), for the Reichstag elections.

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Gawatz, Andreas.Wahlkämpfe in Württemberg. Landtags- und Reichstagswahlen beimÜbergang zum politischen Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf, 2001). Grießmer, Axel. Massenverbände und Massenparteien im wilhelminischen Reich. Zum Wandel der Wahlkultur 1903–1912 (Düsseldorf, 2000). Jones, Larry Eugene and Retallack, James (eds). Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1992). Koshar, Rudy. Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, 1986). Kühne, Thomas. “Wahlrecht – Wahlverhalten – Wahlkultur. Tradition und Innovation in der historischen Wahlforschung,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 33 (1993), pp. 481–547. —. Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preußen 1867–1914. Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf, 1994). —. “Zur Genese der deutschen Proporzkultur im wilhelminischen Preußen,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 36 (1995), pp. 220–42. —. “Parlamentarismusgeschichte in Deutschland. Probleme, Erträge und Perspektiven einer Gesamtdarstellung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 24 (1998), pp. 320–35. —. “Die Jahrhundertwende, die ‘lange’ Bismarckzeit und die Demokratisierung der politischen Kultur,” in Lothar Gall (ed.), Otto von Bismarck und WilhelmII . Repräsentanten eines Epochenwechsels? (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 92–101. —. “Demokratisierung und Parlamentarisierung: Neue Forschungen zur politischen Entwicklungsfähigkeit Deutschlands vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 31 (2005), pp. 293–316. —. “Political Culture and Democratization,” in James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871–1918: The Short Oxford History of Germany (Oxford, 2008), pp. 174–95. Langewiesche, Dieter. Liberalism in Germany (Princeton, 2000). Lässig, Simone, Pohl, Karl Heinrich and Retallack, James (eds). Modernisierung und Region. Studien zu Wahlen, Wahlrecht und Politischer Kultur im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Bielefeld, 1995). Lepsius, M. Rainer. “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: zum Problen der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Wilhelm Abel et al. (eds), Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 371–93. Loth, Wilfried. Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984). Puhle, Hans-Jürgen. Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich (1893–1914) (Hanover, 1966). Reibel, Carl-Wilhelm. Handbuch der Reichstagswahlen 1890–1918. Bündnisse, Ergebnisse, Kandidaten, 2 vols (Düsseldorf, 2007). Retallack, James. Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (London, 1988). —. “‘What Is to Be Done?’ The Red Specter, Franchise Questions, and the Crisis of Conservative Hegemony in Saxony, 1896–1909,” Central European History, 23 (1990), pp. 271–312. —. “Liberals, Conservatives, and the Modernizing State: The Kaiserreich in Regional Perspective,” in Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 221–56. —. The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto, 2006). Ritter, Gerhard A. Die deutschen Parteien 1830–1914 (Göttingen, 1985). —. “Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive,” Historische Zeitschrift, 249 (1989), pp. 295–362.

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— (ed.) Wahlen und Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland von den Anfängen im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Bundesrepublik (Düsseldorf, 1997). Sperber, Jonathan. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Princeton, 1984). —. The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Wilhelmine Germany (Cambridge, 1997). Suval, Stanley. Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, 1985).

90 5 liberalism

eric Kurlander

Liberalism defined Imperial Germany’s challenges and aspirations, its successes and failures, its transformations and legacies, better than any contemporary political movement. Because of its protean nature and universal claims, German liberalism also experienced multiple national, regional, and ideological permutations in the nearly five decades between the foundation of the German Empire and the revolution of November 1918. In 1871 there were two major liberal factions. The National Liberals (Nationalliberalen or NLP), which garnered the most seats in the first imperial Reichstag, had a diverse membership ranging from the center-right-leaning chairman, Rudolf von Bennigsen, and Prussian finance minister, Johannes von Miquel, to center-left-inclined free market liberals like Eduard Lasker, Ludwig Bamberger, and Theodor Barth. The smaller though hardly insignificant left-liberal Progressive Party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei or DFP), under the leadership of Eugen Richter, was complemented by the South German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei or DVp), led by the publisher of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Leopold Sonnemann. While the National Liberals had their strongholds in the German south, west, and center, the Prussian north and east was fertile ground for left liberalism, as were the major metropolitan areas of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Breslau. Over the course of the 1870s, divisions emerged between center-left National Liberals like Bamberger and Barth, who favored a break from Bismarck in tariff and military policy, and the NLP majority which wanted to maintain an increasingly close alliance with the Conservatives. In 1884 these center-left “Secessionists” merged with Richter’s DFP to create the German “Freethinking” or Radical Party (Deutsche Freisinnige Partei). Long-simmering differences over military and social spending, however, soon divided the Radicals as they had the National Liberals. Many former Richterites formed the free- trading Radical People’s Party (Freisinnige Volkspartei or FrVp) in 1893 and most erstwhile Secessionists joined the more imperialist, pro-government Radical Union (Freisinnige Vereinigung or FrVg). In 1903 the FrVg attracted the support of the liberal pastor ’s National Social Association (Nationalsoziale Verein), which wanted to create a united liberal front along national, social, and democratic lines. Thanks in large part to Naumann’s efforts, the two Radical factions again coalesced in 1910, this time with the South German DVp, to form the united Progressive People’s Party (Fortschrittliche Volkspartei or FVP). Hence by the end of the imperial period, German liberalism was once again organized into two wings, a center-right National Liberal Party and a center-left Progressive Party, a division that would carry forward into the Weimar Republic. These two wings of German liberalism dominated the Reichstag, most provincial parliaments, and many local governments during the Empire’s first decade of existence. Together the three (or four) liberal parties regularly received more than 40 percent of the popular vote and often won a majority of seats, due both to their success in frequent run-off elections at the national level and the three-class voting system in Prussia and other German states, which favored wealthier voters who tended to vote liberal. The The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Progressives and National Liberals experienced a notable decline in both electoral support and representation between 1881 and 1903, when the combined liberal parties failed to garner 20 percent of the vote. But they enjoyed renewed success at the polls in the last two elections preceding the First World War, receiving more than a quarter of the popular vote, second only to the Social Democrats. In regard to social, cultural and intellectual life, the liberal parties boasted many of the nation’s leading reformers and critics, standing at the center of debates over trade, tariffs, and the military budget; welfare and work programs; national identity and civil rights; and church, minority, and education policy. Finally, the liberals were among the Reich’s most influential players in terms of directing foreign and colonial policy in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The history of German liberalism in the Kaiserreich is therefore closely tied to broader debates regarding the character and legacies of Imperial Germany: its relative social and political modernity, economic dynamism, and cultural and intellectual maturity. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, most scholarship on German liberalism tended to follow the so- called Sonderweg (“special path”) interpretation, which blamed liberalism’s decline after 1871 on the German bourgeoisie’s political immaturity, cultural pessimism, and proclivity for aping authoritarian modes of social behavior. Bourgeois liberalism’s repeated failure to spearhead German modernization and democratization ostensibly helped perpetuate, in turn, the imperialist, radical nationalist, and undemocratic tendencies that produced the First World War and Nazism. Since the 1980s, as other contributions in this volume suggest, the Sonderweg has come under fire from a new generation of scholars who neither view British or French liberalism as inherently “normal” nor German liberalism as “exceptional.” Rather than trace the failure of German democracy in 1933 to the long- term inadequacies of German liberalism since the mid-nineteenth century, historians have turned their attention to the dynamic period from the 1890s to the First World War, emphasizing both German liberalism’s inherent modernity as well as the positive, open- ended nature of the parties’ prospects on the eve of the First World War.1 In this chapter I will elaborate on these more recent trends by dividing the history of German liberalism during the Kaiserreich into three sections. The first section—“Populists or patricians? Liberal parties, electoral politics, and political culture”—reflects on the debates concerning liberal politics and party organization over the past three decades, centering around the tensions liberals faced as German politics evolved from a mostly notable-dominated, local and regional exercise in the 1870s to a truly national, mass political marketplace in the decade before the First World War. The second section takes up the role of “Reformers and critics: liberal responses to modernity,” examining their relationship to Germany’s rapid industrialization and modernization in the field of social and economic policy; gender and sexuality; confessional politics and minority rights; and culture and intellectual life. Finally, the third section—“Dreams of empire: liberal nationalism, colonialism, and the First World War”—looks at liberal attitudes toward nationalism and foreign policy, from early debates on colonial and naval policy to liberal imperialism and annexationism during the First World War. The chapter concludes by summarizing recent trends in the historiography, highlighting the renewed interest in continuity and particularity as well as the transnational and post-colonial approaches that have emerged in the past decade.

1 For an excellent recent overview of the contentious historiography on the German Empire, see Matthew Jefferies,Contesting the German Empire 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008).

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Populists or Patricians? Liberal Parties, Electoral Politics, and Political Culture

“To this point the research is essentially united,” wrote Wolfgang Mommsen in 1978, “regarding the relative backwardness [Rückständigkeit] of German liberalism in comparison to simultaneous developments in Western Europe.” “There can be no doubt of the fact,” Mommsen continued, “that the German liberal movement was well behind French and English liberalism in all phases of its development and in respect to its political claims as well as its social program.”2 Nowhere was liberalism more “backward” than in its elitist, “pre-industrial,” notable (Honoratioren) character, a political movement that never could and never wanted to adapt to a mass political marketplace defined by universal suffrage. Given the relative consensus Mommsen describes, it should come as no surprise that one of the major debates of the last 30 years has focused on the degree to which German liberals were either “populists or patricians,” to borrow from David Blackbourn’s seminal essay collection of the same name.3 Were the liberal parties composed primarily of local notables, dependent on extensive networks of regional patronage? Or did liberal party leaders and organizations gradually embrace mass politics and campaign techniques, attracting millions of new voters, even if they failed to do so at the same pace as the Social Democratic Party (SPD) or Catholic Zentrum? Drawing on the contemporary analysis of liberal intellectuals such as Max Weber, Eckart Kehr, and , the first generation of post-war historians emphasized the political inadequacies of the liberal parties in the imperial era. In his 1953 work, The Tragedy of German Liberalism, Friedrich Sell highlighted the liberal parties’ repeated capitulation to a neo-feudal, authoritarian Prusso-German state, with the Kaiserreich constituting a case study in lost political opportunities.4 In The German Idea of Freedom, Leonard Krieger likewise noticed the preponderance of the “‘feudal’ over the commercial type of social order” and “an estate of [liberal] intellectuals whose close identification with the bureaucracy emphasized the primacy of the state over the citizen in all matters of reform. The result of this social imbalance was a cultural relationship in which the German society was dominated by the aristocratic weight of stagnation while the German princely states took over all responsibility for change.”5 Anticipating the revisionist arguments of the 1980s and 1990s, Krieger did recognize the inadequacy of interpretations that suggested the state merely “foisted modernizing reforms upon an apathetic and retrograde society,” noting that the liberal elite provided a fertile reservoir of reformers and modernizers well into the twentieth century. He nonetheless concluded that, over the course of the Kaiserreich, the “initiative in the struggle for political freedom passed from the hands of the liberal middle class” to the state as liberal “moderates, radicals, and dualists preserved their identities by organizing in separate party molds which stifled their further development.”6 As the Bielefeld School gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s, so too did the widespread opinion that (bourgeois) liberals failed to embrace democracy or adapt to a mass political

2 Wolfgang Mommsen, “Der deutsche Liberalismus zwischen ‘klassenloser Bürgergesellschaft’ und ‘Organisiertem Kapitalismus’: Zu einigen neueren Liberalismusinterpretationen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 4 (1978), pp. 77–90; Lothar Gall, “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’: Zu Charakter und Entwicklung der liberalen Bewegung in Deutschland,” in idem (ed.), Liberalismus (Cologne, 1976), pp. 162–86. 3 See David Blackbourn, Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London, 1987). 4 Friedrich Sell, Die Tragödie des deutschen Liberalismus (Stuttgart, 1953). 5 Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: A History of Political Tradition (Boston, 1957), p. 8. 6 Ibid., pp. 8–9, 458–9.

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marketplace.7 Lothar Gall’s seminal 1976 essay, for example, contends that the idealistic liberal intellectuals of the Vormärz, who sought universal freedom and political-constitutional reform, were transformed after 1848 into a primarily bourgeois interest group advocating lower taxes and free market capitalism, rapidly losing support after 1871 to the labor-friendly left and populist right.8 Although Mommsen believed that Gall had exaggerated both the idealistic, universalist character of the Vormärz and the purely interest-based liberalism of the Gründerzeit, he agreed that liberalism had lost most of its democratic, populist, or reformist potential by the 1870s.9 James Sheehan’s important interventions in the 1970s tended to highlight more than Gall or Mommsen the relatively heterogeneous and modestly populist character of late-nineteenth-century German liberalism. But Sheehan ultimately agreed with his colleagues that liberalism declined between 1881 and 1903 because of an increasingly class-based, notable-oriented politics that alienated a growing number of Catholics, workers, and Mittelstand voters.10 This relative consensus on both the class-based character of German liberalism and its notable-oriented politics was not altogether different from the Marxist arguments generated in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which blamed the “steady weakening of the left-liberal parties vis-à-vis the parties of reaction” on liberal fears “of the masses born out of the ineffable class and profit interests of the bourgeoisie, and the resulting anti- democratic politics, which concentrated itself in anti-Socialism.”11 Nor did the revisionist work of the 1980s and 1990s produce an immediate reframing of the debate. To be sure, the revisionists argued that the German bourgeoisie, led by the liberals, had actually succeeded by 1914 in carrying out a “silent revolution” in commerce and industry; culture and civil society; and, to some extent, legislative practice.12 While rejecting the assumption that the German bourgeoisie was ideologically backward or socially “feudalized,” however, the revisionists tended to agree with Gall, Mommsen, and company that liberal notables failed to adapt sufficiently to an era of mass politics after 1871. Hence they lost support to conservative, Catholic, and socialist parties that employed more quintessentially modern campaign techniques, punctuated by themes like nationalism, popular religiosity, and class antagonism.13

7 See, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Providence, 1993); , Mittelstand, Demokratie and Nationalsozialismus: Die politische Entwicklung von Handwerk und Kleinhandel in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1972); and Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus in Wilhelminischen Reich 1893–1914: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse des Nationalismus in Deutschland am Beispiel des Bundes der Landwirte und der Deutsch-Konservativen Partei (Bonn, 1975). 8 Gall, “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’.” 9 Mommsen, “Der deutsche Liberalismus”; Gall, “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’.” 10 James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978). 11 Gustav Seeber, Zwischen Bebel und Bismarck: Zur Geschichte des Linksliberalismus 1871–1893 (East Berlin, 1965) p. 204. 12 See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley,The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984); Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, 2003); Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany, Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914 (Oxford, 1999). 13 See Sheehan, German Liberalism; Dan S. White, The Splintered Party: in Hessen and the Reich, 1867–1918 (Cambridge, 1976); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (New Haven, 1980); Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities; Brett Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The German Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903 (Toronto, 1997); David Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (New Haven, 1980); James Retallack, Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (Boston, 1988); Michael Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004).

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Only in the past 15 to 20 years have scholars begun to seriously question the assumption that liberalism was both insufficiently attuned to mass politics and in more or less perpetual decline after 1871. As Alastair Thompson and Margaret Anderson have argued convincingly, the liberal parties were perfectly capable of adapting to a mass political marketplace. Led by Richter and later Naumann, the Progressives built an increasingly active and ultimately effective national organization after 1880, defined by increasingly modern, professionalized party committees.14 Dieter Langewiesche, Larry Jones, and Jonathan Sperber, meanwhile, have emphasized that the history of political liberalism was hardly one of steady decline, but that liberal electoral returns waxed and waned from election to election, just as they did for the other bourgeois parties. Indeed, though the liberals attracted a smaller proportion of a rapidly increasing electorate over the course of the Kaiserreich—due both to overall increases in the number of eligible voters and political participation—the number of liberal voters nearly doubled between 1871 (1.8 million) and 1912 (3.2 million).15 Sibylle Lehmann’s recent article on liberal electoral politics in 1870s reinforces the general consensus that middle- class “swing” voters, far from abandoning liberalism, simply weighed their interests more carefully after 1878, preferring conservative parties in times of economic stagnation and liberal parties in times of economic growth.16 None of the authors above deny the liberals’ relative decline in support, nor do they ignore the liberals’ increasingly demogogic appeals to nationalism, colonialism, and anti-socialism in the interest of competing with the populist right. The fact remains, however, that by the early twentieth century, the liberals had managed to build fairly modern, national campaign techniques similar if not identical to those of the mass parties on the left and right.17 Nevertheless, recent studies of liberalism have been careful to emphasize its limits in terms of creating a modern people’s party, or Volkspartei, before 1918. Liberalism in Germany (and Austria) was still much more dependent on Honoratiorenpolitik and a relatively small group of bourgeois voters than its socialist and Catholic rivals. The quintessentially urban, bourgeois liberalism described by Jan Palmowski and Jennifer Jenkins in Frankfurt and Hamburg respectively (or by Carl Schorske and Pieter Judson in the case of Vienna) was still largely patrician and exclusionary when it came to endorsing a democratic franchise, gender equality, or a centralized welfare state. Thus, insofar as the liberals remained more dependent on traditional, notable-based politics than their socialist, Catholic, or conservative rivals—a problem, it should be noted, that was common to all European liberalisms by the end of the nineteenth century—scholars still accept important elements of Gall, Mommsen, and Sheehan’s classic studies.18

14 Alastair Thompson, Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 2000); Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). 15 Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany (Princeton, 2000), pp. 121–30. Also see Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System (Chapel Hill, 2011); Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2005). 16 Sibylle H. Lehmann, “The German Elections in the 1870s: Why Germany Turned from Liberalism to Protectionism,” Journal of Economic History, 70 (2010), pp. 146–78, at 173–5. 17 Thompson, Left Liberals; Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, pp. 132–7. 18 See, for example, Palmowski, Urban Liberalism; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Manfred Hettling, Politische Bürgerlichkeit der Burger zwischen Individualität und Vergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918 (Göttingen, 1999); Jörg Haustein, Liberal-katholische Publizistik im späten Kaiserreich: “Das Neue Jahrhundert” und die Krausgesellschaft (Göttingen, 2001); Gross, The War Against Catholicism; Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the , 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor, 1996); Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York, 1980).

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Where current research probably differs most starkly from the Sonderweg is in stressing the dynamic nature of liberal civic engagement and associational life. Jenkins and Palmowski, for example, have highlighted the strength of liberal ideas on the local level, emphasizing the eminently modern, progressive, democratic nature of local liberal associational life already in the 1870s and 1880s. Indeed, Palmowski argues that it was the Reich’s complex and authoritarian federal structure that made it difficult for liberals to transfer this democratic praxis to the national level and not the other way around.19 These findings have been bolstered by Larry Ping’s recent analysis of the National Liberals under Bismarck, as well as Lisa Zwicker’s fascinating study of the German student fraternities in the Wilhelmine period. Although conservative, authoritarian, and antisemitic elements persisted among both the National Liberals and the liberal Burschenschaften, they were often drowned out by growing enthusiasm for democracy, civil rights, and economic freedom.20 While Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann agrees that “association mania” was thriving in nineteenth-century Germany, he does not necessarily believe that it led to more liberalism. Hoffmann argues, to the contrary, that many political associations had shed themselves of bourgeois liberal tutelage by the latter third of the nineteenth century, seeking instead to represent special confessional, gender, or proletarian interests, from working-class unions to women’s suffrage associations. Just as importantly, bourgeois (liberal) associations were not always consistent in propagating the universalist tradition of civic virtue on which they were based, often excluding women, Jews, Catholics and other individuals from participation. Hence it was precisely the rise of associational life that undermined German liberalism, fragmented the electorate, and polarized German democracy.21 Although not as critical as Hoffmann, Mark Hewitson’s recent work suggests a middle ground between traditional Sonderweg and revisionist accounts of liberal party politics. Like Ping, Hewitson sees an emerging German Sonderweg debate, critical of Bismarck’s constitutional compromise, among the liberals in the 1870s and 1880s. But unlike Ping, who emphasizes liberal concerns about Germany’s lack of parliamentarization, Hewitson argues that liberals eventually came to embrace Germany’s “special path” in political- constitutional matters.22 By the 1890s, even the most ardent liberal reformers, including Barth and Naumann, had raised multiple concerns regarding the negative aspects of French-style democratization, including the rise of an extreme left and right and the role of parliament as “political stock exchanges.” Naumann urged the liberals to advocate instead a hybrid constitutional arrangment that merged a democratically elected parliament with a strong executive—namely, the Kaiser—as a uniquely German answer to the constitutional question. Hewitson concedes that the liberals became less willing to compromise with the Kaiserreich’s peculiar constitutional arrangement after 1907, in the wake of the embarrassing Daily Telegraph Affair in 1908 and the Zabern incident in 1913. But they continued to prefer a strong chancellor and cabinet that could maintain

19 Jan Palmowski, “Liberalism and Local Government in Late Nineteenth Century Germany and England,” The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 381–409; idem, Urban Liberalism; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity. 20 Larry Ping, “Gustav Freytag, the Reichsgründung, and the National Liberal Origins of the Sonderweg,” Central European History, 45 (2012), pp. 605–30; Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, “The and German Political Culture, 1890–1914,” Central European History, 42 (2009), pp. 389– 428, at 389–96. 21 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Toward a Transnational Perspective,” Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), pp. 269–99. 22 Mark Hewitson, “The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany Before the First World War,” Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp. 725–80.

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its independence from parliamentary horse-trading through a reformed version of the Bismarckian compromise. The constitutional crisis between 1908 and 1914 therefore demonstrates both the relative political agency and adaptability of the liberal parties and the stability of Germany’s only partially democratic system.23

Reformers and Critics: Liberal Responses to Modernity

Much like the early historiography on liberal politics in the Kaiserreich, until the 1980s most research on liberal social and cultural policy tended to mirror the larger project of Bürgertumsforschung spearheaded by the Frankfurt and Bielefeld Schools. In this traditional narrative, the liberals come off as increasingly out of touch with modern industrial society, ignoring the need for greater state intervention in regard to social policy while promoting economic and cultural policies that alienated the majority of workers and Mittelstand.24 Since the 1980s, this conventional impression has undergone significant revision. Far from sitting on the sidelines of “modernity,” scholars now observe, the liberal parties played a crucial role in most parliamentary compromises regarding social security and health insurance benefits; penal reform and education; religion, minority policy, and civil rights. Certainly much of the liberals’ initial focus in the 1870s and 1880s was on occupational training and “self-help” (Selbsthilfe) versus “state-help” (Staatshilfe), especially while Richter was still chairman of the FrVp. Also important, the liberals—from Max Weber to Werner Sombart—produced some of Wilhelmine Germany’s most virulent if well- informed pessimists and critics. But these divisions between interventionist progressives and laissez-faire traditionalists, reformers and critics do nothing to undermine the growing consensus among historians regarding the profoundly modern, progressive and scientifically minded engagement of German liberals in social and cultural life.25 No recent work better encapsulates recent trends in rethinking liberals’ relationship to imperial culture and society than Kevin Repp’s Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914. Repp contends that Germany’s leading social reformers and cultural critics, far from rejecting science, technology or democracy, were keen to solve the challenges of industrial society in

23 Ibid. 24 Ludwig Elm, Zwischen Fortschritt und Reaktion: Geschichte der Parteien der liberalen Bourgeoisie in Deutschland, 1893–1918 (Berlin, 1968); Gall, “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’”; Sheehan, German Liberalism, pp. 1–3; Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany; Holger Tober, Deutscher Liberalismus und Sozialpolitik in der Ära des Wilhelminismus (Husum, 1999), pp. 17–19; Krieger, German Idea, pp. 8–9, 459–61;Heinz Matthes, “Spaltung der Nationalliberalen Partei und die Entwicklung des Linksliberalismus bes zur Auflosung der Deutsch-Freisinnigen Partei (1878–1893): ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Krise des deutschen politischen Liberalismus” ( PhD dissertation, 1953); Renate Köhne, Nationalliberale und Koalitionsrecht: Struktur und Verhalten der nationalliberalen Reichstagsfraktion 1890–1914 (, 1977). 25 Tober, Deutscher Liberalismus, pp. 17–19, 411–15; Richard Wetzell, “From Retributive Justice to Social Defense: Penal Reform in Fin-de-Siècle Germany,” in Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld (eds), Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge, 2004), pp. 59–77; Hoffmann, “Democracy and Associations”; Peter Theiner, “Sozialer Liberalismus und deutsche Weltpolitik,” in idem (ed.), Friedrich Naumann im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Baden-Baden, 1983); Karl Holl, Günter Trautmann and Hans Vorländer (eds), Sozialer Liberalismus (Göttingen, 1986); Karl Heinrich Pohl (ed.), Politiker und Bürger: und seine Zeit (Göttingen, 2002); Simone Lässig, Wahlrechtskampf und Wahlreform in Sachsen, 1895–1909 (Weimar, 1996).

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quintessentially modern, forward-looking fashion.26 Although Reformers, Critics and the Paths of German Modernity represents another nail in the proverbial coffin of those Sonderweg arguments which stressed the German bourgeoisie’s antipathy to modernity, Repp’s work both nuances and complicates the revisionist narrative in important respects. First, Repp’s chief protagonists, from Gertrud Bäumer and Alfred Damaschke to Friedrich Naumann and Werner Sombart, were all supporters of either the Progressive or National Liberal parties. Indeed, while Repp takes this as a given, it is important to emphasize the ways that recent research on imperial culture and society—after many years focusing on the proletarian left, populist right, or Catholic “center”—is turning its lens back on the liberals, who belonged to the cultural and intellectual vanguard of Wilhelmine reformers and critics.27 Secondly, Repp is more willing than many revisionist historians of the 1980s and 1990s to highlight the valence of ethnoracial, biological, and eugenic thinking in the liberal ranks, raising questions about the universality of German (liberal) experience of modernity—à la Hewitson—without reproducing a new Sonderweg.28 Repp argues that liberals enlisted controversial tropes like popular nationalism, the science of eugenics, and cultural pessimism not primarily in order to combat modernity but to meet the challenges of Germany’s rapid industrialization, urbanization, and proletarianization in liberal fashion.29 Gertrud Bäumer, who figures prominently in the bourgeois reform milieu, was typical of many left liberals in proclaiming the victory of the “racial idea” in natural and social science, an idea that would help Germany transcend the debilitating materialism of the nineteenth century. That is not to deny the forces that pushed some reformers, including Sombart, “toward bitter repudiations of technology and of the idea of progress itself.” But rather than capitulate to the “inhumanity of [creating] racist master men,” most liberals embraced eugenics and nationalism in order “to reconcile these twin impulses of social and scientific progress, inextricably intertwined in these reformers’ vision of modernity, by making the ideals of liberal humanism [in Bäumer’s words] ‘more corporeal, more concrete’.”30 Hence bourgeois (liberal) intellectuals come off as less out of touch than the Sonderweg-era interpretations would have it, while nonetheless registering a fascination with eugenic thinking and an underlying pessimism toward the challenges of modernity that is reminiscent of the right-wing cultural critics described by Fritz Stern and Georg Mosse, among others.31 This ambivalent relationship with science and the social consequences of modern industrial society is reflected in recent scholarship on liberal women and liberal feminism. According to Repp, Angelika Schaser, and Lora Wildenthal, for example, liberal women were progressive-minded activists who found a way to promote women’s political representation

26 Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 2000); Fritz Stern,The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study of the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, 1961); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964). 27 See, for example, the contributions in Marchand and Lindenfeld (eds), Germany at the Fin de Siècle. 28 Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities. 29 See Repp, Reformers. 30 Kevin Repp, “‘More Corporeal, More Concrete’: Liberal Humanism, Eugenics, and German Progressives at the Last Fin de Siècle,” Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), pp. 683–730. 31 Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism (New York, 1972); idem, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, 1974); Georg Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York, 1998); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Providence, 1993); Repp, Reformers.

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and education by employing the biopolitical rhetoric of race, eugenics, and empire.32 Bäumer supported decriminalization of abortion and its legality in cases of rape, threat to the life of the mother, or serious likelihood of handicap. Yet she opposed the socialist Helene Stöcker in promoting women’s universal right to an abortion, while rejecting the stronger racialist-eugenicist thinking of the radical right, including sterilization and euthanasia.33 When it came to the majority of male liberals, women’s rights remained a contentious topic. If few liberals questioned the “capacity” of Jews to participate in German political or social life, the matter of women’s “natural” mental and emotional inferiority preoccupied liberal politicians and, perhaps more importantly, their voters.34 Still, Ute Planert has suggested that German liberals were less anti-feminist than their French counterparts, alternating between an underlying skepticism regarding women’s capacity for full political participation and support for female suffrage in a pragmatic attempt to regain liberal majorities.35 Recent scholarship on the relationship between the liberals and German Jewry has also emphasized the tension between liberalism’s emancipatory claims and exclusionary practice. As Jan Palmowski, Till van Rahden, and Reinhard Rürup have recently shown, the relationship between Jews and liberalism became all the more intimate between the 1860s and the First World War, with Jews providing much of the municipal leadership, liberal press corps, and a significant percentage of the liberal constituency in Berlin, Breslau, and Frankfurt.36 Of course, the Jews faced rising antisemitism from the 1880s onwards, often from elements of the same urban and small town Mittelstand. In case studies of local antisemitism in Baden and Königsberg respectively, Ulrich Baumann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum confirm the findings of Peter Pulzer and others who argue that latent antisemitism (and support for left liberalism) waxed and waned in strong correlation to economic conditions, but with important regional distinctions.37 Even liberals hostile to antisemitism, such as Theodor Mommsen and Gustav Stesemann, evinced a greater preoccupation with Jewish religious and, at times, racial difference than one might at first expect.38 And as attacks on

32 See Ann Taylor Allen, “Patriarchy and its Discontents: The Debate on the Origins of the Family in the German-Speaking World, 1860–1930”; and Kevin Repp, “Sexualkrise und Rasse: Feminist Eugenics at the Fin de Siècle,” in Marchand and Lindenfeld (eds), Germany at the Fin de Siècle, pp. 81–128; Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer. Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, 2000); Repp, “‘More Corporeal, More Concrete’,” p. 123. 33 See Repp, “‘More Corporeal, More Concrete’”; Eric Kurlander, Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (New Haven, 2009), pp. 81–113. 34 Karin Hausen, “Liberalismus und Frauenemanzipation,” and Barbara Vogel, “Inklusion und Exklusion von Frauen. Überlgeungen zum liberalen Emanzipationsprojekt im Kaiserreich,” both in A. Schaser and S. Schueler-Springorum (eds), Liberalismus und Emanzipation. In- und Exklusionsprozesse im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 2010), pp. 39–54, 199–218. 35 See Ute Planert, “Liberalismus und Antifeminismus in Europa,” in Schaser and Schueler- Springorum (eds), Liberalismus und Emanzipation, pp. 73–94. 36 Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer. Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen, 2000); Jan Palmowski, “Between Dependence and Influence: Jews and Liberalism in Frankfurt am Main, 1864–1933,” in Henning Tewes and Jonathan Wright (eds), Liberalism, Anti-Semitism, and Democracy (Oxford, 2001), pp. 76–101; Reinhard Rürup, “Der Liberalismus und die Emanzipation der Juden,” in Schaser and Schueler-Springorum (eds), Liberalismus und Emanzipation, pp. 25–38. 37 Ulrich Baumann,“‘Ob dieses Sieges waren die Liberalen ganz paff’. Juden und Nichtjuden in der ländlichen Lokalpolitik Badens 1862 bis 1933,” and Stefanie Schueler-Springorum, “Liberale Stadtkultur und die Grenzen der Integration,” both in Schaser and Schueler-Springorum (eds), Liberalismus und Emanzipation, pp. 95–108, 109–122. 38 Jonathan Wright, “Liberalism and Anti-Semitism in Germany: The Case of Gustav Stesemann,” in Tewes and Wright (eds), Liberalism, pp. 102–26; Uffa Jensen, “Integrationalismus, Konversion und jüdische Differenz. Das Problem des Antisemitismus in der liberalen Öffentlichkeit,” in Schaser and

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the “Jewificiation” of German liberalism proliferated after 1880, the liberals themselves became increasingly uncomfortable in acknowledging the large proportion of Jews in their ranks and sometimes dissuaded Jewish colleagues from running in certain districts, clearly strugging between a desire to build an inclusive bourgeois civil society and less inclusive concepts of racial community.39 This liberal ambivalence toward inclusion and exclusion is exemplifed with regard to Catholicism as well. According to David Blackbourn, the liberals in many ways defined their own progressive values during the first decade after the Reichsgründung in direct opposition to an ostensibly “medieval” Catholicism.40 However, the liberals’ enthusiastic support for the Kulturkampf had the opposite effect of what the liberals sought: it helped further subordinate German liberalism to Bismarck and simultaneously produced a strong and consolidated Catholic political party which would subsequently garner as many seats in some elections as the National Liberals or Progressives.41 Michael Gross’ recent work moves away from the political and parliamentary arena—and the instrumental endorsement of the Kulturkampf—to examine the liberals’ popular intellectual and cultural attitudes toward Catholicism in civil society. The liberals’ “stigmatization of Jesuits, priests, monks and Catholics as stupid, medieval, superstitious, feminine, and un- German,” Gross contends, “helped orient their vision of German society toward modern rationalism, bourgeois individualism, high industrialization, free-market capitalism, the unified nation-state, and gender-specific public and private spheres.” Herethe Kulturkampf appears “not as an exception to liberal principles but as the culmination of liberal demands for a modern German political, economic, social, and sexual order. Anti- Catholic intolerance was not derivative but constituitive of liberalism.”42 In a slightly more pithy, less stinging appraisal, Larry Ping observes that: “If liberals could not hope to outvote the masses, the next best thing would be to transform them into men of the nineteenth century” through a strict separation of church and state and compulsory public education.43 Gross’ study of liberal anti-Catholicism comports with Repp’s work on Wilhelmine social reformers and my own analysis of racialist (völkisch) thinking among Wilhelmine liberals in highlighting, on the one hand, the eminently modern, quintessentially progressive nature of German liberalism, while at the same time acknowledging its exclusionary, even racist and xenophobic, potential.44 As Carl Schorske, Pieter Judson, and more recently Malachi Hacohen have argued for the Austrian case, liberal rationality and probabilism had clearly lost its pre-eminence as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon by the end of the nineteenth century, replaced by German ethnonationalism, antisemitism,

Schueler-Springorum (eds), Liberalismus und Emanzipation, pp. 55–72; Eric Kurlander, The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 (New York and Oxford, 2006), pp. 78–85. 39 See Manfred Hettling,“‘Verbürgerlichung’ und ‘Bürgerlichkeit’. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen für die deutschen Juden im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Schaser and Schueler-Springorum (eds), Liberalismus und Emanzipation, pp. 177–98; Manfred Hettling, Politische Bürgerlichkeit: Der Bürger zwischen Individualität und Vergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918 (Göttingen, 2001); Kurlander,Price of Exclusion, pp. 78–85; Eric Kurlander,“‘I Am No Anti-Semite, but I Am Also No Jew’: Liberalism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in the Third Reich,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 42 (2008), pp. 49–63. 40 David Blackbourn, Volksfrömmigkeit und Fortschrittsglaube im Kulturkampf (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 6–7. 41 Ibid., pp. 50–55. 42 Gross, The War Against Catholicism, pp. 21–2. 43 Ping, “Gustav Freytag.” 44 Fetheringill Zwicker, “Burschenschaft.”

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and relativism.45 There is little question that German intellectuals such as Thomas Mann, Sombart, and Weber slowly dispensed with much of the progressive optimism they evinced in the 1890s, transforming by the eve of the First World War into critics of the materialism, mass culture, and “soulless” science they associated with Wilhelmine modernity.46 In resurrecting some aspects of the Sonderweg, John Breuilly has therefore concluded that there “was a sharp separation between liberal values that were entrenched in powerful cultural and economic institutions that had taken shape in the first ‘de- corporating’ phase of modernization and conservative-authoritarian values, moulded in reaction to revolution and then embedded in the political and military institutions that conducted the unification process. This created a specifically German form of modernity and its characteristic tensions are central to understanding the subsequent history of Germany.”47 Insofar as they produced many of Imperial Germany’s most vocal critics, however, liberals continued to promote rational discourse and civic virtues in the public sphere that seemed increasingly dominated by political extremism, irrationalism, and uncertainty after 1890.48 Local liberal cultural and artistic life was not only vibrant, but could very often represent the cutting edge of aesthetic modernism.49 In her case study of the German Werkbund, with which Naumann and his left-liberal protégé, Theodor Heuss, were closely affiliated, Maiken Umbach shows, for example, how the German Arts and Crafts movement helped shape the German city in quintessentially modern, eminently functional, and socially egalitarian ways.50 Jennifer Jenkins’ outstanding work on liberalism in Hamburg illustrates that the local might be the perfect location to develop a uniquely contemporary, liberal idea of citizenship and nationhood based on a common bourgeois culture, first on an aesthetic level and eventually in terms of welfare and work, space and architecture.51 To be sure, historians of liberal culture and intellectual life have so far tended to focus on large, metropolitan settings such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Berlin, whereas the commitment to aesthetic modernism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism was probably more equivocal in the liberal strongholds of the north (Schleswig-Holstein), center (Saxony), and east (Silesia) of the country.52 Despite this important caveat, the last two decades of scholarship on liberal culture and intellectual life have clearly revised the traditional view of (bourgeois) liberal traditionalism and the image of provinciality that goes along with it.

45 See again Schorske, Vienna; Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries; Malachi Haim Hacohen, “The Culture of Viennese Science and the Riddle of Austrian Liberalism,” Modern Intellectual History, 6 (2009), pp. 369–96, at 371–5. 46 See Repp, “‘More Corporeal, More Concrete’”; Fritz Ringer, “Max Weber’s Liberalism” Central European History, 35 (2002), pp. 379–95.; and Wetzell, “Retributive Justice.” 47 John Breuilly, “Modernisation as Social Evolution, 1800–1880,” Transactions of the RHS, 15 (2005), pp. 117–47. 48 Deborah Coen, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago, 2007). 49 Celia Applegate, “Culture and the Arts,” in James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 123–44. 50 Maiken Umbach, “The Deutscher Werkbund, Globalization, and the Invention of Modern Vernaculars,” in Bernd Hüppauf and Maiken Umbach (eds), Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford, 2005), pp. 114–41. 51 Jenkins, Provincial Modernity. 52 See Kurlander, Price of Exclusion, pp. 347–54.

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Dreams of Empire: Liberal Nationalism, Colonialism, and the First World War

German liberals stood at the center of debates on German foreign and colonial policy in the Kaiserreich. On the one hand, for the better part of the nineteenth century liberals were preoccupied with building a powerful German nation that included as much contiguous territory in continental Europe as possible, what Naumann famously called Mitteleuropa. On the other hand, recent research has indicated that many liberals were also beginning to imagine a German colonial presence in Africa and Asia already before the creation of the Empire in 1871 and worked ardently to sponsor colonial expansion thereafter. Now, virtually all historiogaphy of the last 30 years has worked to complicate our understanding of German nationalism (and colonialism), especially in de-emphasizing its domestic political ramifications in encouraging the liberals’ capitulation to Bismarck in the 1860s and 1870s; failure to work together in the name of domestic reform during the 1880s and 1890s; and willingness to join multiple Bürgerblock coalitions alongside the nationalist right thereafter.53 Where scholars continue to disagree is in respect of the particular territorial focus and ideological valence of nationalism and imperialism in explaining the trajectory of liberal foreign (and domestic) policy, namely the relative importance of building an “overseas Empire” versus pursuing “inner colonization” in Central and Eastern Europe.54 Historians have come to accept, for example, Geoff Eley’s pregnant observation that “the prominence of concepts like ‘the people’, ‘freedom’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘independence’ in the political vocabulary of the radical nationalists suggests a certain relationship to the liberal tradition and some of their debates bear a formal similarity to the discourse of the German Liberals at mid-century.”55 But scholars have yet to reach a consensus regarding the depth and singularity of ethnic (völkisch) nationalism within German liberalism. The revisionists of the 1980s and 1990s, anticipating more recent arguments by Sebastian Conrad and others, view German liberal nationalism as inscribed in the same modern, post-Enlightenment discourse of race, biopolitics, and social disciplining that defined British and French liberal nationalism and imperialism.56 By imbricating German liberal nationalism and imperialism in a broader European project, revisionist scholars have tended to de-emphasize the singular role of radical nationalism in German (liberal) self-understanding.57 Jürgen Hess and Marc-Wilhelm Kohfink, for example, cite the persistence of universalist traditions or “democratic nationalism” and

53 See James Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser William II (New York, 1996); Sell, Tragödie; Sheehan, German Liberalism; Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany; Lothar Gall, “Einleitung,” in idem (ed.), Liberalismus (Cologne, 1976), p. 9; Ludwig Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei (Bonn, 2002). 54 Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (New York and Oxford, 2008), p. 248. See Eric Kurlander, “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire: Liberal Imperialism in Mitteleuropa, 1890–1918,” in Matthew Fitzpatrick (ed.),Liberal Imperialism in Europe (London, 2012), pp. 141–66. 55 Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (Ann Arbor, 1990), pp. 200–1. 56 Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National (New York, 1993), p. 29; Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 2006), p. 322; A. Dirk Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York and Oxford, 2009). 57 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Dieter Langewiesche and Georg Schmidt (eds), Reich, Nation, Föderation. Deutschland und Europa (Munich, 2008).

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German liberalism, auguring back to 1848.58 Hewitson has also noted that, while there was perhaps more discussion of nationalism in Germany than elsewhere, this did not necessarily mean that ideas of ethnic nationalism or imperialism were more widely shared among bourgeois (liberal) Germans.59 If revisionist historians have attempted to place German liberal nationalism in a broader European discourse on identity and empire, a new generation of scholars has revisited the idea that there were singular elements within the German conception of race and space that distinguished liberal nationalism from that of its French and British counterparts.60 According to Harold James, “Germans, lacking any institutional basis for identity and faced by a hostile international system at the beginning of the nineteenth century, engaged in what might be termed the promiscuous construction of a national image, a national identity, and a national mission.”61 Although differing in minor respects regarding chronology and the role of culture versus the state, subsequent work by Rogers Brubaker, John Breuilly, and others has suggested that a stronger ethnic nationalist feeling arose in Central Europe, while a more state-centered (universalist) model arose west of the Elbe.62 In his contribution to this volume, Mark Hewitson, while denying that the racial aspects were necessarily stronger, has likewise contended that there was “an enduring distinction between politics and the state, the rapidity of industrialization, the deepening of class conflict and the scientization of race—which distinguished late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany from other states and helped to make radical nationalists in the Reich more numerous and closer to ruling elites than in the parliamentary regimes of the Third Republic or the United Kingdom.”63 It is undoubtedly an exaggeration to insist that “German national consciousness was unmistakably and distinctly racist from the moment it existed, and the national identity of the Germans was essentially an identity of race, and only superficially that of language or anything else.”64 But the völkisch elements in German liberal nationalism, as I have argued elsewhere, were probably more marked than in French or British liberalism. As Harold James, Hewitson, and other scholars of both German nationalism and liberalism have observed, liberal forces compromised some of their constitutional principles in return for achieving a unified nation-state. The coincidence of late unification and an emerging racial conception of the nation could not help but define German liberalism in ways that might be distinct

58 Jürgen C. Hess, “Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein”. Demokratischer Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republik am Beispiel der Deutchen Demokratischen Partei (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 317–69; see also Thomas Göthel, Demokratie und Volkstum: Die Politik gegenüber den nationalen Minderheiten in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 2002); M.-W. Kohfink, Für Freiheit und Vaterland. Eine sozialwissenschaftliche Studie über den liberalen Nationalismus 1890–1933 in Deutschland (Constance, 2002). 59 Mark Hewitson, “Nationalism,” in this volume. See also idem, National Identity and Political Thought in Germany (Oxford, 2000). 60 See the classic work of Helmuth Plessner, Die verspätete Nation: über die politische Verfuhrbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes (Stuttgart, 1959); Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany (London, 1961); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, 1961); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York, 1964); Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions (London, 1975); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 1994); Volker Berghahn, Imperial Germany: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics 1871–1918 (New York, 2005); also, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in Wilhelmine Germany, 1897–1914,” in idem, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918 (London, 1995), pp. 189–204. 61 Harold James, A German Identity (London, 1989). 62 See John Breuilly, “The German Bourgeoisie from Radicalism to Nationalism,” German History, 14 (2006), pp. 223–31; Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, 1998). 63 See Hewitson, “Nationalism,” in this volume. 64 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, 1992), p. 369.

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from its French and British counterparts. Or, as the nineteenth-century Jewish liberal Gabriel Riesser put it, “to lay the foundations of German nationality, instead of on the fundamentals of common liberty, common rights and common welfare, on large-scale hatred of the French and small-scale hatred of the Jews.”65 Most current historiography, even at its most critical, would not go so far as Riesser in claiming that German liberals sacrificed their values in the name of ethnic nationalism and antisemitism. The fact remains that many liberals were more intent on a foreign policy integrating ethnic brethren who lay in other states than a domestic policy which insisted on the full equality of all citizens before the law.66 Recent work on liberal nationalism and foreign policy in the Kaiserreich has meanwhile followed a general resurgence of interest in overseas colonialism, which contrasts with the traditional Sonderweg interpretation. The Bielefeld School viewed the German liberals as mere epigones of Bismarck and later Kaiser Wilhelm’s foreign and colonial policy, which functioned both as a way of serving the economic interests of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie and as a conservative taming policy aimed at the lower middle classes. These historians also tended to construe profound elements of Social Darwinian and racial thinking in the German colonial imagination which helped propogate this “social imperialist” taming strategy.67 Although diverging from the Bielefelders in some respects, Wolfgang Mommsen and Lothar Gall agreed that Imperial Germany’s brief period of overseas colonialization was tangential in comparison to (liberal) nationalist aspirations on the continent. Instead of constituting an authentic and indelible aspect of the German and European liberal project, then, liberal overseas colonialism was generally represented as a diversion from domestic socio-political reform, or at the very least subordinate to the liberals’ preoccupation with fashioning a contiguous German empire on the continent.68 Many scholars now question the veracity of both assumptions, noting both the liberals’ political agency and widespread colonial aspirations. Following the important work of Russell Berman and Susanne Zantop, among others, historians of German liberalism have begun to argue that German liberals, like their French and British counterparts, were fixated on building a strong German navy and acquiring an overseas colonial empire in Africa and Asia for genuine economic, geopolitical, and ideological reasons.69 Instead of colonialism acting as a means of integrating disparate bourgeois groups through “social imperialism,”

65 See Riesser quoted in Peter Pulzer, “The Jewish Question in Imperial Germany,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 25 (1980), pp. 136–41. 66 Kurlander, Price of Exclusion. 67 See Sell, Tragödie; Fritz Fischer,Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf, 1967); Winkler, Mittelstand; Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik; Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1984). 68 Volker Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (London, 1993); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The German Empire as a System of Skirted Decisions,” in idem, Imperial Germany 1867– 1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State (London, 1995), pp. 1–19; idem, “Wandlungen der liberalen Idee im Zeitalter des Liberalismus,” and Lothar Gall, “‘Sündenfall’ des liberalen Denkens oder Krise der bürgerlichen-liberalen Bewegung?” both in Karl Holl and Günther List (eds), Liberalismus und imperialistischer Staat (Göttingen, 1975), pp. 109–47, 148–58. 69 Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser William II, p. 44; Kurlander, Price of Exclusion; Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany; Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, pp. 7–11; Ludwig Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei (Bonn, 2002); Göthel, Demokratie und Volkstum; Brian Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, 1997); Russell Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln, 1998); Bradley Naranch, “Beyond the Fatherland: Colonial Visions, Overseas Expansion, and German Nationalism, 1848–1885” (Johns Hopkins University PhD dissertation, 2007); Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire: 1884–1945 (Durham, 2001).

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argues Matthew Fitzpatrick, many liberals saw it as a solution to the “Social Question” and the liberal answer to conservative protectionism, offering tangible material benefits.70 Nearly every liberal, after all, from moderate critics of colonialism like Georg Gothein and Ludwig Quidde to ardent imperialists like Naumann and Stresemann, believed in some form of overseas economic and territorial expansion. Hence overseas imperialism was, like German nationalism on the continent, a central component of mid-nineteenth-century liberal thinking and not the byproduct of a conservative nationalist turn toward colonialism in the mid-1880s.71 Not surprisingly, these debates on liberal imperialism in Africa have inevitably become bound up in the larger question of whether there was a direct line “from Windhoek to Auschwitz”; namely whether German colonial experience in Southwest Africa helped pave the way for the Third Reich’s genocidal empire in Eastern Europe (see chapter 25 in this volume). The experience of the Herero genocide in German Southwest Africa is particularly important for students of liberalism, since two prominent liberals— and —were chiefs in the Colonial Office during this period. Fitzpatrick observes, for example, that most Wilhelmine liberals employed racial language as an extrinsic marker “in the maintenance of a hierarchical ordering of colonial society.” But he urges us to “contextualize German Southwest Africa within a broader framework of radical colonial violence in European liberal imperialism” and “the backdrop of the ‘deep structure’ of subjugation and displacement within European settler colonialism.”72 That is not to deny the potentially eliminationist consequences of “liberal” imperialism, only to note the important difference between the ideological underpinnings and potential consequences of a liberal extrinsic versus Nazi intrinsic racial biological conception of the abject racial other.73 As Lora Wildenthal has also noted in her important study of German Women for Empire, eliminationist racism was not the core element of liberal imperialism, even if ethnoracial hegemony and security were.74 Here recent scholarship has tended to come down against Hannah Arendt’s seminal distinction between (western) liberal support for overseas colonialism and the Germans’ more racially exclusionary (eliminationist) desire to build a contiguous Greater German Empire in Central and Eastern Europe.75 Nevertheless, as I have argued elsewhere, these inherent contradictions between an ethnoculturally exclusive, primarily continental Greater Germany and an inclusive, globally oriented Pax Germanica existed already within the liberal ranks before 1914 and were put into stark relief during the First World War.76 Though many liberals promoted a relatively

70 Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany. 71 See, again, ibid.; Gregor Schollgen, Imperialismus und Gleichgewicht. Deutschland, England und die orientalische Frage (Munich, 2000); Kurlander, “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire.” 72 Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History, 41 (2008), pp. 477–503. 73 Ibid. 74 Wildenthal, German Women for Empire. 75 See A. Dirk Moses, “Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms, and the Holocaust,” in Volker Langbehn and Mohammed Salama (eds), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York, 2011), pp. 72–92. See also Naranch, “Beyond the Fatherland”; Zantop, Colonial Fantasies; Wildenthal, German Women for Empire; Jürgen Zimmerer and Michael Perraudin, German Colonialism and National Identity (New York, 2011); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting (Chicago, 2011); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010). 76 See Kurlander, “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire”; see also Peter Theiner, “Sozialer Liberalismus und deutsche Weltpolitik,” in idem, (ed.), Friedrich Naumann im Wilhelminischen Deutschland; Roger Fletcher, Socialist Imperialism in Germany, 1897–1914 (London, 1984); Lothar Albertin,

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moderate and inclusive vision of German Empire in central Europe, exemplified by Friedrich Naumann’s famous 1915 book, Mitteleuropa, a significant minority embraced Pan-German annexationism and xenophobic nationality policies associated with more openly völkisch circles.77 Even where economic demands were indistinguishable from völkisch ones, there was far too much disagreement within ardently capitalist as well as socially progressive liberal circles to construe the purely material or geopolitical reasons for liberal imperial fantasies.78 Certainly by summer 1917 most liberals had accepted the Reichstag peace resolution renouncing annexations. But this practical concession to daunting military and diplomatic realities hardly constituted a reconciliation between more moderate universalist and völkisch liberals.79 On the contrary, by the end of 1918 differences between liberal conceptions of a more inclusive, globally oriented Pax Germanica and a more racially exclusionary, contiguous German Empire on the continent divided German liberalism in important ways.80 As both Fritz Fischer and Geoff Eley remind us, liberals were often members of the same racist and imperialist societies—from the Pan-German and Navy Leagues to the Society for the Eastern Marches—as their colleagues on the radical nationalist right.81 And while economic and geopolitical interests no doubt played a role in liberal imperialist designs in both continental Europe and abroad, liberal annexationism was clearly buttressed by long-simmering völkisch designs on garnering living space for ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe (an element that many revisionist scholars have underestimated in trying to explain liberal visions of Empire in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods). Given a more favorable outcome to the war, many liberals would surely have been satisfied with the kind of liberal, multilateral, German-dominated Europe proposed by Naumann in Mitteleuropa. But the devastating impact of Germany’s defeat, including the intolerable territorial and military losses associated with the Versailles Treaty, caused even many liberals to fall back on a more chauvinist, irredentist vision of “Greater Germany” that was not altogether different in ends (if not means) from the radical nationalist right.82

Conclusion

Though hardly monolithic in approach, virtually all work on liberalism since the 1990s has noted the remarkable engagement of liberal Germans in local, regional, and national

“Das Friedensthema bei den Linksliberalen vor 1914: Die Schwäche ihrer Argumente und Aktivitäten,” in Holl and List (eds), Liberalismus und imperialistischer Staat, pp. 89–108; Wildenthal, German Women for Empire. 77 Henry Cord Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955); Wolfgang Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919–1945 (Munich, 1997); Paul Rohrbach, German World Politics (New York, 1914); Walter Mogk, Paul Rohrbach und das grössere Deutschland (Munich, 1972). 78 Kurlander, Price of Exclusion; H.A. Winkler, “Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus. Der deutsche Liberalismus in der Krise von 1878/79,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 4 (1978), Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004); Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire. 79 See, in particular, Kurlander, Price of Exclusion, pp. 52–9, 108–16; idem, “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire.” 80 Ibid. 81 Eley, Reshaping; Fischer, Griff; see also Schmokel, Dream; Cord Meyer, Mitteleuropa. 82 See Kurlander, “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire.”

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democratic politics; their active involvement in social and sexual reform movements and associational life; and their quintessentially modern tastes in art, science, and literature. Countering the Sonderweg emphasis on liberals’ inability to adapt to mass industrial society, scholars of liberalism have likewise outlined the professionalization and expansion of liberal political organizations, as well as their active recruitment and integration of new voters. Even where the liberals’ failure to achieve (or sometimes seek) full parliamentarization is concerned, historians have highlighted the inherent challenges of modernity itself: the consequences of rapid capitalist industrialization and ensuing socio-economic fragmentation; the onset of mass politics; a burgeoning socialist left and populist right; the divide between urban cosmopolitans and small town provincials. All these socio-political challenges to liberalism, though hardly unique to German-speaking Central Europe, occurred more violently and profoundly there than in France, Great Britain, or the United States. In this respect, there has also emerged a renewed interest in political and ideological singularity (if not “peculiarity”) as well as some of the longer-term continuities that defined German liberalism relative to its European counterparts. In social and cultural terms, a new generation of historians has come to a fundamental consensus regarding the inherent “modernity” of German liberalism, viewing late nineteenth- century trends in social welfare, universal health care, and women’s and worker’s rights as intrinsic to German (and European) liberalism. These same liberals advocated cosmopolitanism and modernism in art and architecture, and embraced the possibilities of science and technology. To be sure, like the culture and society they epitomized, German liberals were both reformers and critics, endorsing some aspects of modern industrial life while rejecting or combating others. German liberalism in the Kaiserreich was also fraught by the contradictions between its emancipatory claims and exclusionary practices toward groups deemed “incapable” of fully participating in the political process. Recent scholarship therefore suggests that political prejudices and socio-economic conjunctures endemic to much of Europe, but manifesting themselves in Germany in particular ways, played an important role in explaining German liberals’ ambivalent attitudes toward Jews, ethnic minorities, Catholics, and women. Still, most current research on German liberalism focuses not on liberalism’s inadequacies but on the movement’s impressive social and cultural dynamism and measurable strides toward inclusion in terms of class, religion, ethnicity, and place. With regard to nationalism, colonialism, and foreign policy, recent work on liberalism in the Kaiserreich has followed contemporary historiographical trends in taking a more explicitly transnational and global perspective, placing German liberalism not only in a fuller local and regional context, but also a broader European and international one. Dispensing with much of the Sonderweg bias, scholars are quicker than ever to emphasize that imperialism before 1914 had not been discredited among liberal Europeans in the way that it has been since the end of the Second World War. Many liberals articulated Germany’s expansionist goals in terms familiar to students of late-nineteenth-century British and French imperialism, promising to bring representative government, superior civilization, and economic prosperity to non-European peoples in Africa and Asia. Certainly, as Hewitson reminds us in this volume, the experience of globalization and empire did not necessarily diminish national ties or destabilize racially essentialist conceptions of identity in the ways that some revisionist historians have argued.83 Indeed, alongside this more traditional liberal vision of global imperialism (Weltpolitik), there emerged within German liberalism a völkisch conception of Empire that was less interested in pursuing overseas colonies than expanding eastwards in an attempt to create an ethnically homogeneous Greater German Reich.

83 See Hewitson, “Nationalism,” in this volume.

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Thus, far from resurrecting the Sonderweg or recapitulating the revisionist critique, the last decade or so of scholarship has opened a new space for research on liberalism in the Kaiserreich. While much has been written on liberal attitudes toward democracy and elections, civic engagement, and the political public sphere, many questions have yet to be answered in regard to gender, sexuality, and social welfare; art, literature, and science; and race, antisemitism, colonialism, and national identity. The published primary and archival sources available to students of German liberalism are immense: from scores of personal (Nachlässe) and party papers in the federal archives to thousands of published primary sources and periodicals available in major university libraries; from the ample collections of primary and secondary sources at the Archiv des Liberalismus in Gummersbach to the dozens of local archives in regions where the liberal parties once had influence. In fact, there is plenty of fodder for new books and articles among the government documents, party protocols, Nachlässe, and contemporary periodicals preserved at the state and municipal archives in Kiel, Schleswig, Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, and Wroclaw (), to name only a few. Nor are these sources, in an age of online databases and search engines, difficult to find. Many others are listed in published catalogs.84 Whatever new directions research might take, one thing is certain: liberalism will remain, as it has for a century, the palimpsest for evaluating the nature and legacies, the successes and failures, indeed, the contradictory pathologies and potentialities of Imperial Germany.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Albertin, Lothar et al. Liberalismus und imperialischer Staat: Der Imperialismus als Problem liberaler Parteien in Deutschland 1890–1914 (Düsseldorf, 1980). Anderson, Margaret L. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1984). Chapman, Mark. Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 2001). Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton, 1975). Conze, Eckart, Scholtyseck, Joachim, Weede, Erich, Frölich, Jürgen and Grothe, Ewald (eds). Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung, vols 1–24 (1989–2012). Cord Meyer, Henry. Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955). Davis, Christian. Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor, 2008). Eley, Geoff.Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (Ann Arbor, 1990). — and Retallack, James (eds). Wilhelminism and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930 (New York, 2003). Elm, Ludwig. Zwischen Fortschritt und Reaktion: Geschichte der Parteien der liberalen Bourgeoisie in Deutschland, 1893–1918 (Berlin, 1968).

84 See, for example, the Bundesarchiv Nachlass data bank (http://www.nachlassdatenbank.de); Archiv des Liberalismus (http://www.freiheit.org/Archiv-des-Liberalismus/716c61/index.html); Ursula Krey and Thomas Trump, Findbücher zu Bestandsgruppe R 45 – Liberale Parteien – I. Nationalliberale Partei II. Deutsche Volkspartei III. Deutsche Demokratische Partei – Deutsche Staatspartei (Koblenz, 1985).

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Evans, Richard J. The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933 (London, 1976). Fairbairn, Brett. Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The German Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903 (Toronto, 1997). Fetheringill Zwicker, Lisa. “The Burschenschaft and German Political Culture, 1890–1914,” Central European History, 42 (2009), pp. 389–428. Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848– 1884 (New York and Oxford, 2008). Gall, Lothar (ed.) Liberalismus (Cologne, 1976). — and Langewiesche, Dieter (eds). Liberalismus und Region (Munich, 1995). Göthel, Thomas. Demokratie und Volkstum: Die Politik gegenüber den nationalen Minderheiten in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 2002). Gross, Michael. Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004). Heckart, Beverly. From Bassermann to Bebel: The Grand Bloc’s Quest for Reform in the Kaiserreich, 1900–1914 (New Haven, 1974). Hewitson, Mark. “The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany Before the First World War,” Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp. 725–80. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. “Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Toward a Transnational Perspective,” Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), pp. 269–99. Holl, Karl, Trautmann, Günter, and Vorländer, Hans (eds). Sozialer Liberalismus (Göttingen, 1986). — and List, Günther (eds). Liberalismus und imperialistischer Staat (Göttingen, 1975). Hübinger, Gangolf. Kulturprotestantismus und Politik zum Verhaltnis von Liberalismus (Tübingen, 1994). Jefferies, Matthew.Contesting the German Empire 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008). Jenkins, Jennifer. Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, 2003). Jones, Larry Eugene. German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System (Chapel Hill, 1988). — and Retallack, James (eds). Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Germany (Washington, DC, 1992). Judson, Pieter. Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor, 1996). Köhne, Renate. Nationalliberale und Koalitionsrecht: Struktur und Verhalten der nationalliberalen Reichstagsfraktion 1890–1914 (Bern, 1977). Kurlander, Eric. The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 (New York and Oxford, 2006). —. “Between Völkisch and Universal Visions of Empire: Liberal Imperialism in Mitteleuropa, 1890–1918,” in Matthew Fitzpatrick (ed.), Liberal Imperialism in Europe (London, 2012), pp. 141–66. Ladd, Brian. Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914 (Cambridge, 1990). Langewiesche, Dieter. Liberalism in Germany (Princeton, 2000). Lässig, Simone. Wahlrechtskampf und Wahlreform in Sachsen, 1895–1909 (Weimar, 1996). Palmowski, Jan. Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany, Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914 (Oxford, 1999). Ping, Larry. “Gustav Freytag, the Reichsgründung, and the National Liberal Origins of the Sonderweg,” Central European History, 45 (2012), pp. 605–30. Pohl, Karl Heinrich (ed.) Politiker und Bürger: Gustav Stresemann und seine Zeit (Göttingen, 2002). Pulzer, Peter. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, 1988).

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Rahden, Till van. Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925 (Madison, 2008). Repp, Kevin. Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, 2000). Retallack, James (ed.) Saxony in German History: Culture, Society and Politics, 1830–1933 (Ann Arbor, 2000). Ringer, Fritz. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890– 1933 (Hanover, 1969). Rohe, Karl (ed.) Elections, Parties, and Political Traditions: Social Foundations of German Parties and Party Systems 1867–1987 (New York, 1990). Rohr, Donald G. The Origins of Social Liberalism in Germany (Chicago, 1963). Schaser, Angelika. Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer. Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, 2000). Sell, Friedrich. Die Tragödie des Deutschen Liberalismus (Baden-Baden, 1981). Sheehan, James. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978). Sperber, Jonathan. The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1997). Struve, Walter. Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (Princeton, 1973). Tamir, Yael. Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, 1995). Tewes, Henning and Wright, Jonathan (eds). Liberalism, Anti-Semitism, and Democracy (Oxford, 2001). Theiner, Peter (ed.) Friedrich Naumann im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Baden-Baden, 1983). Thieme, Hartwig. Nationaler Liberalismus in der Krise: Die Nationalliberale Fraktion des Preußischen Abgeordnetenhaus 1914–1918 (Boppard, 1963). Thompson, Alastair. Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (New York, 2000). Tober, Holger. Deutscher Liberalismus und Sozialpolitik in der Ära des Wilhelminismus (Husum, 1999). White, Dan S. The Splintered Party: National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich 1867–1918 (Cambridge, 1976). Wright, Jonathan. Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford, 2002).

110 6 conservatism

oded heilbronner

This chapter sets out to examine the characteristics of german conservatism in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period in which it was taking shape both as a political force and as an ideology with social and economic implications. As is the case with other ideologies, it is open to debate whether conservatism is really “an ideology at all, worthy of a capital c, or simply a disposition or identity with a small c, which can tolerate an awful lot of difference.”1 i wish to represent german conservatism in the period of its rise and crystallization as one of the main social and political forces in germany alongside liberalism. in the 1850s and 1860s, the stormy years before the unification of Germany, and in the following decades, German conservatism did indeed become “Conservatism with a capital C.” The chapter is divided into three parts. The first briefly considers what we mean by “conservatism”; in the second part, i shall look at the philosophy and socio-political outlook of german conservatism from the 1850s to the 1880s. finally, i devote a section to the changes it underwent in the wilhelmine era, and the historiographical debate which surrounds those changes. The main focus here is on prussian conservatism: throughout this period, and with few exceptions, the most important conservative leaders and thinkers came from prussia,2 where the protestant church was a cornerstone of conservative thought. for all its various currents and factions, the Prussian aristocracy exerted a tremendous influence on german political life throughout the empire and even after 1933. This does not mean, of course, that conservatism was non-existent outside prussia: in the states of central and southern germany like Thuringia, Bavaria, saxony, and Baden, conservative lines of thought developed which were not always in accordance with prussian ones.

What is Conservatism?

A certain perception of the nature of man and his place in society is basic to the conservative outlook. conservatism is a phenomenon universal to all mankind (what Karl mannheim termed “natural conservatism”).3 According to Giambattista Vico, the conservative view

1 Kieron o’hara, Conservatism (Chicago, 2011), p. 3. 2 Biographies of major conservative leaders can be found in Bernd haunfelder, Die konservativen Abgeordneten des Deutschen Reichstags 1871–1918. Ein biographisches Handbuch (Münster, 2009). The private papers of major conservative leaders can be found in the Bundesarchiv Berlin-lichterfelde (Herman Wagener, Leopold von Gerlach, Kuno von Westarp); the Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Heinrich Class, ); the Staatsbibliothek Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Julius Stahl); and the Gehimes Staatsarchiv-Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (Joseph Maria von Radowitz, Edwin von Manteuffel). 3 Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in Kurt Wolf (ed.), From Karl Mannheim (new york, 1971), pp. 152–3. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

is that man is naturally inclined to evil, and the task of society and its rules is therefore to restrain and limit the natural impulses and urges of its component elements. Conservatism seeks a social order for man as he is. The conservative thinks that the nature of man can be changed only with difficulty, if at all, and society therefore has to develop tools over a long period in order to protect itself. The thinkers who can be classed as conservative and who laid the foundation of conservative thought in the West are Xenophon and in the ancient world; Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages; Niccolo Machiavelli and Giambattista Vico in early modern times; and, perhaps most important of all, Edmund Burke at the end of the eighteenth century. Moreover, conservatism is the natural viewpoint of all the established religions, and especially the monotheistic ones, as the rationale for the existence of their institutions is precisely a pessimistic view of the capacity of man to progress on his own after he has heard the word of God, and hence the need for tools that will indicate the proper path. The nature of man is negative, and society can only exist by restraining it. That does not mean that conservatism does not recognize the power of human reason, but it believes that, despite its importance, reason alone is not enough to guide society. In addition to “natural conservatism,” there is another sort of conservatism that is less universal and more modern; the product of particular historical and social circumstances (sometimes referred to as “modern conservatism”). Here, two main issues occupy the conservative outlook: the attitude to the past and the institution of the family. The attitude to the past, or tradition, is set in relation to human experience, including the institutions and social customs that have sprung up over the course of time, and that are the main obstacle to the domination of evil and corruption in man’s life. Historical experience is reflected in behavior, traditions, and sometimes prejudices and taboos of various kinds that prevent us from seeing acts of murder and brutality as a matter of routine, judged solely according to the criteria of usefulness or rationality. Traditions do not oppress but develop sentiment and identification. Tradition is not something played out, but a living force which contributes to contemporary society through the accumulated wisdom of the successful, and unsuccessful, experience of former generations. Complementing the importance of tradition and the attitude to the past, the family is regarded as the cornerstone of every human society; the last refuge of the individual when all hope is lost. If this axis falls, the whole of society is overtaken by revolution. Emphasis is placed on the preservation of the wholeness of the family with its patriarchal order, the place of man and woman within it, and of course the function of the home and of work as contributing to the preservation of the family unit. In the sphere of politics, conservatism became a political force around the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The founding father of conservative political thought was Edmund Burke, author of the seminal essay “Reflections on the French Revolution.” According to Burke, the great danger for man was his liberation from all that the revolutionary saw as fetters. In Burke’s opinion, the human liberty that Rousseau and the revolutionaries so desired was not man’s original state or the product of reason but the result of “civil society,” a traditional framework which came into being at a certain time in order to counteract human obstacles, and which exists through the experience and labor of many generations. The achievements of society can be destroyed if they are not protected. Burke’s legacy was a centerpiece of conservative thinking all over Europe (and in the United States) well into the twentieth century. What makes conservatives “conservative” are the implications they have drawn from Burke’s view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, again with Burke,

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that inheritance is best passed on through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives are not necessarily hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to pre-existing opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the fundamental basis of Burke’s critique of the French Revolution: it was not simply a defense of privilege. So far we have explained what conservatism is against. What is the conservative prescription for an improved social and personal order? According to Vico, human society is not only a collection of interested individuals but also an accumulation of values and communal traditions. Reason and experience emerged separately among different peoples, but they are characteristics common to all mankind. It is the “conventional wisdom” shared by a whole class, a whole people, a whole nation, and the entire human race. The “common sense” (Burke sometimes used the term “public wisdom”) of an uncodified legal system developed through judgments amassed over hundreds of years—a law accepted though unwritten—was different from a body of laws created by parliament. According to Burke, this public wisdom and common sense are praiseworthy obstacles to the revolutionary spirit. It was fortunate that “because we suspect that this stock [of common sense] in each man is small … that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.”4 There were, of course, significant differences on any number of specifics, as wellas ideological disagreements, between those for whom economic laissez-faire was paramount, those who accepted a paternalistic state in the name of social stability, and those who combined elements of both approaches. In the political realm one can find conservative thinking among liberal activists and vice versa. Even among nineteenth-century European socialists, one can sometimes discern a conservative way of thinking, especially with regard to family values and the role of women in public affairs. In short, these are the principles of conservative thought which crystallized in the course of the nineteenth century, and which constituted the corpus of conservative thought in Europe until the second half of the twentieth century. In accordance with these principles, six canons of conservatism may be discerned: first, a belief in a transcendent order, ruling society as well as individual conscience; second, affirmation of virtue in human society; third, a preference for order; fourth, a belief in private property as the basis of freedom; fifth, a distrust of abstraction, and faith in custom, tradition and prescription; and finally, a prudent opposition to hasty reform. In the following discussion, I would like to study these canons in the specific context of Prussia, and in particular with regard to the following issues: state and society; social relations; the market economy; the authoritarianism state; and nationalism. In recent decades historians have begun to examine conservative responses to the democratic challenges laid down across central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. They have found that conservative elites attempted to adapt to the new political circumstances by incorporating and reformulating progressive elements into their policies (“state conservatism”), rather than limiting themselves to a traditional conservative agenda (“old conservatism”). The latter had developed earlier in the century as a defense of traditional corporate interests as against liberal nationalism. A few decades later, after the revolutions of 1848–49, conservative élites and intellectuals used the social, technological, and economic developments initiated by liberalism (railways, freedom of trade, and so on) to demonstrate the continued relevance of conservative thought. Alongside “state conservatism” a “social conservatism” also began to develop, rethinking the relationship between the state and

4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited with an introduction and notes by Conor Cruise O’Brien (London, 2004), p. 183.

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society at a time of deep and rapid social change. Even apparently traditional appeals to preserve old practices and institutions were seldom couched in wholesale opposition to what others considered to be progressive change: few German conservatives wanted simply to stop the hands of time, let alone turn them back.5

Prussian Conservative Thought from the 1850s to the 1880s

Prussian conservatism sought to impose organic principles of harmony and mutuality on the changing pattern of social and economic relationships resulting from the development of industrial capitalism. The metaphor of an organism was favored by nearly all the leading conservative thinkers of the age. The attachment to this metaphor and the construction of whole theses on the basis of it made it the definitive paradigm of nineteenth-century German conservative thought. The reason for the continued relevance of the concept of organicism is that it was an ideological response—political, social, and moral—both to political theories from the end of the eighteenth century and to long drawn-out processes of social, economic, and political modernization. But the relevance of the concept was also to some extent due to its elasticity, which permitted its adaption to processes of change. The stress onthe evolutionary aspect of the organism not only gave validity to what had existed for many years, but led the way to an acceptance of certain modern processes within the organism as a whole. The organism, in accordance with its biological nomenclature, did not deteriorate or cease to develop. It adapted to its changing environment in an attempt to survive. The nature of the organic perception of society and the state reveals another important aspect of the conservative position too. The idea that the state and its institutions are the embodiment of social interaction gives society a special role in determining the character of the state. The state, according to this conception, is not subject to the arbitrariness of a mechanistic ruling apparatus, as, for instance, under an absolutist regime, even if it is not autonomous from the political point of view. As society and the state are natural, successive, and complementary stages in an organic development without any clear, unequivocal division between them, there is no need to have an agreement making the state into an artificial construct (which is how conservatives viewed modern theories of a social contract). Thus society, in the organic conservative conception, does not have to “define itself” in order to become a state or a nation. It is defined by the social relationships that form it and the political authority that regulates and guarantees it. Conservatism saw inequality as a natural and all-important basis of the system of social relationships, and as a dominant characteristic of the structure of society as a whole. Prussian conservatives considered any attempt to introduce social or political equality to be revolutionary. They believed that the equalization of the social and political status of citizens would upset the organic structure of state and society. Inequality was deemed to be the determining factor in the essence and quality of relationships, from the primary difference between men and women to the extension of the family to society and the state. Indeed, from a conservative perspective, inequality was the social organism’s uniting and

5 My analysis owes much to the excellent study by Avraham Doron, In der Krise der Moderne: der preussische Konservativismus im Zeitalter gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen 1848–1876 (Göttingen, 2010). In addition I have consulted Herman Beck, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy and the Social Question, 1815–70 (Ann Arbor, 1995); and Theodore Hamerow, The Social Foundations of German Unification, 1858–1871 (Princeton, 1969).

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motivating principle. The idea that the functioning of the organism was dependent on the heterogeneity of its parts made it indispensable to preserve social inequalities. It is possible to discern some liberal elements in this discussion; for example, in the way that an individual’s primary obligation is to himself and only subsequently to society as a whole. But in order to avoid the undesirable consequences of unfettered liberalism, conservatives stressed the collective obligations and personal responsibilities which governed their relationship to capital. They saw a real difference between their attitude to the different elements in society and the bonds of solidarity between them, andthe irresponsible, hedonistic, and selfish individualism prescribed by liberalism, which stressed the freedom of the individual above all else. From a conservative perspective, the industrial revolution and the rise of the modern capitalist economy broke up the natural organic relationships that held society together. The network of social relationships that created the time-honored values of society—solidarity, authority, mutual obligation, philanthropy, and concern for the collective—was undermined by the development of the market and materialism. The individual who gained economic independence soon found that the freedom imposed upon him could also do harm and undermine his security to the point of threatening his economic existence. According to the conservative view, liberal individualism and the pursuit of material gain ultimately led to the atomization of society. They believed that the individual’s indifference to the collective, which was an inevitable consequence of the new economic order, undermined the foundations of society as a healthy organism in which every organ fulfilled its function in accordance with its capacity and in relation to the whole. At the same time many conservatives realized that social and economic change was inevitable, and their resultant concern for the poor or for industrial workers cannot simply be ascribed to narrow class interests. This “social” principle was not new in conservative thought: it had been there from the start, deriving its legitimacy from . Now, however, following the battering taken by the aristocratic social ethos in the revolutions of 1848–49, there was a need to present it as a supremely aristocratic value. Their sense of obligation towards the collective, and especially towards the disadvantaged, had the same theological origin: the responsibility and obligation which befell the wealthy to aid the poor and the suffering. In the light of the rapid social and economic changes occurring in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century, these values seemed more relevant than ever. Conservatives had already started to discuss a renewed conception of the role of the state and the monarchy before 1848. The declining relevance of the feudal order, the continuous growth of the centralized Beamtenstaat, and the strengthening of the capitalist economy all had the effect of weakening the influence of the landed aristocracy on central government. This had led, as early as the 1830s, to discussions among conservative intellectuals about the purpose of the state. The failed revolutions of 1848–49 did not in the final analysis weaken the power of the state, but indirectly accelerated the growth of the capitalist economy and the decline of the old social order with the break-up of the corporative state (Ständestaat). Monarchy by the grace of God may now have been the sole refuge of the conservatives and their only guarantee of preserving the social order, but this did not make them supporters of absolute royal power. In the decades after the revolutions, a different approach to state power and monarchy can be discerned among the conservatives. Its roots could be found partly in the late eighteenth century, under the influence of Burke and Adam Müller, and in reaction to the French Revolution. At that time, when conservative ideology was first beginning to take shape, the state was considered the broadest and most comprehensive framework in the life of society. The state was the ultimate expression of family, tribal, and social relationships. As an organism, the “health” of all its organs was an essential precondition

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for its proper functioning. This idealistic connection between the whole and its constituent parts, and its commitment to both, was inherent in conservatives’ very definition of the state. After the experience of 1848, and under the influence of social and economic change, some German conservative thinkers began to go further and advocate a stronger state as a way of ordering life for the benefit of the whole of society, and especially its poorer “organs.” As Theodore Hamerow has pointed out, for example, this was evident in the program of the conservative Prussian People’s Association (1861), which advocated a strong state “through adherence of authority and justice […] No break with the past […] Protection and respect for honest labor.”6 The national question was the most burning issue in German (and European) politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, meaning that all political factions had little option but to engage with it. The resulting discourse also helped to provide answers to the gradual dissolution of traditional structures, relationships, and rights. In the liberal view, a modern nation-state would be based on liberal and constitutional principles, in which social emancipation took an appropriate form. The modern German nation-state would be more egalitarian than the preceding states because its citizens, at least in theory, would enjoy considerable freedom compared to the old restricted forms of social and political organization. Conservatives—who could not risk leaving the field to liberals alone—needed to produce alternative concepts and definitions. They argued that the abandonment of the individual in modern society necessitated support frameworks and points of identification, which could restore the individual to the collective and protect the true values of both. It was these social values which lay behind conservative discussions on nationhood and national identity. The differences with the liberal position are significant: liberals wished to create a national identity in accordance with modern principles and cultural criteria, and therefore had to adopt existing points of identification, create new ones, and combine them in order to give the people a new kind of identity. Conservatives, on the other hand, took the most basic and authentic social forms, traditions, and beliefs—forms and beliefs that were essentially universal—and made them especially representative of German identity. The family, for instance, both as an expression of natural organic relationships and as a splendid example of a framework of group solidarity, was regarded by conservatives as a worthy model for the crystallization of the German nation. The family was an ideal model of social relationships and at the same time an expression of exclusively German qualities. Similarly, conservatives attached a special importance to the connection between Christianity and the German people, and to the idea of a Christian nation. The Germans were said to be a people who had tenaciously preserved the values of Christianity from its inception, and were outstanding in their capacity to preserve the unity of the (Protestant) church in times of crisis. From this point of view, the Germans were a chosen people with a special mission which distinguished them from other Christian peoples. A Christian social and political order, and a religious set of values, were therefore the criteria that determined the collective identity of society, and hence of the entire German people. The conservative emphasis on German uniqueness was based on traditional criteria, and at this time downplayed the importance of elements like race, culture, and language. Conservatives felt no particular attraction to the idea of a nation-state, but if Germany was to become one, it would have to safeguard the traditional frameworks and values which they cherished.

6 Hamerow, Social Foundations, pp. 198–9.

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From Conservatism to the Radical Right, 1890–1914

The unprecedented growth of the economy, the consolidation of the capitalist system, the expansion of the proletariat and the continuation of social distress, the decay of old social and economic relationships, the increasingly obvious separation of state and society, and the transformation of the political landscape—all this amounted to a crisis of modernity in conservative eyes. Yet hardly any of them thought that the previous order could be restored: there was now a real necessity to confront the change. Leading Prussian conservatives, most of them members of the agrarian aristocracy, had already adopted many of the ideas of “state conservatism,” while simultaneously seeking to preserve their traditional privileges. However, in the Wilhelmine era the conservative camp underwent further significant change, ideologically and institutionally, and these are the focus of the following section. The name of the game here is the transformation from the conservative mind to conservative action; from Protestant Prussian conservative values (as described above) to the formation of the radical right, as conservative ideology opened up to racial, antisemitic, ultra-nationalist, and imperialist influences in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Alongside the existing conservative parties, new associations and pressure groups sought to influence public life: to lobby for nationalist and/or imperialist policies; to fight republican, socialist, and leftist tendencies in German society; and to establish a social system based on the values of the Protestant church and “law and order” (Ruhe und Ordnung). This kind of society, or “community” (Gemeinschaft), was increasingly proposed as an ideal type for German society, and would of course gain greater significance in the years after 1918.7 Until the 1970s, most scholars of the German right tended to interpret this socio-political phenomenon by continually referring to German conservatism or conservatives—especially the Prussian Junker—and their malign influence.8 For many scholars, these two things were one and the same. At the same time, many sought to examine the socio-political thought and conceptual lexicon of the German right. Particular attention was paid to the cultural and intellectual imagery of right-wing ideologues: the national-religious fundamentalism of and Adolf Stoecker; the völkisch nationalism of and his numerous progenitors; the revolutionary elitism of Friedrich Nietzsche; the aesthetic fundamentalism of Stefan George and Ernst Jünger. In recent decades, however, things have started to change: scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the social and political bases of the radical right, viewing it as a phenomenon connected to German society as a whole, in all its variety and all its regions, without insisting on the obligatory connection with the Junker and Prussian conservatism. The groundbreaking studies of Roger Chickering, Geoff Eley, James Retallack and other predominantly Anglo-American scholars laid down a challenge to their German colleagues.9 Their work not only rewrote the history of the radical right in the Kaiserreich but also sought to redefine it through methods derived from the social history of politics. That is to say, their studies dealt with the complex interplay between the radical right and

7 Thomas Rohkämer, A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism (New York and Oxford, 2007), chapters 3–4; Geoff Eley, “Origins, Post-Conservatism and 1933: Nazism as a Breach,” in idem, Nazism as Fascism (New York, 2013). 8 What follows is based partly on my article “The German Right: Has It Changed?” German History, 21 (2003), pp. 541–61. 9 Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984); Geoff Eley, “The German Right: How It Changed,” in idem,From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), pp. 231–56; James Retallack, Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany 1876–1918 (London, 1988).

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German society, pointing out that the connection between its leaders and supporters was not always manipulative or dictated from above; that it was culturally, geographically, and socially divided; and that for most of the pre-First World War period it remained weak and incoherent. These studies posed a serious challenge to the Sonderweg thesis, which had been revitalized in the 1970s by German historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans‑Jürgen Puhle, Hartmut Kaelble, Dirk Stegmann, and others. This grouping, sometimes referred to as the Bielefeld School, undoubtedly influenced a generation of German scholars to look critically on the Prussian conservatives for their blockade of reform before 1918 and their complicity in the failure of the Weimar Republic. Recent German studies have taken a more nuanced view: Volker Stalmann’s study of the Free Conservative Party, a party whose power bases and organizations were so heterogeneous and geographically dispersed—Silesia, Saxony, the Rhineland, Brandenburg—that it is hard to imagine as part of a Prussian Sonderweg from Bismarck to Hitler; Matthias Alexander’s study of the same party in the Wilhelmine period, which suggested it was given to compromise and flexible in its dealings with both interest groups and government; and Axel Grießmer’s study of electoral politics between 1903 and 1912, which suggested that it was the weakness of the radical right which led to the radicalization of the Pan-German League and the Navy League on the eve of the First World War.10 Recent research suggests we should be very cautious when discussing the “conservative milieu.”11 Although one might imagine it located in the backwoods, a small rural town somewhere east of the River Elbe—with its own distinctive political culture dependent on the local estate owner, the Protestant clergy, and other local notables such as the village school teacher—it was in fact anything but uniform. Contrary to the “milieu” models proposed by M. Rainer Lepsius and Karl Rohe (see Chapter 4 in this volume), most recent authors argue that conservative voters and activists came from different and contradictory directions.12 This is especially true in the case of the Free Conservative Party, which attained what Jonathan Sperber has described as a “dynamic stability” in the years around 1900 by attracting new voters and drawing on other parties, particularly the National Liberals.13 In this sense, the conservative parties had no specific milieu. As my own work has shown, they were weak in south-west Baden, but in neighboring Württemberg they enjoyed stable

10 Volker Stalmann, Die Partei Bismarcks: die Deutsche Reichs- und Freikonservative Partei 1866–1890 (Düsseldorf, 2000); Matthias Alexander, Die Freikonservative Partei 1890–1918: gemäßigter Konservatismus in der konstitutionellen Monarchie (Düsseldorf, 2000); Axel Grießmer, Massenparteien im wilhelminischen Reich: zum Wandel der Wahlkultur, 1903–1912 (Düsseldorf, 2000). 11 Larry Eugene Jones discusses this in a new collection of articles devoted to the German right during the Weimar period. In his introduction he suggests ignoring terms such as “the German right” or “Conservative milieu.” Instead we should study fragmentations and destabilization within those (alleged) camps. See Larry E. Jones, “Introduction: The German Right in the Weimar Republic: New Directions, New Insights, New Challenges,” in idem (ed.), The German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism (New York, 2014), pp. 1–28. 12 Margaret L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000), chapter 6; Robert von Friedberg, “Dörfliche Gesellschaft und Integration sozialen Protests durch Liberale und Konservative im 19. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 17 (1991), pp. 311–43; Peter Lösche and Franz Walter, “Katholiken, Konservative und Liberale: Milieus und Lebenswelten bürgerlicher Parteien in Deutschland während des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000), pp. 474–6. 13 Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1997).

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support from 1880 until the 1900s.14 In Bavaria, they depended on the Protestant districts of Franconia, where the bulk of their voters were peasants, small landowners, and artisans; in the Rhineland, the local Catholic aristocracy was important; in Saxony, they attracted large numbers of the lower-middle class. The heterogeneous character of the conservative milieu is also apparent in works which take a cultural perspective. Frank Bösch, for instance, has shown that a conservative infrastructure was weak or non-existent in parts of northern Germany until well into the twentieth century. In these areas radical right organizations such as the Pan-German League or the Navy League held little sway, and nominally conservative parties such as the German Conservative Party or the Hanoverian-Guelph Party had liberal supporters too. Local Heimat associations, and institutions such as local history museums, sometimes provided a basis for the development of a conservative infrastructure, but this was a slow and gradual process.15 What was needed to consolidate the strength of the right in such places was a powerful enemy which could act as a common rallying point. Often this did not occur until during or after the First World War, with the strengthening of socialism in these areas.

Conclusion

For many, finding the roots of National Socialism remains the Holy Grail of modern German history. Within this search, German—and especially Prussian—conservatism continues to feature prominently. The relationship between the two is, however, complex, problematic, and multifaceted. Many scholars still regard German conservatives as fundamentally different from their counterparts in Britain or France, even if they accept that the relationship between conservatism and the radical right is far more complex than was once thought by proponents of the Sonderweg thesis. Yet we must not forget that there were perfectly legitimate “traditional” grounds for conservative-minded Germans to oppose the liberal reform agenda in the first decade of the Empire, or the clamor for electoral reform in the Wilhelmine era. Many simply wanted to slow the pace of change and to find ways of preserving traditional, often religious, values in an era of growing materialism and secularization. Ideologically, the most fruitful period in the history of German conservatism came in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was in those years that German society as a whole encountered modernity for the first time, and most conservatives did not like what they saw. Forced to adjust and reflect on rapidly changing circumstances, most German conservatives sought a solution which combined modernity with tradition, economic progress with political authoritarianism, class interests with mass politics. Whatever we may think of it, the social model envisaged by conservatives represented a real alternative to the liberal worldview. Indeed, one can argue that it contributed much to the stabilization of Germany in the stormy years after 1871.

14 Oded Heilbronner, “In Search of the (Rural) Catholic Bourgeoisie: The Bürgertum of South Germany,” Central European History, 29 (1996), pp. 175–200; idem, Catholicism, Political Culture, and the Countryside: A Social History of the Nazi Party in South Germany (Ann Arbor, 1998). 15 Frank Bösch, Das konservative Milieu: Vereinskultur und lokale Sammlungspolitik in ost- und westdeutschen Regionen, 1900–1960 (Göttingen, 2002).

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Albrecht, Henning. Antiliberalismus und Antisemitismus: Hermann Wagener und die preußischen Sozialkonservativen 1855–1873 (Paderborn, 2010). Alexander, Matthias. Die Freikonservative Partei 1890–1918: gemäßigter Konservatismus in der konstitutionellen Monarchie (Düsseldorf, 2000). Anderson, Margaret L. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). Baranowski, Shelly. The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (New York and Oxford, 1995). Beck, Herman. The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy and the Social Question, 1815–70 (Ann Arbor, 1995). —. The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light (Oxford and New York, 2008). Berghoff, Hartmut. “Adel und Industriekapitalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Abstoßungskräfte und Annäherungstendenzen zweier Lebenswelten,” in Heinz Reif (ed.), Adel und Bürgertum, vol. 1, Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000), pp. 233–71. Biland, Stefan. Die Deutsch-Konservative Partei und der Bund der Landwirte in Württemberg vor 1914: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Parteien im Königreich Württemberg (Stuttgart, 2002). Bösch, Frank. Das konservative Milieu: Vereinskultur und lokale Sammlungspolitik in ost- und westdeutschen Regionen, 1900–1960 (Göttingen, 2002). Breuer, Stefan. Ordnungen der Ungleichheit. Die deutsche Rechte im Widerstreit ihrer Ideen 1871– 1945 (Darmstadt, 2001). —. Die Völkischen in Deutschland. Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Darmstadt, 2008). Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited with an introduction and notes by Conor Cruise O’Brien (London, 2004). Chickering, Roger. We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984). Clark, Christopher. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947 (London, 2010). Doron, Avraham. In der Krise der Moderne: der preussische Konservativismus im Zeitalter gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen 1848–1876 (Göttingen, 2010). Eley, Geoff. “The German Right: How It Changed,” in idem, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), pp. 231–56. —. “Origins, Post-Conservatism, and the History of the Right,” Central European History, 43 (2010), pp. 327–39. Friedberg, Robert von. “Dörfliche Gesellschaft und Integration sozialen Protests durch Liberale und Konservative im 19. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 17 (1991), pp. 311–43. Gawatz, Andreas. Wahlkämpfe in Württemberg: Landtags- und Reichstagswahlen beim Übergang zum politischen Massenmarkt, 1889–1912 (Düsseldorf, 2001). Giloi, Eva. Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2011). Grießmer, Axel. Massenparteien im wilhelminischen Reich: zum Wandel der Wahlkultur, 1903– 1912 (Düsseldorf, 2000). Grothe, Ewald (ed.) Konservative deutsche Politiker im 19. Jahrhundert. Wirken – Wirkung – Wahrnehmung (Marburg, 2010). Hamerow, Theodore. The Social Foundations of German Unification 1858–1871 (Princeton, 1969).

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Haunfelder, Bernd. Die konservativen Abgeordneten des Deutschen Reichstags 1871–1918. Ein biographisches Handbuch (Münster, 2009). Heilbronner, Oded. “The German Right: Has It Changed?” German History, 21 (2003), pp. 541–61. —. “Es lebe die Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit und das Dynamit”: Populärer Kultur, Populärer Liberalismus und das Bürgertum in ländlichen Deutschland (Munich, 2006). Jones, Larry E. “Introduction: The German Right in the Weimar Republic: New Directions, New Insights, New Challenges,” in idem (ed.), The German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism (New York, 2014), pp. 1–28. — and Retallack, James (eds). Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (New York, 1993). — and —. “German Conservatism Reconsidered,” in idem (eds), Between Reform, Reaction and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (New York, 1993), pp. 1–30. Levinger, Matthew. Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (Oxford, 2000). Lösche, Peter and Walter, Franz. “Katholiken, Konservative und Liberale: Milieus und Lebenswelten bürgerlicher Parteien in Deutschland während des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000), pp. 474–6. Mannheim, Karl. “Conservative Thought,” in Kurt Wolf (ed), From Karl Mannheim (New York, 1971). Matthiesen, Helge.G reifswald in Vorpommern. Konservatives Milieu in Demokratie und Diktatur 1900–1990 (Frankfurt, 2000). Müller, Hans Peter. “Wilhelm Vogt. Württembergischer Bauernbundpolitiker und bäuerlicher Standesvertreter im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik,” in G. Taddey and J. Ficher (eds), Lebensbilder aus Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart, 1994), pp. 395– 417. Muller, Jerry. “Introduction: What Is Conservative Social and Political Thought?” in idem (ed), Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton, 1997). Nipperdey, Thomas. Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866 (Princeton, 1996). Nitschke, Wolf. Adolf Heinrich Graf v. Arnim-Boitzenburg (1803–1868): Eine politische Biographie (Berlin, 2004). Nolte, Ernst. “Germany,” in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber (eds), The European Right (Berkeley, 1966). Nolte, Paul. Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft. Selbstenwurf und Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2000). O’Hara, Kieron. Conservatism (Chicago, 2011). Puhle, Hans-Jürgen. Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich 1893–1914 (Hanover, 1966). Pyta, Wolfram. Dorfgemeinschaft und Parteipolitik 1918–1933. Die Verschränkung von Milieu und Parteien in den protestantischen Landgebieten Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1997). Reif, Heinz. Adel im 19.und 20 Jahrhundert, 2nd edn (Munich, 2000). — (ed.) Elitenwandel in der Moderne (Munich, 2000). Retallack, James. Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany 1876–1918 (London, 1988).

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—. “‘What Is to Be Done?’ Liberals, Conservatives and the Modernizing State: The Kaiserreich in Regional Perspective,” in Geoff Eley (ed.), Culture, Society and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 221–56. —. “Conservatives and Antisemites in Baden and Saxony,” German History, 17 (1999), pp. 507–26. — (ed.) Saxony in German History (Ann Arbor, 2000). Rohkämer, Thomas. A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism (New York and Oxford, 2007). Schildt, Alex. Konservatismus in Deutschland. Von den Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1998). See, Klaus von. Freiheit und Gemeinschaft. Völkisch-nationales Denken in Deutschland zwischen Französischer Revolution und Erstem Weltkrieg (Heidelberg, 2001). Smith, Helmut . “Alltag und politischer Antisemitismus in Baden, 1890–1900,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 141 (1993), pp. 280–303. Sperber, Jonathan. The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1997). Spickermann, Roland. “Pragmatism over Tradition: The Agrarian League and the German Farmers’ Association in the Bromberg Regierungsbezirk, 1909–1910,” German History, 19 (2001), pp. 525–48. Stalmann, Volker. Die Partei Bismarcks: die Deutsche Reichs- und Freikonservative Partei 1866– 1890 (Düsseldorf, 2000). Stegmann, Dirk et al. (eds). Deutscher Konservatismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer (Bonn, 1983). Theilemann, Wolfram. Adel im grünen Rock: Adliges Jägertum, Großprivatwaldbesitz und die preußische Forstbeamtenschaft 1866–1914 (Berlin, 2004). Vico, Giambattista.The New Science (Ithaca, 1984). Weiss, Dieter. “Grundlinien des Konservativismus in Bayern,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 62 (1999), pp. 521–43. Werner, Meike. “Provincial Modernism: Jena as Publishing Program,” The Germanic Review, 4 (2001), pp. 319–34. Wolf, Stefen. Konservativismus in Liberalen Baden (Berlin, 1990). —. Für Deutschtum, Thron und Altar. Die Deutsch-Soziale Reformpartei in Baden, 1890–1907 (, 1995).

122 7 nationalism

mark hewitson

The principal debate about nationalism in imperial germany has come recently to involve an evaluation of the significance of a putative movement towards ‘globalization’ and transnational networks, mobility and forms of interaction. The effects of such mobility and expansion from the 1880s onwards renders intelligible, not so much ‘the shift from a “left-wing” to a “right-wing” nationalism’, given that ‘aggressive and exclusive dimensions had been constitutive elements of german nationalism since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century’, but ‘the adding of ethnic categories and social or eugenic technologies to nationalism’, which encouraged a more and more frequent use of demonic national stereotypes against internal and external ‘foreign’ populations, in Sebastian Conrad’s opinion.1 This supposed ‘transformation of national self-understanding through racial discourse’, which was tied to imperialism and was characteristic of modern antisemitism, coincided with the metamorphosis of nationalism from ‘an affair of the educated middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum) to a mass phenomenon’ and the manifestation of ‘a heightened awareness of questions about the securing of borders’, which is a corollary of the ‘spatial turn’ in the study of nationalism and which corresponded to the spread of passports and the statistical reporting of immigration.2 The increasing movement and expanding horizons of subjects during the imperial period allegedly help to explain their ‘nervousness’, their fear of transgressing boundaries, their anxiety about ‘others’ and their support for – or lack of criticism of – radical forms of nationalism. This chapter examines these questions in light of earlier research into nationalism. During the last 30 years or so, historians have come to accept many of the arguments about subjectivity, mediation, mobility, shifting boundaries and discontinuity which were articulated by the sociologist Georg Simmel more than a century ago.3 At best, a shared sense of attachment to a nation seems to be illusory, artificial and historically specific rather than natural and eternal, as had previously been assumed. ‘Nations’, which combined a cultural sense of belonging with a political will to achieve self-determination, are products of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and are already showing signs, according to scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm, of being eclipsed during this century. ‘National identity’, from this perspective, is not analogous to individual identity, for it is not coterminous with a single will and a consistent personality or single physical entity. normally, it denotes only a common – and possibly transient – sense of political and cultural affiliation: individuals

1 Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (munich, 2006), p. 22; Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (eds), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus (frankfurt, 2002), p. 40. 2 Ibid., pp. 21–3. For the literature on these questions and those below, see the reading list at the end of the chapter. 3 Georg Simmel, ‘Die Arbeitsteilung als Ursache für das Auseinandertreten der subjektiven und der objektiven Kultur’ (1900), in H.-J. Dahme and O. Rammstedt (eds), Georg Simmel: Schriften zur Soziologie (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 116–18. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

are identical in feeling an attachment to the nation, even though the grounds for their attachment, as Celia Applegate, Alon Confino and Dieter Langewiesche have shown, are often divergent and sometimes dissonant. Historically, a sense of national identity has usually rested on a number of shared assumptions, beyond simple attachment: the majority of individuals within a nation, although not the same by any means with respect to their personalities, do hold some similar views, however temporary or unimportant. Individuals must be seen to be similar, and to act as a single group, rather than merely being similar.4 National identity results, as Jürgen Habermas has claimed, from ‘a circulatory process that is generated through the legal institutionalization of citizens’ communication’.5 Historians, in attempting to explain the organicism of German conceptions of the nation (or what the historian Friedrich Meinecke, one of the first theorists of a German nation, called ‘a natural core based on a blood relationship’), have tended to treat the Kaiserreich as a special case, as a consequence of its late unification, rapid industrialization and exposure – in such circumstances – to ‘globalization’.6 There have, since the 1960s, been many variations on these themes, but most have concentrated on race, culture or the state. In the view of many transnational historians, culture had come to be understood increasingly in racial terms in Germany: ‘the permeation of turn-of-the-century nationalism with elements of racial thought can hardly be explained sufficiently if the analysis is limited to an intra-European history of ideas’, Conrad contends, since the combination of global mobility, imperialism and a transformation of the means of communication had allegedly accelerated ‘the dynamic of national differentiation’ and led to a racialization of national discourses.7 To post-war American scholars like Hans Kohn, Fritz Stern and George Mosse too, German national identity owed more to culture, ethnicity or even race than its French or British counterparts, partly because of the absence of a German nation-state before 1871. Accordingly, Deutschtum was rarely a question of voluntary attachment to a set of political ideals or institutions, as in the founding myth of the United States; rather, it was defined in terms of cultural or genetic attributes, frequently as an act of defence against alleged French or British predominance. During the post-unification era, such an exclusive definition of German identity could easily turn inwards, to root out ‘aliens’; or outwards, to subjugate ‘inferior’ neighbouring peoples. Harold James, amongst others, has extended the scope of these arguments by contending that the cultural ‘building blocks of German national identity’ were, in addition, contradictory and precarious, with the result, when they were combined with the ‘incomplete’ political institutions of the Reich, that ‘Germany alone played Great Power politics with all the unfulfilled ambitions and romantic expectations of a movement for national awakening’. The First World War is then understood as ‘a war to complete the incomplete nation’.8 James’ thesis about the German state coincides, in large part, with that which is put forward by Fritz Fischer, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Volker Berghahn and the Hamburg and Bielefeld Schools: the Kaiserreich, it is argued, was an incoherent, aristocratic and outdated system of government, increasingly out of kilter with the economic foundations and class composition of an industrializing society; the continuing power of this state, resting on an expanding, independent and Junker-dominated army, had the dual effect of ‘feudalizing’ significant sections of the German middle classes and prompting Bernhard von Bülow

4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991). 5 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Reply to Grimm’, in P. Gowan and B. Anderson (eds), The Question of Europe (London, 1997), p. 264. Also, Jürgen Habermas, Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität (St Gallen, 1992). 6 Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Princeton, 1970), pp. 1–16. 7 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, p. 322. 8 Harold James, A German Identity, 1770–1990 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 33, 110.

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and Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to pursue a diversionary foreign policy of ‘social imperialism’. Like James, most adherents of the Hamburg and Bielefeld Schools have depicted German nationalism as a means of escape – a Flucht nach vorn – from the conflicts and fragmentation of Wilhelmine society. They differ from James only in the degree of significance which they attach to the state. This is a line of thought that has sincebeen extended by John Breuilly, who discounts many of the cultural underpinnings of the German national movement and idea. Nationalism is described, instead, although not exclusively, as a political reaction to the interventions and aspirations of the state: it was ‘a consequence, not a cause of the new German nation-state’.9 Culture continues to have a role in sustaining national identity, particularly in Breuilly’s more recent writings, but it is subordinated to that of the institutions of the German Empire, which themselves inspired and created a predominant conception of Germanness. The Reich, it is held, ‘rather than being the product of one version of the national idea, was turning into its principal creator’.10 What unites most historians is their inclination to treat German nationalism as a pathology or, at least, a potential menace. Thus, Otto Dann, the author of one of the main German-language works on the subject, makes a distinction between ‘patriotism’, in which individual and group interests are subordinated to those of ‘society as a whole’, and ‘nationalism’, which results ‘when the egalitarian basic consensus, on which a nation rests, is no longer respected’.11 To Dann and many other historians of Germany, the term ‘nationalism’ usually refers to radical, right-wing chauvinism or racism. In the wake of Anglo-American revisionism during the last three decades, some research has examined emancipatory nationalism, which had been intertwined with German liberalism for most of the nineteenth century, yet much of the literature on the Kaiserreich has continued to focus on extra-parliamentary leagues, on the rightward shift of political parties and the creation of a national opposition, and on the popularity of antisemitism, militarism and imperialism. By contrast, this chapter looks at the everyday expressions of what has been termed ‘banal nationalism’.12 It asks whether nationalism in the broad sense – the will amongst a group of people to form or maintain a nation-state – was indeed, as Ernest Gellner claims, a more or less general assumption in a society like Imperial Germany, which stood on the brink of modernity. Since the study of nationalism during the imperial era involves, not the investigation of a discrete political party or movement, but a set of individual assumptions, sentiments, ideas and political objectives, alongside others, it requires historians to consult a wide range of sources, from government records of political negotiations and policy- making decisions to the autobiographical testimony of ‘nationalists’ – officials, politicians, journalists, writers and citizens – themselves, together with the treatises, newspaper articles and other records of rituals and artefacts which contributed to the symbolic framework within which ‘nations’ were represented and embodied. Different aspects of such everyday nationalism are considered here.

9 John J. Breuilly, The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800–1871 (London, 1996), p. 113. 10 John J. Breuilly, ‘The National Idea in Modern German History’, in M. Fulbrook (ed.), German History Since 1800 (London, 1997), p. 570. 11 Otto Dann,Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1770–1990, 3rd revised edn (Munich, 1996), pp. 16, 20. 12 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995).

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Nationalism as a Form of Politics

‘Without overrating itself a people does not arrive at knowledge of itself at all’, declared Heinrich von Treitschke, the Reich’s most famous historian and the former editor of the Preußische Jahrbücher: ‘The Germans are always in danger of losing their nationality, because they have too little of this solid pride.’13 Recent historians of Germany have tended to sympathize with such anxiety. Because, until 1871, they lacked a political framework, Germans’ conceptions of ‘national identity’, it has been claimed, became a confusing, composite construction of French, British, American, Swiss, Dutch, Italian and ancient Greek components. In the years before unification, writers and academics were able to dominate competing and contradictory discourses about the nation, fashioning ‘Germany’ to suit literary tastes and political predilections. From eighteenth-century patriotism and turn-of-the-century romanticism to democratic scepticism during the 1840s and realist admiration of the state in the 1850s, German ideas of the nation oscillated unpredictably, it is held, because they depended on the social circumstances of poets and the vagaries of the book and newspaper trade. What is more, these conflicting versions of national identity continued to coexist with many other allegiances to kin, class, confession, profession, party, region and state. Until the late nineteenth century, loyalty to the nation allegedly remained secondary to a panoply of other affiliations. Even after 1871, such frictions and contradictions were not removed. Rather, they were compounded by the residue of an unresolved argument from the mid-nineteenth century about the geographical extent of Germany – an Austrian- dominated Großdeutschland or a Prussian-led Kleindeutschland – which had been translated by the 1890s, the argument runs, into pan-German yearnings for a ‘Greater Reich’, and into close ties between Austrian and German nationalism. Since the Kaiserreich had been established by Bismarck as a conservative, federal and monarchical compromise, designed to resist any shift towards a unitary nation-state, it not only lacked a binding, consensual set of political practices and traditions; it also struggled to establish a consistent gallery of national symbols. Historians have not been surprised, then, to find that the German Empire never adopted a national anthem. This failure to create an official, political, consensual Staatsnation, it is maintained, led to the popularization of alternative, expansionist ethnic and racial definitions of a GermanVolksnation . Such interpretations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalism overlook a matrix of enduring images and ideas which constituted the core of a German ‘identity’. Of the three possible bases of national particularity – cultural, genetic and political – culture, which was expressed in terms of a German ‘character’ and ‘values’, was arguably the most significant. This did not mean, though, that loyalties to national political institutions were negligible. On the one hand, the Reich, because it was widely seen to have been economically successful, appeared to have fulfilled the fundamental voluntarist condition of a political nation, which was unusually prominent during an age of Realpolitik, by persuading citizens that it had acted in their best interests. The verdict of Paul Rohrbach, one of Wilhelmine Germany’s most famous publicists, arguably echoed the view of the majority: ‘Germany’s rise has been favoured by the fact that the political and economic union of Germany coincided with the most wonderful technical progress that humanity had ever seen.’14 On the other hand, the political institutions of the Reich, although new, seemed to be the continuation of a long ‘German’ tradition. The notion of a strong, interventionist state, a

13 Heinrich von Treitschke, Selections from Treitschke’s Lectures on Politics (London, 1914), p. 10. 14 Paul Rohrbach in Jugend (1912), cited in James, A German Identity, p. 83.

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system of codified, public law separate from politics, constitutional government, federalism and monarchy all went back, in the individual histories of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and the other states, to the start of the nineteenth century and beyond. Moreover, these traditions had been linked together between 1815 and 1867 within the practical structure of the German Confederation and within the persisting, ideological framework of the Holy Roman Empire: it was for this reason that no one thought to challenge the restoration of a German Reich in 1871. The years between the 1880s and 1914 have usually been portrayed by historians as an era of nationalism, different in kind from the rest of the nineteenth century. This was the period, it is argued, when an emancipatory national movement of the left, which had fashioned concepts of the nation in the mid-nineteenth century, was eclipsed by the xenophobic, integral nationalism of the right. The first antisemitic organization was founded in 1879, the Society for Germandom Abroad in 1881, the Association in 1886, the Colonial Society in 1887, the Pan-German League in 1891, the German Society for the Eastern Marches in 1894, the Navy League in 1898, the Kyffhäuser Association in 1899, the Imperial League to Combat Social Democracy in 1904, the Patriotic Book League in 1908 and the Army League in 1912. Many of these mass-membership organizations were based on the notion of political, linguistic or racial defence and expansion. Partly as a response to their success, it is contended, many of the German parties moved to the right, questioning the borders of the Kaiserreich, traditional levels of military expenditure and conscription, and the government’s naval, colonial and foreign policies. The resonance of such ideas was allegedly so great that significant sections of the left-liberal parties and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) repudiated their anti-imperial past and began to call for the expansion of the Reich. This novel, cross-party interest in foreign policy was motivated to a significant extent, the argument runs, by a national-minded or politically opportunistic desire to deflect attention from the domestic failings of the German Empire, with its flawed institutions, hamstrung parties and class conflict. The Reich government, attacked from all sides, gradually gave way to the demands of the radical right and adopted an aggressive policy of prestige and brinkmanship abroad. Such social imperialism, which had been used with increasing regularity since the Bismarckian era, had purportedly proved popular in almost all sections of German society. Anglo-American revisionism during the 1980s and 1990s, despite altering common perceptions of many aspects of German history, had proportionately less impact on analyses of German nationalism. Although research was redirected away from the state and the instrumentalization of national sentiment towards the realignments of the German right and the democratization of politics, historians rarely distinguished between banal and radical nationalism and, as a result, often continued to assume that extreme nationalism was widespread or even preponderant between 1890 and 1914. Such assumptions mean that they have attempted to trace the infusion of antisemitic, racist, xenophobic and integral nationalist ideas into different sections of German society, including working-class milieus, rather than starting with an investigation of everyday concepts of the nation and asking at what point banal nationalism, which was characteristic of almost all European countries, became radical or dangerous. From this latter perspective, it appears that the majority of Reich Germans were more, not less, wary and sceptical of strong expressions of national belonging and national interest than in previous decades.15 Thus, whilst it is true that national identity in Germany had been defined, to a greater extent than in Britain or France, in terms of culture and ethnicity, not political affiliation or history, and that national affairs, which comprised

15 The approach pursued here is quite close to that of works such as Marc-Wilhelm Kohfink’s Für Freiheit und Vaterland. Eine sozialwissenschaftliche Studie über den liberalen Nationalismus 1890–1933 in Deutschland (Constance, 2002).

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matters of state, military security and foreign policy, had enjoyed an unusual degreeof exemption from political scrutiny and debate, it was movement away from these definitions of identity and this type of exemption which created the false impression that mainstream German nationalism had become more extreme. In fact, what had changed was the extent to which Wilhelmine parties, press and public were prepared openly to discuss questions of national identity and national interest.16 Such discussion, though it alienated and radicalized part of the German right and unsettled much of the centre, helped to demonstrate the particularity of Germany’s system of government, making the political components of German identity more salient, just as it helped to clarify what was central to German culture and what was peculiar about the Reich’s international position. That the discussion occurred at all was an indication of increased confidence – on the part of the government and majority public opinion – about the stability and solidity of the German nation-state. This debate had begun, virtually unnoticed, in the 1890s, but only came to the attention of the German public from the mid-1900s onwards. Previously, it had been widely assumed that ‘national affairs’ were sacrosanct, beyond the scope of party politics. In 1902, Alfred Kirchhoff, one of the main academic authorities on the nation-state, still balked at the fact that ‘each party in our political life lays a claim to the predicate “national”’. The practice, he implied, was both novel and unjustifiable: ‘Yet all these national organizations in reality follow factional policies in the first instance … If political particularism is, happily, in the process of dying out, parliamentary narrow-mindedness has nevertheless often produced results which bring Austrian conditions to mind and which must surely be painful for those truly national-minded Germans who are not blinded by the interests of faction.’17 After unification in 1871, the idea of the nation, which had functioned until that date largely as an illicit means of political criticism, was merged with that of the state. The National Association was disbanded and many of its members, who had previously been critics of the princely states, became ardent defenders of the German Empire. Despite Bismarck’s inclination to ignore the national idea altogether, denouncing it as a ‘swindle’ and refusing to adopt a national flag, the Kaiserreich was quickly accepted as a nation-state by most of the German public, as Meinecke correctly observed.18 Consequently, concepts of the nation, which had always been presented as objective descriptions rather than ideological prescriptions, were also included, along with the new polity, within the tradition of state neutrality. Moreover, common anxieties during the Bismarckian era about the precariousness of the political and national settlements of 1871 served to increase the sacrosanctity of each in a self-perpetuating process of mutual reinforcement. Any criticism of the fragile edifice of the German Empire was perceived to be an attack on the German nation, and vice versa. The persistence of the myth that particularism constituted a real danger to the Reich was one manifestation of this process. As was revealed during the Kulturkampf in the 1870s and during the outlawing of the national organization of the SPD in the 1880s, political labels like Reichsfeind were used interchangeably with national ones such as vaterlandslos.19 Catholics and socialists were branded ‘anti-national’ in order to pre-empt discussion and criticism of the polity and the nation: national identity and the political regime were felt to be the untouchable foundations

16 For more on this topic, see Mark Hewitson, National Identity and Political Thought in Germany (Oxford, 2000), pp. 252–9. 17 Alfred Kirchhoff, Was ist national? (Halle, 1902), p. 41; Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, 7th edn (Berlin, 1927), p. 18. 18 Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, p. 499. 19 Dieter Groh and Peter Brandt, ‘Vaterlandslose Gesellen’: Sozialdemokratie und Nation, 1860–1990 (Munich, 1992), pp. 112–57; Michael Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004), pp. 240–91.

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of politics. By the late 1900s, such links between the state, national identity and the polity had been broken. By the turn of the twentieth century, most German commentators treated the Reich as a normal nation-state, comparable to Britain, the , , or France. Even critics of the German Empire like Friedrich Meinecke, who pointed to the continuing duality or ‘schizophrenia’ between ‘old Prussia’ and the ‘new Reich’, remained confident that ‘the goal to which everything is directed is an all-inclusive community of the German nation-state, a community so strong that it is able to tolerate, utilize and overcome all the separate nationalities of its individual members’.20 In spite of the popularity of the großdeutsch idea in 1848, the outbreak of a German ‘civil war’ in 1866 (at least in the opinion of some observers), the existence of German-speaking populations outside the borders of the Reich and Polish, French and Danish-speaking nationalities within them, as well as the persistence or exacerbation of regional, confessional and class divisions, the Reich had quickly been accepted as a Nationalstaat, in contrast to other recently unified nation-states such as Italy. Advocates of a parliamentary regime like the left liberal Friedrich Naumann admitted that the German polity had stood the test of time, becoming ‘a solid political body’. ‘The danger that we shall again sink back into a confusion of small states (Kleinstaaterei) can be regarded as having been removed’, he went on: ‘The fear that this constitution would only be an interlude has not been borne out by events.’21 Supposed supporters of Großdeutschland in the Centre Party, keen to overcome their reputation during the Kulturkampf as enemies of the Reich, usually refrained from calling for a revision of the territorial settlement of 1871. Indeed, the assertion of the influential Catholic publicist Karl Bachem that the founder of the kleindeutsch Empire, Bismarck, was the ‘greatest German statesman of the modern age’ was closer to the party line in the Wilhelmine period than were demands for a redrawing of the Empire’s borders, as German Catholics broke off relations with their Polish counterparts in eastern Prussia.22 Social Democrats were more critical of Bismarck, but they, too, regularly recognized the validity of the nation-state and its borders, even if SPD politicians were careful, in the words of the Bavarian reformist Georg von Vollmar, ‘not to mistake the fatherland with its present rulers’.23 In this respect, the view of the revisionist that ‘great differences exist in different lands’ probably reflected majority opinion in the party: ‘Peculiarities of geographical situation, rooted customs of national life, inherited institutions, and traditions of all kinds create a difference of mind which only slowly submits to the influence of [industrial] development.’ Even though German workers did not yet have the full rights and entitlements of citizenship, Bernstein continued, it could not be ‘a matter of indifference to German Social Democracy whether the German nation, which has indeed carried out, and is carrying out, its honourable share in the civilizing work of the world, should be repressed in the council of the nations’.24 During the main debate about the nation in the SPD, at the time of the Stuttgart meeting of the Second International in 1907, the party’s leader , along with most other Social Democratic deputies, supported ’s call in the Reichstag for the defence of an independent German nation. As the German nation-state began to seem secure from both internal and external enemies, it gradually became an object of political discussion. By the 1900s, as Meinecke

20 Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, pp. 504, 512. 21 Friedrich Naumann, ‘Die Umwandlung der deutschen Reichsverfassung’, Patria (1908), p. 95. 22 Karl Bachem, cited in Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict (Princeton, 1995), pp. 61–78, 138–40, 185–205. 23 Georg Vollmar, cited in Groh and Brandt, ‘Vaterlandslose Gesellen’, pp. 112–57. 24 Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York, 1952), pp. 165–6, 170.

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observed, almost all social and political groups claimed the right to speak for the nation and to debate national affairs.25 Because of the novelty of this type of debate, many Wilhelmine onlookers expressed concern about the instability and insufficiency of German patriotism, and about the possible disintegration of the German nation-state. ‘In Germany, even the love of country has not found a valid form of expression’, wrote , a left-liberal publicist and chairman of AEG: ‘Servile devotion and the noisy patriotism of business societies are not balanced by a secure national consciousness.’26 Earlier, national sentiment had been widely accepted as a prerequisite of German politics, not a subject of party dispute: the label vaterlandslos had previously been used to exclude groupings like the Centre Party and the SPD from the political nation. Now, public controversy about national affairs helped to produce diverse interpretations of national interest and identity, and to reinforce and radicalize a minority movement of right-wing nationalists, which found a focus in the extra-parliamentary leagues and parts of the National Liberal and Conservative parties. To August Keim, later leader of the Army League, this ‘fragmentation’ showed the necessity of ‘a crusade of national education’ so that the ‘development of our inner unity and thereby the completion of the work of our national unification’, which derived from ‘the blood- brotherhood of the German tribes’, could at last occur; to his colleague and leader of the Pan- German League, Heinrich Claß, it demonstrated that German politics had been subverted by Jews, who had exploited popular disaffection over the diplomatic failures of the Reich government and created an alliance amongst socialist, liberal, Catholic, Polish, Danish, Alsatian and Hanoverian enemies of the state.27 Keim, Claß and other radical nationalists sought to monopolize the terminology and political platforms of German patriotism, extending the tradition of the ‘national’ or ‘state-supporting’ parties of the 1870s and 1880s, which had successfully ostracized Catholics and socialists by pointing to their alleged lack of patriotic feeling. Such a strategy failed during the 1900s and 1910s because Catholics and socialists resisted attempts to build a national consensus against them, putting forward their own patriotic credentials and vision of the nation, and because the state-supporting parties themselves were prepared to discuss national affairs, revealing in the process an unsuspected variety of opinions. Strident disputes about the identity, interest and policy of the German nation, together with the assertions of league members that they alone were truly national, convinced observers like Rathenau that a ‘secure national consciousness’ did not exist. By the same token, such disputes and assertions failed to persuade him that the ‘noisy patriotism of business societies’ was to be equated with the views of the majority. Many Germans agreed with the moderate conservative Hans Delbrück ‘that the Pan-Germans were a small, almost comical sect with no significance’ for most of the 1890s and 1900s, even if the Alldeutscher Verband appeared to have become more influential in the 1910s.28 Most, including a significant number on the right, did not hold radical nationalist ideas, with a large number preferring what Meinecke called an ‘active, free idea of the nation’.29 It was for this reason that members of leagues were frequently ridiculed in the press as Teutschen and Teutsch- Nationale, depicted as top-hatted, overweight, bearded and credulous old men indulging

25 Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, pp. 1–19. 26 Walther Rathenau, cited in Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany (Lexington, 1984), p. 76. 27 August Keim, cited in Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right (New Haven, 1980), pp. 265–6; Heinrich Claß, cited in Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984), pp. 283–96. 28 Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, pp. 283–96. 29 Meinecke, cited in Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German.

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in frivolous Deutschtümelei. Even the language of radical nationalism was challenged and mocked. One cartoon in Simplicissimus translated distorted ‘patriotic’ words into pictures: the ‘people’ (das Volk) was represented as a shambolic, pompous procession of decorated, black-suited old men. The caricaturist assumed, without further comment, that his readers would understand the positive, emancipatory and inclusive connotations of the term Volk.30 By the 1900s, it was evident that national feeling, which had been seen during the 1880s as a uniform qualification for full political participation, had assumed a multiplicity of forms, all of which were open to party discussion and political satire. The novelty of this debate about the German nation in itself caused considerable anxiety and precipitated the radicalization of the far right, which, in turn, created the illusion that the Wilhelmine period was an age of extreme nationalism. Political discussion of national affairs helped to relativize most Germans’ perceptions of the nation-state, at the same time as serving to entrench the attitudes of a minority of radical nationalists. Thus, even in the realm of foreign policy, where prejudice, distortion and disputation were especially pronounced, a large number of Germans had gained a more realistic picture of France, Britain, the United States and other Kulturländer, with the result that the majority of the German electorate was reluctant to enter into a war against such states. In the area of constitutional reform, there was greater agreement. After reading press reports on the strengths and weaknesses of the Kaiserreich, where the Empire was compared to the allegedly failing parliamentary regimes of other European states, many Germans came to back, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, what Otto Hintze called the ‘unique Prussian-German system’ of constitutional government.31 A significant number of left liberals and virtually all socialists rejected this type of government. A large number, however, had come during the course of pre-war constitutional debates to accept that Germany stood in a different political tradition from that of its western neighbours, shaped by constitutional monarchy (konstitutionelle Monarchie) and the law-governed state (Rechtsstaat). In this limited sense, a political component had been added to German national identity, even amidst widespread questioning of citizens’ loyalties to the political institutions of the German Empire. Arguably, during the first 25 years of the Kaiserreich, subjects were expected to be loyal to the state, the army and the nation, whether at home or abroad, without discussion or conditions. Over the next 20 years, this fiction had slowly been abandoned and national affairs had been made subject to public interrogation. The overall result, notwithstanding the consolidation of extreme forms of nationalism, was a moderation and relativization – but not destruction – of Germans’ attachment to the nation-state and to the idea of ‘national identity’.

National Comparison, Transnationalism and World Politics

Transnational historians of the German Empire usually accept that processes of nationalization existed, and even increased in scope, but they seek to show how cross- border trade and travel undermined the notion of borders and territory, how emigration and the existence of ‘Germandom abroad’ (Auslandsdeutschtum) provoked debates about ethnicity and what it was to be German (Deutsch-sein), and how the apparent proximity

30 Simplicissimus, 1897, shown in Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 37. 31 Otto Hintze, ‘Das monarchische Prinzip und die konstitutionelle Verfassung’ (1911), in G. Oestreich (ed.), Staat und Verfassung, 2nd revised edn (Göttingen, 1962), p. 359.

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of other parts of the world in the photographs of the press and the newsreels of cinemas, together with a worldwide movement of labour, including ‘coolies’ from the Far East, promoted a racialization of nationalist discourse.32 This radicalization of nationalism from the 1880s onwards is attributable, it is held, to such transnational movements and globalizing developments, which simultaneously challenged the fixity and utility of nation- states and made them seem more necessary, as a system of defence against the uncertainties and threats of the outside world. Nationalization, the argument runs, was connected to and concealed different forms of de- and re-territorialization, as space was imagined differently according to the dictates of capitalist enterprise, quicker means of transport (shipping lines and trans-continental railways), international law, imperialism and informal spheres of influence. By investigating re-territorialization in its own right, together with the instances of transnational interaction which produced it, scholars of globalization such as Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel aim to ‘rescue history from the nation’, which allegedly enjoyed a privileged and distorting status as a category, even in the mind of an author of a ‘universal history’ like Karl Lamprecht.33 To the Leipzig historian, the transformation of the nation around the turn of the century was ‘the most profound consequence of internal development’.34 To Conrad, such testimony merely proves the ‘hegemonic character of the internalistic paradigm’.35 It is difficult to assess, from a reading of many transnational histories, how significant globalization was in the definition and contestation of national interest and identity. Global commerce and manufacturing output had increased markedly during the nineteenth century, but much of that growth had occurred within Europe, which had accounted for 28.1 per cent of world output in 1800 and 62 per cent in 1900. Between a fifth and a third of Germany’s trade in the years before the First World War was external, which was a figure not reached again until the 1960s, but 74 per cent of combined imports and exports came from and went to other European states, most notably the United Kingdom. The United States, which accounted for 35.8 per cent of world manufacturing output in 1913, took most of the rest of the Reich’s exports, meaning that ‘global’ trade was, in fact, largely transatlantic and intra-European trade. Similar trends can be observed in the incidence of migration and travel, most of which was internal. Between the 1860s and 1914, 15 to 16 million German subjects had moved beyond the state in which they were born, with 30 per cent of residents in Saxony and Prussia coming from another German state in the late nineteenth century. Such internal migration outstripped net emigration, which had been 2.46 million in 1871–95 but had dropped to 14,000 in 1895–1910. Ninety-one per cent of recorded overseas migration between 1871 and 1913 was to the United States, where 2.5 million ‘Germans’ were living by 1911. More than 650,000 were living in neighbouring European states, whereas only 71,000 were living in Australia, Argentina and Chile, which were the main destinations for German émigrés in the rest of the world. The same was true of immigrants in Germany, the number of which had increased from 433,000 in 1890 to 1.26 million in 1910: most came from surrounding European states (1,236,000), especially from Austria- (667,200),

32 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, pp. 168–228; Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt (Munich, 2009), pp. 1173–1238; James Sheehan, ‘Paradigm Lost? The “Sonderweg” Revisited’, in G. Budde et al. (eds), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006), p. 158. 33 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, pp. 334–6. See also, Philipp Ther, ‘Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe’, Central European History, 36 (2003), pp. 45–75; Jürgen Osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats (Göttingen, 2001). 34 Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit (originally published in 1903) (Berlin, 1921), p. 612. 35 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, p. 334.

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with the rest of the world accounting for a mere 24,000 residents. It has been estimated that there were 207 Chinese inhabitants in Hamburg, the Reich’s largest Chinese community, by 1910. ‘Foreigners’, many of whom were native German-speakers, made up less than 2 per cent of the population before the First World War. Their numbers were augmented, in many contemporaries’ opinion, by large national minorities within Germany, particularly by 3.7 million Polish Germans in the eastern territories of Prussia, yet these communities were long established within the German states and have proved difficult to incorporate into a transnational explanation of a radicalized nationalism.36 Statistically, most commerce and movement was internal, of a type often associated – as Lamprecht indicated – with conventional conceptions of nation-building. When German subjects traded, travelled or migrated abroad, they generally did so within Europe or the United States rather than the rest of the world. What mattered more than such statistics, of course, was how the rest of the world was perceived. A communicative definition of globalization has, accordingly, been integral to transnational studies of the German Empire. The available evidence, however, casts doubt on historians’ claims concerning the salience of ‘world politics’, without denying its significance at certain historical junctures and in specified discursive contexts. The significance of Weltpolitik has traditionally been tied to the claims of the historians of the ‘Hamburg School’ that the conduct of German foreign policy was offensive in the years before 1914. In general, such scholars have either argued that aggressiveness resulted from uncertainty about Germany’s stability at home and its position abroad, so that policy- makers came to favour an ‘escape into war’, or they have proposed that expansionism was an intrinsic part of a widespread ethnic and even racist sense of identity, which was predicated on the idea of German superiority, often in a Darwinian struggle for survival, but which in fact derived from the inadequacy of more benign cultural and political forms of identity.37 In many instances, uncertainty about Germany’s place in the world could, apparently, encourage expansionist racism, and vice versa. A shift towards world politics and changes in the means of communication, which presented other countries and continents in a much more immediate and vivid way, could be expected to have exacerbated such uncertainty and racism. During the last two decades or so, a limited number of scholars have begun to question whether the leaders of the Reich and German public opinion acted in an aggressive manner at all, but their case about ‘defensiveness’ has generally also been linked to the pursuit of world politics. ‘Germany felt virtually compelled to take part in the scramble for overseas territories’, writes Gregor Schöllgen, for ‘Great Power status within Europe could only be maintained by activity and self-assertion outside Europe.’38 Whether conservative, liberal or Social Democrat, ‘most Germans’ were in no doubt that ‘a Great Power such as Germany must also pursue Great Power politics and that, in the age of imperialism, meant world-power politics’, he goes on: ‘In Berlin, especially after 1890, there was little doubt that a Great Power had to act as a world power.’39

36 Conrad attempts to show how Poles and Polish-speaking areas of Germany were treated as objects of ‘colonization’, yet many of the stereotypes, sources of conflict and instances of cooperation antedated the discursive shifts of Weltpolitik, even if the Ostmarkenverein was also – amongst other things – a product of extra-parliamentary nationalist politics: Vejas J. Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, 1800 to the Present (Oxford, 2009), pp. 117–29; Mark Tilse, Transnationalism in the Prussian East: From National Conflict to Synthesis, 1871–1914(Basingstoke, 2011). 37 The latter argument about racism has been most forcefully made by George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York, 1964), and the former about a Flucht nach vorn, by Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions (London, 1975). 38 Gregor Schöllgen, ‘Germany’s Foreign Policy in the Age of Imperialism: A Vicious Circle?’ in idem, Escape into War? (Oxford, 1990), p. 123. 39 Ibid.

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It can be argued, however, that there was no straightforward relationship between an offensive or defensive foreign policy of expansion, anxiety about the external predicament of the Reich, and cultural, ethnic and racial identity. The German government and army, it is true, acted offensively in 1914 and bore a greater responsibility for the outbreak and escalation of war than did the government of any other power. There was also widespread support for the idea of German expansion, either by acquiring colonies or defending economic markets. Yet such contested facts are not adequately explained by references to increasing anxiety about world politics or to the radical nature of a putative German identity. Indeed, during the two decades before the First World War, it can be contended – as has been seen – that most Germans’ fears about the Reich’s international position subsided and that their sense of identity came to include more pronounced attachments to political institutions, as in France, Britain and the United States. Certainly, the majority of German citizens believed in the existence of a common national culture, in the natural competition of nation-states and in the superiority of white or European races. None of these sets of beliefs, however, distinguished Germany’s populace from those of other countries. Thus, during the First World War, French and British writers, journalists and politicians were just as willing as their German counterparts to view the conflict as an ideological struggle between different systems of values and ‘civilizations’ or ‘cultures’. Most Germans continued on the eve of the First World War, like other Europeans, to be convinced of the superiority of their own culture and race, despite changes in the means of communication and in the international position of the Kaiserreich. Although the balance of forces and alliances changed rapidly, and although newspapers and magazines began to portray foreign nation-states in new ways, many of the long-standing international bulwarks of German identity remained in place. The commonplace belief of Wilhelmine Germans in their racial and cultural superiority over the ‘black’ and ‘yellow’ races made imperialism seem natural, if sometimes expensive and impracticable. Left liberals and many socialists, although their parties were opposed to the acquisition of colonies on other grounds, upheld Germany’s civilizing mission, viewing the Reich as a less barbaric imperial power than France, or Britain. This point, which was made repeatedly in press reportage of the ‘colonial atrocities’ of neighbouring states, was illustrated in the left-liberal, anti-imperial satirical magazine Simplicissimus, which represented Africans and Chinese in stereotypical, barely human form, even though it also revealed the cruelty of colonial administrations. One cartoon, entitled ‘Colonial Powers’, compared regimes in four separate pictures: a Belgian administrator was shown roasting an African on a spit; French legionnaires played sexual games with apparently primitive African women; and a British soldier put an African through a press in order to squeeze out money from his gut. German officers, in contrast, were depicted in front of a line of giraffes, not Africans, which they were teaching, innocuously, to goose-step.40 Simplicissimus implied that imperialism was a European evil, worse in Belgian or British colonies than in their German counterparts. All the same, the magazine’s cartoonists continued to base their jokes on the assumption of European cultural and, in most cases, racial superiority. At times, Russians and other ‘Slavs’ were also depicted as racial inferiors – Simplicissimus, for example, showed them variously as sub-humans, lice and rats – yet, on the whole, the Slavs provided a cultural rather than a racial foil for German commentators, partly because they were sometimes included in the family of Aryan or Indo-European peoples. Russian culture, in particular, which had already

40 Allen, Satire and Society, pp. 124–5.

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been described as barbaric in the eighteenth century, came to represent ‘Asia’, menacing the borders of Germany and Europe.41 Germany, according to most onlookers, was part of a shared European culture, combining Christianity, the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism and imperialism, which extended to British dominions and former colonies in North America and Australia. A sense of national particularity, which had in some respects been reinforced by a series of international comparisons, does not seem, as some historians claim, to have been an explosive and unpredictable by-product of Germans’ anxieties about the Reich’s position in the world, however. In an era of Weltpolitik and of photographs in newspapers, magazines and encyclopaedias, which presented images of German, European and overseas ‘events’ to an unaccustomed public, there was considerable discussion of Germany’s metamorphosis into a ‘world empire’ or ‘world state’. The popular prediction that the future belonged to far-flung trading areas and blocs of territory such as Greater Britain, Russia and the United States reinforced existing convictions about a national struggle for survival and led liberals like Max Weber to regard German unification as ‘a youthful prank’, which would have been better left undone ‘if it was meant to be the end and not the starting point of a German policy of world power’.42 The idea that the Reich had to expand or decline was widely believed. Yet this notion of struggle was not seen by most Germans as a sufficient reason for war, nor was it perceived to be a constant or overriding aim of Germany’s foreign policy. The fact that neither the United States, which had not come into conflict with the Reich until the late 1880s over Samoa, nor Russia, which had been weakened by defeat in the Russo-Japanese war and revolution in 1905, constituted direct threats to German national security over the short term meant that attention remained fixed on Europe. During the 1900s and 1910s, as in the nineteenth century, France arguably remained the principal military threat to the Reich, and Britain the main economic threat. Consequently, German newspapers and magazines, despite giving more column inches in the period after 1880 to extra-European powers than in previous decades, continued to focus on the Empire’s western neighbours. In the historiographical debate about international politics and national identity, most historians have argued either that Reich Germans defined themselves increasingly in terms of ethnicity and race, which allowed the suppression of neighbouring peoples, or that they became more and more anxious about the domestic stability and international predicament of the Reich, which pushed them to risk war as a means of escape or diversion. However, the premises of such arguments are worth re-examining, for it is possible to claim that many Germans appear to have had a strong sense of their own cultural identity, defining themselves primarily with reference to France and Britain, and they seem to have been confident about the Empire’s position in Europe and, as a corollary, in the world. During the decades before the First World War, Germans had become more moderate, on the whole, as a stream of information from telegraphic agencies and series of photographs and reports from correspondents in mass-circulation newspapers had helped to level some of the distinctions that had previously been drawn between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, making

41 L. Kopolew, ‘Zunächst war Waffenbrüderschaft’, and C. Schmidt, ‘Ein deutscher Slawophile? August von Haxthausen und die Wiederentdeckung der russischen Bauerngemeinde 1843/44’, both in Mechthild Keller (ed.), Russen und Rußland aus deutscher Sicht, vol. 3 (Munich, 1992), p. 51, pp. 196–216; Gerd Voigt, Rußland in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung, 1843–1945 (Berlin, 1994), pp. 66–114; Dieter Groh, Rußland im Blick Europas, 2nd edn (Frankfurt, 1988), pp. 97–412; Troy R.E. Paddock, ‘Still Stuck at Sevastopol: The Depiction of Russia During the Russo-Japanese War and the Beginning of the First World War in the German Press’, German History, 16 (1998), pp. 358–76. 42 Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen, 1958), p. 23; Wilhelm J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1984), pp. 68–90.

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foreign nation-states seem at once more mundane and less threatening. Although images of these nation-states were interpreted by means of references to long-established stereotypes, occasioning different evaluations on the part of left- and right-wing commentators, a more or less widespread, stable and realistic view of France and Britain was discernible in the pre-war period. Neither country, it was widely agreed, had either the ability or the desire to launch an offensive against the Reich. During the Moroccan crises in 1905 and 1911, when Berlin came into conflict with London and Paris, such an assessment of Germany’s position in Europe pushed socialists, left liberals and left-wing Catholics, representing the majority of the German electorate, to oppose war and prompted right-wing Catholics, National Liberals and conservatives to support it. In 1914, this division of the political nation, which was based on competing representations of Germany’s national interest, was obscured by the government’s successful policy of putting Russia, in the words of the Head of the Naval Cabinet, ‘in the wrong’.43 The spectre of Russia as an enemy united most of the German nation behind a credible ‘war of defence’, not only because the tsarist state was the long-standing bugbear of the German left and because Russian conditions were very different from those in Germany, but because they were seen to differ: Russia, like and other extra-European regions and states, was depicted less consistently and realistically in the German press than were ‘European’ states. By casting Russia as the aggressor, the Reich government was able to risk war and keep the support of the German left. However, any ‘national’, anti-Russian, pro-war coalition was likely to be temporary and conditional, as Bethmann was aware. In this sense, the unity of the Burgfrieden and the ‘August days’ was deceptive: it obscured a dispute about the nature of Germany’s national interest and about which parties had the right to represent it.

Conclusion

It can be contended that banal forms of nationalism in Imperial Germany were similar to those which could be found in other Western European countries. However, although manifestations of nationalism in Germany had become more like those in states such as Britain, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, they still diverged from them in significant ways. First, the cultural component of German identity was more salient, and the political component less evident, than in countries with longer histories of a shared state and common political institutions. This circumstance did not mean, though, that Reich Germans found the idea of race more attractive or compelling than their French or British counterparts, particularly as a means of distinguishing themselves from other Europeans. Second, radical nationalism in Germany was different in content and scope from that which emerged in neighbouring countries. Thus, a minority of extreme German nationalists were deeply affected by a unique conjunction of events and processes – most notably, the tardiness of unification, an enduring distinction between politics and the state, the rapidity of industrialization, the deepening of class conflict and the scientization of race – which distinguished late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany from other states and helped to make radical nationalists in the Reich more numerous and closer to ruling elites than in the parliamentary regimes of the Third Republic or the United Kingdom. At the same time, this radicalization of a minority of German nationalists during the imperial era produced a counter-reaction amongst the majority of politicians, publicists and, even,

43 G.A. v. Müller, cited in Niall Ferguson, ‘Public Finance and National Security’, Past and Present, 142 (1994), p. 18.

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citizens, serving to distinguish banal from extreme forms of nationalism in important areas of policy-making. Third, nationalism in general – both banal and radical – had a greater impact on German policy-making than it did in the rest of Western Europe or in the United States, not least because many moderate nationalists, too, were aware of Germany’s unusual position as a late arrival in an already established system of European states and as a country at the outer edge of ‘Europe’. Accordingly, such national-minded moderates were ready to countenance a more offensive policy towards Russia and a more hostile attitude to the continental balance of power, which was frequently treated as a British instrument against the Reich. Such differences of outlook, however, did not make Wilhelmine Germans more willing than Edwardian Britons, in most instances, to go to war, even if they showed themselves more willing to enter into a particular kind of war with Russia. Overall, ubiquitous, more accurate representations of Britain and France in the German press and increased confidence in the Reich’s position on the European mainland helped to ensure that the majority of Wilhelmine subjects were more likely to oppose and question the necessity of war during the 1900s and 1910s than had been their grandparents in 1870. Contrary to much of the recent literature on transnationalism in pre-war Germany, I have argued here that most contemporaries defined the new German nation-state through historical or contemporaneous observations of internal transformations and through comparisons with other European states. The concept of ‘globalization’ is both suggestive and misleading, hinting at connections and proximities which barely existed in nineteenth- century Europe. Although the world had certainly shrunk by the turn of the century, as Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (1873) – one of the best-selling works in Wilhelmine Germany – spelled out, its spaces or hinterlands remained unenclosed and unknown, meaning that Phileas Fogg’s voyage was not only quick, but also adventurous. The world, in the advertisements of the Hamburg-America Shipping Line and the Norddeutscher Lloyd, was criss-crossed by lines of communication, stretching like threads from a German or European centre but becoming more and more tenuous in – and emphasizing the great land masses of – the South and the East. As the novelist and sailor Joseph Conrad made plain in An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1902) and other works, it was possible to link distant points on a map without comprehending what lay between them. In this sense, more immediate cartographical and pictorial representations of the rest of the world – normally shown, not as a globe, but as a flat plane, with the European continent in the middle – could serve to underline Europe’s, and later – during and after the First World War – the West’s, centrality or their isolation within a primitive hinterland. The metropolis as a point of emanation and embarkation in such a conception could easily become – following the example of Rome and other civilizations popularized by Theodor Mommsen and Eduard Meyer and seized upon by Oswald Spengler – the besieged capital or centre of a crumbling empire. Even at the high-point of European imperialism and commercial expansion, many contemporaries seem to have been at once confident about, fascinated by and fearful of the wider world which was being brought – more vividly than in the past – within their imaginary horizon. The main question concerns the significance of such horizons in the realms of policy-making and politics, more broadly defined. It is necessary to place many of the claims of transnational historians of pre-war Germany in the context of wider debates about a German nation-state and to assess their significance relative to other aspects of nationalist politics.44 Increasing movement and a

44 See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Transnationale Geschichte – der neue Königsweg historischer Forschung?’, in Budde et al. (eds), Transnationale Geschichte, pp. 161–74.

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transformation of the means of communication were central to the contest between different national parties, with fears about the threats faced by Germandom and the nation-state in the wider world playing a part, but the majority of transnational networks, interactions and horizons of imperial Germans remained intra-European or, at most, transatlantic. Observers’ assessments of the Reich’s position in Europe or in the ‘West’ tended, with many qualifications, to be optimistic, giving grounds for many contemporaries to identify and support specifically ‘German’ traditions and institutions. In this sense, instead of attempting to rescue history from the nation, historians would be better advised to investigate and problematize the history of the nation as the contingent product of a multiplicity of overlapping, entangled discourses, political conflicts and acts of cooperation. Many transnational or global histories of pre-war German nationalism fail to analyse the relationship of such internal and external processes of national consolidation and disintegration, and to assess their relative significance. Although worldwide commerce and a revolution in the means of communication challenged established conceptions of territory, identity, boundaries and horizons, they also made the outside world – and predominantly Europe – more familiar and less threatening to a larger number of German subjects. Since many of the main points of contention in Bismarckian and Wilhelmine debates about national interest and identity were domestic, concerning the allocation of resources and distribution of power in a newly formed polity, such European and ‘Western’ points of reference appeared to stabilize the Reich’s system of government, limiting the effects of radical nationalism and helping to defuse international crises.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Alter, Peter. The German Question and Europe: A History (London, 2000). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (London, 1991). Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990). Berger, Stefan. Inventing the Nation: Germany (London, 2004). —. ‘Germany’, in M. Hewitson and T. Baycroft (eds), What Is a Nation? Europe, 1792–1914 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 42–62. Besslich, Barbara. Wege in den ‘Kulturkrieg’. Zivilisationskritik in Deutschland 1890–1914 (Darmstadt, 2000). Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism (London, 1995). Breuilly, John. The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800–1871 (London, 1996). —. ‘The National Idea in Modern German History’, in M. Fulbrook (ed.), German History Since 1800 (London, 1997). —. ‘Nationalismus als kulturelle Konstruktion: Einige Überlegungen’, in J. Echternkamp and S.O. Müller (eds), Die Politik der Nation. Deutscher Nationalismus in Krieg und Krisen 1760–1960 (Munich, 2002), pp. 247–69. —. ‘Nationalism and the First Unification’, in John Breuilly and Ronald Speirs (eds), Germany’s Two Unifications (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 101–21. —. ‘The German Bourgeoisie from Radicalism to Nationalism’, German History, 14 (2006), pp. 223–31. —. ‘Theories of Nationalism and the Critical Approach to German History’, in S.O. Müller and C. Torp (eds), Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (New York, 2013), pp. 67–80. Chickering, Roger. We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984).

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—. ‘Militarism and Radical Nationalism’, in J. Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany, 1871– 1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 196–218. Coetzee, Marilyn.The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 1990). Confino, Alon. The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997). Conrad, Sebastian. Globalisierung und Nation im deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 2006). —.‘Transnational Germany’, in J. Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 219–41. —. ‘Wilhelmine Nationalism in Global Contexts’, in S.O. Müller and C. Torp (eds), Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (New York, 2013), pp. 281–96. — and Osterhammel, Jürgen (eds). Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004). Dann, Otto.Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland 1770–1990 (Munich, 1993). — (ed.) Die deutsche Nation (Vierow, 1994). Echternkamp, Jörg and Müller, Sven Oliver (eds). Die Politik der Nation. Deutscher Nationalismus in Krieg und Krisen, 1760–1960 (Munich, 2002). Eley, Geoff. Reshaping the German Right (New Haven, 1980). —. ‘State Formation, Nationalism and Political Culture: Some Thoughts on the Unification of Germany’, in idem, From Unification to Nazism (London, 1986), pp. 61–84. Fischer, Lars. The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2007). Fletcher, Roger. Revisionism and Empire: Socialist Imperialism in Germany, 1897–1914 (London, 1984). Frevert, Ute. Kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 2001). Geiss, Imanuel. Geschichte des Rassismus (Frankfurt, 1988). —. The Question of German Unification, 1806–1996(London, 1997). Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983). Gosewinkel, Dieter. Einbürgern und Ausschliessen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen, 2001). Gross, Michael. The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004). Hahn, Hans Henning and Kunze, Peter (eds). Nationale Minderheiten und Staatliche Minderheitenpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1999). Haupt, Heinz-Gerhardt and Langewiesche, Dieter (eds). Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt, 2001). —. Nation und Religion in Europa (Frankfurt, 2004). Hering, Rainer. Konstruierte Nation. Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg, 2003). Hewitson, Mark. National Identity and Political Thought in Germany (Oxford, 2000). —. ‘Nation and Nationalismus: Representation and National Identity in Imperial Germany’, in M. Fulbrook and M. Swales (eds), Representing the German Nation (Manchester, 2000), pp. 19–62. —. ‘The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany Before the First World War’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp. 725–80. —. ‘The Wilhelmine Regime and the Problem of Reform: German Debates About Modern Nation-States’, in Geoff Eley and James Retallack (eds), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies (New York, 2003), pp. 73–90. —. Nationalism in Germany, 1848–1866: Revolutionary Nation (Basingstoke, 2010). Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘Mass-Producing Traditions, 1870–1914’, in E.J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 263–308.

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—. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990). Hughes, Michael. Nationalism and Society: Germany, 1800–1945 (London, 1988). Kipper, Rainer. Der Germanenmythos im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 2002). Klautke, Egbert. Unbegrenzte Möglichkeiten. ‘Amerikanisierung’ in Deutschland und Frankreich 1900–1933 (Wiesbaden, 2003). —. The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955 (New York, 2013). Kohfink, Marc-Wilhelm. Für Freiheit und Vaterland. Eine sozialwissenschaftliche Studie über den liberalen Nationalismus 1890–1933 in Deutschland (Constance, 2002). Kühne, Thomas. ‘Political Culture and Democratization’, in J. Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008). Langewiesche, Dieter. Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (Munich, 2000). —. Reich, Nation, Föderation: Deutschland und Europa (Munich, 2008). — and Schmidt, Georg (eds). Föderative Nation. Deutschlandkonzepte von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2000). Link, Jürgen and Wülfing, Wulf (eds).Nationale Mythen und Symbole in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1991). Mommsen, Wolfgang. ‘A Delaying Compromise: The Division of Authority in the German Imperial Constitution of 1871’, in idem, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918 (London, 1995), pp. 20–40. —. ‘The German Empire as a System of Skirted Decisions’, in idem, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918 (London, 1995), pp. 1–19. —. ‘Public Opinion and Foreign Policy in Wilhelmine Germany, 1897–1914’, in idem, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918 (London, 1995), pp. 189–204. Mosse, George. The Nationalization of the Masses (Ithaca, 1975). —. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978). Müller, Sven Oliver and Torp, Cornelius (eds). Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (New York, 2013). Neitzel, Sönke. Weltmacht oder Untergang. Die Weltreichslehre im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Paderborn, 2000). Osterhammel, Jürgen. Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats (Göttingen, 2001). Panayi, Panikos. Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others (London, 2000). Puschner, Uwe. Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache – Rasse – Religion (Darmstadt, 2001). Rohkrämer, Thomas. Der Militarismus der ‘kleinen Leute’. Die Kriegervereine im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Munich, 1990). —. Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (Paderborn, 1999). Sheehan, James. ‘What Is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), pp. 1–23. Smith, Helmut Walser. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict (Princeton, 1995). Stargardt, Nicholas. The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994). Steber, Martina. Ethnische Gewissheiten. Kultur und Politik im bayerischen Schwaben vom Kaiserreich bis zum NS-Regime (Göttingen, 2009). Stern, Fritz. The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, 1961). Ther, Philipp. ‘Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe’, Central European History, 36 (2003), pp. 45–75.

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Tilse, Mark. Transnationalism in the Prussian East: From National Conflict to Synthesis, 1871– 1914 (Basingstoke, 2011). Vogel, Jakob. Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der ‘Nation in Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 1997). Volkov, Shulamit. Germans, Jews and Antisemites (Cambridge, 2006). Walkenhorst, Peter. Nation – Volk – Rasse. Radikaler Nationalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914 (Göttingen, 2007). Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Sozialdemokratie und Nationalstaat. Nationalitätenfragen in Deutschland 1840–1914 (Göttingen, 1971). —. Nationalismus (Munich, 2001). Winkler, Heinrich August. ‘Vom linken zum rechten Nationalismus. Der deutsche Liberalismus in der Krise von 1878/79’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 4 (1978), pp. 5–28. Zimmer, Oliver. Remaking the Rhythms of Life: German Communities in the Age of the Nation-State (Oxford, 2013).

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lars fischer

If a lack of conceptual clarity and transparency is rarely likely to benefit historical debate, seldom does it wreak quite as much havoc quite as quickly as it does when it comes to scholarship on the prevalence and significance of antisemitism in Imperial Germany (or any other context, for that matter). There is obviously no suggestion that scholars must all conceptualize the topic in the same way in order to have a meaningful debate, but any discussion will be extremely difficult unless scholars reveal their respective conceptualizations to each other. It is no coincidence that most of the ongoing debate about antisemitism and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Imperial Germany hinges not so much on disagreement as to what actually went on, but rather on what it meant, that is to say, how it should be interpreted. Much of this chapter will therefore discuss a range of conceptual issues. Although there is obviously considerable overlap between them, I have tried to organize these around a number of basic questions or juxtapositions.1

Modern or Perennial? scholars have long debated whether antisemitism as an ideology and political movement emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century is best understood as a modern phenomenon, not unconnected but nevertheless distinct from other long-standing forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiments, or simply as yet another permutation of The Longest Hatred. This debate may now be rather less sharp among serious scholars than it used to be but nevertheless remains important, and on this issue students, and occasionally even more advanced scholars, sometimes rely on habit and convention rather than careful reflection and a reasoned decision. if the debate has mellowed somewhat this is not least because assumptions about modernity and its proliferation in general have become much more differentiated in recent decades. It is generally worth bearing in mind that the study of antisemitism, like all scholarship, never transpires in a vacuum but is subject to broader overarching trends. As historians’ assumptions about modernization in general, and secularization in particular, change fundamentally, so too do their assumptions about the modernity or otherwise of antisemitism. One obviously would not want to fall into the trap of assuming that changes in interpretation and emphasis are specific to the study of antisemitism when in fact one is dealing with the way in which broader conceptual trends have impacted upon the study of antisemitism as one among many areas of scholarship.

1 The best survey of these and other relevant conceptual issues can be found in Klaus Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung (Hamburg, 2001), pp. 26–111. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

It is undeniable that the modernist thesis existed for some time in a stark and undialectical version that effectively implied that modern antisemitism reared its head in the 1870s and almost instantly displaced all other forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiment. Its ability to do so, the argument went, hinged fundamentally on its secular and racialized nature. As a secular ideology and movement, modern antisemitism superseded previously widespread anti-Jewish attitudes that ultimately hinged on religious enmity between Christians and Jews. Fundamentally racist in its approach, modern antisemitism blocked off all possibilities that Jews might integrate into non-Jewish society since their distinct traits were now considered to be racial in nature, and racial features were by definition immutable. As already indicated, implausible as these suggestions now sound in this stark formulation, it should be borne in mind that they were made at a time when mainstream historiography in general was enamoured of rather simplistic notions positing a rapid and irrevocable transformative process towards modernity and secularization. If scholars now place much more emphasis on continuity as well as discontinuity, on the coexistence of modern and pre-modern phenomena and dynamics, and the complex and conflicting ways in which individuals and groups formed identities that negotiated and straddled both the old and the new, it is not so much because scholars of antisemitism specifically realized that modernization and secularization were rather more complicated developments than previously assumed, but because the historiographical agenda as a whole has moved in this direction. Consequently, serious modernists and perennialists alike now acknowledge the messy nature of these developments and have considerably modified their positions. In some ways their debate is now one designed to determine whether ultimately the glass was half full or half empty. Does the evidence for existing continuities, when everything is taken into consideration, ultimately outweigh the significance of the change that took place or not? Is the antisemitic ideology and movement emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century ultimately ‘just’ the same old antisemitism in a slightly updated guise or do the characteristics that set it apart make it qualitatively a different beast, its many commonalities with other forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiment notwithstanding? The resurgence of the Blood Libel in the nineteenth century, and especially after 1891, is an obvious, particularly striking, case in point for the complex interaction of old and new that would merit more comprehensive, systematic analysis, the existing scholarship notwithstanding.2 As far as racial discourse as a distinct feature of modern antisemitism is concerned, much disagreement among historians has resulted from overly narrow assumptions as to what constitutes racialized discourse. Scholars on both sides of the argument have suggested that the criterion here is the prevalence or absence of fully fledged racial ideology in its starkest, most pure formulation(s). Perennialists have then concluded from the fact that racialized notions frequently coexisted with other mutually attenuating if not contradictory assumptions that the racialized dimension within modern antisemitism, such as it is, does not qualify as a distinguishing factor. Yet modernists too have increasingly come to question the importance of this particular distinguishing factor. Marcel Stoetzler suggests that ‘the overlap between Jew-hatred that is articulated within the rhetoric of race and those forms of Jew-hatred that do not use that same rhetoric is so strong that such a conceptual distinction obscures more than it clarifies’.3 On his account, what makes modern antisemitism modern

2 For Germany, see Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002), pp. 112–15, 123–33. 3 Marcel Stoetzler, The State, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany (Lincoln, NE and London, 2008), p. 192.

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lies not in ‘any of its formal aspects (being formulated in racial as opposed to theological languages etc.)’, but rather in ‘its specific social content’.4 Modern antisemitism is modern, then, because it adapts to contend with modernity and address issues raised in and by modern society. That said, with modern society evolved a complex of widespread ideas that in most people’s perceptions and value systems privileged notions of ethnic belonging, hereditary community and rootedness in the Heimat, combined, to varying degrees, with various titbits of popularized racial discourse. The interesting question, then, is not so much the extent to which attitudes towards Jews were fully racialized, but rather how this complex mapped on to widespread notions about Jews and the prospects of their successful integration. Here the significance of the deep-seated assumptions that found their expression in the juxtaposition given its classic formulation by Ferdinand Tönnies as that between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (community and society),5 and the closely related contrast of Kultur and Zivilisation,6 though obviously by no means ignored in the literature to date, is still awaiting a comprehensive in-depth assessment. The ascription of Jewish characteristics in keeping with typologies and juxtapositions of this kind is evidently crucial to the dynamics of antisemitism, irrespective of whether those engaging in, or subscribing to, this ascription ‘may or may not imagine these characteristics to be inscribed into the DNA’.7 Further research along these lines is much more likely to help identify what was or was not distinct about antisemitism from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards than a litmus test seeking to distinguish who did and did not subscribe to racial theory in its purest and most radical formulations. Then again, it is also worth bearing in mind that in a very important sense even the Nazis themselves ultimately came a cropper with their supposedly scientific racial theories, and found no better way of distinguishing Jews from non-Jews than simply on the basis of their ancestry. In this sense, they too were ultimately inconsistent in their adherence to racist ideology and yet few would surely doubt that they were serious about it and meant business.

Is Antisemitism a Form of Racism?

This issue is obviously closely related to the one just discussed. If the significance of racialized discourse proper as a distinguishing feature of modern antisemitism has arguably been exaggerated and the organized antisemitic movement was in fact capable of integrating a whole range of anti-Jewish worldviews, then it is hard to see how antisemitism could be in any straightforward way equated to racism. At best, then, one might suggest that racism is one of modern antisemitism’s traits and/or that racists can also be antisemites and vice versa. Yet there is a rather more fundamental issue at stake here. Christine Achinger has suggested that ‘what we usually subsume under modern “antisemitism” are in fact two different kinds of phenomena that, although interrelated, should be distinguished analytically: what I call “anti-Jewish racism”, and “antisemitism” in the narrow sense of the word’. What, on Achinger’s understanding, is the difference between the two? ‘While

4 Ibid., p. 191. 5 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1887); idem, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge, 2001). 6 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford, 1994), pp. 5–30. 7 Stoetzler, The State, p. 304.

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the former typically targets unassimilated recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe for their self-segregation, cultural maladaptation, poverty and backwardness, the latter operates with a diametrically opposed set of stereotypes: it is directed against the wealthy, assimilated Jew who … has blended into the fabric of the nation where he is pulling the strings of modern economy and politics as part of a secret . Whereas the former refuses to become part of modern society, the latter is nesting at its heart and manipulates it to his nefarious ends.’8 Achinger has undertaken a careful analysis of the ways in which the phenomenally popular best-selling novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit) by Gustav Freytag constructs the portrayal of two groups in contrast to the Germans – Poles and Jews. Her crucial finding is that while ‘both groups serve to define German national identity through opposition … the characteristics of both groups and their function for the national self-image are radically different’.9 While the Poles are presented as ‘an external enemy … the Jews represent the enemy within … The Poles are a visible “other”, whereas the Jews become more dangerous the more assimilated and invisible they become. The power of the Poles is concrete, it is the power of sickles, scythes and cavalry, while the power of the Jews is abstract, they are in league with uncontrollable, impersonal and incomprehensible social forces.’ Ultimately, in Freytag’s scheme of things, while ‘the Poles come to stand for a feudal past that the project of a “German” modernity wants to leave behind, the Jews are in league with forces at the heart of modern society itself, it is they who are to blame if the desired harmonious and homely modernity can never truly be realised’.10 Both Poles and Jews, then, are othered by Freytag’s account in order to construct, by contrast, German identity, yet they are othered in distinct ways that facilitate the clarification and consolidation of differing aspects of German identity. Needless to say, all formsof othering have something in common, simply by merit of being forms of othering. Yet one might ask the very simple question why any one group would bother to construct and maintain more than one other if all forms of othering were fundamentally the same. A group requires a range of others to formulate and stabilize a variety of aspects of its own identity, and the typology indicated by Achinger’s account illustrates that there is good reason to assume that racism and antisemitism in fact speak to quite distinct needs and insecurities in the forming and maintaining of group identities. As Achinger astutely points out, the same holds true, incidentally, for the relationship between antisemitism and what is now commonly referred to as Islamophobia (Achinger suggests that a better designation would be ‘anti-Muslim racism’).11

Kernel of Truth or Projection?

Many scholars of antisemitism assume that it constitutes a distorted response to Jewish behaviour or characteristics, that is to say, that a kernel of truth inheres in the antisemites’ perception and portrayal of ‘the Jews’. Others insist that what actual Jews may or may not get up to is ultimately neither here nor there as far as the antisemites’ attitudes are concerned since antisemitism is fundamentally a form of projection. This latter contention is sometimes

8 Christine Achinger, ‘Threats to Modernity, Threats of Modernity: Racism and Antisemitism Through the Lens of Literature’, European Societies, 14 (2012), p. 242. 9 Ibid., pp. 250–51. 10 Ibid., p. 251. 11 Ibid., pp. 241, 253–4.

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misunderstood or misrepresented as claiming that no connection at all exists between anything that Jews do and antisemitic perceptions. In fact, what the projection thesis really argues is that such connections as do exist between antisemitic perceptions and Jewish realities are coincidental and not causal. The issue, then, is not whether some Jew(s) may at some point in time in some place have behaved in a manner that may to varying degrees correspond to anti-Jewish stereotypes; the answer to this question would in most (though certainly not all) cases undoubtedly be yes. The crucial issue is whether the way in which antisemites derive their ‘knowledge’ about ‘the Jews’ from such correspondences conforms, or at least approximates, to what one might ordinarily and by any stretch of the imagination seriously acknowledge as an empirical approach. At least two crucial observations militate against the suggestion that this is the case. Firstly, arguably one of the most important factors that does allow us to make a clear distinction (though, again, of degree rather than of kind) between modern antisemitism and previously dominant forms of anti-Judaism and anti-Jewish sentiment is, as already noted, the shift in emphasis towards a preoccupation principally with the invisible Jew. In response to Jewish emancipation, real or prospective, it is no longer Jews as clearly discernible aliens that primarily arouse concern but the very fact that Jews are becoming (or might become) increasingly indistinguishable from non-Jews, thus enabling them to subvert non-Jewish majority societies from within, potentially unobserved until it is too late. Ironically, then, the ideologues of modern antisemitism themselves emphasize the hidden nature of the problem. For many of them, the fact that their privileged knowledge about the true role of the Jews is at odds with empirical evidence only demonstrates how far Jewish subversion has already turned the world upside down, making it increasingly unintelligible. Their extraordinary obsession with the documentation of (alleged) Jewish transgressions can only really be understood as the flipside of a fundamental paradox within their worldview: they claim to fight an essentially invisible foe and yet would like to convince others that this foe is in fact hidden in plain sight. Against this backdrop it is not without irony that historians have been so willing to suggest that a kernel of truth, however tiny, and however dramatically distorted, does inhere in the antisemitic worldview. It is almost as though the antisemites are being credited with a greater measure of common sense than that to which they themselves would lay claim. Secondly, there is a fundamental epistemological issue at stake here. Put very bluntly indeed, the question is whether one assumes that human beings fundamentally do or do not have the ability to perceive of reality without in the very same process already imposing their attempts to make sense of it on that reality. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this problem lies in the notion that there is such a thing as an exception that confirms the rule. When one classifies something as the exception that confirms the rule, what is one actually doing? One is saying that something that can be clearly observed and that on its own terms would mean A does not in fact mean A because one knows enough about the bigger picture to know that what one has observed is not representative of that bigger picture. Hence the fact that what one has observed in and of itself would mean A cannot change the truth that it in fact means B. To put it slightly differently: we do not and cannot discern the meaning of a phenomenon we observe simply from the observation of the phenomenon itself; we can only do so by contextualizing it, by applying various techniques that we have acquired to make sense of the world to this phenomenon as we would to any other phenomenon of which we are trying to make sense. The crucial question for this context here, then, is not what phenomena – as potential kernels of truth – signify on their own terms but how one has learnt to make sense of phenomena more generally. What is it that makes a person decide which phenomena simply

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conform to the rule and which are the exceptions that nevertheless confirm it? After all, even if all the Jews one met in one’s lifetime happened to be perfectly wonderful, this in and of itself would not rule out the possibility that Jews in general are rather beastly creatures. Conversely, even if all the Jews one met in one’s lifetime happened to be exceptionally dreadful human beings, this in and of itself would not rule out the possibility that Jews in general are really quite wonderful. Consequently, introducing an antisemite to a nice Jew will in and of itself achieve nothing, because he will only assume that this particular Jew is the exception that confirms the rule. The real question is how an antisemite can be brought to reconsider what is the rule and what the exception. As Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out in the 1940s,12 antisemitism is ‘by no means altogether irrational’ but depends on a form of ‘applied rather than spontaneous irrationality’.13 ‘One cannot “correct” stereotyping by experience’, Adorno consequently concluded, ‘merely … taking a real look’ does not subvert the false projection. Instead, in order to do so, one ‘has to reconstitute the capacity for having experiences’.14 It stands to reason that one opportunity for the closer exploration of these issues should be the closer examination of conversion narratives, that is, accounts of the reasons for their change of heart given by former self-avowed antisemitic ideologues and activists who subsequently leave the antisemitic movement. Though a seemingly obvious point of reference, remarkably little systematic research has been undertaken in this area. While there is a strong case to be made that no causal connection exists between Jewish realities and antisemitic projections, well-established patterns of non-Jewish perceptions of Jews that do have some base in empirical observation, however partial and decontextualized, may help explain the choice of ‘the Jews’ as a foil in the first place. Though not entirely unconnected, these are two distinct issues that should not be confused. There is no reason why the grounds for the choice of the foil and the content of the projection need be inextricably linked. At this juncture, psychoanalytic modes of analysis have a crucial role to play in explaining how antisemitism, as a projection, represents a form of displacement that springs from the complex web of social relations in which the antisemite sees himself or herself embroiled and yet is in no way causally connected to actual social relations between Jews and non-Jews. Not least, this helps explain the paradox that antisemites persecute those they identify as Jews as Jews (and not, in their own minds, as symbols for something other than Jewry and Jewishness) and yet the qualities they ascribe to ‘the Jews’ are clearly displaced attributes that are in no way specifically connected to Jews and Jewishness. We therefore need to find a way of striking a balance between understanding the universal significance of what is being projected on to ‘the Jews’ without forgetting that those at the receiving end of antisemitic vitriol and violence were (and are) nevertheless real-life Jews (whether self-identified or, for better or for worse, identified as such by others).

12 It is now sometimes forgotten how crucial the 1940s were for the evolution of modern critical theories of antisemitism, in part because this process took place principally under the auspices of sociology and social theory long before history established its current disciplinary hegemony in this field. The enormous wealth of this sociological tradition needs to be made much more accessible again to the academic mainstream to ensure we garner the best of both worlds. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Darmstadt, 1998), p. 401. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Prejudice in the Interview Material’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9 (Darmstadt, 1998), p. 303. The foundational text for much work currently being undertaken in this critical tradition, and arguably the single most important conceptual text on antisemitism published in recent decades, is Moishe Postone, ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’, in Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (eds), Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust (New York, 1986), pp. 302–14.

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‘Politics’ or ‘Culture’?

Among scholars of modern antisemitism, this juxtaposition has the dubious honour of being a useful shorthand while at the same time implying a facile and problematic dichotomy. As a shorthand it signifies approaches to antisemitism that focus primarily either on antisemitism as a (party-)political ideology and movement, on the one hand, or on attitudes towards ‘the Jews’ prevalent in society more widely, on the other. This distinction is particularly pronounced among historians of Imperial Germany because organized party-political antisemitism was a startlingly new phenomenon, on the one hand, but, initial successes notwithstanding, ultimately failed to establish itself as a significant political movement prior to 1914, on the other.15 And yet everything we know about the significance of antisemitism in twentieth-century Germany illustrates that this cannot possibly be the whole story as far as the prevalence of antisemitism in German society is concerned. Imperial Germany presumably maintains such a fascination for scholars of antisemitism not least because it offers such a rich case study for the interplay between these two dimensions, the political (in the narrower) and cultural (in the broader sense of the word). In terms of their perceptions of and attitudes towards Jews, the number of Germans (and Europeans more generally) prior to 1914 who, by the standards many would accept today, were not antisemitic is negligible. And yet, these Germans who today would widely be seen as antisemites in terms of their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, Jews nevertheless displayed a range of political stances vis-à-vis ‘the Jews’, the many commonalities in their underlying attitudes notwithstanding. Consequently it was perfectly possible to subscribe to a whole range of attitudes that scholars today would classify as antisemitic stereotypes and yet be an outspoken opponent of antisemitism as a political movement. Conversely, as my own research has shown, it was also possible to be an outspoken opponent of (party-)political antisemitism without ever genuinely taking issue specifically with the antisemites’ stance vis-à-vis the Jews.16 While a self-avowed antisemitic movement existed, the term antisemitism became a generalizing party-political label covering anything and everything done or said by a member of the antisemitic camp. By this logic, support for agricultural tariffs or the imperial government’s armaments policy was no less ‘antisemitic’ than the call for specific anti-Jewish measures. Consequently, it is no foregone conclusion that anti-antisemitic activism necessarily targeted the antisemites’ anti-Jewish orientation. Put slightly differently, ‘political’ anti-antisemitism was perfectly capable of co-existing – even within one and the same head – quite peacefully with ‘cultural’ antisemitism. Consequently, assessments of antisemitism as an organized political movement in Imperial Germany are likely to sound very different from assessments of antisemitism as a broader social phenomenon. These assessments are obviously not mutually contradictory, but merely reflect differing approaches and the fact that the goalposts have been placed in very different places; yet they obviously have the potential to cause considerable confusion unless the criteria applied in each case are made transparent. What renders this entire shorthand problematic, however, is the assumption that one could distinguish between the political and the cultural in such a neat fashion. Anti-Jewish attitudes prevalent in society more widely may not offer a sufficient explanation forthe success of organized forms of political antisemitism, but are surely one of its necessary

15 For the classic formulation of this argument, see Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven and London, 1975). 16 See Lars Fischer, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (New York, 2007); idem, ‘The Social Democratic Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany: The Case of the Handlungsgehilfen’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 54 (2009), pp. 151–70.

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preconditions all the same. As Shulamit Volkov explained when reviewing Rosemarie Leuschen-Seppel’s study of German Social Democracy’s stance vis-à-vis antisemitism and ‘the Jews’,17 Leuschen-Seppel concluded that ‘while the [Social Democratic] party was practically immune against antisemitism on the political level, it consistently succumbed to it on the cultural level’. This failure, Volkov added, surely ‘must be seen as fatal indeed’, given that, on her account, the continuities that did exist between antisemitism in Imperial Germany, on the one hand, and Weimar and Nazi Germany, on the other, drew precisely on ‘the persistence of a cultural system of norms, vocabulary, and associations’, rather than any direct continuity of organized political antisemitism.18 That said, people at the time clearly had a neatly ‘political’ understanding of what did and did not constitute antisemitism. Antisemitism was indeed defined not in terms of what people thought about Jews but in terms of what they thought should be done to them; not in terms of people’s perceptions of ‘the Jews’, in other words, but in terms of their prescriptions for them. Short of either belonging to the antisemitic movement, and/ or blaming all the world’s woes on the Jews and expressly demanding special measures against them, one did not qualify as an antisemite. Consequently, when looking at primary sources it is important to bear in mind that contemporaries’ comments about the strength or weakness of antisemitism are highly likely to refer specifically to organized political antisemitism as a movement and not – or not primarily – to the prevalence of anti-Jewish sentiments in day-to-day life.19 The historian of the labour movement and Engels biographer, Gustav Mayer (1871– 1948), having fled to England in 1936, reflected upon this issue when writing his memoirs in the mid-1940s. As a youth, he wrote, he never doubted that ‘the remaining differences between German Jews and Christians – the “Aryan” did not yet play a role – would wane over time … Never would it have entered my mind to doubt that, just as trains would get ever faster and postage ever cheaper in future, people would cast off their prejudices ever more completely too.’20 Interestingly, even though he subsequently reflects critically upon this perception, in his account of his youth he fundamentally downplays the significance of antisemitic occurrences. ‘Usually, I was the only Jewish pupil in my class and since I was also one of the youngest and smallest, I had a hard time amongst these youngsters for whom only physical strength really counted and who did not consider it dishonourable to pick on someone who was physically weaker.’ Note the way in which Mayer here connects his Jewishness, on the one hand, and his youth and physical weakness, on the other. For whatever reason, he is evidently disinclined to explain the bullying to which he was clearly subjected exclusively with his Jewishness, but then neither does he deny the link between the two. He goes on to mention one particularly hideous incident when ‘the son of a tenant farmer who was four years older and two heads taller than I, during a break, cheered on by the pupils on the neighbouring benches, forcibly rubbed pork dripping into my mouth because he knew that my religion prohibited me from eating it’. In later years, Mayer went on, physical violence became less of an issue and the behaviour of

17 Rosemarie Leuschen-Seppel, Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus im Kaiserreich (Bonn, 1978). 18 Shulamit Volkov, review in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 9 (1980), p. 546. 19 When it comes to primary source material documenting Jewish perceptions of antisemitism, one of the richest resources readily available to those who read German is the electronic repository of German-Jewish periodicals covering the period between 1806 and 1938 at http://www.compactmemory. de/. 20 Gustav Mayer, Erinnerungen. Vom Journalisten zum Historiker der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Zurich and Munich, 1949), p. 7.

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most of his fellow pupils was simply characterized by a ‘marked lack of camaraderie’.21 Mayer then adds that, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems evident to him that the seeds of the catastrophe that would subsequently befall German (and European) Jewry were essentially already contained in the everyday life of his childhood years, but had not yet crystallized to a political phenomenon.22 The Shoah is by no means the only factor, though, that needs to be borne in mind when evaluating contemporaries’ statements about the extent and significance of antisemitism. In this context, Miriam Gebhardt’s findings deserve much more attention than they have received to date. She examined German Jewish letters, diaries, memoirs and autobiographies from the period 1890 to 1932. Insofar as these sorts of documents each reflect differing contexts, intentions and conventions, comparing them offers an insight into the choices made by their authors by including or excluding certain themes from some but not others.23 Notably for the context here, it transpires that antisemitism features much more prominently in diaries than it does in memoirs or autobiographies. This is partly due to the more immediate, less discriminate focus and usually more detailed nature of daily diaries. Yet Gebhardt argues that the differing intentions attached to diaries and memoirs are in fact a more important explanatory factor. As a general rule, prior to 1933, these sorts of memoirs were meant to offer a wholesome and successful narrative of integration into German society andtheir authors therefore had no interest in making antisemitism part of the narrative.24 Indeed, personal experiences of antisemitism were assumed to reflect a personal failure to integrate sufficiently.25 Why else would one be singled out for ill treatment as a Jew? Gebhardt notes that schools emerge from the diaries as the most frequent site of antisemitic discrimination, yet this hardly features at all in the memoirs and autobiographies. Consequently, questions about the prevalence of antisemitism in Imperial German schools are obviously going to be answered very differently, depending on whether the answers are based mainly on diaries or mainly on memoirs.26 Finally, thinking about the ‘cultural’ sphere in particular, the issue of intentionality (or lack thereof) needs to be borne in mind. Not everyone who unthinkingly reproduced culturally and socially well-established anti-Jewish stereotypes in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries was a willing executioner in waiting; but then neither does this in and of itself render those stereotypes and their unthinking reproduction unproblematic – quite the opposite in fact. As Jay Geller points out in his discussion of Marx in The Other Question, ‘Marx … would … argue that the objects with which one engages daily – including the phrases that populate our reading, writing, and conversation and the social interaction between Gentile (whether or not of Gentile descent) and Jew (whether or not the individual accepts such an identification) – are among the “circumstances that make men” … if not necessarily, “in the last instance.”’ These phrases ‘may seem to be as merely incidental … as day residues seem to be to the content of dreams, but like those remains they prove to be not merely at hand; they shape the hand that would employ them’.27 In short, ‘once these “quasi-

21 Ibid., p. 12. 22 Ibid., p. 13. 23 Miriam Gebhardt, Das Familiengedächtnis. Erinnerung im deutsch-jüdischen Bürgertum 1890 bis 1932 (Stuttgart, 1999), p. 26. 24 Ibid., p. 110. 25 Ibid., p. 109. 26 Ibid., p. 229. 27 Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York, 2011), p. 211.

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objects” emerge, they affect the possible directions that an argument or analysis can pursue: constraining or even foreclosing some, expanding or opening up others’.28

Philosemitism and Anti-Antisemitism

As if all this did not make life quite complicated enough for scholars of antisemitism in Imperial Germany, they also need to take into account the discourse on so-called ‘philosemitism’.29 The pioneers of the antisemitic movement in the 1870s promptly denounced their opponents as ‘philosemites’. This was a smart and highly successful move as a result of which the entire subsequent discourse on the matter ultimately took place on the antisemites’ terms. This juxtaposition of antisemitism and philosemitism implied that one could only be either the Jews’ foe or their friend, and that only those who were friends of the Jews could have a reason to oppose antisemitism. That one might not care much about the Jews one way or the other and still find antisemitism problematic is an option nobody seems to have given any serious consideration. Philosemitism, then, was a dirty word, and it increasingly came to be seen as the counter-problem to the problem of antisemitism, suggesting that one had to oppose one as much as the other. Anti-antisemites therefore tended to preface their criticism of antisemitism with the clarification that they certainly would not want to be thought of as philosemites. In short, exceptions apart, those who considered themselves opponents of ‘political’ antisemitism in Imperial Germany would almost certainly have been not only ‘cultural’ antisemites but also committed anti- ‘philosemites’. Against this backdrop, much speaks for the suggestion that one is well advised to refer to opponents of ‘political’ antisemitism as anti-antisemites and use the term ‘philosemites’ and it derivatives only in inverted commas to reflect the polemical usage of these terms at the time. To grasp any of the intricacies just discussed, we obviously depend desperately on thick descriptions that allow us to reconstruct with precision what exactly various seemingly familiar terms and concepts really meant when used by various people in a variety of contexts. Moreover, it may not be terribly helpful to want to divide Imperial German society neatly into one antisemitic and one non-antisemitic camp. Analytically, it makes more sense to assume we are in fact dealing with a much broader spectrum or continuum of attitudes towards ‘the Jews’, including a whole range that are deeply problematic in their own right and yet fall short of constituting fully fledged antisemitism. In the first instance this is obviously simply a question of where one places the goalposts. If one assumes that all problematic attitudes towards Jews are per se antisemitic, then the distinction just suggested clearly makes no sense. Indeed, from a post-Shoah perspective it may seem problematic to introduce such a distinction at all and I would hasten to insist that it indeed no longer works after Auschwitz. After Auschwitz all forms of ignorance or inadvertent complicity have lost any such innocence as they may ever have had. Yet the crucial question when trying to understand the state of play in Imperial German society is to assess the full range of prevalent attitudes towards Jews precisely in order to explore the extent to which their interplay may or may not have rendered German society more susceptible to what was to follow. We may wish that more people had shown

28 Ibid., p. 387, note 164. 29 For a more detailed discussion, see Lars Fischer, ‘Anti-“Philosemitism” and Anti-Antisemitism in Imperial Germany’, in Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp (eds), Philosemitism in History (New York, 2011): pp. 170–89.

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more foresight and a greater sense of urgency in combating (what they considered to be) antisemitism, and the fact that at least a few individuals did go beyond the general consensus raises the tantalizing possibility that many more people could have known better. What nobody can reasonably expect Imperial German citizens to have known, however, is that one way or another this whole process could end in the death camps. That their failure to challenge antisemitism, not just as a political movement but as a widespread complex of anti-Jewish stereotypes, may indeed have helped facilitate this catastrophic outcome is in many ways a tragedy rather than a scandal. Yet for anyone today to show the same ignorance is obviously a scandal of considerable proportions.

Where to Begin?

For students and more advanced scholars alike for whom this topic is virgin territory, a good place to begin is Peter Pulzer’s 2005 article, ‘Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism’.30 This is a slightly revised English-language version of the introduction Pulzer wrote for the new translation of his pioneering monograph, The Rise of Political Anti- Semitism in Germany and Austria, which appeared in Germany in 2004.31 In it he surveys what he considers the important scholarly developments since the original publication of his book in 1964. One need by no means share all his judgements to find this an extraordinarily useful survey that can be used to great benefit as an annotated bibliography. Not least, it allows me to be rather more specific and selective in my choice of the new scholarship than would otherwise have been the case. Pulzer acknowledges crucial shifts, inter alia, towards ‘a more sophisticated investigation of the place of antisemitism in the main political movements’, that is to say, not just in the antisemitic movement itself, and ‘a new emphasis on cultural history and the history of mentalities that throws new light on the social and cultural implantation of antisemitism’.32 He reiterates the consensus outlined above that ‘antisemitic political parties were relatively unsuccessful in the Wilhelmine Empire compared to the pervasive influence of antisemitism in society’,33 adding that, to his mind, he differs from Richard Levy’s assessment in that ‘I regard the penetration of wide circles of German society by antisemitic sentiment as more important than the fact of the unsuccessful parties’.34 Yet much as Pulzer seeks to do justice to the shifts he acknowledges, ultimately his perspective remains firmly focused on the political (in the narrower sense of the word). ‘The historian of antisemitism’, he writes, ‘needs to find out how a political concept … can become politically effective. Thorough knowledge of the contents of antisemitism can be less useful here than a more general acquaintance with modern political processes.’35 Then again, in an introduction to what is, after all, a volume on The Rise of Political Antisemitism, this is hardly surprising.

30 Peter Pulzer, ‘Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 4 (2005), pp. 137–78. 31 Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964); idem, Die Entstehung des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Österreich (1867–1914) (Göttingen, 2004). Pulzer characterizes this translation as ‘much improved’ compared to the first German edition of 1966. 32 Pulzer, ‘Third Thoughts’, p. 140. 33 Ibid., p. 143. 34 Ibid., p. 145. 35 Ibid., p. 160.

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Among the desiderata, Pulzer noted that ‘the ambivalence of sections of the Social Democratic movement towards Jews and antisemitism should be given more emphasis’.36 Here my own work, despite being received with extraordinary hostility in some quarters, has hopefully given some important impulses. Pulzer also emphasized that ‘remarkably little has been written on the attitudes of the liberal parties to antisemitism’.37 The work of Marcel Stoetzler and Christine Achinger, though focusing more on liberal discourse than party politics as such, has certainly brought about a sea change in this respect, albeit one far removed and barely conceivable from the perspective of Pulzer’s remaining faith in the ‘Jewish-Liberal symbiosis’ in Imperial Germany.38

‘The anti-Semitism of liberals is grounded in their liberalism’39

Marcel Stoetzler has presented a detailed discussion of the so-called Berlin Antisemitism Dispute of the late 1870s and early 1880s that was unleashed by public remarks in which Heinrich von Treitschke, one of Imperial Germany’s most respected historians and a long- standing liberal deputy, expressed his sympathies for some of the antisemites’ concerns.40 These remarks by no means went unopposed but, crucially, ‘overlapping theoretical premises were used for the defense of, as well as for the attack on, Jewish emancipation’, thus creating ‘ambiguities and confusions that make the analysis of the Dispute significant far beyond its specific historical context’.41 Not least, Stoetzler explains, the dispute ‘attracted some of the brightest, most articulate, and most politically committed minds of the time’ and consequently ‘it can scarcely be rivalled as a document of social and political thought in Bismarck’s Germany’.42 Stoetzler frames his analysis as ‘a contribution to the wider analysis of the tendency of liberalism to be complicit in its own undoing’.43 As he stresses, ‘antisemitism develops from within; it is not a challenge coming from somewhere outside society and its values. To the extent that antisemitism is anti-liberal, it is an element of the self-negation of liberal society.’44 His ‘deliberately paradoxical’ contention is ‘that Treitschke’s illiberalism is liberal, and his opponents’ liberalism is also illiberal’.45 Since ‘only close inspection can reveal what is interesting here’,46 Stoetzler demands of his readers ‘a childlike, leisurely pleasure in wading through a labyrinth of original text that was written by people who were scholarly trained but found themselves in political combat and who threw into battle all and sundry

36 Ibid., p. 168. 37 Ibid., p. 146. 38 Ibid., p. 147. 39 Marcel Stoetzler and Christine Achinger, ‘German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-Seeking Jews: The Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals’, Nations and Nationalism, 19 (2013), pp. 739–60. 40 Stoetzler, The State. A comprehensive edition of the texts published in the course of the dispute is now available as Karsten Krieger (ed.), Der ‘Berliner Antisemitismusstreit’, 1879–1881, 2 vols (Munich, 2003). 41 Stoetzler, The State, p. 3. 42 Ibid., p. 8. 43 Ibid., p. 5. 44 Ibid., p. 9. 45 Ibid., p. 12. 46 Ibid., p. 3.

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they could muster’.47 Stoetzler’s central conclusion from his painstaking analysis is that ‘even the most extravagant examples of liberals or democrats who turned into antisemites … should … not be treated as isolated cases explicable only on an individual level’. Rather, ‘their antisemitism should … be taken seriously as part of the continuum of responses to capitalist-industrial modernization that emerged from within liberal and democratic traditions in Germany (in distinction to but also intertwined with the antisemitism of conservatives, which never ceased to exist next to it)’.48 Stoetzler summarizes the complex constellation at hand as follows: ‘Because Treitschke expects antisemitism to accelerate the assimilation of German Jews (his first objective) and strengthen national consciousness of all Germans (his second objective), he endorses it. The tension in his argument between whether or not he believes Jewish assimilation to be possible implies that the second objective can still be achieved independently from the first: if inclusion does not work, exclusion will.’ Treitschke’s opponents, on the other hand, ‘do not want the second objective (strengthening of the Germans’ national consciousness) to be realized without the first (inclusion and assimilation of the Jews). Treitschke’s liberal critics oppose antisemitism primarily because they think it weakens national unity. Statements that reject antisemitism for reasons other than its adverse implication for nation building are few and far between.’49 Given this orientation, Treitschke’s critics ‘had to concede a significant extent of consensus between themselves and him’.50 Christine Achinger comes to very similar results in her aforementioned work on Gustav Freytag’s best-selling novel Debit and Credit, first published in 1855. Her analysis adds methodological depth and sophistication to the argument insofar as she deploys literary theory as a means of ‘inform[ing] our thinking about the social imaginary and provid[ing] impulses for empirical research’ in order to ‘sharpen our understanding of social discourses more generally’.51 If one follows the conventional periodization, that is, the assumption that modern political antisemitism emerged in the mid-1870s, Achinger’s research really contributes to the pre-history rather than the history of modern antisemitism proper. Yet a joint piece by Achinger and Stoetzler in which they pool their research illustrates the far-reaching congruence between their findings. They make a compelling case that the ambiguities revealed by their two chronologically, thematically and methodologically distinct case studies reflect ‘a systematic fault line within liberalism itself’.52 Liberals’ antisemitism in nineteenth-century Germany, they argue, ‘is consistent with and grounded in their overall social, cultural, economic and political assumptions rather than a contingent, illiberal peculiarity of their thinking’;53 it is, in other words, ‘grounded in their liberalism, and … not merely contingently related to it’. It is distinctly liberal insofar as it is ‘primarily motivated by ideas about social cohesion and homogeneity and about socio-economic ethics and patterns of behaviour that are adequate to a modern, capitalist society that is sustainable, i.e. warrants its own reproduction and cohesion’. To the extent that notions of race may feature in this context, they are in fact a ‘shorthand … for the fundamentally “cultural” imagery thus described’.54

47 Ibid., p.13. 48 Ibid., p. 221. 49 Ibid., p. 286. 50 Ibid., p. 303. 51 Achinger, ‘Threats to Modernity’, p. 240. 52 Stoetzler and Achinger, ‘German Modernity’, p. 740. 53 Ibid., p. 753. 54 Ibid., p. 755.

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The ease with which Achinger’s and Stoetzler’s findings map onto one another is all the more interesting in light of Henning Albrecht’s study of social conservative antisemitism between the late 1850s and the 1870s.55 While his thesis is not unproblematic – and the extent to which he actually manages to substantiate it in his book is a moot point – a number of his suggestions and implications are extremely intriguing. Albrecht seeks to refute the conventional wisdom that antisemitism became a party-political cause only from the 1870s onwards by demonstrating that the social conservative wing within the conservative movement already conformed to the criteria generally applied to modern political antisemitism as early as the late 1850s. On his account, this has been overlooked in part simply because most of the relevant scholarship has focused either on the period up to and including the revolutions of 1848–49 or on the period from German unification onwards. Indeed, it has been widely accepted that the issue of Jewish emancipation sailed into calmer waters in the intervening years.56 Albrecht also implies, however, that this oversight, if it can be called that, springs in part from apologetic impulses designed to exonerate German conservatism. All too often, antisemitism within the conservative spectrum from the 1870s onwards has been downplayed as being primarily an opportunistic response to the fact that the conservatives were courting the same constituencies as the newly established antisemitic parties. On Albrecht’s reading, this antisemitism in fact sprang from an already well-founded ideological and practical tradition of political antisemitism within the conservative movement established by the social conservatives in the 1850s and 1860s.57 Perhaps the most intriguing implication to emerge from Albrecht’s argument is that modern political antisemitism, if we follow his account, did not originate in a crisis of the capitalist economy – as the conventional periodization that begins the tale of modern political antisemitism with the crash of the Viennese stock exchange in 1873 has long suggested – but is in fact a product of capitalism in rude health.58 This would obviously tie in rather neatly with the contention that antisemitism develops from within society, and that not only in times of crisis but also in times of growing prosperity. Whether Albrecht would share this assessment is hard to say. If I understand his account correctly, his social conservatives are pick-and-mix modernists that look remarkably like Achinger’s Freytag and Stoetzler’s Treitschke, affirming what they consider to be the benign aspects of modernity while holding ‘the Jews’ responsible for its less palatable consequences. The constituency, on the other hand, that Albrecht’s social conservatives seek to mobilize with their antisemitic campaigning consists of those who are (or feel) disadvantaged by the modernization process and are thus inclined to turn on modernization as a whole. Albrecht’s account vacillates somewhat between these two potentially contradictory trends. Perhaps he would argue that, in terms of the target group, the social conservatives’ pre-1870 antisemitism was a response to crisis all the same. Then again, capitalism is constantly in flux, of course, and new groups are forever finding themselves disadvantaged by change. If one made the existence of such groups the decisive criterion, one could only conclude that capitalism is either always in crisis or never. In any case, it is evident from Albrecht’s account that the social conservatives’ own interest in political antisemitism springs not so much from their conservatism but principally from their serious engagement of the ‘Social Question’. Given their aforementioned adherence to

55 Henning Albrecht, Antiliberalismus und Antisemitismus. Hermann Wagener und die preußischen Sozialkonservativen 1855–1873 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich, 2010). 56 Ibid., p. 23. 57 Ibid., p. 26. 58 Ibid., p. 113.

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a pick-and-mix modernism not dissimilar from that of the likes of Freytag and Treitschke, it is all the more surprising that Albrecht, while seeking to hold German conservatives fully to account, at the same time totally exonerates the liberals.59 Antisemitism in Imperial Germany is arguably a more exciting field of study now than ever before, chiefly because a critical mass of scholars and scholarship is finally affording us precisely those thick descriptions that we need for an in-depth assessment of its prevalence, dynamics and significance. It is no secret, of course, that scholars remain divided on the issue of how dominant a feature and how grave a threat antisemitism was in Imperial Germany, but one of the huge advantages of working with carefully – and transparently – conceptualized thick descriptions is that we can acknowledge, and indeed benefit from, one another’s scholarship while continuing to disagree fundamentally about the conclusions we draw.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Achinger, Christine. Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben. Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild (Würzburg, 2007). —. ‘Antisemitismus und “Deutsche Arbeit” – Zur Selbstzerstörung des Liberalismus bei Gustav Freytag’, in Nicolas Berg (ed.), Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900 – Über antisemitierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig, 2011), pp. 361–88. —. ‘Threats to Modernity, Threats of Modernity: Racism and Antisemitism Through the Lens of Literature’, European Societies, 14 (2012), pp. 240–58. —. ‘Allegories of Destruction: “The Woman” and “the Jew” in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character’, Germanic Review, 88 (2013), pp. 121–49. Albrecht, Henning. Antiliberalismus und Antisemitismus. Hermann Wagener und die preußischen Sozialkonservativen 1855–1873 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich, 2010). Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923, 2nd edn (Madison, 1999). Berg, Nicolas (ed.) Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900 – Über antisemitierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig, 2011). Bergmann, Werner and Wetzel, Juliane. ‘“Der Miterlebende weiß nichts.” Alltagsantisemitismus als zeitgenössische Erfahrung und spätere Erinnerung’, in Wolfgang Benz, Arnold Paucker and Peter Pulzer (eds), Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 173–96. Bering, Dietz.The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812–1933 (Cambridge, 1992). Blaschke, Olaf. Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 1997). Claussen, Detlev. Vom Judenhaß zum Antisemitismus. Materialien einer verleugneten Geschichte (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1987). Engel, David. ‘The Concept of Antisemitism in the Historical Scholarship of Amos Funkenstein’, Jewish Social Studies, 6 (1999), pp. 111–29. Fischer, Lars. The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (New York, 2007). —. ‘The Social Democratic Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany: The Case of the Handlungsgehilfen’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 54 (2009), pp. 151–70.

59 Ibid., p. 127.

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—. ‘Anti-“Philosemitism” and Anti-Antisemitism in Imperial Germany’, in Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp (eds), Philosemitism in History (New York, 2011), pp. 170–89. Funkenstein, Amos. ‘Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Pagan, Christian and Modern’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 19 (1981), pp. 56–72. —. Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993). Gebhardt, Miriam. Das Familiengedächtnis. Erinnerung im deutsch-jüdischen Bürgertum 1890 bis 1932 (Stuttgart, 1999). Geller, Jay. On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (New York, 2007). —. The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York, 2011). Gilman, Sander L. and Zipes, Jack (eds). Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven and London, 1997). Heschel, Susannah. ‘Jewish Studies as Counterhistory’, in David Biale, Michael Galchinsky and Susannah Heschel (eds), Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 101–15. Hoffmann, Christhard, Bergmann, Werner and Smith, Helmut Walser (eds). Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, 2002). Holz, Klaus. Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung (Hamburg, 2001). Jelavich, Peter. ‘Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany: Cultural Code or Pervasive Prejudice?’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 99 (2009), pp. 584–93. Kaplan, Marion. ‘Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany’, Central European History, 34 (2001), pp. 471–501. Mack, Michael. German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago, 2003). Massing, Paul W. Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York, 1949). Postone, Moishe. ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’, in Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (eds), Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust (New York, 1986), pp. 302–14. Pulzer, Peter. ‘Third Thoughts on German and Austrian Antisemitism’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 4 (2005), pp. 137–78. Rotenstreich, Nathan. The Recurring Pattern: Studies in Anti-Judaism in Modern Thought(London, 1961). Scheit, Gerhard. Verborgener Staat, lebendiges Geld: Zur Dramaturgie des Antisemitismus (Freiburg, 1999; 2nd edn, 2006). Smith, Helmut Walser. The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002). —. The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and New York, 2008). Stoetzler, Marcel. The State, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany (Lincoln, NE and London, 2008). —. ‘Cultural Difference in the National State: From Trouser-Selling Jews to Unbridled Multiculturalism’, Patterns of Prejudice, 42 (2008), pp. 245–79. —. ‘Antisemitism, Capitalism and the Formation of Sociological Theory’, Patterns of Prejudice, 44 (2010), pp. 160–93. — (ed.) Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology (Lincoln, NE and London, 2014). — and Achinger, Christine. ‘German Modernity, Barbarous Slavs and Profit-Seeking Jews: The Cultural Racism of Nationalist Liberals’, Nations and Nationalism, 19 (2013), pp. 739–60. Wiese, Christian. Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden and Boston, 2005).

158 9 political catholicism

Jeffrey T. Zalar

Political Catholicism in Imperial Germany refers to believers’ efforts to defend their interests against liberal and secular legislative pressure. Grounded in the religious revival of the middle decades of the nineteenth century and framed by the pan-European “culture war” pitting Catholics against the forces of economic, social, and political modernization, these efforts mobilized Germany’s sizable Catholic minority largely behind the Center Party.1 This party became a powerhouse. It defiantly asserted Catholic rights and influence during the Kulturkampf (1871–78), the church-state struggle in which Chancellor Otto von Bismarck attempted to achieve national integration on the basis of Protestant culture and liberal anticlericalism. By improving the standing of Catholics in society, the party enjoyed impressive stability in voter loyalty that other parties could not ignore. And because of its core support and position in the middle of the political spectrum, by 1900 the Center was able to form either a right or left majority in the Reichstag, making its allegiance crucial to moving legislation.2 Although by 1914 the Center’s cohesion had eroded, political Catholicism, increasingly nationalistic in tone and integrated into Germany’s public institutions, joined the consensus behind the government during the early years of the First World War. In view of the Center Party’s rapid maturity and pivotal role in legislative affairs, it is hardly surprising that in the 1970s, when historians began devoting serious attention to the place of Catholicism in modern German history, their work focused on party politics.3 This attention continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s in an eruption of scholarship that established political Catholicism as essential to any comprehensive explanation of national development in the Empire. But in the aftermath of the Sonderweg debate, as investigation of

1 On the connection between the religious revival and Catholic politics, see Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 1984). On the “culture war,” see Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds), Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003); Olaf Blaschke, Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen, 2002); and Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen, 2010). 2 On the “dynamic stability” of Catholic loyalty to the Center Party, see Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge and New York, 1997), pp. 75–94. 3 Rudolf Lill, Die Wende im Kulturkampf: Leo XIII., Bismarck und die Zentrumspartei 1878–1889 (Tübingen, 1973); Rudolf Morsey, “Die Deutschen Katholiken und der Nationalstaat zwischen Kulturkampf und Erstem Weltkrieg,” in Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Deutsche Parteien vor 1918 (Cologne, 1973), pp. 79–105; Ursula Mittmann, Fraktion und Partei: Ein Vergleich von Zentrum und Sozialdemokratie im Kaiserreich (Düsseldorf, 1976); Ronald J. Ross, Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany (Notre Dame, 1976); John K. Zeender, The German Center Party, 1890–1906 (Philadelphia, 1976); and Ellen Lovell Evans, The German Center Party, 1870–1933: A Study in Political Catholicism (Carbondale, 1981). Reviews of earlier confessional work include: Rudolf Morsey, “Bismarck und der Kulturkampf: Ein Forschungs- und Literaturbericht, 1945–1957,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 39 (1957), pp. 232–70; and idem, “Probleme der Kulturkampf-Forschung,” Historisches Jahrbuch, 83 (1964), pp. 217–43. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

the bourgeoisie opened up new vistas into civil society, and as the “cultural turn” emphasized symbols and their meanings over structures and institutions, with few exceptions political Catholicism receded from the research agenda.4 When politics did appear, historians tended to situate them within broader contexts of national culture or European Christian democracy.5 By the early 2000s, historians were wondering where the Kulturkampf, for example, had gone.6 However, it would be a mistake to conclude from these initial observations that recent emphases on civil society and culture contribute little of importance to our knowledge of political Catholicism. On the contrary, these studies, which depict Catholicism less as a political force than as a way of life, as a distinctive way of being modern and being German, have offered trenchant insights into politics. For example, work on Catholic nationalism, a surprisingly neglected topic of inquiry in earlier political studies, has altered our understanding of the extent of Catholic integration into the national community. Religious conflicts and the tensions of living in mixed confessional communities have emergedas formative conditions of popular political consciousness. Local religious peculiarities by region, even by Heimat, shaped the policy positions of Catholics up and down the social scale, while religious inflections in political discourse impinged upon electoral mobilization from one end of Germany to the other. Recent scholarship has even drawn attention to theological claims that authorized Catholic accommodation, despite the real antipathy of the Kulturkampf and its painful legacy, with the liberal ethos of the national state. While there is no sign that politics have returned to the front of the agenda, younger historians in particular are integrating the knowledge of Catholic spirituality and culture, on the one hand, with knowledge of politics, on the other, in exciting syntheses that are powerfully advancing the field of modern German history. The study of political Catholicism, far from being closed, appears as open as it has ever been. This chapter will track these historiographical developments. It begins with further remarks on the reorientation of the field away from church-state relations and toward confessional and inter-religious relations among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews living in competing, sometimes peacefully co-existing, socio-cultural milieus. Then it analyzes the scholarship brought forward since this reorientation, especially after 2000, as it pertains to political Catholicism. The chapter concludes with recommendations for enlarging the research landscape and suggestions for further reading.

From Politics to Culture

With the exception of the source identification work conducted by the Center Party politician, editor and writer Karl Bachem, until the 1970s political Catholicism was a neglected topic

4 Exceptions include: Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887 (Washington, DC, 1998); and Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). 5 See, for example, Noel D. Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA and London, 1996); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, NY and London, 1996); Winfried Becker, “From Political Catholicism to Christian Democracy: The Development of Christian Parties in Modern Germany,” in Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg (eds), European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives (Notre Dame, 2003), pp, 93–120; and Winfried Becker, Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union (Cambridge, 2007). 6 Armin Heinen, “Umstrittene Moderne: Die Liberalen und der preußisch-deutsche Kulturkampf,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003), pp. 138–40.

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of research.7 John Zeender attributed this neglect to abiding liberal and Marxist disdain for Catholicism as a conservative residue from a discarded past unworthy of consideration as a factor in modern Germany’s political and economic emancipation.8 The authority of the “new social democratic orthodoxy,” with Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the Bielefeld School at its forefront, reinforced these basic assumptions. Beyond assigning interpretive significance to the Kulturkampf as a characteristic episode of Bismarckian “negative integration,” the “Bielefelders” placed little store on the relevance of Catholicism to the main course of German history. Catholics, according to this view, were not only uneducated and culturally retrograde, they were economically and socially underdeveloped. Their over-representation in agriculture and craftsmanship disqualified them from the future envisioned by Marxist and modernization theory, so Catholics appeared uninteresting except to the extent that they impeded the upward drive of the working class. Upon the basis of these claims, both the liberal and Marxist traditions in German historiography wrote Catholics out of the national historical story. Hans-Ulrich Wehler himself ties up the threads of the general aversion in his famous social history of the Empire:

[Catholic culture] was opposed to the social mobility of the modern age and its notions of parliamentary representation and democratic equality. It cemented the backward- looking traditions of Catholicism, and turned the values of a vanished world based on estates into an ideology. It sought to tie the nineteenth century into the strait-jacket of the medieval order while the tide of history moved in the opposite direction. […] Catholicism was even less likely than Protestantism to make an active and lasting contribution to the spread of parliamentary influence in Germany, to say nothing of its eventual democratization.9

The critique of this historiography appears most prominently in the work of Margaret Lavinia Anderson, the magistra magna of modern German religion. In a recent retrospective essay on her publishing career, she writes of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the status of the discipline in the early 1980s:

Although historians of Germany proudly dubbed themselves “critical” vis à vis their conservative predecessors, their own narratives were framed along traditional lines, as a struggle between Left and Right, only now with the protagonists reversed. A newly fashionable vocabulary of class easily mapped on to this Left-Right dichotomy, without challenging it. In this story, Catholics—more than a third of the German population, but too diverse for class analysis—hardly appeared; when they did, they were chopped and stretched into the procrustean categories of Left and Right (usually Right), leaving them unrecognizable, at least to me.10

Beginning with her biography of Bismarck’s irrepressible opponent Ludwig Windthorst, who led the Center Party from 1874 until his death in 1891, and all along the arc of her

7 Karl Bachem, Vorgeschichte, Geschichte und Politik der deutschen Zentrumspartei, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der katholischen Bewegung, sowie zur allgemeinen Geschichte des neueren und neuesten Deutschland, 1815–1914, 9 vols (Cologne, 1927–32). 8 John K. Zeender, “Recent Literature on the German Center Party,” Catholic Historical Review, 70 (1984), p. 428. 9 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen, 1973), pp. 121–2. 10 Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “Confessions of a Fellow Traveler,” Catholic Historical Review, 99 (2013), p. 635.

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scholarly activity culminating in her 2000 study of elections and political culture, Anderson undertakes to “[put] Catholics into Germany’s grand narrative,” hammering home the centrality of Catholicism and religion more generally to the political development of modern Germany.11 This is her argument: no general account of modern German history that excludes a third of the population may pretend to competence; the “secularism” of German historiography cannot be justified in light of the pervasive evidence of religious faith among nineteenth-century Germans themselves; the embittering and long-term impact of the Kulturkampf was a chronic stimulant to “the maximum possible confessional consciousness” in political affairs;12 the Catholic clergy, especially the lower clergy, played emancipating roles in the political mobilization and “democratization” of their parishioners; and Catholic– Protestant hatred, which flared with baleful consequences over the life of the Empire, was a defining and destabilizing fact of German politics. This argument, made with real analytical provocation and empirical depth, rattled and re-described the field. Writing the political history of Imperial Germany now requires attention to liberal–Catholic animosities and Catholic politicking on the local and national levels. Anderson is not the sole laborer in this vineyard. Two other key figures are Wilfried Loth and David Blackbourn. Characteristic of liberal/Marxist orthodoxy is not merely that Catholicism blocked modernization, but that it did so as a socio-cultural monolith. According to Hans-Ulrich Wehler once again, it stood “under the halo of its supreme functionary’s infallibility atop a hierarchy of equally self-assured professional dispensers of salvation,” who ruled the credulous laity from on high and dictated its political behavior.13 This view, all but indistinguishable from nineteenth-century anti-clericalism, conveys an image of Catholicism whose homogeneity requires no empirical support to sustain: Catholicism was an ideationally founded and closed social construct; through intellectual manipulation the clergy controlled the minds of people who constituted it; therefore, Catholics did as they were told, even when they voted. This image has damaged the study of Catholicism in many areas by promoting a clerical intentionalism that leaves the laity flat and undifferentiated. Wilfried Loth sets it aside. In a path-breaking study whose empirical findings have been reconfirmed, Loth identifies the social cleavages that undermined Catholic politics during the Wilhelmine era, thereby altering the image of a docile and unvarying Catholic constituency.14 Once the unifying duress of the Kulturkampf subsided, he argues, the industrial, agrarian, artisanal, and bourgeois social groups that comprised the Center Party’s electorate split in pursuit of irreconcilable demands. Catholic workers called for immediate amelioration of their poverty and precarious status, agrarian and artisanal interests turned to conservatism, while the Catholic bourgeoisie, studied to such a high degree of precision by Thomas Mergel, took advantage of the economic and social opportunities promised by greater assimilation

11 Ibid., p. 639. Among Anderson’s important contributions are: Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford and New York, 1981); “The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf: Some Reflections on the Historiography of Imperial Germany,” Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), pp. 447–86; “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History,” Central European History, 19 (1986), pp. 82–115; “Interdenominationalism, Clericalism, Pluralism: The Zentrumsstreit and the Dilemma of Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany,” Central European History, 21 (1988), pp. 350–78; “Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany,” American Historical Review, 98 (1993), pp. 1448–74; “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Historical Journal, 39 (1995), pp. 647–70; and Practicing Democracy. 12 Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization,” p. 669. 13 Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, p. 121. 14 Wilfried Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984).

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into middle-class business culture.15 These four centrifugal “movements and tendencies” strained the coherence and cohesiveness of the Catholic community, requiring the Center Party constantly to readjust its message and recruitment strategies: now as the champion of social reform; now the defender of conservative agrarian traditions; now the partner of ruling elites; now the advocate of liberal parliamentary and economic rights.16 While the Center remained a “clerical” party to the extent that clergy stood in parliament and mobilized their parishioners to vote, Loth shows us its submission to formidable agitation “from below.” David Blackbourn’s contribution is no less significant. Fresh off his triumph in the Sonderweg debate, Blackbourn lent his credibility to the study of Catholicism in insightful considerations of the liberal–Catholic relationship.17 Foremost among them is his landmark examination of the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1876 to three young girls in Marpingen, a tiny village in the Saarland. It had been characteristic of social-scientific approaches to German religion to describe Catholic piety in the nineteenth century as either epiphenomenal of social distress or the product of impassioned clerical incitement of lay emotions.18 But these reductionist approaches, Blackbourn contends, despite their value in illuminating the frameworks of social change, either explain away unfamiliar, even baffling, popular practices or unnecessarily foreshorten what could be a richer, more complicated view of the interplay among “external” powers and “internal” meanings in a fully contextualized history of religious experience:

Some may feel that this is all we need to know about the events themselves—that they are of minimal intrinsic concern, interesting chiefly because of their trigger- function, essentially a symptom or reflection of larger, more important things. […] But the experience of the three girls, their families, and neighbours was also rooted in the particularities of life in Marpingen, as a parish, as a productive entity, as a web of family and village relationships. The advent of the apparitions can be fully understood only if we penetrate the lives and beliefs of Marpingen’s inhabitants at a time when much was changing, materially and mentally (and the two can hardly be

15 On Catholic workers, see Raymond C. Sun’s richly documented and articulate study, Before the Enemy Is Within Our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885–1912: A Social, Cultural and Political History (Boston, 1999). On the agrarian and artisanal sectors, see David Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg before 1914 (New Haven, 1980). On the middle class, see Thomas Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland 1794–1914 (Göttingen, 1994). 16 Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich, p. 382. 17 The story of Blackbourn’s charge against the “Kehrites” has been told many times, recently and succinctly by Matthew Jefferies in Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 31–7. Blackbourn’s contribution includes: “The Political Alignment of the Centre Party in Wilhelmine Germany: A Study of the Party’s Emergence in Nineteenth-Century Württemberg,” Historical Journal, 18 (1975), pp. 821–50; “Class and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Center Party and the Social Democrats in Württemberg,”Central European History, 9 (1976), pp. 220–49; “Die Zentrumspartei und die deutschen Katholiken während des Kulturkampfes und danach,” in Otto Pflanze (ed.), Innenpolitische Probleme des Bismarck-Reiches (Munich and Vienna, 1983), pp. 73–94; “Catholics and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Centre Party and Its Constituency,” in Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London, 1987), pp. 188–214; “Progress and Piety: Liberals, Catholics and the State in Bismarck’s Germany,” History Workshop Journal, 26 (1988), pp. 57–78; and “The Catholic Church in Europe Since the French Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (1991), pp. 778–90. 18 See, for example, Wolfgang Schieder, “Kirche und Revolution: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 14 (1974), pp. 419–54; Richard van Dülmen, “Religionsgeschichte in der Historischen Sozialforschung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 6 (1980), pp. 36– 59; and Christoph Weber, “Ultramontanismus als katholischer Fundamentalismus,” in Wilfried Loth (ed.), Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 20–45.

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disconnected): the size of the village, its relationship to the outside world, patterns of employment, the structure of family life, forms of popular devotion.19

By approaching his subject with such sensitivity, Blackbourn proposes modern piety as a worthy subject of study in its own right while evoking its value in comprehending other dimensions of German national history, including participatory politics. For example, he deepens our awareness of the reciprocal relationship of irritation and response in which liberal and Catholic communities existed. External pressures structured the environment and informed the experience of popular piety, but the apparition accounts also “triggered” liberal stereotypes of Catholics as simple, superstitious, and dangerous to the cultural progress of the nation, amplifying the vilification against them in the political press. These developments encouraged an intensified legislative assault on the church in moves that raised real concerns about the state’s dedication to the rule of law while provoking both active and passive resistance among Catholic believers. The government’s proud but ultimately embarrassing and misbegotten defense of Kultur, Blackbourn writes, as well as the Catholic reaction to it, not only remind historians of the fundamental and violent nature of the Kulturkampf; they also recall the bite of unbridged cultural divisions inspired by the liberal–Catholic disagreement, which upset domestic politics repeatedly in the long term. This revisionist critique—that Catholicism was relevant, socially diverse, lay directed, and culturally powerful—repositioned the study of political Catholicism by the middle of the 1990s. No longer a topic of marginal importance to high governmental affairs and economic rearrangement, Catholicism now figured prominently in any satisfactory account of Imperial German politics and society and their close inter-relationship. The durability of this accomplishment was undiminished by the influence Anderson, Loth, and Blackbourn exerted over graduate studies from their respective research locations at California-Berkeley, Berlin/Münster/Essen, and Harvard. Many of their students subsequently wrote excellent monographs on Catholic political culture of their own, as we shall see below.20 Between Doktoreltern and their “children,” however, came Helmut Walser Smith, who recast the field yet again by drawing upon revisionist conclusions in a compelling reinterpretation of German nationalism on the basis of confession and confessional conflict. Before assessing Smith’s contribution, it is helpful to define terms. What is “confession” as an analytical category, how is it employed, and what is the “confessional turn” in the history of modern German religion that Smith, among many others, did so much to enable? “Confession” is a term of religious and political demarcation developed in scholarship devoted to early modern history to separate post-Reformation Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists into definable units for study. According to the “confessionalization thesis” from which the term springs, and as originally popularized by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, in the early modern period church and state authorities defended the boundaries separating the confessions in a deliberate strategy of control to promote the development of distinct identities.21 Their stiff rules of social discipline reinforced the lines of division structuring three communities apart in early modern Germany, a land rife with social and

19 David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1994), p. xxvii. 20 See, for example, the discussions of the work of Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker (Anderson), Michaela Bachem-Rehm (Loth), and Rebecca Ayako Bennette (Blackbourn). 21 A helpful recent introduction is Ute Lotz-Heumann, “Confessionalization,” in David M. Whitford (ed.), Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research (Kirksville, 2007), pp. 136–57. See also Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), pp. 77–101.

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cultural divisions and hesitant against the emergence of supra-territorial political units across confessional boundaries. Proponents of the “confessionalization thesis” in its several guises have applied the paradigm to explain the rise of the modern state and to measure the unifying force of social norms, practices of intellectual control, and models of education. Its detractors have challenged the paradigm from every angle, most recently by applying the methods of micro-history and the history of everyday life to demonstrate how porous and easily transgressed the confessional boundaries really were.22 Now, what is the “confessional turn”? The “confessional turn” has to do with the rediscovery of the importance of religion—or, to be more precise, the importance of confession and confessional differences—inmodern German history. By the 1980s, empirical studies in many national contexts demonstrating the flexibility and endurance of religion, not its inevitable decline, seriously undermined the secularization thesis. Developments in international politics, such as in Iran, Ireland, America, and the Middle East, also argued that modernity was not only compatible with religious belief, but could be conducive to it. At the same time, the new cultural history, with its emphases on rituals, ceremonies, the dynamics of expression, and the importance of meaning in social behavior, alerted historians to the part religious beliefs played in interpretive cultures which, as Thomas Nipperdey put it in 1988, “[constituted] the entire reality of lived experience.”23 Suddenly, the field was clear to see religion again and, in fact, to see it everywhere. If it was no longer possible to claim a necessary opposition of religion and modernity, then it was no longer possible to exclude considerations of religion from modern historiography. This is where Helmut Walser Smith enters the conversation. In analyzing the sweep of these developments, he and Chris Clark observe that this shift in the agenda is intended “not simply to draw attention to a neglected field on the margins of mainstream research, but, more importantly, to show how widely and deeply religion was woven into the fabric of modern politics and society. Religion was no longer perceived simply as an instrument of social or institutional hegemony, but as a social force capable of shaping and bestowing meaning upon political, social, and cultural action.”24 Early leaders in the field, including Jonathan Sperber, Lucian Hölscher and Gangolf Hübinger, along with Anderson, Loth, and Blackbourn, tended to focus on a single group in a way not all that dissimilar conceptually from the confessional history of early modern Germany. The publication of Wolfgang Altgeld’s comparative study of religion in the history of German nationalism in 1992 and Dagmar Herzog’s smart 1996 analysis of religious politics in Baden introduced new emphases on relations among the confessions, as well as Christian relations with Jews, the nature of religious prejudice, and the power of boundaries to maintain allegiance.25 It now did not seem sufficient to recover the history of a confession; the confessions had to be studied together in examinations of conflict, cooperation, and coexistence in their several zones of social, cultural, and political contact.

22 An overview of developments in the controversy is Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred Jakubowski- Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann and Hartmut Lehmann (eds), Interkonfessionalität—Transkonfessionalität— binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese (Heidelberg, 2003). 23 Thomas Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1914 (Munich, 1988), p. 7. 24 Helmut Walser Smith and Chris Clark, “The Fate of Nathan,” in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (Oxford and New York, 2001), p. 5. 25 Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz, 1992); Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton, 1996).

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More than any other study in this trajectory, Smith’s 1995 book on nationalism and religious conflict crystallized the transformative elements of the new perspective.26 He insists that understanding Imperial German politics has to begin with understanding confessional cultures in all their particularity. These cultures, held together in part by Germany’s long history of religious disagreement, to which the “confessionalization thesis” helped give such eloquent testimony, appealed to rival traditions, competing memories of shared events, and different histories, myths, and heroes. That these cultures clashed in the course of erecting the public institutions of the Imperial German state is hardly surprising, especially insofar as the Protestant majority sought to compel social, cultural, and political uniformity on the Catholic minority as a method of national integration. This compulsion enflamed polarizing tensions, especially in mixed confessional regions where members of antagonistic groups who had been separated by the confessional geography of the early modern period were now thrown together to live side by side. In the hands of aggressive nationalists, who made use of an expanding press to articulate shrill discourses of belonging and exclusion, the rhetoric of religious conflict was made to overlap with perceptions of social status and cultural attainment in a way that exposed Catholics not only to religious bigotry butto class hatred and cultural denigration as well. Catholics, for their part, responded to their exclusion with a hatred no less intense than that of their Protestant opponents, constructing a more congenial German nationalism of their own. The Catholic minority’s integration into the national culture of the German Empire, then, was not a matter of “gradual assent to a dominant ideology,” but part of “a history of contention over the definition, and the legitimating effects, of the nation” itself.27 The process of German modernization was inescapably religious, Smith wants to say. The break from the “Kehrite” past was complete. The historiographical impact of the “confessional turn” was perhaps unintentionally to direct attention away from politics as such, and to relocate it upon the confessional cultures informing them.28 It was not long before studies of religion in Imperial Germany made little or no reference to politics, while studies of politics, to the extent they appeared at all, began not with the church-state contest, but with inter-confessional relations.29 Reinforcing these developments was the adoption of the concept of socio-cultural milieus, originally proposed by M. Rainer Lepsius and taken to its fullest theoretical development in the field of German religion by Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, both products of the “Bielefeld School,” which itself is a telling indication of the shift in historiographical tendency. The milieu idea, which has had a productive career in multiple sub-disciplines, offers an analytical framework and suggestive interpretive vocabulary for explaining the fragmentation of modern Germany’s competing confessional camps under industrial capitalism (see Chapter 4 in this volume).30 When united with “confession,” which stresses the characteristics, internal coherence, and articulation of discrete religious cultures, a

26 Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870– 1914 (Princeton, 1995). 27 Ibid., p. 237. 28 A perfect example of this shift is Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews. 29 For an example of the latter, see Maria D. Mitchell’s recent book on Christian democracy in Germany, which begins with a discussion of confessional conflict: The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor, 2012), pp. 12–32. 30 M. Rainer Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Deutsche Parteien vor 1918 (Cologne, 1973), pp. 56–80; and Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann (eds), Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus— Mentalitäten—Krisen (Gütersloh, 1996). The clearest discussion of the milieu concept in the historiography of German Catholicism, which also takes advantage of Steinbach’s notion of “cleavages,” remains the study by the Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Münster, entitled “Konfession und Cleavages

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method endorsed by multiple theoretical authorities took hold that combined the strengths of social and cultural history. This dynamic method of investigation has organized a rich body of scholarship, which examines the importance of religion as a socially based cultural expression in a variety of scholarly contexts.31 The third part of this chapter discusses the advances this scholarship makes in our understanding of political Catholicism. These advances cluster around three main topics: the liberal anti-Catholic imagination; voter mobilization; and Catholic nationalism.

From Culture to Cultural Politics

Surely it would come as no great solace to Johann von Droysen, Theodor Mommsen, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke, four nineteenth-century historians who did so much to define Catholicism as inimical to the development of the German nation, to know that in time they and liberals in general would bear the odium of the historiographical establishment.32 In light of the scholarship described thus far, that time has arrived. These liberals, these “martinets of modernity” as David Blackbourn calls them, appear in the literature as so many reactionary bullies, intolerant of religious diversity to the point of obsession, whose outrageous ideas and unrelenting attacks only unified Catholics in defense against state persecution and in agitation for an end to the discrimination that held them in subordinate positions throughout German society.33 As Alastair Thompson observes in his terrific study of left-liberal politics, to liberals, Catholics—and the Center Partyin particular—were “the enemy for all seasons,” sufficient to mobilize their electorate well into the twentieth century. “Antipathy towards Rome, the ‘dead hand’, and ‘dark’ forces of cultural backwardness,” Thompson writes of the election of 1907, “attracted a far wider section of opinion than specific liberal economic, social, or political policies.” Antipathy to the Center Party was, in fact, “part of the everyday attitudes of left liberal voters.”34 This antipathy comes through in the several studies of liberal anti-Catholicism produced since the “confessional turn.” These studies focus on the legislative history of the liberal– Catholic antagonism, but more concretely on the symbols of inner self-understanding whose expression in public discourse supplied the antagonism’s emotional content. An exemplary addition to this literature is Róisín Healy’s account of liberal anti-Jesuitism.35 German liberals came naturally to anti-Jesuitism. Their vision of the nation—Protestant in confessional identity, sovereign in commanding the primary loyalty of citizen-subjects, autonomous in matters of personal freedom, and intellectually sympathetic to science and the self-cultivation of neo-humanist Bildung—made little room for Catholics who might fall under the Jesuits’ spell. In the liberal imagination, Jesuits opposed this vision in all its parts. Recognized for their missionary efforts in Central Europe during the Counter- im 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Erklärungsmodell zur regionalen Entstehung des katholischen Milieus in Deutschland,” Historisches Jahrbuch, 120 (2000), pp. 358–95. 31 For an evaluation of this literature, see James E. Bjork’s contribution to this volume. 32 See the discussion of the roles played by these four in theorizing the anti-Catholicism of liberal- Protestant Kultur in Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, pp. 20–37. 33 Blackbourn, Marpingen, p. xxxiv. A concise introduction to the social position of Catholics in imperial German society is Martin Baumeister, Parität und katholische Inferiorität: Untersuchungen zur Stellung des Katholizismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Paderborn, 1987). 34 Alastair P. Thompson, Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 2000), pp. 162–3. 35 Róisín Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston and Leiden, 2003).

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Reformation, they remained bent on re-converting Protestants to Catholicism.36 Known for their special vow of obedience to the pope, whom church fathers at the First Vatican Council in 1870 had just proclaimed to be infallible in matters of faith and morals, their ultramontanism threatened fifth-column resistance that could strangle the infant nation in its cradle. Invasive of the private sphere in pastoral direction, they frustrated the autonomy of a proper bourgeois social order. And given their penchant for standing upon dogma in intellectual debate, they undermined the epistemic authority of science as well as the free development of a learned electorate necessary for flourishing public life. The Jesuits had to go: and indeed they did go after the passage of the Jesuit Law in 1872, which provided for their expulsion and expropriation. This law remained on the books until its final provisions were rescinded in 1917, but not before poisoning German political life with chronic Catholic demands for its repeal, misalignment between the Reichstag and the Bundesrat, which invoked the law to conflicting purposes, and inconsistent application of the law by local governments throughout the Empire, which only added to the instability of domestic affairs in the years before the war. Liberal anti-Jesuits, Healy concludes, because they “would not admit approaches to national identity, morality, education, scholarship, and worship that did not rest upon Protestant traditions,” undermined the nation they sought so earnestly to build, above all by obscuring the extent of Catholic integration into it. “By the 1890s,” she argues, “German Catholics had committed themselves fully to the new state, including the imperialist politics of its governments, and embraced much of the ethos of its cultural elite.”37 The liberals were more successful than they knew, yet their anxieties and insecurities did not allow them to see it. A broader analysis of liberal anti-Catholicism, of which anti-Jesuitism was a central component, appears in the work of Michael Gross.38 The Catholic religious revival of the 1850s and 1860s, led by Jesuit, Redemptorist, and Franciscan priests, aroused believers to such a degree, Gross observes, that even Protestants were touched by it, confirming liberal fears about mass conversions to Catholicism. These fears provoked liberals to organize anti-Catholicism into an ideology of discrimination. This ideology coded Catholics as ignorant, backward, superstitious, and un-German, while liberals embodied the freedom and progress inherent in enlightenment, capitalist innovation, and national emancipation. Anti-Catholicism among Protestant Liberals was thus “a rich and elaborate ritual of identity”—notice here the interpretive vocabulary of the new cultural history—whose binary oppositions of light and darkness structured “bourgeois respectability and national character.”39 Moreover, this ideology’s emotional compulsion drew from its assignment of gendered status to Catholics as private/feminine and to Protestant liberals as public/male, which itself had to do with liberal misgivings about the women’s emancipation movement. According to this view, Catholics—irrational, submissive, meddling—belonged in the private sphere, while Protestant liberals—sober, assertive, responsible—belonged in the public and therefore at the forefront of national leadership. By the time of unification, Gross argues, “the women’s question and the ‘Catholic problem’ were one and the same,” so that the Kulturkampf is rightly seen as an attempt not merely to construct an exclusive national

36 For a fascinating study of the role played by memories of early modern history in nineteenth- century confessional politics, see Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, 2007). 37 Healy, The Jesuit Specter, pp. 228–9. 38 Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004). 39 Ibid., pp. 26 and 181.

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identity but to preserve the threatened bourgeois order of divided spheres.40 Deeply tinged with hatred and pathological fears of “others,” and liable to discriminatory practice and aggression against “enemies,” a pronounced intolerance, Gross concludes, has to be considered part of the liberal legacy to German national consciousness. Andrew Zimmerman advances provocative claims upon Gross’ conclusion. He argues that the Kulturkampf, in part because it also expressed anxieties about Catholic Poles in the Prussian east, “constituted the first major instance in which German policy followed the racist logic of specifying and subordinating elements of a population as minorities.”41 Liberal politics of anti-Catholicism thus supplied ideological concepts and language important to colonial hegemony, both overseas and near to home, an effort which soon became a matter of imposing control over “natural” peoples to the benefit of superior Kulturvölker. More alarming still is Helmut Walser Smith’s observation that by the 1880s, liberal Kulturkampf legislation provided antisemites with the justification and policy ideas for their own proposals for expulsion and expropriation. “If the state could expel religious minorities and expropriate their property, as Bismarck had done with the Jesuits,” Smith writes, “it could do the same with Jews, especially if their alleged racial status made them a state within a state. Their modeling reminds us of the complexity of the Imperial German context, and that German-Jewish history did not happen in isolation from other histories.”42 Indeed it did not. Michael Gross relates the “Battle Song of the Jesuits,” published in the satiricalKladderadatsch in early October 1871, which played upon the themes of an emerging biological discourse: “We are elusive like the air, / Quietly sinking into the night, / Like vapors rising from a bog / Or shrub or poisoned goblet. / When you think you’ve caught us, / We have already disappeared / Into a hidden lair; / It is easier to get rid of the plague / Than us, the Jesuits!”43 The study of political Catholicism has also benefited from new work on voter mobilization. The energizing effect of theKulturkampf well into the 1880s has been confirmed again and again in studies of all regions of Germany, including the eastern borderlands, when it came to the main campaigning issues bringing Catholics to the polls behind the Center Party.44 Jonathan Sperber observes that, although the Center’s main attraction remained its confessional affiliation, throughout the decade of the 1890s this attraction diminished due to the increasing urgency of economic concerns among Catholic workers, the Center’s bulk constituency. Mollifying these concerns enhanced the reputation of Social Democrats, despite their robust anti-Catholicism. In industrialized regions of Bavaria, the Rhine-Main region, the lower Rhine, the Ruhr Basin, and Upper Silesia, adherence to the

40 Ibid., p. 197. See also Michael B. Gross, “The Strange Case of the German Nun in the Dungeon, or German Liberalism as a Convent Atrocity Story,” German Studies Review, 23 (2000), pp. 69–84; and Róisín Healy, “Anti-Jesuitism in Imperial Germany: The Jesuit as Androgyne,” in Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews, pp. 153–81. As Derek Hastings has shown, this stigmatization of Catholics as feminine, although brushed aside by most Catholics as “a crass form of Catholic-baiting,” achieved a powerful echo in intra-Catholic discourse, in which reformist Catholics, too, called for a more “masculine” church amid the emerging völkisch appeal and intensifying international competition of the Wilhelmine era. See Derek K. Hastings, “Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany,” European History Quarterly, 38 (2008), p. 40. 41 Andrew Zimmerman, “Race and World Politics: Germany in the Age of Imperialism, 1878– 1914,” in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), pp. 360–63, at 360. 42 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth-Century (Cambridge, 2008), p. 176. 43 Quoted in Michael B. Gross, “Kulturkampf and Unification: German Liberalism and the War Against the Jesuits,” Central European History, 30 (1997), p. 562. 44 See, for example, Mark Tilse, Transnationalism in the Prussian East: From National Conflict to Synthesis, 1871–1914 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 137–54.

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Center Party waned mostly to the advantage of Social Democrats, who politicked heavily here to peel off Catholic voters.45 By 1912, the losses were so severe in places like Cologne and Saarbrücken that priests urged that if their own districts were safely “black,” voters should subvert the rules by casting their ballots in neighboring districts at risk of falling into competitors’ hands.46 But the power of clerical influence upon voter mobilization can be overestimated. Despite the well-organized and heavy presence of party political associations—the Christian Peasant League, the Catholic Workers Associations, the massive People’s Association for Catholic Germany—over which they presided, the clergy could not set the Center Party’s agenda without lay agreement. In a carefully researched volume of Catholic Workers Associations in the Ruhr, Michaela Bachem-Rehm shows how tenuous the lines of clerical authority had become by 1900.47 For example, while the upper clergy continued to insist upon clerical domination of the workers’ movement, their resistance to any form of independent politics, including strike activity, met with outright dismissal by workers themselves, who went over their bishops’ heads, so to speak, by scouring papal pronouncements to find endorsements of their own positions. When it came to the lower clergy, priests were not always the reliable allies depicted in the scholarship. For one thing, many priests, even those assigned to working-class parishes, distanced themselves from the workers’ movement, citing the primacy of strictly spiritual concerns, skepticism about lay agency in the public sphere, or the physical exhaustion of maintaining punishing pastoral, liturgical, and associational schedules. For another, those priests who did come forward were not always welcomed. Workers ridiculed the insufficiently committed and abused authoritarians, whom they denounced either publicly or in secret letters of complaint to diocesan authorities. They might even react with violence. Bachem-Rehm relates the shocking fate of a priest in Duisburg in 1898 who, upon imprudently cutting off the lights of a meeting hall to break up an assembly of workers protesting limits on their political action plans, was struck in the head with a beer glass. Despite an immediate investigation by the police, the wrongdoer was never identified.48 Such evidence as this, Bachem-Rehm concludes, indicates that in the Wilhelmine era, voter mobilization might still benefit from clerical direction, provided that priests led the laity where they already wanted to go. A third area of historiographical development is Catholic nationalism. I have mentioned the work of Wolfgang Altgeld and Helmut Walser Smith on the confessional dimensions of German national consciousness. In fact, intellectual histories of German nationalism have blossomed since the “confessional turn.” In 2001, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche produced an edited volume, nearly 700 pages in length, which assessed the latest developments in the field.49 These developments emphasize the conceptual chasm separating Catholics and Protestants, already evident during the first half of the nineteenth century, which framed efforts at nation-building during the second. The relationship between Prussian identity and Protestantism had, of course, long been acknowledged, but the new studies lay bare the binding tie and animating force of theology. According to Jörg Echternkamp, Protestant emphasis on the predestined elect identified Prussians as the chosen people through whom God would bring about national unity. Fortified by the

45 Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters, pp. 96–107. 46 Anderson, Practicing Democracy, pp. 330–31. 47 Michaela Bachem-Rehm, Die katholischen Arbeitervereine im Ruhrgebiet 1870–1914: Katholisches Arbeitermilieu zwischen Tradition und Emanzipation (Stuttgart, 2004). 48 Ibid., pp. 148–55. 49 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt and New York, 2001).

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prestige of élite figures like Goethe, who offered the Bible as the foundation of a German “New Jerusalem,” and Hegel, who argued that Protestant religious practices were most likely to usher in the age of freedom, Prussians were able to align their aspirations to national leadership with divine causation in a way that lent these aspirations the emotional urgency of crusade, primarily against Catholics.50 Willibald Steinmetz develops the conceptual affinities between this Prussian nationalism, on the one hand, and Protestant confessionalism, on the other, arguing that they only reinforced their inherent tendencies to identify and include friends while condemning and excluding foes.51 The outcome was an intensified confessional polemic, rich in stereotypes of guiltless Protestants and reprobate Catholics nearly as ferocious as those of the sixteenth century. This is the theological background to the liberal anti-Catholicism analyzed so well by Róisín Healy and Michael Gross. As Siegfried Weichlein has shown, Catholics were just as willing to investigate their theological traditions for usable ideas in fashioning their own national identity.52 In the decades preceding unification, their focus centered on St Boniface, the eighth-century Anglo- Saxon “Apostle to the Germans,” who evangelized Central Europe until 754, when he was hacked to death by Frisian pagans. Catholics held up Boniface as an alternative national hero to the Protestants’ execrable : Boniface came earlier, tried to unify Germany rather than sunder it with theological divisions, worked in cooperation with the papacy— the source of truth and morality—rather than against it, and died a martyr, not a heretic. After national unification, theology continued to perform important work for Catholics as they dealt with the liberal legal onslaught. In an intelligent recent book, Rebecca Ayako Bennette argues that from the beginning of the Empire, Catholics sought to correct the nation from which they were excluded by asserting an alternative vision of unity that drew upon their own sense of history, philosophy of knowledge, and social and ethical doctrines.53 By locating serious efforts at national integration already in the 1870s, Bennette confronts a considerable body of scholarship, such as the pioneering work conducted by Barbara Stambolis, which sees Catholic attempts at reconciling with the symbols and institutions of national culture only after 1890, when the Kulturkampf was definitively over.54 Bennette claims that historians who view the 1870s strictly in terms of contest and estrangement will fail to recognize pervasive Catholic declarations of “Germanness” and love for the Reich. Her most revealing observations made in this vein have to do with Catholic support for early German

50 For these remarks, see Jörg Echternkamp, “‘Religiöses Nationalgefühl’ oder ‘Frömmelei der Deutschtümler’? Religion, Nation und Politik im Frühnationalismus,” in Haupt and Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte, pp. 145–69; Georg Schmidt, “Die frühneuzeitliche Idee ‘deutsche Nation’: Mehrkonfessionalität und säkulare Werte,” in Haupt and Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte, pp. 63–5; and Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge and New York, 2000), pp. 216–20. 51 Willibald Steinmetz, “Die ‘Nation’ in konfessionellen Lexika und Enzyklopädien (1830–1940),” in Haupt and Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte, p. 217. 52 Siegfried Weichlein, “Religion und Nation: Bonifatius als politischer Heiliger im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte, 100 (2006), pp. 45–58. I am referring here to Catholics outside the Upper Silesian borderlands who, according to James Bjork, pursued a more indeterminate path to national identity. See James E. Bjork, Neither German Nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008). 53 Rebecca Ayako Bennette, Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion After Unification (Cambridge, MA and London, 2012). 54 Barbara Stambolis, “Nationalisierung trotz Ultramontanisierung oder: “Alles für Deuschland. Deutschland aber für Christus”. Mentalitätsleitende Wertorientierung deutscher Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift, 269 (1999), pp. 57–97; idem, “Nation und Konfession im Spannungsfeld: Aspekte historischer Vereinsforschung am Beispiel des Schützenwesens,” Historisches Jahrbuch, 120 (2000), pp. 199–226.

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imperial designs. While their ethics rejected the advancement of Prussian military values into all areas of public and private life, these ethics also accepted the imperative of defeating “barbarism” with “civilization,” a core affirmation of the Catholic missionary ethos since late antiquity and the intellectual bedrock of universal Christendom. Catholics took a different path to chauvinism, but on this as on so many other important “points of commonality,” Bennette explains, their sense of national and cultural superiority, especially overthe Russians, was all but indistinguishable from that of other Germans by the end of the 1870s.55 This is an astonishing conclusion in light of all that has been said about the alienating impact of the Kulturkampf, but Bennette’s diligence in the archives and deft analysis of discourse in the Catholic political press command respect. Along with Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, who arrives at a similar conclusion regarding the “Academic Kulturkampf,” which raged against Catholic university students in 1904–1907, Bennette accepts that discrimination always rallied Catholics to the flag of their embattled confessional identity. But it also incited claims to fuller inclusion, often achieved through political action.56 The hope among Catholics for involvement was that strong, the appeal of nationalism that seductive.

Conclusion

As this chapter has attempted to show, the last 30 years have seen remarkable activity in the field of political Catholicism. From a backwater neglected by professional historians on ideological grounds to one of the hottest sub-disciplines in the study of the Empire on its empirical merits, the field has demonstrated the value of dedicated archival research, clear analysis, and novel theoretical application. It has seen the integration of cultural studies with proven methods of social analysis and thoroughly expanded the definition of what constituted political behavior. And yet there is more work to be done. For example, there is a great need for a study of the Center Party during the First World War. Wilfried Loth dedicates two chapters of his social history of the party to the topic, and Rudolf Morsey wrote a monograph covering the years from 1917 to 1923, but we have no up-to-date study of the party during the war years employing the latest research methods and incorporating the enormous body of knowledge amassed since the 1980s.57 Another area in need of continued reflection is the nature and reach of Catholic antisemitism. We have Olaf Blaschke’s account of the usefulness of antisemitic imagery to the promotion of Catholic political causes and the role this imagery played in holding together the Catholic “milieu.”58 But recent studies by Derek Hastings and John Connelly raise new questions whose answers lie beyond Blaschke’s contribution. In his impactful cultural- confessional history of Nazism’s appeal to Catholics early in the Weimar Republic, Hastings claims that this appeal was restricted to circles in and around Munich, where a unique intellectual culture took hold before the war that was hostile to the political Catholicism

55 Bennette, Fighting for the Soul of Germany, p. 188. 56 Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890–1914 (Ann Arbor, 2011), pp. 165–96. 57 Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich, pp. 278–381; Rudolf Morsey, Die deutsche Zentrumspartei 1917 bis 1923 (Düsseldorf, 1966). 58 Olaf Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 1997). Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s critical response to the book is “From Syllabus to Shoah?” Central European History, 34 (2001), pp. 231–8. On the Center Party specifically, see Uwe Mazura,Zentrumspartei und Judenfrage 1870/71–1933: Verfassungsstaat und Minderheitenschutz (Mainz, 1994).

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practiced elsewhere.59 How unique this culture was is an open question, however, for Hastings’ study does not address intellectual conditions outside Bavaria. The importance of investigating the matter takes on greater urgency in light of John Connelly’s notion of “a German Catholic racist syndrome,” which coalesced in the 1920s but which had clear theological origins in the Kaiserreich.60 We just do not know enough about Catholic racism, theologically inflected appropriations of Volksgemeinschaft, and the performative influences of liturgy in pre-war Germany to be certain how deep such concepts were anchored in Catholic culture or how broadly the ground had been prepared for the Nazi appeal by the early 1920s. Still other topics in need of attention include the clerical–lay relationship in the Center Party as it developed over time, the roles women played in local political action, and differences in Center Party politics by region. A final study-worthy subject should be the memory of political Catholicism in Germany’s national history. Thanks to the historians whose innovative contributions are reviewed here, elaborating the details of this topic is far easier today than seemed possible but a short time ago.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Altgeld, Wolfgang. Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz, 1992). Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford and New York, 1981). —. “The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf: Some Reflections on the Historiography of Imperial Germany,” Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), pp. 447–86. —. “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History,” Central European History, 19 (1986), pp. 82–115. —. “Interdenominationalism, Clericalism, Pluralism: The Zentrumsstreit and the Dilemma of Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany,” Central European History, 21 (1988), pp. 350–78. —. “The Zentrumsstreit and the Dilemma of Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany,” Central European History, 21 (1990), pp. 350–78. —. “Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991), pp. 681–716. —. “Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany,” American Historical Review, 98 (1993), pp. 1448–74. —. “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth- Century Germany,” Historical Journal, 39 (1995), pp. 647–70. —. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). Bachem, Karl. Vorgeschichte, Geschichte und Politik der deutschen Zentrumspartei, zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der katholischen Bewegung, sowie zur allgemeinen Geschichte des neueren und neuesten Deutschland, 1815–1914, 9 vols (Cologne, 1927–32). Bachem-Rehm, Michaela. Die katholischen Arbeitervereine im Ruhrgebiet 1870–1914: Katholisches Arbeitermilieu zwischen Tradition und Emanzipation (Stuttgart, 2004).

59 Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford and New York, 2010), pp. 17–45. 60 John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge and London, 2012), p. 66.

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Becker, Frank. “Konfessionelle Nationsbilder im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt and New York, 2001), pp. 389–418. Becker, Winfried. “Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei im Bismarckreich,” in idem (ed.), Die Minderheit als Mitte: Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei in der Innenpolitik des Reiches 1871–1933 (Paderborn, 1986), pp. 9–45. —. “From Political Catholicism to Christian Democracy: The Development of Christian Parties in Modern Germany,” in Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg (eds),European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives (Notre Dame, 2003), pp. 93–120. Bennette, Rebecca Ayako. Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion After Unification (Cambridge, MA and London, 2012). Bjork, James E. Neither German Nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008). Blackbourn, David. Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg before 1914 (New Haven, 1980). —. “Progress and Piety: Liberals, Catholics and the State in Bismarck’s Germany,” History Workshop Journal, 26 (1988), pp. 57–78. —. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1994). Blaschke, Olaf. Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 1997). —. Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen, 2002). — and Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael (eds). Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus—Mentalitäten— Krisen (Gütersloh, 1996). Cary, Noel D. The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA and London, 1996). Clark, Christopher and Kaiser, Wolfram (eds). Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York, 2003). Evans, Ellen Lovell. The German Center Party, 1870–1933: A Study in Political Catholicism (Carbondale, 1981). Gross, Michael B. The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004). Hastings, Derek. “Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany,” European History Quarterly, 38 (2008), pp. 34–65. —. Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford and New York, 2010). Healy, Róisín. The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston and Leiden, 2003). Heinen, Armin. “Umstrittene Moderne: Die Liberalen und der preußisch-deutsche Kulturkampf,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003), pp. 138–56. Kaiser, Wolfram. Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cambridge and New York, 2007). Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, NY and London, 1996). Loth, Wilfried. Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984). —. Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne (Suttgart, 1991). Mazura, Uwe. Zentrumspartei und Judenfrage 1870/71–1933. Verfassungsstaat und Minderheitenschutz (Mainz, 1994).

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Mergel, Thomas. Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland, 1794– 1914 (Göttingen, 1994). —. “Ultramontanism, Liberalism, Moderation: Political Mentalities and Political Behavior of the German Catholic Bürgertum, 1848–1914,” Central European History, 29 (1996), pp. 151–74. Mitchell, Maria D. The Origins of Christian Democracy: Politics and Confession in Modern Germany (Ann Arbor, 2012). Nipperdey, Thomas. Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918 (Munich, 1988). Reibel, Carl-Wilhelm. “Bündnis und Kompromiß: Parteienkooperation im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1918,” Historische Zeitschrift, 293 (2011), pp. 69–114. Ross, Ronald J. Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany (Notre Dame, 1976). —. The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887 (Washington, DC, 1998). Smith, Helmut Walser. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, 1995). — (ed.) Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (Oxford and New York, 2001). Sperber, Jonathan. The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge and New York, 1997). Stambolis, Barbara. “Nationalisierung trotz Ultramontanisierung oder: ‘Alles für Deutschland. Deutschland aber für Christus’: Mentalitätsleitende Wertorientierung deutscher Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift, 269 (1999), pp. 57–97. Sun, Raymond C. Before the Enemy Is Within Our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885–1912: A Social, Cultural, and Political History (Boston, 1999). Van Rahden, Till. Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen, 2000). Weber, Christoph. “Eine starke, enggeschlossene Phalanx”: Der politische Katholizismus und die erste deutsche Reichstagswahl 1871 (Essen, 1992). Zeender, John K. The German Center Party, 1890–1906 (Philadelphia, 1976).

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stefan Berger and stefan Braun

Before 1914 the german social Democratic party (spD) was the largest socialist party in the world. it was widely admired and much copied, but also often criticised. millions of workers in Imperial Germany pinned their hopes for a better future on socialism; millions of middle- and upper-class Germans feared it as a revolutionary movement; millions of others hoped to be able to harness the power of the spD to bring about further social reform.1 This chapter begins with a brief overview of the historiography on german social Democracy. it then turns to key periods and debates in the party’s development, before closing with some observations on sources and potential directions for future research.

The Historiography of German Social Democracy

The study of the history of the german labour movement began in the late nineteenth century with the research of academic outsiders and social Democratic ‘activist historians’. One of the party’s first historians was , an orthodox Marxist, who wrote his History of German Social Democracy in 1898.2 Foreign intellectuals and academics also became interested in the party’s history: Bertrand Russell, for instance, delivered a series of lectures on german social Democracy at the london school of economics as early as 1896.3 mainstream german academics, however, ignored the movement for many years. As the case of Gustav Mayer demonstrates, in the first half of the twentieth century it was virtually impossible to build a university career on the history of the labour movement. mayer’s Habilitation was undermined by a clique of conservative historians at Berlin University in 1917, and he was unable to obtain a regular university professorship during the weimar Republic, despite the fact that he was a renowned authority on such figures as , Johann Baptist von Schweitzer and Friedrich Engels.4 not surprisingly, scholarly research on german social Democracy was impossible during the Third Reich. Gustav Mayer, for example, had to emigrate. After the Second world war, however, some historians who had been representatives of a national socialist

1 This is a revised and updated version of the chapter: ‘Between isolation and integration, 1871– 1918’, in stefan Berger, Social Democracy and the Working Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (London and New York, 2000), pp. 54–93. We are indebted to Longman for permitting its use here. 2 Franz Mehring, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. Von der Julirevolution bis zum preussischen Verfassungsstreit 1830–1863 (Berlin, 1980). 3 Bertrand Russell, German Social Democracy (london, 1896). 4 See Jens Prellwitz, Jüdisches Erbe, sozialliberales Ethos, deutsche Nation: Gustav Mayer im deutschen Kaiserreich und der Weimarer Republik (Mannheim, 1998); Gustav Mayer, Radikalismus, Sozialismus und bürgerliche Demokratie (Frankfurt, 1969). The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Volksgeschichte, such as Werner Conze, showed an interest in the history of the labour movement. Conze, for example, wrote an influential book with Dieter Groh on Social Democracy and the foundation of the Kaiserreich.5 Groh was later to write a seminal book on the history of the SPD in the imperial era, putting forward the thesis that the party had been ‘negatively integrated’ into German society, practising only verbal radicalism while doing nothing to further the revolution. It was characterised by a ‘wait-and-see attitude’, or in Groh’s words, ‘revolutionary attentism’.6 As a result of the leftward shift in society in the late 1960s and 1970s, more historians became interested in labour history and a huge number of doctoral dissertations and other studies were published, both in Germany and the English-speaking world. From the early 1970s the so-called Bielefeld School set the pace for social history in West Germany and some of its most distinguished representatives, like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, wrote about German Social Democracy.7 During the Cold War era the Social Democratic perspective on the history of the SPD ruled supreme in West Germany, while the Communist perspective was developed in the GDR.8 Many West German historians of Social Democracy had – and continue to have – a close political affinity to the SPD: this is true of Heinrich Potthoff, , Helga Grebing and Bernd Faulenbach.9 However, there is also a long tradition of English-language historians working on the German labour movement. The American Carl Schorske, for instance, published his important book on the great split within German Social Democracy as early as 1955.10 Interest in the history of German Social Democracy peaked in the 1980s with new projects such as a multi-volume book series History of the Workers and the Labour Movement in Germany.11 Thereafter, the crisis of social history and the political decline of the SPD meant that the subject lost popularity. More recently, with the rise of a political party to the left of the SPD in the reunified Germany (Die Linke), the history of the German labour movement has become lively and contested once more.12 The 150th anniversary of the founding of

5 Werner Conze and Dieter Groh, Die Arbeiterbewegung in der nationalen Bewegung: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor, während und nach der Reichsgründung (Stuttgart, 1966). 6 Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie am Vorabend des ersten Weltkriegs (Berlin, 1973). 7 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Sozialdemokratie und Nationalstaat: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfragen in Deutschland von Karl Marx bis zum Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges (Cologne, 1962). 8 For East German perspectives, see Dieter Fricke, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1869–1917, 2 vols (East Berlin, 1987); Jutta Seidel, Internationale Stellung und internationale Beziehungen der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 1871–1895/96 (East Berlin, 1982). 9 Susanne Miller and Heinrich Potthoff, A History of German Social Democracy from 1848 to the Present (Oxford, 1986); Helga Grebing, Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: von der Revolution 1848 bis ins 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2007); Bernd Faulenbach, Geschichte der SPD: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2012). 10 Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955; New York, 1972); Gary P. Steenson, ‘Not One Man – Not One Penny’: German Social Democracy 1863–1914 (Pittsburgh, 1981). 11 Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Geschichte der Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, 10 vols (Bonn, 1986 ff.). The series is not yet complete and further volumes are forthcoming. 12 See Stefan Berger, ‘Writing the Comparative History of Social Democracy: A Comparative Look at Britain and Germany’, in John Callaghan and Ilaria Favretto (eds), Transitions in Social Democracy: Cultural and Ideological Problems of the Golden Age (Manchester, 2006), pp. 59–74; David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990 (New York and Oxford, 1998), pp. 1–33; Gary P. Steenson, After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914 (Pittsburgh, 1991); Ralf Hofrogge, Sozialismus und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland: von den Anfängen bis 1914 (Berlin, 2011).

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German Social Democracy in 2013 was marked by the publication of several new books on the subject.13

The Origins of Social Democracy

The first German socialist party, a direct forerunner of today’s SPD, was founded on 23 May 1863 in Leipzig. The General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV) was led by Ferdinand Lassalle, whose writings were to remain influential in the socialist milieu through the early decades of the German Empire. He looked to the state to improve the situation of workers, and argued in favour of equal (male) suffrage as the means by which workers could gain control of the state. By contrast, he was sceptical about the role trade unions could play in improving the workers’ situation.14 In 1869 August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht founded the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP) in Eisenach as a rival to the ADAV. There were important differences over the national question: while the ‘Lassalleans’ were in favour of the ‘little German’ solution, the so-called ‘Eisenacher’ were predominantly ‘greater German’ in orientation. The latter were also more sceptical about using the state asa means of improving the workers’ lot. The specific aims of the two parties, however, were often similar, aiming at the improvement of living and working conditions for workers, and an equal (male) suffrage at all levels of government. Both parties, ADAV and SDAP, started off small: the ADAV had only 4,600 members in 1864 and the SDAP hadeven fewer in 1870. The founding generations of both parties consisted mainly of artisans, with a sprinkling of skilled workers and intellectuals. Small farmers and agricultural labourers were almost entirely absent: they would remain a clientele that the SPD was unable to mobilise in large numbers during the lifetime of the Empire and beyond.15 Only seven Social Democrats – five Lassalleans, plus August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht of the SDAP – were elected to the Reichstag of the North German Confederation, the predecessor of Imperial Germany’s parliament.16 The founding of the Empire in 1870–71 initially divided ADAV and SDAP, but both were united in their rejection of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and both declared their solidarity with the short-lived (18 March to 28 May 1871) which was perceived by socialists across Europe as an experiment in

13 Franz Walter and Stine Marg, Von der Emanzipation zur Meritokratie: Betrachtungen zur 150-jährigen Geschichte von Arbeiterbewegung, Linksintellektuellen und sozialer Demokratie (Göttingen, 2013); Bernd Faulenbach and Andreas Helle (eds), Menschen, Ideen, Wegmarken: aus 150 Jahren deutscher Sozialdemokratie (Berlin, 2013). 14 On the Lassalleans, see Toni Offermann, ‘The Lassallean Labor Movement in Germany: Organization, Social Structure, and Associational Life in the 1860s’, in Barclay and Weitz (eds), Between Reform and Revolution, pp. 87–112. On early German Social Democracy, see Thomas Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn, 2000); Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York, 2013). 15 Andreas Dornheim, ‘Sozialdemokratie und Bauern – agrarpolitische Positionen und Probleme der SPD zwischen 1890 und 1948’, Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 2 (2003), pp. 43–60; Welskopp, Banner, pp. 37 and 148 ff. On the social structure of early German Social Democracy, see Toni Offermann, Die erste deutsche Arbeiterpartei. Organisation, Verbreitung und Sozialstruktur von ADAV und LADAV 1863–1871 (Bonn, 2002), pp. 222 ff. 16 For a recent biography of Bebel, see Jürgen Schmidt, August Bebel – Kaiser der Arbeiter. Eine Biografie (Zürich, 2013).

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practical socialism.17 The leaders of the SDAP, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, were sent to jail in 1872 because of their support for the Paris Commune, and local party organisations faced persecution in many parts of the newly founded German Empire. Nevertheless the socialists were able to increase their number of voters in every Reichstag election: from 3.2 per cent in 1871 to 9.1 per cent in 1877. In 1875 members of the two parties met at Gotha and united to form the Socialist Workers’ Party (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei, SAP): a shared sense of oppression and local co-operation between party chapters had paved the way for the 15,000 ADAV members to join ranks with the 9,000 SDAP members.18

The Anti-Socialist Law and Its Consequences (1878–90)

German Social Democracy was increasingly united and it became stronger. This raised fears among middle-class Germans,19 which were skilfully fuelled and exploited by Otto von Bismarck who dubbed the Social Democrats ‘enemies of the Empire’ (Reichsfeinde) and ‘vagrants without a fatherland’ (vaterlandslose Gesellen). In 1878 the Reichstag passed Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law (Sozialistengesetz) which banned all socialist parties and affiliated trade union organisations until 1890.20 Individual socialists were allowed to stand for elections but their associations were forcibly dissolved, their newspapers were repressed and many activists were forced into exile or imprisoned. Bismarck accompanied his heavy- handed approach with an attempt to woo the working classes away from socialism. He introduced a number of social reforms which made Imperial Germany one of the early pioneers of the welfare state. Basic health insurance was introduced in 1883, followed by accident insurance the following year and a rudimentary old-age and disability pensions system in 1889. The early period of the reign of Wilhelm II witnessed the introduction of further social reforms, notably the 1891 Workers’ Protection Act which included firmer regulations concerning workplace safety, prohibited Sunday work and improved the protection of women and children at work. There was a whole string of other measures in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War, all seeking to improve the social and legal situation of the working class.21 Despite such measures of social reform – which have to be seen in the context of the continuing destitution, poverty and insecurity in which the vast majority of workers in Imperial Germany laboured – Bismarck’s gamble did not pay off.

17 Wolfgang Wette, ‘August Bebel und Wilhelm Liebknecht: Die Sozialistenführer als Gegner des deutsch-französischen Krieges 1870/71’, in Helmut Kramer and Wolfgang Wette (eds),Recht ist, was den Waffen nützt (Berlin, 2004), pp. 100–8. 18 Welskopp, Banner, p. 46 f.; Peter Steinbach, ‘Die Entwicklung der deutschen Sozialdemokratie im Kaiserreich im Spiegel der historischen Wahlforschung’, in Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialdemokratie und Freie Gewerkschaften im Parteiensystem und Sozialmilieu des Kaiserreiches (Munich, 1990), pp. 1–37, at 5. 19 Torsten Kupfer, Geheime Zirkel und Parteivereine: Die Organisation der deutschen Sozialdemokratie zwischen Sozialistengesetz und Jahrhundertwende (Essen, 2003); Stephan Resch, Das Sozialistengesetz in Bayern 1878–1890 (Düsseldorf, 2012). 20 For an overview of the relationship between Bismarck and German Social Democracy, see Klaus Tenfelde, ‘Bismarck und die Sozialdemokratie’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 26 (2001), pp. 5–24. 21 E.P. Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914: Social Policies Compared (Cambridge, 2007); Florian Tennstedt, Sozialgeschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1981); Gerhard A. Ritter, Soziale Frage und Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Opladen, 1998).

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More and more workers opted for socialism at the ballot box. Despite the Anti-Socialist Law, the SAP had still been able to increase its share of the vote to 19.7 per cent in 1890.

The SPD, 1890–1914

In 1890, when the Anti-Socialist Law was allowed to lapse, the SAP changed its name to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD). In the following decades the SPD succeeded in developing a formidable party organisation, based on an impressive mass membership. This rose from around 100,000 in 1890 to 1.086 million in 1914. Party members were not only drawn into the organisational orbit of Social Democracy through ward meetings and electioneering. They became part and parcel of an elaborate labour movement culture: its libraries offered a wide range of books for the faithful; labour choirs attracted tens of thousands of enthusiasts; and its sports clubs mobilised the masses in their (limited) leisure time. Social Democratic women’s organisations were built up under the leadership of , who founded the first Women’s International in 1907 and edited the International’s weekly journal, Equality (Die Gleichheit). Party members would also join socialist trade unions, co-operatives, debating societies and even funeral societies. Social Democracy really did cater for its members ‘from the cradle to the grave’.22 At its 1891 Erfurt congress the SPD adopted a Marxist orientation which set it apart from all the other political parties in Imperial Germany. The Erfurt programme offered a vision of the future in which the ever more intense class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class would lead to social transformation. It was a radical revolutionary programme, but its lengthy second part indicated that the SPD at the very least wanted to implement specific aims and policies on the path towards that social transformation. There were concrete demands for the democratisation of the political system and social reform measures which would improve the life of working people under capitalism. Thus the evolutionary reformist practice of the party could be justified with reference to the Erfurt programme just as well as its revolutionary posture. The contradictions between revolutionary theory and reformist practice were to spark off the longest and most heated discussion on the ‘true path’ to socialism in pre-First World War Germany: the so-called revisionism debate, which pitted two personal friends and two of the most adept political theorists of the party, Eduard Bernstein and , against each other. Bernstein had come to doubt some of the central theses of Marxist theory: the increasing proletarianisation and immiseration of an ever-growing number of people; base–superstructure dichotomies; the primacy attached to economics; the need for violent revolution; and teleological utopianism. Instead he embraced the language of citizenship and human rights, which had hitherto been part of left liberalism, and attempted to give socialism an ethical base, anchoring it more in the empirical analysis of advanced capitalist

22 Kupfer, Geheime Zirkel, pp. 15 and 45; Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford and New York, 1985). On the co-operative movement, see Michael Prinz, Brot und Dividende. Konsumvereine in Deutschland und England vor 1914 (Göttingen, 1996). On socialism and feminism, see Richard J. Evans, ‘Bourgeois Feminists and Women Socialists in Germany, 1894–1914: Lost Opportunity or Inevitable Conflict?’, Women’s Studies International Quarterly, 3 (1980), pp. 355–76; idem, ‘German Social Democracy and Women’s Suffrage 1891–1918’,Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), pp. 533–59.

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societies.23 Kautsky – the most effective populariser of Marxism in Imperial Germany24 – guarded Marxist orthodoxy in the debate and was ultimately to prevail in this struggle for the ideological orientation of the SPD. But ideology had little impact on the day-to-day practice of the party, which was resolutely reformist. In Bebel’s words, the party did not have to work for revolution; it simply had to prepare patiently for the ‘big bang’ (Kladderadatsch) which the inherent contradictions of capitalism would inevitably produce. Kautsky’s famous description of the SPD as a ‘revolutionary, but not a revolution-making party’ also reflected the basic desire of the SPD to transcend the existing state without leaving the legalistic framework provided by that state. In the meantime most Social Democrats concentrated on living their lives in the socialist milieu of separate clubs and associations, celebrating each election victory as the next step towards the socialist millennium. Kautsky’s rather technocratic Darwinist version of Marxism provided the Social Democrats with a common millenarian vision underpinning their group identity and serving as a safety valve against the everyday experience of oppression. There is little to suggest that many Social Democrats actually read Marx. As Hans-Josef Steinberg has demonstrated, most Social Democrats had a very limited understanding of Marxism, and the books most frequently borrowed from workers’ libraries were certainly not written by him.25 It seems that the majority of the party faithful were influenced far more by the party’s ‘organisational patriotism’ than by ideology, whilst their ‘communities of solidarity’ were upheld by vague communitarian, ethical and humanist convictions rather than by strict Marxism. Such vagueness blended in nicely with the disparate hopes and ambitions of ordinary workers who replied to Adolf Levenstein’s survey of 1910, which asked them what they most desired. Prominent amongst the wishes of the 5,000-plus workers who responded were basic material needs such as to eat as much as they wanted, but high up on the list was the desire to prevent future wars. There were also highly specific goals – such as to possess a microscope – and rather mystical ones, such as envisioning the ‘godly spark’ (göttlichen Funken). Those who identified themselves as Social Democrats hoped to see all their ambitions fulfilled in a socialist ‘future state’ (Zukunftsstaat).26 The debates about this state filled a great number of pages in pamphlets and newspapers in the 1890s and beyond. European socialism developed powerful illustrations expressing its vision of a better future. For example, socialism was often equated with the rising sun or with other symbols of light. The muscular figure of the locksmith, representing the manual worker freeing his fellow workers from the chains of capitalism, was also prominent. The iconography of the male body, in particular the hard, strong hands of the manual worker, idealised labour as the only true creator of society’s wealth. This fitted in well with the inflationary use of the word ‘worker’ (Arbeiter) in the names of Social Democratic associations and print media.27 The imagined future state was dominated by two ideas in particular: the liberating effects of a socialist revolution and the equally liberating powers of technical industrial progress. Social Democracy essentially shared the belief in the two main gods

23 Josef Mooser, ‘Revolution oder Reform? Revisionismusstreit und Massenstreikdebatte 1890 bis 1914’, in Anja Kruke (ed.), Deutsche Sozialdemokratie in Bewegung (Bonn, 2012), pp. 78–87; Manfred B. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1997). 24 Gary P. Steenson, Karl Kautsky 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years (Pittsburgh, 1978). 25 Hans-Josef Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie: Zur Ideologie der Partei vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Bonn, 1979); Andrew G. Bonnell, ‘Did They Read Marx? Marx Reception and Social Democratic Party Members in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 1 (2002), pp. 4–15. 26 Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der sozialpsychologischen Seite des modernen Großbetriebs und der psycho-physischen Einwirkungen auf die Arbeiter (Munich, 1912), p. 227. 27 Axel Körner, Das Lied von einer anderen Welt: kulturelle Praxis im französischen und deutschen Arbeitermilieu 1840–1890 (Frankfurt, 1997).

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of nineteenth-century liberal secularism: progress and science. Socialism itself was widely regarded as the last word of science and a form of scientific progress for all people.28 The future was bright: it would be socialist, scientific and marked by the general progress of mankind in all areas of existence. On the one hand, this utopianism belies the verdict of much of the historiography that the SPD in Imperial Germany was already essentially a ‘democratic socialist party of reform’.29 On the other hand, however, such utopianism also had a depoliticising effect: some Social Democrats got lost in speculating about the details of the future state and were in danger of losing sight of the possibilities of improving the present one. Yet any one-sided emphasis on the political passivity of the SPD runs the risk of seriously underestimating the reformist drive of those in the party who were not content to sit back and wait for the fulfilment of a prophecy enshrined in the first part of an official party document. While the Social Democratic parliamentary party was treated as an outsider during the early years of the Empire, there were many Social Democrats in the Reichstag who threw themselves wholeheartedly into the work of its committees, trying their hardest to achieve what they perceived to be the best for their working-class clientele. Thus, the SPD played a vital role in the Reichstag’s deliberations to establish an extensive factory inspection system, as well as wide-ranging housing and health regulations. Social Democratic members of parliament worked hard to broaden parliamentary immunity, extend legal reforms, establish classical liberal freedoms, eliminate indirect taxation as far as possible, prohibit child and female labour in certain industries, legislate for increased safety in the workplace and establish an imperial labour office. Even in areas such as the reform of the German military, Social Democrats were able to collaborate constructively. Often considered to be an anti-militaristic party before 1914, Social Democratic members of parliament thought hard about improving the conditions for serving soldiers.30 In view of the increasing parliamentary of the SPD, Kautsky wrote to Eduard Bernstein as early as 1895: ‘I believe no Social Democratic party suffers more from parliamentary cretinism than German Social Democracy. This is understandable, as it is only in parliament that the party achieves great things.’31 The parliamentary orientation of the SPD was underlined by its successful conclusion of an electoral pact with the left-liberal Progressive Party in the Reichstag elections of 1912. Indeed some historians, such as the American Jonathan Sperber, have suggested that the Wilhelmine SPD should be seen as the first ‘people’s party’ (Volkspartei) in Germany, as it successfully mobilised substantial segments of Protestant middle-class voters, amongst them considerable numbers of businessmen, salaried employees, civil servants and professionals. His evidence is largely based on a statistical method known as ecological inference which, as Sperber readily admits, can be quite inaccurate. Whereas it is undoubtedly the case that the Social Democrats in the more liberal south-western states of Germany preferred to portray their party as a ‘people’s party’ rather than a narrow class-based party, this was not the case in Prussia. Unless more qualitative evidence can be found to substantiate Sperber’s thesis

28 Friedrich Engels, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (Berlin, 1891). 29 Helga Grebing, History of the German Labour Movement: A Survey (Oxford, 1985; first published in German in 1966), p. 84. 30 Andreas Biefang, ‘Die Sozialdemokratie im Reichstag. Das Parlament als Faktor der Integration 1871–1890’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 26 (2001), pp. 25–54, at 53 f.; Nick Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994); Bernard Neff, ‘Wir wollen keine Paradetruppe, wir wollen eine Kriegstruppe …’. Die reformorientierte Militärkritik der SPD unter Wilhelm II. 1890–1913 (Cologne, 2004). 31 SAPMO, papers of Eduard Bernstein, 23/8, 171: letter from Kautsky to Bernstein, 8 October 1895.

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of a substantive middle-class voting bloc for Social Democracy, his arguments should be treated with caution.32 It is certainly true, however, that the reformist practice of the SPD had become established long before Bernstein published his revisionist theses. His theory came as an important ideological legitimation, but it was also criticised by many for undermining the unity of the party. Ignaz Auer’s famous remark to Bernstein seems characteristic: ‘What you call for, my dear Ede, is something which one neither admits openly nor puts to a formal vote; one simply gets on with it.’33 Although the SPD’s 1903 Dresden conference officially condemned Bernstein’s revisionism, the reformist practice of the party continued unabashed. In Hesse and Baden after 1891, and in Bavaria after 1894, Social Democrats co-operated with bourgeois parties in the state diets (Landtage). The heavy involvement of the SPD in local politics before 1914 further demonstrated its willingness to participate constructively within the framework of politics provided by the Reich. Some 13,000 local and municipal councillors and an estimated 100,000 Social Democratic members of administrative and representative bodies – such as industrial and commercial courts, industrial insurance and employment certification agencies – worked hard in their day-to-day political practice without worrying too much about the finer points of Marxist theory, or the ultimate breakdown of capitalism (which did not necessarily mean that they were not professed Marxists). In the larger cities, in particular, the SPD was often able to win substantial representation on the council and to play a major role in municipal politics; participating, for example, in the establishment of public works programmes, unemployment insurance schemes, as well as housing and public health policies. ‘Municipal socialism’ seemed to offer a practical way of improving workers’ living conditions, although substantially increasing the state’s control and disciplinary potential over working-class lives at the same time. In a pioneering study of the Göttingen SPD, Adelheid von Saldern has argued that the predominant reformism of the local party emanated from the everyday life experiences and subjective perspectives of party members.34 It could be argued that the basic dividing lines in pre-war German Social Democracy were not so much between a revolutionary left wing (headed by and , among others), a revisionist right wing (often identified with Eduard Bernstein, and Ignaz Auer) and an immobile Marxist centre (Karl Kautsky and August Bebel). Arguably, the real distinction was between those who wanted the SPD to play a more active role in politics and those who were content to sit back and wait for the collapse of capitalism. Whilst the latter came largely from the ranks of party officials overseeing the vast party machine, the former came from both the left and right wings of the party. One can illustrate this point with reference to the famous general strike debate which ravaged Social Democracy between 1905 and 1907. The party left, in particular Luxemburg, was strongly impressed by the 1905 Russian Revolution and came to perceive the general strike as a key

32 Jonathan Sperber, ‘The Social Democratic Electorate in Imperial Germany’, in Barclay and Weitz (eds), Between Reform and Revolution, pp. 167–94; see also Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1997). 33 Cited in Eduard Bernstein, Ignaz Auer. Eine Gedenkschrift (Berlin, 1907), p. 63. 34 Adelheid von Saldern, Auf dem Weg zum Arbeiter-Reformismus: Parteialltag in sozialdemokratischer Provinz (Frankfurt, 1984); also idem, ‘Frühe sozialdemokratische Kommunalpolitik 1890–1933’, in Heinz Reif and Moritz Feichtinger (eds),Ernst Reuter. Kommunalpolitiker und Gesellschaftsreformer 1921–1953 (Bonn, 2009); Dieter Rebentisch, ‘Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die kommunale Selbstverwaltung’, in Peter Hamon (ed.), Sozialdemokratie und Kommunalpolitik (Berlin, 2008), pp. 13–140, especially pp. 13–55. For Saxony and Thuringia, see also Franz Walter, Tobias Dürr and Klaus Schmidtke, Die SPD in Sachsen und Thüringen zwischen Hochburg und Diaspora. Untersuchungen auf lokaler Ebene vom Kaiserreich bis zur Gegenwart (Bonn, 1993).

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weapon with which to politicise the workers. Paradoxically, important representatives of the party right like were also in favour of the general strike, arguing that it should be employed in order to force the Prussian government to democratise the discriminatory three-class franchise. In fact, the 1905 suffrage demonstrations in the city of Dresden revealed a remarkable readiness on the part of the Social Democratic ranks to engage in actions of civil disobedience in order to further the party’s political aims.35 In the light of several successful general strikes in other European countries for extending voting rights, representatives of both the left and right wanted a total mobilisation of the SPD, if ultimately for different reasons: social revolution here, democratisation there. Yet, both the left and the right ultimately lost out to the party centre whose representatives avoided everything which might have endangered the organisation and threatened to provoke a renewed period of illegality. Consequently, at the 1906 Mannheim party conference, a resolution was passed which ruled out the general strike as a political weapon (the so-called Mannheimer Abkommen).36 The trade unions’ reluctance to get involved in a political general strike played an important part in the ultimate defeat of the idea at Mannheim. The strike weapon was used to some effect to ensure higher wages and to shorten the length of the working day, yet it was endorsed only to achieve bread-and-butter aims. Trade union leaders were among the most outspoken opponents of the use of the general strike for political ends. Fearing the destruction of their organisations in an all-out confrontation with the state, they sought legal recognition and the establishment of procedures of regulated collective bargaining instead.37 When stable trade union organisations were first founded in the German states in the 1860s, socialists had been important in helping them to become established. Subsequently some in the SPD perceived unions as ‘prep schools for socialism’, which should be clearly subordinated to the will of the party. However, there was increasing resistance to such ideas from within the trade union movement itself, which went from strength to strength in the two decades before the First World War. In 1906 agreement was reached between the party and the trade unions, explicitly making the latter equal partners of the SPD. But in reality, the unions, with their much bigger membership and influence amongst workers, increasingly set the pace for the SPD’s political decision-making.38 At the outbreak of the First World War the unions were quick to forge a ‘civil truce’ (Burgfrieden) with employers and the state, leaving the SPD with few options of their own. Yet, overall, the union–party relationship was characterised by mutual co-operation and help. Given a marked overlap in the leadership of local SPD and trade union institutions and a widespread perception of unions, party and co-operatives as forming the three columns on which the Social Democratic house was built, the tensions and rivalries inherent in the close alliance between unions and party proved containable.39

35 Christoph Nonn, ‘Putting Radicalism to the Test: German Social Democracy and the 1905 Suffrage Demonstrations in Dresden’, International Review of Social History, 41 (1996), pp. 183–208; Gisela Notz, ‘Her mit dem allgemeinen, gleichen Wahlrecht für Mann und Frau!’: die internationale sozialistische Frauenbewegung zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts und der Kampf um das Frauenwahlrecht (Bonn, 2008), p. 17. 36 On the development of German trade unionism, see the articles in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Hans-Gerd Husung (eds), The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany 1880 – 1914 (London, 1985). 37 Friedhelm Boll, Arbeitskämpfe und Gewerkschaften in Deutschland, England und Frankreich (Bonn, 1992); Michael L. Hughes, ‘“The Knife in the Hands of the Children”? Debating the Political Mass Strike and Political Citizenship in Imperial Germany’, Labor History, 2 (2009), pp. 113–38. 38 Michael Schneider, History of the German Trade Unions (Bonn, 2005). 39 Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im 1. Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1974); Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration. Eine Neuinterpretation des sozialdemokratischen Burgfriedensschlusses 1914/15 (Essen, 1994).

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Although the SPD’s integration into Imperial German society was well advanced in some respects, the party was nevertheless still very much an outsider in others. It occupied a curious and uneasy position somewhere between integration and isolation. The SPD can hardly be described as vigorously pursuing the aim of social revolution, yet it was also far from making its peace with Wilhelmine Germany. Instead it was leading a workers’ movement which aimed at achieving a peaceful but thorough change of the political, economic and social structure. This ambitious goal in turn led to the formation of anti- socialist coalitions. Discrimination against Social Democrats was intense. State employees were expressly forbidden to join Social Democratic unions or the party. The franchise in many localities and states was heavily loaded against the SPD, especially in Prussia, where the three-class franchise meant that a few super-rich voters in the first class could determine as many members of parliament as millions of poorer voters in the third class. In Saxony, equal male suffrage was actually abolished by an alliance of Conservatives and National Liberals, fearful of a possible absolute majority for the SPD in the Saxon Landtag.40 Social Democrats were faced with frosty non-acceptance in many state legislatures, but there were also signs of increased sociability and mutual acceptance between Social Democrats and some of the bourgeois parties, in particular the National Liberals, left liberals and the Centre Party. The law courts in Imperial Germany sentenced tens of thousands of Social Democrats to prison, and hefty fines were imposed for offences ranging from lèse majesté (that is, insults to the royal head of state) to the incitement of violence. On the other hand, Imperial Germany was a state which respected the rule of law. It was a far cry from the autocracy of Tsarist Russia. The legal framework of the German state provided a reliable reference point for Social Democrats and contributed to the strong legalistic orientation of the SPD.

SPD and Nation

The attitude of Social Democrats towards the national question demonstrates its ambiguous position between rejection of Imperial Germany’s dominant nationalism and its attachment to the principle of the nation-state.41 Social Democrats attempted to formulate their own brand of social patriotism which was distinct from right-wing nationalism. They rejected ethnic definitions of the nation and instead sought to anchor nationality in citizenship, and the notion of political and social rights and obligations. Thus Social Democrats in Alsace were at times able to integrate elements of both German and French national culture in their movement: participants in a socialist demonstration in 1893 shouted ‘Vive le France! Hoch Bebel!’42 Moreover, although individual socialists may have shared antisemitic prejudices,

40 Maria Görlitz,P arlamentarismus und Sachsen: Königtum und Volksvertretung im 19. Jahrhundert und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2011), pp. 135 ff.; Gerhard A. Ritter, ‘Das Wahlrecht und die Wählerschaft der Sozialdemokratie im Königreich Sachsen 1867–1914’, in idem (ed.), Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, pp. 49–101. 41 On the attitude of German Social Democracy to the nation, see Stefan Berger, ‘British and German Socialists Between Class and National Solidarity’, in Stefan Berger and Angel Smith (eds), Nationalism, Labour and Ethnicity 1870–1939 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 31–63; also Dieter Groh and Peter Brandt, Vaterlandslose Gesellen. Sozialdemokratie und Nation 1860–1990 (Munich, 1992), especially pp. 13–173; Dieter Groh and Werner Conze, Die Arbeiterbewegung in der nationalen Bewegung. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor, während und nach der Reichsgründung (Stuttgart, 1966). 42 Alison Carrol, ‘Socialism and National Identity in Alsace from Reichsland to République, 1890– 1921’, European History Quarterly, 1 (2010), pp. 57–78, at 61.

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the SPD fought strenuously against antisemitism in Imperial Germany, even withdrawing their candidates in elections where otherwise a three-cornered contest might have allowed an antisemite to emerge victorious.43 While some Social Democrats were also apologists for German empire-building, the SPD officially indicted the German elites for their pursuit of imperialist ambitions (Weltpolitik). Through the Socialist International and its contacts with its sister parties across Europe, the SPD attempted to provide alternatives to the militarism and imperialism which characterised official government policy in Wilhelmine Germany.44

Social Democratic Internationalism and the First World War, 1914–18

The SPD played an important role in the Socialist International. Many of its sister parties admired the SPD’s organisational strength, its electoral success and its ideological rigour. Socialists across Europe saw it as a model to follow and to emulate.45 Many expected the socialist world revolution to start in, and spread from, Germany. Admiration, however, often breeds self-conceit and vanity: German socialists started to believe in their own hegemonic role, treating socialists from other countries in a condescending and paternalistic manner. A passage from August Bebel’s widely read Woman and Socialism reflects the widespread self-perception of German Social Democrats as the schoolmasters of European socialism: ‘In the enormous struggle of the future, German socialists have taken the lead. Germany … is predestined for such leadership. It is not by chance that it was Germans who discovered the laws of modern society … It is not by chance that the German socialist movement is the most important in the world … It is furthermore not by chance that Germans are the pioneers who bring the socialist idea to the workers of the various peoples of the world.’46 Unsurprisingly, such attitudes met with resentment. Well before 1914, socialists such as the Scot Keir Hardie or the Frenchmen Jean Jaurès criticised the SPD for its mixture of verbal radicalism and practical powerlessness. Its huge organisation, Jaurès argued, was poor compensation for its exclusion from German society and from positions of power and influence. Its schematic and doctrinaire Marxism, he contended, was meaningless for socialists in the Western democracies where real opportunities for power-sharing had to be grasped. Ultimately, the Socialist International proved an ineffective means of either preventing war in 1914 or co-ordinating socialist policies across national frontiers. Its adherence to an abstract and sterile Kautskyanism proved meaningless in a variety of national contexts which continued to shape the outlook of diverse socialist parties across Europe. Yet the socialists in the Second International perceived their internationalism as compatible with

43 Andrew G. Bonnell, ‘Was German Social Democracy Before 1914 Antisemitic?’, German History, 27 (2009), pp. 259–69. This article was Bonnell’s reply to Lars Fischer’s The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge and New York, 2007). 44 On the question of the SPD and imperialism, see Roger Fletcher, Revisionism and Empire: Socialist Imperialism in Germany, 1897–1914 (London, 1984); Jens-Uwe Guettel, ‘The Myth of the Pro-Colonialist SPD: German Social Democracy and Imperialism Before ’, Central European History, 45 (2012), pp. 452–84, at 471. 45 Jürgen Rojahn, however, has struck a note of caution about the alleged ‘role model’ status of the SPD in the International. See Rojahn, ‘War die deutsche Sozialdemokratie ein Modell für die Parteien der Zweiten Internationale?’, Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 27 (1991), pp. 291–302. For the older view, see Peter Nettl, ‘The German Social Democratic Party 1890–1914 as a Political Model’, Past and Present, 30 (1965), pp. 65–95. 46 August Bebel, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Berlin, 1891), p. 379.

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national commitments. In their attempt to develop their own brand of left-wing patriotism, they insisted that love for one’s fatherland could go hand in hand with international class solidarity. However neat such a distinction between ‘good’ socialist patriotism and ‘bad’ right-wing nationalism might appear in theory, in practice the two tended to merge. Thus, for example, socialist patriotism allowed for the condemnation of Tsarism in Russia but not for the denigration of the Slavs. Indeed, none other than the revered leader of the SPD, Bebel, had declared the party’s readiness to shoulder the rifle should Germany be threatened by Tsardom, a form of despotism hated and reviled by left wingers all across Europe. But at times statements made by German Social Democrats became tinged with anti-Slav sentiments which were clearly influenced by ethnic nationalism. Other idiosyncrasies came to characterise the SPD’s positioning towards the nation too. For instance, while the party was officially republican, many Social Democrats came to feel some loyalty and respect for the German monarchy.47 In August 1914 the distinction between Social Democratic patriotism and official nationalism collapsed in the fateful decision of the SPD to join the German élites in supporting the war. The question of whether the SPD should vote in favour of war credits provoked stormy debates in the parliamentary party and across the country. A majority of the parliamentary party eventually came down in favour of supporting the German war effort, and the minority, who did not want to threaten party unity, followed suit. Some genuinely believed that Germany was being attacked by Russia and had to defend itself. Others had domestic reasons for their support of the war. An influential group of Social Democrats around Eduard David wanted to use the war to integrate the SPD more firmly into the Kaiserreich, to achieve civil equality and political liberty, and at the same time to rid the party of its unpatriotic image and continued isolation. A number of well-known Social Democrats from both the right and left wings of the party were so overwhelmed by patriotic sentiment in August 1914 that it drowned out all other considerations. It is still unclear, however, to what extent such sentiment was shared within the Social Democratic ranks. The left-winger Konrad Haenisch confessed that for him it was a moment of cathartic release when, in August 1914, he could sing the refrain of Deutschland, Deutschland über alles for the first time. Some Social Democrats, however, quickly became disillusioned with their party’s policy of ‘civil truce’. The party became increasingly divided between pro-war patriots, anti-war socialists and a revolutionary left who wanted to use the war to bring about the socialist revolution. The Marxist Kautsky and the revisionist Bernstein found themselves united in their anti-war stance. In the parliamentary party, Karl Liebknecht was the first to break ranks in December 1914, when he defied party discipline and voted openly against the second War Loans Bill. In March 1916 the pro-war majority of the parliamentary party excluded 20 of its members who had voted against the government’s emergency budget. The split within the wider party occurred almost a year later, in January 1917, when a National Conference of the Opposition was convened. Three months later, in April 1917, the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was formed, and local SPD associations had to decide whether they wanted to stay in the old party, now referred to as the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD), or join the new one. USPD strongholds were rapidly established in several cities. The war-time split of the SPD corresponded largely to that between the party left and the party right which had been a feature of Imperial German Social Democracy. However, it was not brought about by ideological factionalism alone. The issue of the party’s stance

47 Werner K. Blessing, ‘Der monarchische Kult, politische Loyalität und die Arbeiterbewegung im deutschen Kaiserreich’, in Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Arbeiterkultur (Königstein im Taunus, 1979), pp. 185–208.

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on the German war effort was of particular importance, but so too was the over-rigid application of party discipline by the majority, who first expelled the minority members of the parliamentary party in 1916 and subsequently expelled those who had participated in the January 1917 Conference of the Opposition. The question of whether the war led to the split (Susanne Miller) or whether that split originated in the factional conflicts of the preceding years (Carl Schorske) is still a controversial one. Dieter Buse underlines the tremendous changes in the party caused by the First World War, while Frank Engehausen argues that the split originated in pre-war factionalism.48 The last two years of the war saw a considerable radicalisation of working-class opinion. Initially some ordinary workers enthusiastically joined the army in August 1914, expecting the adventure of a lifetime, or, at any rate, a welcome change from the monotonous work routine in the factories. However, the reactions of workers were far more ambiguous and far less ecstatic than the war euphoria displayed by the middle classes. Cross-class alliances in pursuit of war-related national goals were at best intermittent and always volatile and contested. As the effects of food shortages and general misery were increasingly felt among the working classes, dissatisfaction with the war mounted. Malnutrition, declining real wages, longer working hours, shortages of clothing and general frustration with the extensive black market led to widespread strikes and social protest. In January 1918, 200,000 workers in Berlin went on strike. It was organised and controlled not by the trade unions but by so-called revolutionary shop stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute). They were highly critical of attempts by the state and employers to introduce firmer factory rules and restructure work practices along more authoritarian lines in the context of the war-time economy.49 They were even more critical of the trade unions’ willingness to co-operate with the state and employers in achieving those aims. The unions had gained state-enforced recognition in return for such co-operation. The Auxiliary Service Law (Gesetz über den vaterländischen Hilfsdienst) made reluctant employers accept Social Democratic unions in their companies. However, in the light of the popular shop stewards’ movement, union officials found it more and more difficult to enforce the unions’ authority in the workshops. Shop stewards, who acted independently of the unions, began to mobilise radicalised sections of workers who led the upsurge of militancy between 1915 and 1918. Such shop- floor militancy was supported by a heterogeneous alliance of skilled core workers with those workers who had found their way into the factories during wartime and had few links with the trade unions: former agricultural workers, young workers, women and sometimes slave labourers, who had been recruited forcibly to help the German war effort. The erosion of traditional occupational differences under intolerable conditions in the factories eliminated many of the obstacles which had hitherto stood in the way of common action. An increasing number of workers rejected their regimentation in the workplace. They abhorred the deteriorating social conditions and yearned for peace and better living standards. Drastic food shortages were probably the single most important cause of industrial discontent.50

48 Dieter K. Buse, ‘Breaking and Remaking a Party: The Division and Militancy of Germany Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1914–1918’, Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz, 1 (2004), pp. 1–21; Frank Engehausen, ‘Die sozialdemokratische Reichstagsfraktion im Wilhelminischen Kaiserreich: Altersstruktur und Generationenkonflikte’, in Klaus Schönhoven and Bernd Braun (eds), Generationen der Arbeiterbewegung (Munich, 2005), pp. 145–63, at 162. 49 Ottokar Luban, ‘Spartakusgruppe, revolutionäre Obleute und die politischen Massenstreiks in Deutschland während des Ersten Weltkriegs’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für Soziale Bewegungen, 40 (2008), pp. 23–38, especially pp. 29–32. 50 Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000); Ute Daniel, The War From Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford, 1997).

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The USPD, which called for an immediate end to the war, became the party of hope for many workers in 1917 and 1918. By contrast, the MSPD’s continued support for the war meant that sections of the party’s working-class base became disillusioned and turned to the USPD. However, the MSPD’s alliance with the bourgeois centre parties in the Inter-Parliamentary Committee (Interfraktioneller Ausschuß) of 1917 also bore fruit. The majority Social Democrats were eventually included in the last imperial government under Max von Baden in 1918. It seemed to vindicate those on the right of the party who had planned this ‘pact with the devil’ all along: co-operation in exchange for integration. For them, the revolution of 1918 was unwelcome because it risked undermining all that had been achieved; sacrificing hard- won reforms in the name of root-and-branch renewal. The revolution ushered in a new political system, ended monarchical rule and revealed the full diversity of German workers’ aims and ambitions.51

Conclusions and Future Research

If we consider the entire history of Social Democracy in Imperial Germany, three developments in particular are striking. Firstly, at the organisational level, the SPD built one of the most formidable political parties complete with its own subculture, which served as a global model for other socialist parties. Secondly, Marxism became the official ideology of the SPD in 1891, largely due to the oppression of the Anti-Socialist Law period which lent credence to Marx’s idea about the state as an instrument of class rule. Thirdly, we can observe the position of German Social Democracy between isolation and integration in the political system and society of the Empire. The tension between those two poles also produced the internal splits which surfaced in the revisionism debate, and the divisions between reformists and revolutionaries in the pre-war SPD. Research into the history of German Social Democracy continues to suffer from the ongoing crisis in labour history. Despite excellent archival resources and readily available published sources, relatively few PhD students seem attracted to research the history of the German labour movement.52 Easy solutions to this situation are hard to find: some scholars have suggested strengthening comparative and transnational research, which has certainly become very popular in other historical fields. Labour history also still needs to fully take up the challenges of the new cultural history which emerged in the 1980s. Research on visual representations of Social Democracy and its ancillary culture is still underdeveloped.53 One example of innovative thinking, however, has been the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s recent initiative to launch an extensive website on the ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de mémoire) of German socialism;54 and Kevin Callahan has recently shown how a ‘cultural history’ approach can

51 Karl-Christian Führer, Jürgen Mittag, Axel Schildt and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Revolution und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland 1918–1920 (Essen, 2013). 52 For example, the transcripts of Reichstag debates are available online at http://www. reichstagsprotokolle.de/index.html. Party manifestos and other key documents can be found in Dieter Dowe and Kurt Klotzbach (eds), Programmatische Dokumente der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Bonn, 2004). Party periodicals such as the Neue Zeit and Sozialistische Monatshefte can be found online at http://www. fes.de/hfz/arbeiterbewegung/epochen/wilhelminische-ara-1890-1918/kollektion/atct_topic_view?b_ start:int=20&-C=. 53 An exception is W.L. Guttsman,Art for the Workers: Ideology and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Manchester, 1997). 54 http://www.erinnerungsorte-der-sozialdemokratie.de/.

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lead to a better understanding of the history of the Second International.55 At the time of writing, capitalism is undergoing one of its worst financial and economic crises. This is producing new forms of opposition and resistance, such as the world social forums and the Occupy movement. It is to be hoped that this might also spark renewed interest in past social movements, and that a new generation of historians will be attracted to the history of labour.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Barclay, David E. and Weitz, Eric D. (eds). Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990 (New York and Oxford, 1998). Berger, Stefan. Social Democracy and the Working Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (London and New York, 2000). Bonnell, Andrew G. The People’s Stage in Imperial Germany: Social Democracy and Culture 1890– 1914 (London, 2005). Brandt, Peter and Groh, Dieter. ‘Vaterlandslose Gesellen’. Sozialdemokratie und Nation 1860– 1990 (Munich, 1992). Buse, Dieter K. ‘Breaking and Remaking a Party. The Division and Militancy of German Social Democracy Reconsidered, 1914–1918’, Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz, 1 (2004), pp. 1–21. Callahan, Kevin. Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889– 1914 (Leicester, 2010). Faulenbach, Bernd. Geschichte der SPD: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2012). Fischer, Lars. The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge and New York, 2007). Fletcher, Roger. Revisionism and Empire: Socialist Imperialism in Germany, 1897–1914 (London, 1984). Geary, Dick. Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914 (Oxford, 1989). Guettel, Jens-Uwe. ‘The Myth of the Pro-Colonalist SPD: German Social Democracy and Imperialism Before World War I’, Central European History, 45 (2012), pp. 452–84. Jacobs, Jack. On Socialists and ‘the Jewish Question’ After Marx (New York, 1992). Kocka, Jürgen. Weder Stand noch Klasse. Unterschichten um 1800 (Bonn, 1990). Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders – The Golden Age – The Breakdown (New York, 2005). Leuschen-Seppel, Rosemarie. Sozialdemokratie und Antisemitismus im Kaiserreich: die Auseinandersetzungen der Partei mit den konservativen und völkischen Strömungen des Antisemitismus 1871–1914 (Bonn, 1978). Lidtke, Vernon L. The Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany 1878–1890 (Princeton, 1966). —. The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (Oxford and New York, 1985). Miller, Susanne and Potthoff, Heinrich.A History of German Social Democracy from 1848 to the Present (Oxford, 1986). Morgan, David M. The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922 (Ithaca and London, 1975).

55 Kevin Callahan, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914 (Leicester, 2010).

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Nolan, Mary. Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf 1890–1920 (Cambridge and New York, 1981). Potthoff, Heinrich and Miller, Susanne. The Social Democratic Party of Germany 1848–2005 (Bonn, 2006). Prüfer, Sebastian. Sozialismus statt Religion: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage 1863–1890 (Göttingen, 2002). Quatert, Jean H. Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton, 1979). Resch, Stephan. Das Sozialistengesetz in Bayern 1878–1890 (Düsseldorf, 2012). Ritter, Gerhard A. Arbeiter, Arbeiterbewegung und soziale Ideen in Deutschland (Munich, 1996). — (ed.) Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung: Sozialdemokratie und Freie Gewerkschaften im Parteiensystem und Sozialmilieu des Kaiserreichs (Munich, 1990). — and Tenfelde, Klaus. Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871–1914 (Bonn, 1992). Saage, Richard. Zwischen Darwin und Marx: zur Rezeption der Evolutionstheorie in der deutschen und der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie vor 1933/1934 (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 2012). Schorske, Carl E. German Social Democracy: 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955; New York, 1972). Schwartz, Michael. Sozialistische Eugenik: eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1890–1933 (Bonn, 1995). Sperber, Jonathan. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York, 2013). Steenson, Gary P. Karl Kautsky 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years (Pittsburgh, 1978). —. ‘Not One Man! Not One Penny!’ German Social Democracy 1863–1914 (Pittsburgh, 1981). —. After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884– 1914 (Pittsburgh, 1991). Steger, Manfred B. The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1997). Tenfelde, Klaus. ‘Germany’, in Marcel van der Linden and Jürgen Rojahn (eds), The Formation of Labour Movements, 1870–1914: An International Perspective, vol. 1 (Leiden, 1990), pp. 243–70. Ünlüdag, Tânia. ‘Bourgeois Mentality and Socialist Ideology as Exemplified by Clara Zetkin’s Constructs of Femininity’, International Review of Social History, 47 (2002), pp. 33–58. Welskopp, Thomas. Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn, 2000).

192 pART iii culture and identity This page has been left blank intentionally 11 particularism and localism

Jennifer Jenkins

Heimat as a Keyword

Heimat is one of the most resonant words in the german language. meaning both ‘home’ and ‘homeland’, it is a highly emotional term. it evokes personal and childhood memories and is inclusive in its reach. every german has a Heimat, a place in which they feel most at home. yet its meanings are also broader and more social. Referencing a universal human need for belonging and community, Heimat signals the spatial and embedded (ortsbezogen) aspects of identity central to german culture.1 geographically it points to the characteristics of germany’s many regions, its diverse natural and cultural landscapes. its meanings are individual and collective, local and national. working in several registers, Heimat is a keyword for the writing of modern german history. politically it can be contradictory. with its connections to the imagining of community, Heimat was readily politicized by nationalist thinkers over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The writings of the mid-nineteenth-century Bavarian wilhelm heinrich Riehl celebrated Heimat as the pre-industrial rural culture of the Volk and its cultural and racial embeddedness in the natural landscape. The movement which Riehl helped to found gave Heimat a place in an evolving national politics, and ever since the term has held a central place in debates on german modernity. political conservatives after 1890 used Heimat in their anti-urban and anti-modern diatribes. with the slogan ‘away from Berlin’ (Los von Berlin) they called for a ‘return’ to the ‘healthy’ traditions of the small town and the rural environment. national socialist organizations forged bonds between their racial ‘blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden) ideology and Heimat’s lifeworlds.2 But decades of politicization did not exhaust such a malleable concept, so close to the german Alltag that it could not help but reflect its complexity. In contrast to its usage in National Socialist rhetoric, Heimat took on new meanings after 1945. The german Democratic Republic generated its own socialist Heimat, and in the federal Republic Heimat pointed toward the recovery of local cultural identities in the aftermath of national socialism.3 The term was too important to

1 Raymond williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford, 1976). Otto Brunner, werner conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Gründbegriffe: historisches Lexikon zur politisch- sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972–97) exemplifies the German version of the keyword approach. 2 george mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (new york, 1964); werner hartung, Konservative Zivilisationskritik und regionale Identität: am Beispiel der niedersächsischen Heimatbewegung 1895 bis 1919 (hanover, 1991). Kay Dohnke, norbert hopster and Jan wirrer (eds), Niederdeutsch im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rolle regionaler Kultur im Faschismus (hildesheim, 1994) details the instrumentalization of northern german ideas of Heimat by national socialism. 3 Jan palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990 (New York, 2009). The eleven-part television drama series directed by Edgar Reitz under the title Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984) revived discussion on the topic in the federal Republic. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

lose. A character in Siegfried Lenz’s post-war novel Heimatmuseum (1978) gave voice to this sentiment when he protested: ‘Pardon me? A detestable word? A word with a dark history? … I realize that the word has a bad reputation, that it’s been so seriously abused that one can hardly use it nowadays … But couldn’t we try to rid the word of its bad connotations? Give it back a sort of purity?’ By the 1970s this was well underway. The West German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on a resurgence of Heimat activities: neighbourhood and city festivals, local historical exhibitions, environmental protection initiatives and a renewal of interest in dialect literature.4 Heimat’s progressive sides were once again visible. As a term it came alive in Green Party politics, local activism and progressive initiatives. Playing across such a broad range of meanings, Heimat’s place in the writing of modern German history is multifaceted. As the ‘local’ it has often played the role of the ‘other’ in a scholarly field that defines the nation-state, and the forging of a modern national identity, as the central topics of analysis. After 1945 a generation of studies measured the degree of Germany’s failed political modernization by pointing to the rise of an anti-modern Heimat movement in the 1880s and 1890s, often obscuring the term’s broader, and older, meanings. What Heimat looked like depended on where one stood. In studies detailing the rise of the Bismarckian nation-state, and the drama of its Wilhelmine successor, Heimat evoked the lifeworld outside of and opposed to the nation: the cosy hometown, the quiet village.5 Against the triumphalism of Berlin, it was the guardian of things non-Prussian and non- national. It referenced the local parameters through which much of German history took place and the particularism of modern German historical development.6 Seen negatively, Heimat was the local and rural place undone by the national and urban centre. Seen positively it was a place apart, an alternative to Prusso-centric national culture, a space of plurality and political difference.7 Methodologically it evoked history ‘from below’ in a field top heavy with histories ‘from above’. It was a term which was often politicized, except when it wasn’t. The historiography of Heimat is complicated. To clarify matters the following will focus on the related literatures on particularism and localism. Particularism highlights the state, localism the nation. The literature on particularism has traditionally had an institutional focus, while that on localism has concentrated on the protean issue of belonging, specifically national belonging. Both literatures address the topic of political community and the many forms it has taken in modern Germany – from the unified nation-state to allegiances to regions and local places – and how these have, or have not, fitted together over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Particularism

At the beginning of many modern German histories is the state, specifically the nation-state of 1871. As the Kaiserreich was declared in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January

4 Wilfried von Bredow and Hans-Friedrich Foltin, Zwiespältige Zufluchten: zur Renaissance des Heimatgefühls (Berlin, 1981); Siegfried Lenz, Heimatmuseum (Hamburg, 1978). 5 Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca and London, 1971). 6 See James J. Sheehan, ‘What is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), pp. 1–23; and idem, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989). 7 Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer and Mark Roseman (eds), German History from the Margins (Bloomington, 2006).

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1871, it was a vehicle for Prussian domination over the German lands. It stood at the apex of a Prussian-led drive for mastery in the ‘German question’ and as the culmination of Bismarck’s wars of unification (1864–71). Anton von Werner’s well-known third painting of the founding of the Reich (Kaiserproklamation in Versailles, 1882) depicts the making of the state as a coming together of dynastic rulers, all of them men and all of them in uniform. They stand with swords raised toward the Hohenzollern monarch, Wilhelm I. Presiding in the middle and clad in white is the state-maker, the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and the image depicts the noise and energy of a military vow. The new state would be more than a set of interlocking military alliances, but it was an administrative and institutional patchwork to be sure. It brought together entities of different sizes and strengths. These ranged from kingdoms (Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony), through duchies grand and less grand (Baden, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Oldenburg in the former group, and Anhalt, Brunswick, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in the latter) to principalities of varying sizes (Lippe, Reuss-Gera) and the three Hanseatic free cities (Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck), centres of Germany’s commercial economy. Prussia’s influence was paramount. It was the largest state and held veto power in the upper chamber of government (Bundesrat). It gave Germany its monarchical head and imperial dynasty, which controlled the central state issues of foreign policy, war and peace. Prussia’s drive for dominance was unmistakable, yet diversity was built into the structure. This diversity is viewed positively today in discussions on European federalism, but in the nineteenth century it was the stuff of insults. In a nationally focused age, particularism signalled the fragmentation and powerlessness arising from the dreaded German condition of ‘many- stateness’ (Kleinstaaterei). For nationalist thinkers, particularism belonged on the dust- heap of history. But the topic goes beyond simple ideological opposites. The Kaiserreich was, rightly speaking, a federation of separate states.8 These continued to be the locus of much governing authority after 1871, particularly on the bread-and-butter issues that touched the lives of citizens. Matters of taxation and policing, education, religion, culture, labour, health and welfare – as well as suffrage laws – were administered by the regional states. These states were also more durable than they seemed to nationalist activists at the time. As historical entities in their own right, they had their own cultural institutions, economic networks, public spheres, constitutions, parliaments and forms of political community. Württemberg’s constitution dated to 1819 and Saxony’s to 1831; both states had joined the Prussian Customs Union in 1834. They had their own monarchies and aristocratic dynasties, the heads of which were repositories of local patriotism and figures of, in several cases, enduring political loyalty. Thus the making of the German nation-state unfolded through complex processes of institutional change throughout its separate regions. New institutions were built and older ones dismantled on both the national and regional levels.9 The best guide to this topic is Abigail Green’s Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century

8 A growing literature on federalism extols the positive aspects of German regional diversity. Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Der Föderalismus in der deutschen Geschichte’, in idem (ed.), Nachdenken über die deutsche Geschichte (Munich, 1986), pp. 60–109; Dieter Langewiesche and Georg Schmidt (eds), Die föderative Nation: Deutschlandkonzepte von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2000); Maiken Umbach (ed.), German Federalism: Past, Present, Future (Basingstoke, 2002). 9 Geoff Eley, ‘State Formation, Nationalism and Political Culture: Some Thoughts onthe Unification of Germany’, in Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), Culture, Ideology and Politics (London and Boston, 1983), pp. 277–301.

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Germany.10 In an account spanning political, administrative and cultural history, Green outlines the development of three regional states of the ‘middle tier’ – Württemberg, Saxony and Hanover – detailing the similarities and differences in their transformation from particular sovereign entities into federal states of the German Empire. This process properly began at the Congress of Vienna as part of the rationalization of the European map that followed in the wake of Napoleon’s conquest and defeat. Through this period of enforced political modernization, the 300-plus sovereign entities of the Holy Roman Empire became the 39 states of the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund). Modernization, coupled with nationalism, was the grand solvent in which Kleinstaaterei would be dissolved. Yet even after the founding of the German Empire in 1871, nationalists discovered that the legacies of particularism could be tenacious. Via decades of organized political activity – the writing of constitutions and the meeting of parliaments – by the 1850s, as Green writes, in Württemberg, Saxony and Hanover there was ‘popular awareness of the state as a community’.11 Particular loyalties held fast. ‘By 1866’, she states, ‘Hanoverians, Saxons and Württembergers had a strong sense of these states as political units.’ Against Prussia’s bid for dominance, these non-Prussian entities had fostered durable forms of ‘state patriotism’ which it would be the task of the new nation-state to either harmonize with or overcome.12 Nation-building was a time-intensive process, and it would take decades to bring clarity into the question of national identity in the German Empire. To paraphrase Massimo D’Azeglio: ‘We have made Germany; now we must make Germans’; but what did it mean after 1871 to be a German, as apart from a Saxon, a Prussian or a Württemberger?13 The literature on particularism tracks this process. An older literature highlighted institutional and dynastic histories, as well as venturing into nineteenth-century traditions of Landesgeschichte. Here an either/or approach was popular, which worked to the detriment of regional studies. Particularism was placed with all things outmoded, as an outdated form of tradition; the nation-state was associated with the future and modernity. Green’s position, by contrast, is considerably more nuanced. Fatherlands ‘attempts to establish how national Germany was before unification and how federal it remained thereafter’.14 Other scholars have worked in this direction, exploring the types of political identification fostered by the regional states, and how these changed after 1871.15 David Blackbourn’s Marpingen and The Conquest of Nature both detail the transformation of Germany’s regions by its modernizing governments, powerfully conjuring up the local events and experiences central to creating a sense of national identity.16 Green also emphasized the

10 Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge and New York, 2001); David Blackbourn’s survey of modern Germany, Fontana History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (London, 1997) also takes regional aspects seriously. 11 Green, Fatherlands, p. 50. On the topic of local political community, see also Ian F. McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003). 12 Green, Fatherlands, pp. 60, 50. 13 James Retallack, ‘“Why Can’t a Saxon Be More Like a Prussian?” Regional Identities and the Birth of Modern Political Culture in Germany, 1866–67’, Canadian Journal of History, 32 (1997), pp. 26–55. 14 Green, Fatherlands, p. 7. 15 Green, Fatherlands; Werner K. Blessing, Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft: institutionelle Autorität und mentaler Wandel in Bayern während des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1892); Siegfried Weichlein,Nation und Region: Intergrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (Düsseldorf, 2004). 16 David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford and New York, 1993); idem, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London, 2006).

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‘nation state as work-in-progress’, showing that Bismarck’s creation, declared with such pomp, was not complete.17 Yet she refused to pathologize the unfinished aspects of the new state, as an earlier generation of historians had done. In this she differed strongly from scholars such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, for whom the Kaiserreich’s national mis-development was a central theme in the new Sozialgeschichte of the 1970s and 1980s. Slow and incomplete political modernization at the national level – which ran out of sync with Germany’s powerful economic modernization – was seen as the root cause of the Kaiserreich’s crisis-ridden character and the deep divisions in its national politics. These led, in turn, to the rise of National Socialism during the Weimar Republic and Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. What became known as the Sonderweg discussion on Germany’s ‘special path’ to modernity arose out of these discussions. Supported by a generation of scholars, it provided a framework for much subsequent research, but on the nation rather than the region.18 The making of national politics, the modernization of the national economy and the formation of national identity were central topics in historical discussions during the 1970s and 1980s. The nation-state ruled the roost. Yet the legacies of particularism were tenacious. They came through in the strong de facto regional focus of many modern German histories, even for those that explicitly focused on national topics. Methodology played a role. In the years following the publication of Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s The German Empire – and the Sonderweg argument it furthered – historical-sociological studies aiming to test Germany’s degree of national political modernization often drew data from regional studies. The region was not studied as a historical entity; nevertheless, it was a favored unit of study. It appeared mainly in the abstract as a building block of the nation. The turn toward social history in the 1980s reinforced this trend. The after-effects of particularism at work surfaced here in studies of national politics inspired by ‘history from below’. The ‘social history of politics’, as a first wave of this research was called, concentrated on political modernization at the national level. Starting with the early sketch of party formation in Thomas Nipperdey’s Die Organisation der deutschen Parteien vor 1918, historians conducted research on the build-up of party-political organizations from the Rhineland and Baden to Hamburg’s bustling port and the agricultural estates of Prussian Poland. Modernization theory provided the model.19 The literature revealed, somewhat against its will, that regionalism remained a significant factor. Questions of politics and party were configured differently in Germany’s different regions.20 National politics, in fact, could be seen as an amalgamation of regional patterns. The literature on liberalism provides a case in point. One of the earliest studies in this genre, Lothar Gall’s Der Liberalismus als regierende Partei, analysed events in Baden; Dan White’s The Splintered Party took up the history of National Liberalism in Hesse. The nationally focused argument in James J. Sheehan’s study of liberal politics also worked

17 In this she draws on Eley, ‘State Formation’. 18 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen, 1973) – published in English as The German Empire 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, 1985); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918: Studien zur deutsche Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte, 2nd edn (Göttingen, 1979). Robert Moeller, ‘The Kaiserreich Recast? Continuity and Change in Modern German Historiography’, Journal of Social History, 17 (1984), pp. 655–83 is a useful summary of the Sonderweg approach. 19 Thomas Nipperdey, Die Organisation der deutschen Parteien vor 1918 (Düsseldorf, 1961); Georg Iggers (ed.), The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing Since 1945 (Leamington Spa, 1985). A vital text for the Sonderweg approach was Barrington Moore, Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966). 20 Richard J. Evans (ed.), Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978).

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from regional data.21 Liberal Germany was found in the regions and the cities.22 Dieter Langewiesche’s work highlighted the importance of regional development and regional diversity in the history of liberalism in both a party-political sense and as a broader cultural formation. Not only did German liberalism differ from its British, French and American counterparts, but regions differed from each other in social composition, institutional development and political expression.23 Prussian liberalism was a different animal from that in the southwest; Hamburg differed from Frankfurt.24 Germany’s cities were shown to be bastions of liberal politics, often due to the tenacity of particularistic urban traditions including that of the restricted franchise.25 Studies of the Social Democratic and Centre parties were also de facto regional in focus. The ‘other’ Germany was regional Germany, the federal states as opposed to the Prussian centre. The literature on political Catholicism and Social Democracy worked from the ground of regional difference. David Blackbourn’s Class, Religion and Local Politics, Jonathan Sperber’s Rhineland Radicals and James Brophy’s Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland all analysed regional politicization in an evolving national political sphere.26 The large literature on Social Democracy also showed regional differences in the development of the country’s first mass party.27 In the 1990s the impulse toward ‘history from below’ moved from studies of party- political organizations into research on civil society more broadly conceived. Drawing on the critique of the Sonderweg paradigm in David Blackbourn’s and Geoff Eley’s The Peculiarities of German History, the supposed weaknesses of liberalism, and the corresponding strengths of authoritarianism, were tested via a body of research on Bürgerlichkeit in Germany’s

21 Lothar Gall, Der Liberalismus als regierende Partei: das Grossherzogtum Baden zwischen Restauration und Reichsgründung (Wiesbaden, 1968); Dan S. White, The Splintered Party: National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich 1867–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1976); Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus und Demokratie in Württemberg zwischen Revolution und Reichsgründung (Düsseldorf, 1974); James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978). Alastair Thompson, Left Liberals, the State and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 2000) outlines regional left-liberal organizations. 22 Konrad H. Jarausch and Larry Eugene Jones (eds), In Search of a Liberal Germany: Studies in the History of German Liberalism from 1789 to the Present (Oxford, 1989); Michael John, ‘Liberalism and Society in Germany 1850–1880: The Case of Hanover’, English Historical Review, 101 (1987), pp. 579–98. 23 Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1988) – published in English as Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Banerji (Basingstoke, 2000); Dieter Langewiesche (ed.), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen, 1988); Lothar Gall and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Liberalismus und Region: zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1995). 24 Matthew Levinger,Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture 1806– 1848 (Oxford, 2000) on Prussia; Paul Nolte, Gemeindebürgertum und Liberalismus in Baden 1800–1850: Tradition, Radikalismus, Republik (Göttingen, 1994) on the southwest; Richard J. Evans,Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987) on Hamburg; Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany: Frankfurt am Main 1866–1914 (Oxford, 1999) on Frankfurt. 25 James J. Sheehan, ‘Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), pp. 116–37; Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘The Liberal Power Monopoly in the Cities of Imperial Germany’, in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds), Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 93–117. 26 David Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg Before 1914 (New Haven, 1980); Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, 1991); James Brophy, Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland (Cambridge, 2007). 27 Two examples would be Volker Ullrich, Die Hamburger Arbeiterbewegung vom Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zur Revolution 1918–1919 (Hamburg, 1976); and Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf 1890–1920 (Cambridge, 1981).

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regions, specifically its cities and towns.28 The view from above was juxtaposed to that from below; national assumptions came up against important local correctives. To the question of ‘how bürgerlich was Imperial Germany?’ the answer was a resounding ‘very’. Studies mapped the social composition and activity of civic associations (Vereine) and the local patriotism they fostered. Both were seen as influential forces in the expansion of an urban- based liberal culture.29 Research projects conducted at the universities of Bielefeld and Frankfurt published prodigiously on the topic.30 A row of monographs and edited volumes on Bürgerlichkeit covered topics from associations to professions, patronage and politics.31 Reviews highlighted the diversity of middle-class life across Germany.32 Methodologically, this research proved equally expansive, branching out into new forms of social and cultural history, including histories of the family, gender and sexuality, religion and the place of minority cultures.33 The social position and cultural identities of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie were looked at anew.34 Studies of civic culture and middle-class associations even raised the topic of democracy in a new way.35 For this research on civil society, the particularities of place – regional, local and urban – could not be overlooked.

Localism

From particularism we arrive at the literature on localism. We come to the study of Heimat and its discussions of belonging and community. Here the historiography demonstrates a dramatic transformation between the initial post-war decades and now. Due to its instrumentalization under National Socialism, the Heimat movement was viewed by

28 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984). 29 Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Verein als sozialer Struktur in Deutschland im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert’, in Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur neueren Geschichte(Göttingen, 1976), pp. 174–205; Rudolf Vierhaus (ed.), Deutsche patriotische und gemeinnützige Gesellschaften (Göttingen, 1994). 30 The Bielefeld project was entitled ‘The Social History of the Modern Bürgertum’. The three volumes edited by Jürgen Kocka, Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich (Munich, 1988), provide examples of the research direction. At Frankfurt, the project ‘From the Traditional to the New Bürgertum’ was under the direction of Lothar Gall. Gall (ed.), Vom alten zum neuen Bürgertum: die mitteleuropäische Stadt im Umbruch 1780–1820 (Munich, 1991) is a sample. 31 Lothar Gall, Bürgertum in Deutschland (Berlin, 1989) became paradigmatic for the literature in German. Examples in English can be found in essays published in David Blackbourn and Richard Evans (eds), The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century (London, 1991). 32 Jürgen Kocka, ‘The Middle Classes in Europe’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), pp. 783– 806; Jonathan Sperber, ‘Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and its Sociocultural World’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), pp. 271–97. 33 Ute Frevert (ed.), Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988); Rebekka Habermas, Männer und Frauen des Bürgertums: eine Familiengeschichte 1750–1850 (Göttingen, 2000). 34 Rainer Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1998); Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen, 2000); Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke and Till van Rahden (eds), Juden, Bürger, Deutsche: zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz 1800–1933 (Tübingen, 2001). 35 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Towards a Transnational Perspective’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), pp. 269–99.

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most post-war historians as a purely reactionary phenomenon. Focusing on the agrarian romanticism of popular nineteenth-century writers such as Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl and Julius Langbehn, studies situated Heimat at the intellectual origins of Nazism. It was a repository of ‘cultural pessimism’, a toxic blend of völkisch and anti-urban resentment, which prepared the ground for National Socialism. With its anti-modern ideologies and racial hatreds, it was a vehicle for the dissemination of antisemitism.36 A portion of this history was accurate. Heimat associations were founded across Imperial Germany in the 1880s, and a central organization for Heimat art (Heimatkunst) appeared in Berlin in 1891.37 Led by the writers Adolf Bartels and Friedrich Lienhard, this organization championed racial ideas, populist militarism and a full-throated antisemitism. Bartels and Lienhard pronounced on what constituted ‘healthy art’ and a ‘healthy Volk’, and popularized stories of hardened peasant farmers, racialized enemies and violent territorial politics. Their version of Heimatliteratur celebrated the warrior peasant and a cult of blood and soil. Some practitioners of the movement crossed over into colonial literature; German Volkstum under threat and a racial idea of culture were alive in both. Authors such as the north German Gustav Frenssen were bestsellers in both genres. His book on the Herero uprising in German Southwest Africa, Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1906), found as many readers as his wildly popular Heimat novel Jörn Uhl (1901). The organization led by Bartels and Lienhard attempted to mobilize and instrumentalize the Heimat movement across Germany, and the example set by their association played an outsize role in the subsequent literature. For many years it was assumed that Germany’s regional and local Heimat clubs followed the national template, that the bluster and prejudice of Bartels, Lienhard, Langbehn and Heinrich Sohnrey – another huckster of the Scholle – were aped on down the line. Philistinism was, after all, a central theme in this literature. Matthew Jefferies summarized that for most post-war historiography the Heimat movement was defined ‘in a negative context: as the mouthpiece of organised philistinism; as a misguided body of people who sought to prevent the onward march of modernism’. The role played by National Socialism loomed large. The ‘ill-advised flirtation of certain Heimatschutz leaders with racial theory’, wrote Jefferies, ‘and the Nazi Party’s eager exploitation of the propaganda opportunities which this presented, have inevitably cast a dark shadow on the movement’s history.’38 Yet were the local clubs just knock-offs of Bartels in Berlin, or were they something else entirely? Was this trickle-down idea of national culture too simplistic, particularly in a country in which the regional organization of cultural life was so strong? For it is true that the model of an easy dissemination of cultural ideas from the capital to the provinces has never worked well for understanding Germany. The local view again provided an important correction to national assumptions. Research from the late 1980s onward revealed that the Heimat associations that sprang up across Germany’s regions were not miniature copies of Bartels’ Berlin group. They pursued an impressive array of topics and expressed ideas that stretched across the political spectrum. Rather than being simply regressive, their activities were more contradictory and changeable. Going in several different directions, they were hard to characterize. ‘Even the

36 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961); Karlheinz Rossbacher, Heimatkunstbewegung und Heimatroman: zu einer Literaturesozialogie der Jahrhundertwende (Stuttgart, 1975). 37 Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Göttingen, 1969) covers Bartels, Lienhard, Langbehn, Sohnrey and other Wilhelmine contributors to völkisch nationalism. 38 Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford and New York, 1995), p. 53.

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most cursory of glances at the movement’s literature’, writes Jefferies, ‘reveals a complex and dynamic set of ideas which do not fit neatly into any simplistic “progressive”/“reactionary” schema.’39 These interests included historical conservation, environmental protection and local architectural styles. As a new scholarly literature on Heimat began to take a decided bottom-up approach to the topic, it explored a movement in which the national direction may have been authoritarian but local clubs exhibited a fascinating diversity, both in their membership and in their activities. This new discussion began in earnest with Celia Applegate’s imaginative study of the Rhineland Palatinate, A Nation of Provincials, published in 1990.40 Her analysis of local and national identity in the Palatinate interwove the two topics. Here local particularity, what she has called the ‘sense of place’ central to German cultural identity, was a vital component of an emerging national culture.41 National unity did not mean nationalist uniformity. Heimat associations, Applegate wrote, ‘embodied a vision of national unity as the gathering together of diversity, especially local diversity’.42 Her work defined Heimat as the mediating term. It reconciled the here-and-now of the local with the abstract quality of the national, bringing it closer to everyday life. Local identifications thus connected to growing national feeling, transforming both in the process. The older, narrow, emphasis on anti-modernism was left far behind. For Applegate’s actors, Heimat was not an instrument for looking backward, nor was it used solely to express political resentment. It was a capacious term through which actors staged a variety of discussions on the Palatinate’s Speyer and Prussian Berlin, the country and the city, here and there, the past and the present. Unity from diversity was the ideal; Heimat clubs became places where the local was imagined as part of a national whole. The term brought together Germany’s distinct geographies, the Rhineland with the eastern Prussian provinces. All belonged to the German Heimat. Applegate’s work retrieved the Heimat movement from the condescension of posterity. Her socio-cultural approach gave an example of what post-Sonderweg history would look like – freed of the older assumptions about nation and region and their stale certainties regarding local forms of political community – and it inspired a large and lively literature. Alon Confino’s The Nation as a Local Metaphor was clearly inspired by Applegate, and it explored local–national connections in Württemberg in a similar fashion. He supported the argument that the term played a mediating role in the ‘nationalizing’ of Germans through local spaces and idioms.43 Matthew Jefferies’ work branched further afield and took on new topics. He investigated Heimat together with modernist architecture and life reform (Lebensreform). Exploring the Bund Heimatschutz (Society for Local Preservation), founded in 1904, Jefferies examined the connections betweenHeimat , industrial architecture, historical conservation, environmental protection and tourism. These topics came together in projects such as Germany’s first garden city at Hellerau. Built outside Dresden in 1908, it was a fascinating experimental modernist community. In Jefferies’ insightful study, Heimat was very far from the older emphasis on philistinism. Rather, the local – and the call to

39 Ibid., p. 54. 40 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990). 41 Celia Applegate, ‘Senses of Place’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Oxford Companion to Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), pp. 49–70. 42 Celia Applegate, ‘Localism and the German Bourgeoisie: The “Heimat” Movement in the Rhenish Palatinate Before 1914’, in Blackbourn and Evans (eds), The German Bourgeoisie, pp. 224–54, at 233. 43 Alon Confino,The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and NationalM emory 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997).

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protect Heimat – inspired a range of social and cultural reforms, including the beginnings of organic farming. Heimat was a big tent. For these scholars, national uniformity was no longer paramount, although some would argue for the similarity of Heimat images across Germany’s different regions.44 But for most, plurality was the point. Every region had a different flavour; studies were also not limited to an analysis of rural areas or small towns. Urban areas were included. Germany’s cities housed their own Heimat organizations in which new understandings of the local became part of popular urban histories. Pedagogical reformers, inspired by the Wilhelmine art education movement, introduced Heimatkunde (local studies) and local history and geography into the curriculum of urban public schools.45 Several studies focused on the local roots of environmental protection activity and policy. These too were part of Heimat.46 The new literature placed Heimat firmly into the history of mass politics and the beginnings of mass culture, including early forms of commercial tourism.47 The growing audiences for its activities were the creation of a period of mass politicization, riding on the changes brought by, as it is said, the railroad, the daily newspaper and the cheap oil lamp. A more modern form of localism was emerging, particularly as vernacular traditions were taken up into modern marketing and modernist art and architecture.48 The sociology of the movement reflected this change. In some small towns the local notables (Honoratioren) were in charge, exercising paternal authority, while in others the mix was decidedly more colourful. The movement in Hamburg, for example, exhibited a kind of messy democracy. It included women of all stations and lower middle-class men – autodidacts all – as active participants in discussions of local architecture, geography, literature and historical preservation.49 Heimat was a populist term, and populism was politically mobile and culturally malleable. Studies have taken different positions on this issue. Older works that defined Heimat as characterized by a penchant for an authoritarian collectivism and a growing antisemitism saw it exhibiting the kind of conservative populism that seeded the ground for National Socialism. By the 1990s, however, these narratives were challenged by the new interpretations. Prised loose from its position in völkisch ideology, Heimat became a term without a fixed or dominant meaning. For the residents of the Rhineland Palatinate described by Applegate, Heimat was the concept through which they negotiated the lived reality of modernization as it transformed their local environments. Correspondingly, it took on a variety of political shadings. Confino, by contrast, saw Heimat as a largely depoliticized term. He argued that the decline of liberalism on the national level supported the rise of an apolitical Heimat idea across the country, which turned toward the military in 1914. Others took different positions. Jefferies and Jenkins discussed Heimat as part and parcel of Germany’s changing

44 Confino, in particular, argued for the similarity of Heimat images across Germany’s regions, a point refuted by most other authors. His ‘Federalism and the Heimat Idea in Imperial Germany’, in Umbach (ed.), German Federalism, pp. 70–90, has a summary. 45 Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca and London, 2003). 46 William H. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German HeimatschutzM ovement, 1904–1918 (Ann Arbor, 1997); Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 47 Caitlin Murdock, Changing Places: Society, Culture and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946 (Ann Arbor, 2010). Several of the essays published in Katharina Wiegand (ed.), Heimat: Konstanten und Wandel im 19./20. Jahrhundert: Vorstellungen und Wirklichkeiten (Munich, 1997) further the discussion of Heimat as a modernization of tradition. 48 A sample can be found in Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf (eds), Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford, 2005). 49 On this point, see Jenkins, Provincial Modernity.

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public culture after 1890, as older certainties gave way to a plethora of new positions, parties and discussions. They took its diversity seriously, foregrounding the dizzying array of topics approached under its banner. Here Heimat was not a depoliticized term; quite the opposite. It lay at the centre of the transformation of older discussions of both liberalism and conservatism as these attempted to capture the larger audiences brought by the railroad and the newspaper. In Jenkins’ study on Hamburg, for example, organizations for Heimat art and culture popularized themes in the city’s traditional liberal culture, striving to make them accessible to all. While there were anti-modern expressions of Heimat in Hamburg to be sure, she argued that, in an age of public schooling, mass literacy and growing politicization, local reactionaries could no longer exercise sole control over its meanings. The movement was broader, taking in large numbers of lower middle-class and working-class members, including most of Hamburg’s public school teachers. Its frame of reference grew wider. In her work Heimat became a carrier of liberal ideas of individuality and community, while also a site for their transformation and democratization. Instruction in local history, for example, which was to generate a sense of community and belonging that would ripen into mature individual political responsibility, had essentially civics at its core. Jefferies’ study likewise wove Heimat ideas together with the life reform movement, thus illuminating its association with a range of projects dedicated to the wholesale transformation of self and society.50 These works uncovered the progressive and oppositional valences of localism in German history in a way that left older ideas of anti-modernism far behind.

Localism and Counter-History

In a 2000 review Celia Applegate stressed the astonishing ‘range of scholarly undertakings that the term Heimat can sponsor … the ease with which the term attaches to such diverse undertakings’.51 In the years since this review, localism’s range has only grown. It now includes studies on memory, on spatial identities in Imperial Germany and thereafter, and explorations of all kinds into popular history and questions of identity, including the study of film.52 ‘This most sleepily persistent of historical terms’, in Applegate’s fine phrase, has become a vehicle for the writing of oppositional and ‘counter-histories’, those analysing Germany ‘from its margins’, in the words of a recent collection.53 In this spirit of an oppositional localism, a writer with deep roots in ‘people’s culture’ can be a suitable guide. Theodor Fontane is often considered to be Imperial Germany’s most trenchant literary analyst. Traditionally viewed as a national author for this reason, Fontane actually spent most of his time penning works – particularly his Travels Through the Mark Brandenburg

50 See Jefferies, Politics and Culture; and idem, ‘Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wilhelminism?’, in Geoff Eley and James Retallack (eds), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930 (New York, 2003), pp. 91–106; as well as idem, Imperial Culture in Germany 1871–1918 (Basingstoke and New York, 2003). 51 Celia Applegate, ‘Heimat and the Varieties of Regional History’, Central European History, 33 (2000), p. 110. 52 Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal and Nancy Reagin (eds), The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (Ann Arbor, 2006); Claus-Christian Szejnmann and Maiken Umbach (eds), Heimat, Region and Empire: Spatial Identities under National Socialism (Basingstoke, 2012). David Blackbourn and James Retallack (eds), Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860– 1930 (Toronto, 2007) exhibits a range of topics. 53 Applegate, ‘Heimat and the Varieties of Regional History’, p. 110; Gregor, Roemer and Roseman (eds), German History from the Margins.

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(1862–89 in five volumes) – which set a high standard for local literature and history. All of his books draw their energy from connections between the local and the national, the old and the new, with ‘the local’ becoming positively promiscuous, taking on numerous shadings and meanings. His last novel, Der Stechlin, published posthumously in 1899, is a good case in point. It opens with a detailed description of a place. The Stechlin was a small lake, one of the hundreds dotting the landscape of the Mark Brandenburg. It was also a residence, the Schloss Stechlin, which stood on the lake shore, an aging pile of stone in which the family Stechlin, proud members of the traditional Prussian nobility, had long lived. Der Stechlin, to continue the chain of associations, was also a man, the elderly Dubslaw von Stechlin, head of the family and heir to the house. Here place, identity and history merged on the personal, dynastic and environmental levels. Moreover, Fontane used a fanciful device to illustrate that the Stechlin, for all of its remoteness, was not a place apart. It reverberated in a highly sensitive fashion to global events. When proceedings of great importance shook the seas and continents, from the lake a plume of water would shoot skyward. As Lisbon quaked and Krakatoa exploded, the placid waters of the Stechlin registered the disquiet. The local place was in direct communion with the forces of national and transnational change. In the Heimat, one felt the tremors of larger lifeworlds. Fontane had much to say on the intertwined character of place, history and identity so central to German historical development. Fittingly he originally published Der Stechlin in 1897 in a Heimat journal, the magazine Over Land and Sea, which had a mass national circulation and a reliance on local literature. This was not a contradiction, for local stories were popular, and they often had an oppositional edge. In sum, before 1914 a diverse public discussion on Heimat had produced popular concepts of history and restored voices to common people as narrators and collectors of the past. It exhibited a fine ability to criticize abstract paradigms of social analysis, such as class and nation, in order to focus on the particular forms and geographically specific expressions of subjectivity and identity so central to German culture. Its democratizing power has only grown. With its roots in everyday life, and its current connections to federalism, the literature on Heimat has seemingly come full circle, back in a positive way to the local terrain.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990). —. ‘Localism and the German Bourgeoisie: The “Heimat” Movement in the Rhenish Palatinate Before 1914’, in David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (eds), The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century (London and New York, 1991), pp. 224–54. —. ‘A Europe of Regions: The History and Historiography of Subnational Places in Modern Times’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 1157–82. —. ‘Senses of Place’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Oxford Companion to Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), pp. 49–70. Blackbourn, David. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford and New York, 1993). —. Fontana History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (London, 1997). —. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London, 2006).

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— and Retallack, James (eds). Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German- Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 (Toronto and London, 2007). Bredow, Wilfried von and Foltin, Hans-Friedrich. Zwiespältige Zufluchten: zur Renaissance des Heimatgefühls (Berlin, 1981). Confino, Alon. The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997). Dohnke, Kay, Hopster, Norbert and Wirrer, Jan (eds). Niederdeutsch im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rolle regionaler Kultur im Faschismus (Hildesheim, 1994). Gall, Lothar and Langewiesche, Dieter (eds). Liberalismus und Region: zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1995). Green, Abigail. Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge and New York, 2001). Gregor, Neil, Roemer, Nils and Roseman, Mark (eds). German History from the Margins (Bloomington, 2006). Hartung, Werner. Konservative Zivilisationskritik und regionale Identität: am Beispiel der niedersächsischen Heimatbewegung 1895 bis 1919 (Hanover, 1991). Jefferies, Matthew.Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford and New York, 1995). —. Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke and New York, 2003). Jenkins, Jennifer. Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca and London, 2003). —. ‘Heimat Art, Modernism, Modernity’, in David Blackbourn and James Retallack (eds), Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860– 1930 (Toronto and London, 2007), pp. 60–75. —. ‘Locating Germany’, German History, 29 (2011), pp. 108–26. Langewiesche, Dieter. Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1988). — and Schmidt, Georg (eds). Die föderative Nation: Deutschlandkonzepte von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2000). Lässig, Simone, Pohl, Karl-Heinrich and Retallack, James (eds). Modernisierung und Region im wilhelminischen Deutschland: Wahlen, Wahlrecht und politische Kultur (Bielefeld, 1995). Lekan, Thomas M. Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2004). Lenz, Siegfried. Heimatmuseum (Hamburg, 1978). Mosse, George. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964). Murdock, Caitlin. Changing Places: Society, Culture and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946 (Ann Arbor, 2010). Nipperdey, Thomas. ‘Der Föderalismus in der deutschen Geschichte’, in idem (ed.), Nachdenken über die deutsche Geschichte (Munich, 1986), pp. 60–109. Palmowski, Jan. Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990 (New York, 2009). Retallack, James. ‘“Why Can’t a Saxon Be More like a Prussian?” Regional Identities and the Birth of Modern Political Culture in Germany, 1866–67’, Canadian Journal of History, 32 (1997), pp. 26–55. — (ed.) Saxony in German History: Culture, Society and Politics, 1830–1933 (Ann Arbor, 2000). Rollins, William H. A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918 (Ann Arbor, 1997). Rossbacher, Karlheinz. Heimatkunstbewegung und Heimatroman: zu einer Literatursoziologie der Jahrhundertwende (Stuttgart, 1975).

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Sheehan, James J. ‘What is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), pp. 1–23. Umbach, Maiken (ed.) German Federalism: Past, Present, Future (Basingstoke, 2002). — and Bernd Hüppauf (eds). Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford, 2005). Walker, Mack. German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca and London, 1971). Weichlein, Siegfried. Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (Düsseldorf, 2004). Wiegand, Katharina (ed.) Heimat: Konstanten und Wandel im 19./20. Jahrhundert: Vorstellungen und Wirklichkeiten (Munich, 1997).

208 12 popular culture

Kaspar maase

over the last 50 years, research on wilhelmine popular culture has evidently been shaped by the trends that have characterized the study of modern and contemporary history in general. Two major perspectives can be discerned. The topic may be regarded in the context of fundamental social and political processes, asking what role popular culture played in the general history of the period. on the other hand, we may take the formation of modern Western popular culture as the point of reference, and focus on the specific contributions of the wilhelmine period to the evolution of commercial mass arts and entertainment. from this point of view, many scholars agree that the years between 1890 and 1914 saw the evolution of the full range of basic structures and patterns of action that have characterized Western popular culture for a century since. As a consequence, researchers have often tried to shed light on features of today’s popular culture (especially those that are regarded as highly problematic by contemporaries) by tracing them back to their emergence in the period ‘around 1900’ (a formula often found in the subtitles of relevant studies). obviously, both perspectives are not incompatible, but they imply a distinctively different set of questions and have generated diverse strands of research. it is not an expression of false modesty on the part of the scholars involved to observe that the study of popular culture ranks among the minor fields of the historiography of the german empire. in few of the representative historical accounts and anthologies on the period will you find more than scattered remarks on popular culture. In fact, thisis due to the dubious reputation of this topic among german scholars; popular culture has long been regarded as trivial entertainment with often problematic ramifications, and as a pastime without real historical relevance. As a side effect of this attitude, the field of research, although quite small, appears fragmented; it is characterized by rather isolated clusters of knowledge. This is probably the flipside of the highly interdisciplinary character of historical popular culture studies, which has to integrate contributions from a broad range of disciplines: musicology and theatre studies as well as historical ethnography and economic research into the entertainment industry. in fact, as only a few historians have concentrated on the topic since the 1990s, the findings of specialists in the arts, leisure and media studies constitute the larger part of our knowledge of wilhelmine popular culture. Before going into ‘the matter itself’, another question has to be broached: what exactly does the study of historical popular culture comprise? for some time now, a rather narrow concept has dominated, equating popular culture with the world of commercial entertainment and amusement. This is a narrow understanding compared with the older notion of (popular) culture as a ‘whole way of life’ (Raymond williams). from that point of view, popular culture would include the structures of everyday life of ‘the common people’, of the social milieus ‘below’ the educated middle classes, with the practices of leisure, amusement and entertainment forming a particular focus of interest. in the development of the study of wilhelmine popular culture, both of these basic concepts have played a major role. THE ASHGatE RESEarCH COMPaNION tO IMPErIaL GErMaNY

Different approaches may also have an influence on how scholars decide to name the topic: popular culture or mass culture? In the German-speaking world, the concept of popular culture (Populärkultur, populäre or populare Kultur)1 has been adapted from English- speaking scholars since the 1970s, mostly from British cultural studies. Not infrequently, this transfer was inspired by the idea that (West) German historiography showed grave deficits in dealing with the everyday life and cultural praxis of the working classes and the common people in general. This critical stance resulted in a turn towards working-class culture. Initially, scholars focused on cultural politics and cultural organizations;2 yet with a slight time-lag, research was expanded towards those workers and those activities that were not part of the organized worker’s movement. Thus an understanding of popular culture as a non- and anti-bourgeois phenomenon that is essentially linked to the material conditions of lower-class living emerged and became a kind of paradigm; in this context, the concept of ‘a whole way of life’ played a certain role. It was not until the 1990s that scholars began to question whether the British concept of popular culture really met the reality of Wilhelmine society.3 Grossly simplified, at the core of the British concept is the idea of a network of modern, commercially driven entertainment and amusement which nevertheless cannot be characterized as classless because it was steeped in, and shaped by, the themes, habits and values specific to the modern working class: studies of music halls, football, seaside holidays and other traits of late nineteenth-century amusements in Britain have basically consolidated this view. In Germany, though, things were different, at least with regard to the core point: the class character of modern commercial popular culture. What we know now – and this picture is preliminary, based on little empirical research and awaiting correction – differs from the British model in two respects. First, audiences for popular entertainments in Germany were already socially mixed before the Great War, including everyone from the underclass to social élites. Partially, these audiences were gathered at the same venues; partially, people from different social milieus preferred places that were clearly segregated. Yet there was no significant difference, for instance, in the programming of the grimiest flea-pits and the shiniest downtown movie palaces. The only distinction was that distributors privileged the so-called ‘première theatres’ (Uraufführungstheater) and their middle-class audiences by showing supposed ‘hit’ films (Schlager) there first, before copies were delivered to cinemas in the working-class quarters.4 Second, and more importantly, in the Wilhelmine period the topics, and the way in which popular culture dealt with them, were widely not perceived as having a special relationship to working-class life or values. Educated critics may have attacked these materials for being vulgar, but not for being proletarian. Indeed, the Social Democrats (the activists at least) attacked them for being apolitical and militaristic, and for corrupting

1 Put simply, populär refers to matters that are liked by people from all social levels, whilepopular refers to the preferences and habits of the working class. Cf. Bernd Jürgen Warneken, Die Ethnographie popularer Kulturen: eine Einführung (Vienna, 2006). 2 Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Arbeiterkultur (Königstein, 1979); Peter von Rüden (ed.), Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1848–1918 (Frankfurt, 1979). 3 Christiane Eisenberg, ‘English sports’ und deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800– 1939 (Paderborn, 1999); idem, ‘Zum Spannungsverhältnis von kommerzieller Massenkultur und Arbeiterkultur: England aus deutscher Perspektive’, in Hartmut Kaelble and Martin Kirsch (eds), Selbstverständnis und Gesellschaft der Europäer: Aspekte der sozialen und kulturellen Europäisierung im späten 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2008), pp. 299–317. 4 Joseph Garncarz, Maßlose Unterhaltung: Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland 1896 bis 1914 (Frankfurt, 2010).

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tastes.5 There are no studies yet that have asked if and how the skits, couplets and comedy texts presented in the music halls and vaudeville theatres (Singspielhallen, Spezialitätentheater, Tingeltangel) catering for working-class audiences related to a proletarian worldview. The evidence we have today suggests a predominantly petit-bourgeois, conventional character to the programmes.6 Irrespective of the historical analyses still to come, contemporaries (and especially working-class families) did not ascribe a distinct class character to these popular pastimes. The idea that this popular culture might be cherished as part of a shared working-class identity would not have occurred to them. Because of such German peculiarities, some scholars have tried to avoid the term populäre Kultur, and use ‘mass culture’ (Massenkultur) instead. This is meant to accentuate the cross-class character of commercial entertainment and amusement: in terms of the social composition of the audiences as well as their preferences, tastes and emotional reactions. In this view, Wilhelmine popular culture can be understood primarily as a field of behaviour that fostered experiences of approximation and convergence among the mass of people enjoying it. No doubt, different patterns of experiencing cultural pleasures contributed to social distinction and thus to marking social differences and antagonisms, yet in the Kaiserreich these effects were already overlaid by a growing feeling that the new commercial popular culture could appeal to all Germans (except maybe to small groups of intellectual critics and missionary educators). On the other hand, the preference for the term ‘mass culture’ may express an essentially critical stance towards modern commercial popular amusements along the lines of traditional German cultural criticism (Kulturkritik), which condemned aspects of modern civilization and the so-called ‘mass society’.7 Finally, by choosing ‘mass culture’, scholars may project the critical concept of the ‘culture industry’ (Kulturindustrie) back into the late nineteenth century.8

Basic Strands of Research

It goes without saying that the scientific study of Wilhelmine popular culture dates back to the period itself; the sociological investigations organized by the Verein für Socialpolitik, for instance, or the 1914 cinema study by Emilie Altenloh serve as reliable sources of data and of interpretations until today.9 For the purposes of this review, however, it seems appropriate to start in the 1980s. From that time onwards we can discern three major strands of work on Wilhelmine popular culture. First, local or regional amateur historians and folklorists,

5 Jens Wietschorke, ‘Schundkampf von links: Eine Skizze zur sozialdemokratischen Jugendschriftenkritik vor 1914’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 34 (2010), pp. 157–75; Brigitte Emig, Die Veredelung des Arbeiters: Sozialdemokratie als Kulturbewegung (Frankfurt, 1980). 6 Cf. Martin W. Rühlemann, Variétes und Singspielhallen – Urbane Räume des Vergnügens: Aspekte der kommerziellen populären Kultur in München Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2012). 7 Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt, 1994). 8 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente [1947] (Frankfurt, 1971). 9 Karl Heinrici, ‘Die Verhältnisse im deutschen Colportagebuchhandel’, in Untersuchungen über die Lage des Hausiergewerbes in Deutschland. Dritter Band (Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik LXXIX) (Leipzig, 1899), pp. 183–234; Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena, 1914).

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together with collectors and enthusiasts of popular entertainment heritage, began to produce a large body of knowledge about local fairs, pleasure gardens and entertainment venues like variétés, popular theatres or cinemas, on show business, circus events, magicians and similar topics. None of this writing lays claim to having scientific quality, yet as long as historical study is based on factual knowledge, this ever growing body of information – heterogeneous, uncritical and romanticizing as it may be – will be indispensable. Its local and regional interest balances the metropolitan focus of academic research; and in the face of the massive lack of interest of professional historians and archives, all those who are convinced of the importance and dignity of popular culture will be grateful. As a second strand we have scholarly studies that are held together by a shared paradigm which we may characterize as social history, including Marxist approaches. This research has roots in a number of different disciplines and covers many aspects of Wilhelmine popular culture. What such studies have in common is their integrative approach that connects the spread and professionalization of popular culture with basic economic and societal trends: urbanization and the development of a modern transportation infrastructure; the growth of an industrial working class and its successful struggle to increase leisure time; rising levels of education and wages; technological innovations that made it possible to produce and distribute cultural commodities at prices that were affordable to ever more workers, and so on (the list may easily be extended). For the development of popular culture in particular, the North German Confederation’s 1869 decision to remove guild restrictions and allow freedom of trade set free enormous creative energies; now entrepreneurs could open up businesses in fields that had until then been subject to restrictive regulations, such as the theatre and publishing. Integrative concepts that have made the rise and use of popular culture part and parcel of social development in Germany include ‘industrial culture’ (Industriekultur)10 and the working-class ‘way of life’ (Lebensweise).11 To a certain extent, this approach has become a kind of unchallenged framework for detailed historical studies into aspects of Wilhelmine popular culture. Even so, there have been remarkably few attempts to sketch an overview of the basic characteristics and trends of Wilhelmine popular culture; chapters in general accounts of the history of popular culture or of modern Germany are quite rare.12 Consequently there has been little debate about the essential features of Wilhelmine popular culture and of writing its history. What has blossomed, however, is a third strand of research: studies with a limited question and shaped by a wide range of different disciplinary traditions and methods.

10 Jochen Boberg, Tilman Fichter and Eckhart Gillen (eds), Die Metropole: Industriekultur in Berlin im 19./20. Jahrhundert, 2 vols (Munich, 1984/86); another exemplary social history study (without reference to a concept like Industriekultur) is Karl Ditt, Zweite Industrialisierung und Konsum: Energieversorgung, Haushaltstechnik und Massenkultur am Beispiel nordenglischer und westfälischer Städte 1880–1939 (Paderborn, 2011). 11 Dietrich Mühlberg (ed.), Arbeiterleben um 1900 (East Berlin, 1983); idem (ed.), Proletariat: Kultur und Lebensweise im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1986). 12 Lynn Abrams, Worker’s Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London, 1992); Dagmar Kift (ed.), Kirmes – Kneipe – Kino: Arbeiterkultur im Ruhrgebiet zwischen Kommerz und Kontrolle (1850–1904) (Paderborn, 1992); Lisa Kosok and Mathilde Jamin (eds), Viel Vergnügen: Öffentliche Lustbarkeiten im Ruhrgebiet der Jahrhundertwende (Essen, 1992); Thomas Kuchenbuch, Die Welt um 1900: Unterhaltungs- und Technikkultur (Stuttgart, 1992); Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba (eds), Schund und Schönheit: Populäre Kultur um 1900 (Cologne, 2001); Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 223–8; Werner Faulstich, Medienwandel im Industrie- und Massenzeitalter (1830–1900) (Göttingen, 2004); idem, Das erste Jahrzehnt (Munich, 2006); Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850–1970, 4th edn (Frankfurt, 2007); Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford, 2008).

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These studies have done much to expand our knowledge of particular works, artists, entrepreneurs, venues and genres of the mass arts; of particular types of popular entertainment and spectacular public events; of audiences, their preferences and habits of response; of how contemporary patterns of gender, race, age, class and colonial relations were reflected and negotiated in popular culture and in the ways of using it; of conflicts and campaigns over the moral character and alleged detrimental effects of particular segments of popular culture. Overall, such research has substantially deepened our understanding of popular culture as a field of historical activity, following its own rules with remarkable autonomy and with a strong dynamic of its own. Within the social history paradigm scholars are prone to look at popular culture as being essentially dependent on basic economic and social trends; partially as a response to this flaw the third strand of empirical studies has focused on understanding the diversity of the topic and the central role of human creativity and aesthetic achievements in its rise. It is neither new nor surprising to state that historians’ questions are shaped by the times in which they live and work. Scholars have long been inclined to read the imperial era as the prehistory or origins of our present society, and this seems to be even more the case with Wilhelmine culture. During the 1970s and 1980s, questions of class relations, of social inequality and of the potentialities of working-class everyday culture had an extraordinary impact on research into popular culture. For some time now, this prime interest has been replaced by a range of questions (not to say preoccupations) related to today’s popular culture: cultural exchange and globalization; consumer society and hedonism; the dominance of visual media; changing regimes of aesthetic perception and related issues. The following pages will take a closer look at some of the most exhilarating lines of this research.

Scope, Audiences, Laboratories

Some of these lines converge insofar as they pose basic questions with regard to the scope of Wilhelmine popular culture, and especially the role of middle-class groups. Is it possible, and does it make sense, to look for a clear-cut distinction between popular culture and fields that are usually labelled as bourgeois or aristocratic? Would it not seem obvious that the creators and entrepreneurs of successful popular genres obtained part of their expertise, their know-how and their inspiration from middle-class amusements? After all, it was a booming business. One can locate a central issue by citing the title of an essay by Peter Jelavich – ‘Am I allowed to amuse myself here?’13 – in which the author articulates a middle-class view of early film. The new medium had made its first steps as a technical gadget of aristocratic and economic élites and in the context of popular entertainment in fairs, travelling shows and variety theatres.14 Most middle-class critics judged that the new medium was far from art and would never be able to overcome this inherent flaw. Nevertheless, even before the Great War, going to the movies had become established as a widespread leisure activity amongst members of the educated middle classes; artists and intellectuals cherished the new medium, as did those who were already used to participating in the colourful urban entertainment mix. Jelavich generalizes these findings by stating that before 1914 educated

13 Peter Jelavich, ‘“Darf ich mich hier amüsieren?” Bürgertum und früher Film’, in Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (eds), Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2000), pp. 283–303. 14 Garncarz, Maßlose Unterhaltung.

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middle-class citizens were becoming accustomed to an art form that served ‘visual curiosity and distraction’ (Schaulust und Zerstreuung). He concludes that this development constituted a foundation for those cultural forms of the twentieth century which would cut across class divides. One need not totally agree with how Jelavich characterizes the movies of the 1910s – some film historians have elaborated on the aesthetic qualities of early film;15 others have stressed from a gender studies perspective the ‘secret complicity between cinematography and women’s emancipation in Wilhelminian society’ that made many movies attractive for women.16 The crucial point is that feature films already appealed to a mixed audience, including the middle classes. The film industry’s deliberate efforts to give its products the aura of serious culture – screening classical literature; making prominent authors and actors work for the movies – only added to its appeal amongst bourgeois clients. Indeed, a lot of recent research suggests that ‘visual curiosity and distraction’ had been fundamental elements of middle-class culture and entertainment even prior to the coming of film. The most prominent field of culture where this has been studied is the theatre, and especially the theatrical landscape of the capital, Berlin. Private theatres boomed following the introduction of freedom of trade in 1869. By 1897, Berlin had three royal court theatres with a combined total of 4,400 seats; the 27 private theatres had around 38,000 seats.17 A few, like the Deutsches Theater and the Lessingtheater, were dedicated to demanding contemporary drama, but most managers put their money on the entertainment qualities of their programmes. This included a wide range of productions, from exclusive extravaganzas, musical comedies and revues to humorous plays with a regional or ethnic note, as well as variety and cheap entertainments similar to the British music hall and the French café concert (known in German as Tingeltangel, such as the establishment depicted in the 1930 movie, The Blue Angel). Additionally, the big stationary circuses developed lavish stagings that were inspired by the sumptuous extravaganzas seen in other European metropolises, stringing together fascinating tableaux with plenty of human, animal and machine actors – elephants or trains on stage guaranteed that any show would become the talk of the town – in exotic and often colonial settings.18 ‘Ultimately, the desire of aristocratic and middle class audiences for distraction and entertainment determined the repertoire of all “upmarket” theatres’,19 and not just in Berlin. One can get an impression of the tastes and pleasures of the urban upper class from Alfred Kerr’s ‘Letters from Berlin’;20 in these newspaper features metropolitan high society was depicted with a degree of irony, but the celebrated critic nevertheless created a model for readers in other parts of the Empire. According to theatre statistics, the most successful stage genres were the operetta and the musical comedy which both attracted large numbers of

15 Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel (eds), Kino der Kaiserzeit: Zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Munich, 2002); Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Die Modellierung des Kinofilms: Zur Geschichte des Kinoprogramms zwischen Kurzfilm und Langfilm 1905/06–1918 (Munich, 1998). 16 Heide Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema (Urbana, 2010), p. 11. 17 Ruth Freydank, ‘Zur Einführung’, in idem (ed.), Theater als Geschäft: Berlin und seine Privattheater um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin, 1995), pp. 9–21, at 10. 18 Martin Baumeister, Kriegstheater: Großstadt, Front und Massenkultur 1914–1918 (Essen, 2005); Nic Leonhardt, Piktoral-Dramaturgie. Visuelle Kultur und Theater im 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld, 2007). 19 Bärbel Reißmann, ‘Das Lessing-Theater: Geschäftserfolg eines Bühnenautors’, in Freydank (ed.), Theater als Geschäft, pp. 122–33, at 128. 20 Alfred Kerr, Wo liegt Berlin? Briefe aus der Reichshauptstadt 1895–1900, ed. Günther Rühle (Berlin, 1997); Alfred Kerr, Warum fließt der Rhein nicht durch Berlin? Briefe eines europäischen Flaneurs 1895–1900, ed. Günther Rühle (Berlin, 1999).

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middle-class clients.21 As for drama, the so-called bürgerliches Lachtheater (comedy, burlesque and farce in all its variations) drew by far the largest audiences from right across the social spectrum.22 Such findings suggest a working hypothesis that mainstream middle-class art and entertainment had much in common with the qualities that petit-bourgeois and working- class audiences cherished:23 plausible, exciting and sentimental narratives; erotic and humorous entanglements; melodious and snappy music; attractive bodies; sumptuous and sensational mise-en-scène, to name a few basic features. So from an aesthetic point of view, we have to assume there was an intensive transfer of artists and artistic know-how between ‘upmarket’ and ‘popular’ entertainment. Taking into account that providers catering to middle- and upper-class audiences could dispose of relatively rich material and artistic resources, it seems likely that they had a prime influence on the overall development of modern mass culture, creating ever new ‘recipes’ and artistic possibilities, setting standards and, last but not least, spotting talents in working-class and provincial venues and turning them into national or even international stars. To be sure, things look different if we regard popular culture as social praxis. Then, differences and distinctive antagonisms in terms of framing, audience behaviour, perception and the social production of meaning come to the fore. But although a lot of research into these dimensions of Wilhelmine popular culture is still to be done, there is no reason to disregard the connections and transfers between the different strands of modern commercial arts and entertainments. On the contrary, the field of middle- and upper-class pleasures and amusements seems to have been a kind of experimental laboratory whose inventions and know-how have shaped the development of mass culture well into the interwar period and beyond. Berlin played a prominent role in this process after it had became the Empire’s capital in 1871. More and more, local élites were eager to measure up to the European metropolises of London, Paris and Vienna, and entertainment was definitely one of the major fields in which comparisons were made. This meant not only that variety stars, sensational shows and popular songs from other capitals made their way to the Berlin stages, but also that the Prussian authorities had to find a balance between ‘safeguarding public morals’ on the one hand and tolerating European standards of metropolitan nightlife on the other.

Characteristics

Yet in spite of the special status of the capital, it seems that the dominant trends in Berlin’s entertainment business soon spread to all urban parts of the Empire. In many places we can observe the expansion of a more diversified, more spectacular, and more internationalized range of popular arts and entertainments, though there is a lack of detailed local and comparative studies. Findings for the Ruhr district, for instance, provide evidence of the inexorable rise of multifaceted amusements around the turn of the century, in an industrial

21 Tobias Becker, Inszenierte Moderne. Populäres Theater in Berlin und London, 1880–1930 (Munich, 2014). 22 Volker Klotz,Bürgerliches Lachtheater. Komödie – Posse – Schwank – Operette, 4th edn (Heidelberg, 2007). 23 Cf. Kaspar Maase, ‘Wie “bürgerlich” waren Massenvergnügung und -unterhaltung im Deutschland der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts?’, in Roland Prügel (ed.), Geburt der Massenkultur (Nürnberg, 2014), pp. 134–42.

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region without much urban glamour and cultural tradition.24 What has been formulated as the seven essential characteristics of Berlin’s amusement culture can, more or less, be applied to all the Empire’s urban districts.25 Firstly, the aim of a broad range of amusements was to provide distraction, variety and relief from the stress of work and everyday life, through overwhelming sensual and aesthetic experiences. Secondly, the entire urban population was addressed, rather than a particular class or segment. Thirdly, amusement culture was commercial in character, oriented towards attracting ever bigger crowds with ever more spectacular shows and experiences. Fourthly, in principle, all events were open to the whole public, although in practice this egalitarian quality was often restricted by class and gender. Fifthly, the availability and visibility which characterized amusement culture shaped the entire urban environment: beyond the entertainment venues themselves, picture postcards and advertisements, electric lights and illustrated papers, cheap art prints and gramophone music contributed to an overall ‘aestheticization of the world’.26 Sixthly, popular culture was controversial. At any point in time there were public debates as to the moral and criminal dangers of particular branches of the entertainment industry. Finally, amusement culture was in many respects political: it gave room for nationalist sentiment and satirical comment; and both the establishment and opposition sought to instrumentalize its appeal. Not every phenomenon of Wilhelmine popular culture displayed all of these traits; moreover each of these features can be found – some way or other – in earlier periods of urban life. In fact, it can be argued that popular culture has been shaped by the spread of characteristics of Western metropolitan life since the Roman Empire, or even earlier. However, the interplay of all the aforementioned characteristics in a modern, industrial, secular and democratizing society together amounted to something new. The beginning of modern popular culture in Germany has been repeatedly dated to around 1850; certainly, by the imperial era this process was developing and consolidating structures of production, perception and expectation that were in many respects to shape the twentieth century.

A New Visual Culture

One of the fundamental changes that came about with the rise of popular culture in the nineteenth century has been extensively researched and debated: the growth of visual culture and the shifts in perception which accompanied it.27 This is a good example of the way in which mainstream bourgeois entertainment played an important and innovative role, as visual representations, images and optical illusions made their way into the centre of a Western culture which had until then been shaped by the written word. This was, of course, a development on two different levels. On the level of cultural praxis, new media

24 See Abrams, Worker’s Culture; Kosok and Jamin (eds), Viel Vergnügen; Kift (ed.), Kirmes – Kneipe – Kino. 25 Tobias Becker and Johanna Niedbalski, ‘Die Metropole der tausend Freuden: Stadt und Vergnügungskultur um 1900’, in Tobias Becker, Anna Littmann and Johanna Niedbalski (eds), Die tausend Freuden der Metropole: Vergnügungskultur um 1900 (Bielefeld, 2011), pp. 7–20, at 14 f. 26 Kaspar Maase (ed.), Die Schönheiten des Populären: Ästhetische Erfahrung der Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 2006); Werner Telesko, Das 19. Jahrhundert: Eine Epoche und ihre Medien (Vienna, 2010). 27 See Leonhardt, Piktoral-Dramaturgie; Telesko, Das 19. Jahrhundert; also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1990); idem, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MS, 1999); Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1993); Faulstich, Medienwandel.

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such as photography, the panorama and cinematography made inroads into many sections of public and private life, as did the progress of representational techniques and optical effects in established media like print, stage design and education. This was the result of a dense interplay with audiences, who responded enthusiastically to enlarged and intensified sensual attractions. This in turn indicates that expectations with regard to visual opulence and innovation were rising quickly too. On another level we find German intellectual gatekeepers (mostly of Protestant background)28 debating the moral and educational value of visual images and sensual power versus the centrality of ‘the word’ in occidental civilization. In these discussions, scepticism and a fear of cultural decline set the tone. The argument, for instance, that film could never be considered a true art form because it lacked language was to be influential well into the inter-war period. Instead of celebrating the new opportunities for learning and insight, and the growing visual competence of the mass audience, the majority of Germany’s educated middle classes bemoaned the rise of sensuality, vulgarity and shallowness brought about by the rise of moving images and public imagery. As a result, we have to distinguish between the factual rise of an ubiquitous and all-pervading visual culture and the ambivalent response of educated and influential élites. The spread of intensified visual qualities in the second half of the nineteenth century can be found in every area of life, especially of urban life. The strength of commercial motives meant that entertainment and popular culture became a hothouse of innovation and experiment in visual effects; this becomes even more obvious if advertising is included. Yet the extent to which this change was apparent to contemporaries has to be regarded with some caution. First, it was paralleled by an expansion and intensification of acoustic emissions and impressions of comparable scope.29 In both cases, sensual perceptions that were non-intentional by-products of industry, traffic, trade and urban swirl combined with the multiplication of impressions that were created in order to attract, amuse or inform inhabitants of the city. Old media like costermongers and street music conjoined with new media like gramophones, and we should not forget that in each of the booming entertainment performances the sonic dimension was essential. This is true even for early cinema, which was by no means silent: piano music and gramophone records, sound effects and the dramatic commentaries of so-called ‘film explainers’ (Filmerklärer) were all indispensable to complete the pleasure. Secondly, research into the visual culture of the late nineteenth century, and the role that popular entertainments played in it, has mainly focused on the objective, material developments and on the response to it in public discourse. What exactly the changes in the subjective patterns and standards of visual perception and visual pleasures of contemporaries were, and what they actually meant with terms like Sehsucht (‘addiction to seeing’) and Schaulust (‘visual curiosity’) is still to be analysed and is likely to remain highly challenging in terms of methodology. Thirdly, the danger of a teleological approach is lurking. Magic lanterns, photography, panoramas, flip-books and the mutoscope, stereoscopy and slide projection: the nineteenth century saw a whole slew of different optical and representational inventions that enriched

28 Dietrich Kerlen, ‘Protestantismus und Buchverehrung in Deutschland’, Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte, 1 (1999), pp. 1–22. 29 The new discipline of historical sound studies has just begun research into this field: see Daniel Morat, ‘Der Klang der Zeitgeschichte: Eine Einleitung’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 8 (2011), at http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041- Editorial-2-2011 (accessed 19 November 2014); Gerhard Paul and Ralph Schock (eds), Sound des Jahrhunderts: Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen 1889 bis heute (Bonn, 2013).

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the visual appetite of Europeans. Combining this with global diagnoses of urban life from the period – increased mobility, the multiplication of sensory perceptions, the ‘speeding up’ of time itself – has led some historians to conclude that the invention of film and its sweeping success had a kind of inevitability, if not necessity. Cinema thus becomes an emblem, an embodiment of modern life, of Western modernity as a whole.30 As a consequence, scholars have tended to reduce the multifarious popular visual media and attractions, games and gimmicks to the status of precursors of cinematography;31 their specificity and their concrete effect on the development of optical know-how and visual sensibility have often been neglected. So pleas for an ‘archaeological’ approach to a history of visual culture that would study each phenomenon in its own right and would not hasten to construct a simple causal line of development ought to be taken seriously.32

Public and Private Dimensions

Up to this point, various public dimensions of Wilhelmine popular culture have been in the foreground of this chapter. Yet one should also bear in mind that Imperial Germany was still part of the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’. Print and individual reading strengthened their positions at the heart of contemporary culture;33 Georg Simmel and Gerhart Hauptmann spoke of a ‘papery age’.34 It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that, due to the ‘second revolution of reading’,35 nearly the whole German population was able to read at least short literary texts for the first time; more precisely, this was true for the young generation which had received sufficient schooling for the first time. So before film, cheap reading materials were at the centre of popular culture.36 It is deplorable that whole genres of this literature have not yet been analysed thoroughly. To mention just a few examples, this holds true for cheap collections of humorous stories and jokes, and for collections of speeches, addresses and poems to be performed on special occasions like anniversaries, weddings or funerals. Even more common in working-class and rural milieus were all kinds of cheap prayer books, catechisms and simple religious tracts, calendars and collections with consolatory texts – often distributed for free – mingling with varieties of what we would today call esoteric or self-help literature: instructions on divination and magic; on finding the right love partner; or using the language of colours, flowers and stamps. Equally patchy is scholarly knowledge of periodicals and serial literature, and of the ways in which people used it. Periodicals were the most important source of fictional texts (stories and poems) for the majority of Germans. Yet non-fiction pieces like reports on foreign

30 See, for instance, Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds),Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, 1995). 31 See, for instance, Friedrich von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films, 2 vols (Hildesheim, 1979). 32 Thomas Elsaesser, Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels (Munich, 2002). 33 Although reading fiction and non-fiction texts aloud to others was still a widespread practice too. 34 Anett Holzheid,Das Medium Postkarte. Eine sprachwissenschaftliche und mediengeschichtliche Studie (Berlin, 2011), p. 271. 35 Wolfgang Langenbucher, ‘Die Demokratisierung des Lesens in der zweiten Leserevolution’, in Herbert Göpfert et al. (eds), Lesen und Leben (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 12–35. 36 Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe 1770–1910 (Frankfurt, 1970); Georg Jäger (ed.), Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 1: Das Kaiserreich 1871–1918, part 2 (Frankfurt, 2003); Heinz J. Galle, Volksbücher und Heftromane, vols 2 and 3 (Lüneburg, 2006).

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countries and strange peoples, on crimes and technical inventions, even pieces of advice for doing household chores, had no smaller impact on people’s worldviews, emotional habits and the everyday lives of readers. Around the turn of the century, scandals and sensations involving more and more members of the power élite played a growing role in publishers’ strategies and found a massive response throughout Wilhelmine society.37 Finally, the new visual culture also changed popular reading matter. Pictures (at least one on the cover) had long been essential for the appeal of popular literature. In the Wilhelmine era, the number and aesthetic quality of pictures in periodicals and cheap literature increased considerably, and before the Great War magazines appeared in which images were more important than words. Pictures that were cut out from the popular press and fixed to the wall brought a sense of beauty into places where even the poorest lived. Picture postcards were printed with ever improved techniques so that many people started collecting, and some contemporary observers hoped that this might advance Germans’ aesthetic education. One cannot fully understand the social meaning and societal effects of popular culture without studying the activities of its opponents.38 The centrality of popular literature is mirrored by the fact that moral panics and ‘self-help movements’ – which is how activists legitimated their actions – triggered off by popular arts focused on two fields: narrative cinema and cheap literature. Campaigns against ‘filth and trash’ (Schmutz und Schund) were driven by moral and aesthetic objections to these mass arts and their working-class audiences. Critics suggested that such works would brutalize or eroticize juvenile readers and ultimately undermine the strength of the German people (deutsche Volkskraft). After 1900, hundreds of local committees on Schundfilme and Schundliteratur intervened heavily in the distribution of pulp fiction and campaigned against young people visiting the movies. The dangers of Schund and how to tackle it became a prime topic of debate in pre-First World War Germany. Most of the activists came from the educated middle classes and included many teachers and professors. From this it has been concluded that the main motive of these groups was their fear of losing control over taste and culture to the market, which in their view meant surrendering to the uncontrolled power of the cultural industries.39 Another interpretation suggests that at the centre of the perceived threat was the fact that new media and the cultural marketplace made it impossible for teachers and parents to control the channels through which young people gained knowledge about the world (not least knowledge about the lives of grown-ups).40 In any case, the patterns of argument, protest and regulation that were developed during the so-called Schundkampf shaped German debates on popular culture for more than half a century. Looking back from today’s perspective, one can see the beginning of another line: the private use of modern technical media. In the nineteenth century, wealthy families could already buy a magic lantern to watch shows of glass slides at home. Private film showings, however, remained a pleasure for royalty alone, and one which could not compete with the sights and sounds of a city movie theatre. Things were different with the recording and replaying of sound. The gramophone, patented in 1887, had been designed for private use,

37 Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880–1914 (Munich, 2009); Martin Kohlrausch: Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin, 2005); Hartwig Gebhardt, ‘“Halb kriminalistisch, halb erotisch”: Presse für die “niederen Instinkte”. Annäherungen an ein unbekanntes Kapitel deutscher Mediengeschichte’, in Maase and Kaschuba (eds), Schund und Schönheit, pp. 184–217. 38 Kaspar Maase, Was macht Populärkultur politisch? (Wiesbaden, 2010). 39 Georg Jäger, ‘Der Kampf gegen Schmutz und Schund: Die Reaktion der Gebildeten auf die Unterhaltungsindustrie’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 31 (1988), pp. 163–91. 40 Kaspar Maase, Die Kinder der Massenkultur: Kontroversen um Schmutz und Schund seit dem Kaiserreich (Frankfurt, 2012).

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and it succeeded so quickly that by 1914 a high-earning skilled worker could think of saving up to buy one.41 So modern popular culture in the Wilhelmine era presents two faces at the same time: mass events, from films in gorgeous cinemas to large permanent fairs and one- off spectaculars where 100,000 people might gather; and private aesthetic experiences in the cozy atmosphere of home, also made possible by modern technology.

Trends and Shortcomings of Research

In recent years, the international entanglements of Wilhelmine popular culture have attracted increasing attention. This has not just been an adoption of general historiographical trends: questions about the dynamics of cultural globalization around 1900, about transnational cultural transfers and developments, and about the ramifications of colonial commitments lead to the core of our topic. Without doubt, a high level of cultural exchange across political and linguistic borders has been a feature of life in Europe for thousands of years. Yet it seems plausible to suggest that the commercial imperatives which are so central to modern popular culture may have intensified such processes to a previously unprecedented degree. This was often discussed by contemporaries under the heading of cultural ‘Americanization’, a term which itself dates back to the last third of the nineteenth century. An outstanding exponent of such transfers was William F. Cody who toured Europe with his Wild West show in the 1880s and 1890s.42 Popular music, dancing and literature were the most prominent fields where critics noticed American influences after 1900.43 At that time, imports from Latin America, such as the tango craze, were included too. In culture, however, importation always means adaptation, and it did not take long before German composers started writing tango, cakewalk and ragtime pieces themselves. Similarly, German writers successfully invented heroes along the lines of ‘Nick Carter’. Of course, German entrepreneurs and impresarios had their eyes and ears on successes all over Europe. Hit songs and popular couplets were translated very quickly,44 and music hall and variety stars gave guest performances on stages across the continent. Research has so far focused on metropolitan theatres and other entertainment venues,45 but we need to learn more about developments in small and medium-sized cities and towns. Early film was international from the beginning, with the German film industry only conquering a large share of the national market during the Great War. It should also not be forgotten that movies reached large audiences in rural regions of Germany too. One of the main turntables mediating ideas and distributing innovations in popular culture were the global expositions or world’s fairs. From the last third of the nineteenth

41 Stefan Gauß, Nadel, Rille, Trichter: Kulturgeschichte des Phonographen und des Grammophons in Deutschland (1900–1940) (Cologne, 2009). 42 Robert W. Rydell, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago, 2005). 43 Astrid Kusser, Körper in Schieflage: Tanzen im Strudel des Black Atlantic um 1900 (Bielefeld, 2012); Hans-Friedrich Foltin (ed.), Nick Carter – Amerikas größter Detektiv: Reprint in zwei Bänden (Hildesheim, 1972). 44 Lukas Richter, Der Berliner Gassenhauer: Darstellung – Dokumente – Sammlung, ed. Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (Münster, 2004); Peter Wicke, Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik (Leipzig, 1998). 45 Christoph Charle, Théatres en Capitales: Naissance de la société du spectacle à Paris, Berlin, Londres et Vienne 1860–1914 (Paris, 2008); see also Becker, Littmann and Niedbalski (eds), Die tausend Freuden der Metropole; Becker, Inszenierte Moderne.

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century, they included ever growing entertainment spaces where displays, shows and new media techniques set ever rising standards that radiated out over the world.46 Among the most frequented events were presentations of ‘wild tribes’, or exotic stagings of native life. Beginning in Paris in 1867, organizers presented what purported to be an Egyptian quarter. In 1889 the Paris exposition included a ‘street in Cairo’ (Rue du Caire), which was populated with supposedly authentic Egyptians. Visitors could mingle with the natives, walk through a harem and watch belly-dancing. This model was restaged in many places across the Western world, including at the 1896 German Trade and Industry Fair (Deutsche Gewerbeausstellung) in Berlin, with overwhelming popular success.47 From 1874, so-called Völkerschauen (expositions of ‘primitive peoples’) toured throughout Germany.48 Visitors could watch large groups of men, women and children from other continents or even from the margins of Europe, under seemingly ‘natural’ conditions, in ‘authentic’ villages and carrying out everyday routines. The exotic strangers also performed singing, dancing and fighting, thus giving a ‘true insight’ into their nature and habits. Addressing voyeuristic as well as scientific curiosity, these shows helped to shape Germans’ views of so-called ‘primitive peoples’ (Naturvölker), fostering racial stereotypes and Eurocentric prejudices. The mix of curiosity, attraction (not least sexual) and colonialist presumption towards strange and ‘exotic’ branches of mankind formed an actualcross-section feature of Wilhelmine popular culture, albeit with the roots reaching back into the era of European discoveries.49 It was part of the appeal of African-American music and dance shows; it was used, with a broad range of meanings and messages, in advertising,50 as a motif of picture postcards,51 in cartoons and variety shows, and in many other genres. This is connected to another trend of recent research on Imperial Germany, focusing on the period as the take-off point of modern consumer society. This has many ramifications for popular culture and vice versa, since popular culture is a crucial element in shaping the modern consumer’s attitudes and practices.52 It makes sense to regard advertising, for instance, as a very dynamic field of popular visual culture and as a source, as well asa formative force, of aesthetic experience in modern societies.53 In fact this perspective was already under debate in the Wilhelmine era. Groups which were committed to popular education and to raising the level of aesthetic sensitivity among average citizens discussed posters and trading cards (Sammelbilder),54 picture postcards and shop window displays.

46 Martin Wörner, Die Welt an einem Ort: Illustrierte Geschichte der Weltausstellungen (Berlin, 2000). 47 Alexa Färber, Weltausstellung als Wissensmodus: Ethnographie einer Repräsentationsarbeit (Münster, 2007), pp. 293–96; Alexander C.T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 49–52. 48 Anne Dreesbach, ‘Kolonialausstellungen, Völkerschauen und die Zurschaustellung des “Fremden”’, in Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (ed.), Europäische Geschichte Online (Mainz, 17 February 2012), at http://www.ieg-ego.eu/dreesbacha-2012-de (accessed 19 November 2014). 49 Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer and Eckhart Hellmuth (eds), Exotica: Konsum und Inszenierung des Fremden im 19. Jahrhundert (Münster, 2003). 50 David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011). 51 Felix Axster, Koloniales Spektakel in 9x14: Bildpostkarten im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Bielefeld, 2014). 52 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Claudius Torp (eds), Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland 1890– 1990: Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt, 2009). 53 Jörg Meißner (ed.), Strategien der Werbekunst 1850–1933 (Berlin, 2004). 54 Hiram Klümper, ‘Nichts als blauer Dunst? Zigarettensammelbilder als Medien historischer Sinnbildung: quellenkundliche Skizzen zu einem bislang ungehobenen Schatz’,Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 59 (2008), pp. 492–508.

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Others were convinced that the design of mass products which were coming within the reach of the working class could be used as an instrument for lifting the quality of aesthetic judgement and taste. The Deutsche Werkbund and the Dürerbund were among the organizations that advanced such views.55 Finally, one aspect should be addressed which in the eyes of this author constitutes the gravest shortcoming of the research reviewed here. Put bluntly, historical studies in popular culture have dealt mainly with the ‘works’ themselves, their social context, and contemporary reports relating to them; mostly this material has been interpreted hermeneutically. Usually the sources represent a middle-class – and often a state – perspective on the topic. Yet we know that working-class audiences had their own expectations and patterns of perception toward popular culture which often differed considerably from middle-class standards. When taken together with the fact that scholars have seldom studied the practical uses of popular culture systematically – what was really going on for two hours in a ‘flea-pit’ with 300 visitors, and how did this differ from the ‘movie rituals’ in a downtown picture palace? – we have to admit that the perspective of the majority of popular culture users has remained marginal in research. Of course, the number and quality of sources that would allow us to fill this gap vary with the different genres and fields of popular culture, but it must be said that the majority of blank areas are not due to a lack of sources.56 A focus on the audiences and their ways of behaving might present scholars with some fresh challenges; yet a study of popular culture without solid knowledge about how ‘the people’ used it will always remain unsatisfactory.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Abrams, Lynn. Worker’s Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London, 1992). Axster, Felix. Koloniales Spektakel in 9x14: Bildpostkarten im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Bielefeld, 2014). Ballstaedt, Andreas and Widmaier, Tobias. Salonmusik. Zur Geschichte und Funktion einer bürgerlichen Musikpraxis (Stuttgart, 1989). Baumeister, Martin. Kriegstheater: Großstadt, Front und Massenkultur 1914–1918 (Essen, 2005). Becker, Tobias. Inszenierte Moderne. Populäres Theater in Berlin und London, 1880–1930 (Munich, 2014). —, Littmann, Anna and Niedbalski, Johanna (eds). Die tausend Freuden der Metropole: Vergnügungskultur um 1900 (Bielefeld, 2011). Boberg, Jochen, Fichter, Tilman and Gillen, Eckhart (eds). Die Metropole: Industriekultur in Berlin im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1984). —. Die Metropole: Industriekultur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1986).

55 Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (New Haven, 1996); Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford, 1995); Gudrun M. König, Konsumkultur: Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900 (Wien, 2009). 56 Reconstructions of the Lebenswelten of children and youths in the German Empire have been very suggestive. See Margarete Flecken, Arbeiterkinder im 19. Jahrhundert: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchung ihrer Lebenswelt (, 1981); Imbke Behnken, Urbane Spiel- und Straßenwelten: Zeitzeugen und Dokumente über Kindheit am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Weinheim, 2006); Rolf Lindner, ‘Straße – Straßenjunge – Straßenbande’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 79 (1983), pp. 192–208; Maase, Die Kinder der Massenkultur.

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Bollenbeck, Georg. Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt, 1994). Bösch, Frank. Öffentliche Geheimnisse: Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880–1914 (Munich, 2009). Brückner, Wolfgang. Elfenreigen – Hochzeitstraum: Die Öldruckfabrikation 1880–1940 (Cologne, 1974). Ciarlo, David. Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1990). Dreesbach, Anne. ‘Kolonialausstellungen, Völkerschauen und die Zurschaustellung des “Fremden”’, in Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (ed.), Europäische Geschichte Online (Mainz, 17 February 2012), at http://www.ieg-ego.eu/dreesbacha-2012-de. Eisenberg, Christiane. ‘English sports’ und deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800– 1939 (Paderborn, 1999). Elsaesser, Thomas and Wedel, Michael (eds). Kino der Kaiserzeit: Zwischen Tradition und Moderne (Munich, 2002). Faulstich, Werner. Medienwandel im Industrie- und Massenzeitalter (1830–1900) (Göttingen, 2004). —. Das erste Jahrzehnt (Munich, 2006). Freydank, Ruth (ed.) Theater als Geschäft: Berlin und seine Privattheater um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin, 1995). Galle, Heinz J. Volksbücher und Heftromane, vols 2 and 3 (Lüneburg, 2006). Garncarz, Joseph. Maßlose Unterhaltung: Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland 1896 bis 1914 (Frankfurt, 2010). Gauß, Stefan. Nadel, Rille, Trichter: Kulturgeschichte des Phonographen und des Grammophons in Deutschland (1900–1940) (Cologne, 2009). Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Torp, Claudius (eds). Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland 1890– 1990: Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt, 2009). Holzheid, Anett. Das Medium Postkarte. Eine sprachwissenschaftliche und mediengeschichtliche Studie (Berlin, 2011). Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente [1947] (Frankfurt, 1971). Jäger, Georg. ‘Der Kampf gegen Schmutz und Schund: Die Reaktion der Gebildeten auf die Unterhaltungsindustrie’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 31 (1988), pp. 163–91. — (ed.) Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 1: Das Kaiserreich 1871–1918, part 2 (Frankfurt, 2003). Jefferies, Matthew.Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford, 1995). —. Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke, 2003). Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, 1993). —.‘“Darf ich mich hier amüsieren?” Bürgertum und früher Film’, in Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (eds), Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2000), pp. 283–303. Kerlen, Dietrich. ‘Protestantismus und Buchverehrung in Deutschland’, Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte, 1 (1999), pp. 1–22. Kift, Dagmar (ed.) Kirmes – Kneipe – Kino: Arbeiterkultur im Ruhrgebiet zwischen Kommerz und Kontrolle (1850–1904) (Paderborn, 1992). Klotz, Volker. Bürgerliches Lachtheater: Komödie – Posse – Schwank – Operette, 4th edn (Heidelberg, 2007).

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Klümper, Hiram. ‘Nichts als blauer Dunst? Zigarettensammelbilder als Medien historischer Sinnbildung: quellenkundliche Skizzen zu einem bislang ungehobenen Schatz’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 59 (2008), pp. 492–508. Kohlrausch, Martin. Der Monarch im Skandal. Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin, 2005). König, Gudrun M. Konsumkultur: Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900 (Wien, 2009). Kosok, Lisa and Jamin, Mathilde (eds). Viel Vergnügen: Öffentliche Lustbarkeiten im Ruhrgebiet der Jahrhundertwende (Essen, 1992). Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.) Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1993). Kusser, Astrid. Körper in Schieflage: Tanzen im Strudel des Black Atlantic um 1900 (Bielefeld, 2012). Leonhardt, Nic. Piktoral-Dramaturgie. Visuelle Kultur und Theater im 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld, 2007). Lorenz, Detlef. Reklamekunst um 1900: Künstlerlexikon für Sammelbilder (Berlin, 2000). Maase, Kaspar. Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850–1970, 4th edn (Frankfurt, 2007). —. Die Kinder der Massenkultur: Kontroversen um Schmutz und Schund seit dem Kaiserreich (Frankfurt, 2012). — and Kaschuba, Wolfgang (eds). Schund und Schönheit: Populäre Kultur um 1900 (Cologne, 2001). Meißner, Jörg (ed.) Strategien der Werbekunst 1850–1933 (Berlin, 2004). Mühlberg, Dietrich (ed.) Arbeiterleben um 1900 (East Berlin, 1983). —. Proletariat: Kultur und Lebensweise im 19. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1986). Müller, Corinna. Frühe deutsche Kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen 1907–1912 (Stuttgart, 1994). — and Segeberg, Harro (eds). Die Modellierung des Kinofilms: Zur Geschichte des Kinoprogramms zwischen Kurzfilm und Langfilm 1905/06–1918 (Munich, 1998). Paul, Gerhard and Schock, Ralph (eds). Sound des Jahrhunderts: Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen 1889 bis heute (Bonn, 2013). Pieske, Christa. Bilder für jedermann: Wandbilddrucke 1840–1940 (Munich, 1988). Prügel, Roland (ed.) Geburt der Massenkultur (Nürnberg, 2014). Richter, Lukas. Der Berliner Gassenhauer: Darstellung – Dokumente – Sammlung, ed. Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (Münster, 2004). Ross, Corey. Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford, 2008). Rühlemann, Martin W. Variétes und Singspielhallen – Urbane Räume des Vergnügens: Aspekte der kommerziellen populären Kultur in München Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2012). Schlüpmann, Heide. The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema (Urbana, 2010). Schwartz, Frederic J.The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (New Haven, 1996). Telesko, Werner. Das 19. Jahrhundert: Eine Epoche und ihre Medien (Vienna, 2010). Wicke, Peter. Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik (Leipzig, 1998). Wörner, Martin. Die Welt an einem Ort: Illustrierte Geschichte der Weltausstellungen (Berlin, 2000).

224 13 gender

Ann Taylor Allen

of all the questions that historians ask about germany during the years 1870–1918, the most important concerns the direction of its political, social, and cultural evolution. hans-Ulrich Wehler’s influential history, published in 1973, portrayed the Kaiserreich as a reactionary regime that in its authoritarian and militaristic tendencies foreshadowed the national socialist era.1 more recent investigators, however, emphasize the rapid social and economic change that created new pressures toward openness, inclusion, and democratization.2 This shift in emphasis from conservative to progressive aspects of the period was due in part to the new perspectives introduced by the field of women’s and gender history. In Germany as elsewhere in the western world, the turn of the twentieth century saw an upheaval in gender relations that many termed a “sexual crisis.” women organized on a large scale to demand inclusion in the areas of education, work, and politics; artists, scientists, and moralists challenged traditional norms of manhood and womanhood; and both men and women experimented with new sexual moralities and gender identities.3 when we include this colorful story, we highlight upheaval rather than continuity, and change rather than stability. The field of gender history, at least in its present form, traces its origins to the 1970s and to that era’s feminist movement. It is still a relatively new enterprise.4 The earliest feminist historians worked to restore women to a history that up to that point had focused almost exclusively on men and on male judgments of historical significance. Not content just to add new information to existing historical narratives—which some derided as “malestream” or “master narratives”—these scholars discredited these narratives by showing the vast omissions and silences on which they had been based. The new history, however, required new definitions. First of all, who were “women”? Women (and men) had traditionally been defined by their physical characteristics, or sex. Historians concluded, however, thatthe identity “woman,” and its difference from “man,” often had much more to do with culture than with actual physical characteristics. A new term, “gender,” denoted the ways that culture constructed gender difference and prescriptions for male and female behavior.5

1 hans-Ulrich wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985). 2 For a very thorough discussion of these general issues, see Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 7–46. 3 For an overall account of the “sexual crisis,” see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (New York, 1990). On progressive aspects of the period, see (among many other works) Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 4 Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, “Gendering Modern German History,” in Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, Gendering Modern German History: Themes, Debates, Revisions (New York and Oxford, 2007), pp. 1–38. 5 Kathleen Canning, “Gender History: Meanings, Methods, and Metanarratives,” in idem, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, 2006), pp. 3–62; Lynn The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

When seen historically, gender clearly had no fixed essence, but like other aspects of culture varied widely across time and space. Theorists defined gender as one of the fundamental concepts—or, in the memorable term coined by the historian Joan W. Scott, a “category of analysis”—that lay at the base of social organization, family structures, symbolic systems such as religion and art, intellectual traditions such as philosophy and science, moral codes, and many other aspects of culture.6 In the so-called “linguistic turn,” some historians turned away from social history, which during this era drew largely on economic and quantitative methods, to linguistic and cultural analysis; an approach that they found better suited to exploring gender in its many manifestations. Others resist this tendency, claiming that it avoids a serious analysis of material, political, and social contexts, and focuses instead on what Karen Offen has called “that highly trendy, floating object, discourse.”7 However they may revise their views of this period, historians cannot deny its causal relationship with the First World War, the failure of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Third Reich. Therefore a central question, whether stated or implied, focuses on the long- term effects of this era’s gender disorder. Should we see it as the beginning of a process of transformation in the direction of tolerance and equality? Or, on the contrary, should we emphasize the weaknesses and failures of reform movements, the underlying conservatism of the society as a whole, and the virulent hostility to changes in the gender order? The following brief discussion of a few important themes will raise these questions.8

Class: A Male Invention?

The social history of the 1960s and 1970s relied on class as a conceptual framework in which to understand social change and its impact on individuals. Though British historians such as E.P. Thompson had presented class as an identity with both economic and cultural dimensions, German social historians in general saw it in chiefly material terms, defining class as a relationship to production and class formation as the recognition of a shared status and interests among a group defined by its economic circumstances. The relationship between working and middle class (in Marxist terms, proletariat and bourgeoisie) was

Hunt, “The Challenge of Gender: Deconstruction of Categories and Reconstruction of Narratives in Gender History,” in Hans Medick and Anne-Charlott Trepp (eds), Geschlechtergeschichte und allgemeine Geschichte: Herausforderungen und Perspektive (Göttingen, 1998), pp. 15–98. 6 Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), pp. 1053–75. 7 Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History After the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” in idem, Gender History in Practice, pp. 63–101; Laura Lee Downs, “If ‘Woman’ Is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35 (1993): pp. 414–37; Karen Offen, “The Use and Abuse of History,” The Women’s Review of Books, 6 (1989), p. 15. A few notable examples of the voluminous literature on this subject: Geoff Eley, “Introduction 1,” in idem (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 1–42; Jean Quataert, “Introduction 2,” in Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State, pp. 43–67; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?” Central European History, 29 (1996), pp. 541–72; Geoff Eley, “Theory and the Kaiserreich: Problems with Culture: German History After the Linguistic Turn,” Central European History, 31 (1998), pp. 197–227. 8 For a general overview of reform movements and their significance, see Edward Ross Dickinson, “Not So Scary After All? Reform in Imperial and Weimar Germany,” Central European History, 43, no. 1 (2010), pp. 149–72. See also Dennis Sweeney, “Reconsidering the Modernity Paradigm: Reform Movements, the Social and the State in Wilhelmine Germany,” Social History, 31, no. 4 (2006), pp. 405–34.

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presented primarily as a confrontation between labor and capital, and women (when mentioned at all) were assumed to share the class identity of their male family members.9 Gender historians pointed out that this analysis centered wholly on the male industrial worker who derived his personal and political identity chiefly from his full-time employment in technologically advanced industries and regarded home, family, and reproduction as marginal concerns. As Kathleen Canning asserted, women industrial workers, though employed full time, did not define themselves wholly through their jobs, but through a combination of occupational and familial identities. Though highly class conscious, these women did not identify themselves with their male co-workers, but often emphasized their separate and specifically feminine interests. They set themselves apart through language— for example, weibliche Eigenart, a term taken from the era’s feminist movements, denoted a distinctively female set of characteristics—and by a distinctive workplace culture. Class identity, then, was not unitary but diverse and contested, and not defined solely by material differences but also by language and culture.10 These works, however promising, only begin to encompass the complex history of gender and working class formation. After all, the full-time factory hands who figure in Canning’s research constituted only a privileged and highly atypical minority of female workers. A far greater number of women engaged in what was called “domestic industry”; that is, they manufactured items at home, often using labor-intensive and minimally skilled methods. Barbara Franzoi’s and Jean Quataert’s account of these workers destabilizes another conventional assumption based chiefly on the experience of male workers: that “modernization” was a process whereby mechanized work done in factories displaced manual work performed in households. Their research shows that, as an integral part of many major industries, such as the ready-made garment industry, domestic manufacture expanded rather than contracted during this era.11 Rural women, though a large segment of the female population—indeed, as Elizabeth Jones remarks, during these years more women worked in agriculture than in any other occupation—have attracted little attention from historians who assume that they were passive and traditional. In fact, the rebellion of farm women against heavy labor and patriarchal authority drove a migration to cities that some commentators saw as a threat to the entire system of food production.12 Many rural women escaped from the countryside to work under almost equally harsh conditions in domestic service. Quite unlike Canning’s factory workers, who were proud of their trade- union membership, servants still lived in nearly feudal servitude under the Servants’ Code (Gesindeordnung), which obligated them to obey their employers and gave them no right to organize. And in contrast to the factory employees, who took pride in their work, servants often looked forward to getting married and quitting their underpaid and arduous jobs.13

9 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963). One German example: Klaus Tenfelde, Sozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1977). 10 Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany 1850–1914 (Ithaca, 1996); idem, “Gender and the Politics of Labor History: Rethinking Class Formation,” American Historical Review, 92 (1997), pp. 736–8; idem, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn.” 11 Barbara Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent: Women and German Industrialization, 1871– 1914 (Westport, 1986); Jean Quataert, “A New View of Industrialization: Proto-Industry or the Role of Small-Scale Labor-Intensive Manufacture in the Capitalist Environment,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 33 (1988), pp. 3–22. 12 Elizabeth B. Jones, Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany, 1871–1933 (Farnham, 2009). 13 Dorothee Wierling, “Women Domestic Servants in Germany at the Turn of the Century,” Oral History, 10 (1982), pp. 47–57; idem, Mädchen für alles: Arbeitsalltag und Lebensgeschichte städtischer Dienstmädchen um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin, 1987). 227 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

M.J. Maynes’ work on the history of childhood is one of very few studies of the working- class home.14 Clearly, generalizations about working-class women will have to await more thorough research on this large and diverse group. The other large group that historians define as a “class” is the Bürgertum, a term that is inadequately translated by the English “middle class.” Conventional definitions of this class center on Bildung und Besitz: education in the sense both of general cultivation and professional qualifications, and wealth or property.15 Obviously this is a male-centered conception of a class that defined itself as much by denying these privileges to women as by providing them to men.16 The theory and practice of the liberal parties that purported to speak for the middle class in fact rested on the disenfranchisement of women as well as on the empowerment of a male elite. The use of gender as a category of analysis therefore calls into question the widespread tendency to associate the “rise of the middle class” with such values as individual liberty and representative government. While social histories of the working class focus almost entirely on the workplace, those of the Bürgertum often identify a class-specific form of home and family structure. Nineteenth-century philosophers and moralists defined the home as a “private” sphere, removed from the male-dominated “public” realm of politics, the state, and civil society; a sheltered existence that only prosperous people could afford.17 But this division was more prescriptive than descriptive, particularly during an era when the state intruded into many aspects of personal and domestic life. For example, Nancy Reagin explores the ways in which the German housewife’s reputation for cleanliness fit into German nationalist propaganda; and Sybille Meyer discusses the indispensable role of the civil servant’s wife in upholding and advancing his career by entertaining guests in a suitable manner.18 As Gunilla Budde remarks, moreover, many nineteenth-century women did not perceive the home as separate from the state and civil society; for them, it served as a place to exchange information, form alliances, and debate important issues. Media created by and for women constantly emphasized the public significance of such traditionally familial tasks as the molding of future citizens through child-rearing and early education.19

14 Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, 1995). See also Tom Taylor, “Images of Youth and the Family in Wilhelmine Germany: Toward a Reconsideration of the German Sonderweg,” German Studies Review, 15 (1992), pp. 55–73. 15 Jürgen Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe,” Journal of Modern History, 67, no. 4 (1995), pp. 783–806. 16 Ute Frevert, “Bürgerliche Meisterdenker und das Geschlechterverhältnis. Konzepte, Erfahrungen, Visionen an der Wende von 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert,” in idem (ed.), Bürgerinnen und Bürger: Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988), pp. 17–48; Karin Hausen, “Die Nicht-Einheit der Geschichte als historiographische Herausforderung. Zur historischen Relevanz und Anstössigkeit der Geschlechtergeschichte,” in Medick and Trepp (eds), Geschlechtergeschichte und allgemeine Geschichte, pp. 7–14. 17 Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe,” pp. 783–806. 18 Nancy Ruth Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (New York, 2007); Sybille Meyer, “The Tiresome Work of Conspicuous Leisure: On the Domestic Duties of the Wives of Civil Servants in the German Empire,” in Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean Quataert (eds), Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (New York and Oxford, 1987), pp. 156–66. 19 Gunilla Budde, “The Public Side of the Private: The Family as a Core Institution of Civil Society,” in Karen Hagemann, Sonya Michel and Gunilla Budde (eds), Civil Society and Gender Justice (New York, 2008), pp. 171–95. On middle-class childhood, see Carolyn Kay, “How Should We Raise Our Son, Benjamin? Advice Literature for Mothers in Early Twentieth-Century Germany,” in Dirk Schuman (ed.), Raising Citizens in the Century of the Child (New York, 2010), pp. 105–21; Bryan Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford and New York,

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The conventional view of the home as what Kocka termed a “sphere of female-influenced privacy” fails to take into account the many ways in which women of this era connected domestic and public worlds.20 We should not understand the movement of girls and women into educational institutions, social activism, and the professional workforce—one of this era’s most important trends—simply as a rejection of, or an escape from, domesticity. On the contrary, many female activists made connections between the private and public spheres, arguing that the capacities developed in the home could serve the state and society as well.21 As a rationale for the expansion of their responsibilities in both philanthropic and paid work, women of this era often relied on some of their culture’s central assumptions about female nature, including women’s distinctive capacities for nurture and compassion. Women across the political spectrum, both feminist and anti-feminist, found new ways to deploy energies and skills that they defined as distinctively feminine in the public sphere.22 Some of the most conspicuous achievements of privileged women were in the areas of philanthropy and social reform; activities that they now expanded to alleviate the hardships caused by the rapid growth of cities. Women reformers of the imperial period also besieged two major bastions of male privilege: higher education and professional status. As James C. Albisetti shows in his study of German women’s education, the admission of women to universities in 1908 was among the major breakthroughs of this era.23 Women’s persistent efforts also resulted in the opening of professional opportunities in social work, teaching, and some areas of the civil service.24 Men are still largely absent from accounts of both the working and middle classes. Of course, most historical narratives are about men, but few of these accounts recognize masculinity as a cultural construct parallel to femininity. Recently, a few historians have begun to look more specifically at the historical development of male gender identity. For example, two recent works identify dueling as an originally aristocratic custom adopted during this era by middle-class men, particularly university students, as the expression of a distinctive masculine identity.25 Other trends of this era suggest that many men responded to the new assertiveness of women by defending male privileges such as family headship. Conservative male politicians and voters defeated a feminist-led movement to revise the Civil Law Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) in the direction of marital equality. Both labor unions and professional associations strengthened their opposition to the entry of women into many stereotypically male occupations.26 Increasingly men defined themselves as

2009); David Ehrenpreis, “The Figure of the Backfisch: Representing Puberty in Wilhelmine Germany,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 67, no. 4 (2004), pp. 479–508. 20 Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe,” p. 787. 21 Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991). 22 Anja Schüler, Frauenbewegung und Soziale Reform: Jane Addams und Alice Salomon im transatlantischen Dialog, 1889–1993 (Stuttgart, 2004); Alice Salomon,Character Is Destiny: The Autobiography of Alice Salomon, ed. Andrew Lees (Ann Arbor, 2004); Adriane Feustel, Das Konzept des Sozialen im Werk Alice Salomons (Berlin, 2011). 23 James C. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1988). 24 James C. Albisetti, “Portia ante Portas: Women and the Legal Profession in Europe, ca. 1870– 1925,” Journal of Social History, 33, no. 4 (2000), pp. 825–57; Johanna Bleker and Sabine Schleiermacher, Ärztinnen aus dem Kaiserreich: Lebensläufe einer Generation (Weinheim, 2000); Ute Gerhard and Ulla Wischermann, Unerhört: die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1990), pp. 170–276. 25 Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890–1914 (Ann Arbor, 2011); Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge and Cambridge, MA, 1995). 26 Gerhard and Wischermann, Unerhört, pp. 170–276.

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sole breadwinners and their wives as dependent homemakers. The concurrent changes in conceptions of fatherhood and masculinity, and their effects on male–female relations in the home and the workplace, require much more examination than they have hitherto received. Gender historians’ critical assessment of conventional notions of class highlights more general problems in the social and political history of this and later eras. The composition of the groups known as “classes” was in fact diverse, not only in gender but in religion, language, regional origin, educational level, and many other respects. But the leaders of the political parties that claimed to represent these groups—whether the liberal parties of the middle class or the socialist parties of the working class—usually suppressed diversity, overrode differences of opinion and upheld a narrow, elitist, and male-centered version of class identity and interests. Though this happened in many countries, nowhere were the results more fateful than in Germany, where the failure of these parties to gain a broad basis of support eventually led to the fall of democracy and the rise of dictatorship under the Weimar Republic.27

Sexuality and Reproduction: A Sexual Crisis?

In Germany, as in other Western societies of this era, reproduction and sexuality emerged from the unmentionable “private” sphere into the glare of public scrutiny. Political and military authorities warned that declining birth rates threatened military strength; moralists deplored what they saw as a new moral laxity and frivolity; scientists pondered the nature, origins, and consequences of sexual behavior; writers and artists exulted in a new freedom to explore sexual themes; and reformers vocally challenged conventional standards of sexual morality. Historians who try to make sense of these developments disagree on their long-term significance. Some emphasize the emergence of authoritarian and repressive mentalities and practices; others a newly assertive defense of liberty and diversity. A theoretical framework for all interpretations of sexuality, reproduction, and state power in the modern world is provided by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault asserted that the modern state has added to the sovereign’s traditional prerogative of inflicting death on his subjects a more encompassing control over “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life”; a regime to which Foucault gives the name “bio-power.”28 Following Foucault’s analysis, most historians emphasize the new zeal with which governmental and private organizations cracked down on many forms of rebellion against accepted sexual and familial morality. As justification for their crusade, these activists warned of a “sexual crisis,” caused primarily by the trend toward falling birth rates and smaller families that appeared not only in Germany but (on varying timetables) in most Western nations. In an era when military victory depended directly on the number of men who could be put into the field, declining birth rates threatened national survival. Moreover, widespread family limitation was a sign that both men and women now aspired to reproductive autonomy. Historians of medicine such as Paul Weindling and Robert Proctor show how physicians defined these new behaviors as a sign of what they termed “degeneracy.” Religious and political authorities joined the medical establishment in blaming feminism for placing national survival in peril by estranging women from

27 See Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford and New York, 2002). 28 Michel Foucault, “Bio-Power,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), pp. 258–62.

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their maternal duties and encouraging them to take advantage of new educational and professional opportunities.29 Demographic concerns reinforced more general anxieties about changing gender roles. As George Mosse explains, contemporary observers deplored the increasing visibility of both “unwomanly women” and “unmanly men.” As both feminist and homosexual organizations formed to represent the rights and interests of their members, so-called “morality leagues” (Sittlichkeitsvereine) mounted an increasingly aggressive defense of traditional social norms. These leagues, often led by male professionals and Protestant clergy, portrayed all sexual transgressions—whether homosexuality, prostitution, or non-procreative marital sex—as symptoms of a more general sickness of an urban society that had broken ties to nature and to religious traditions.30 Authors such as Weindling, Proctor, and Ute Planert place these campaigns to control women, reproduction, and sexuality in the context of a broader expansion of governmental surveillance and control that foreshadowed the totalitarianism of the 1930s.31 Weindling portrays even measures designed to save children’s lives and health, such as the monarchy’s sponsorship of a magnificent new hospital, the Kaiserin Auguste-Victoria Haus, as examples of “how the idea of motherhood was appropriated by an imperialist and national ideology” that redefined responsibility for children “from a private concern to the professions and the state.”32 A related development was the emergence of the science of eugenics as a popular basis for reproductive and social policy. Eugenics, which claimed that the quality of the human race could be improved by scientific breeding, had originated in Britain and spread to Germany in the 1890s, where it acquired an institutional basis in the German Racial Hygiene Society, founded in Berlin in 1905. In Germany and elsewhere, and especially among physicians and other professionals, eugenic theory justified state intervention in areas formerly considered private. Some proponents of the popular science claimed that only governmental control of reproductive and familial behavior could rescue modern society from its state of degeneration. To this end, these eugenicists advocated various measures that included the requirement of health certificates for marriage, penalties for the transmission of venereal disease, and (rarely) the compulsory sterilization of individuals afflicted with a range of ailments considered hereditary. These measures existed purely at the theoretical level and none was enacted into law during the imperial period. Some historians acknowledge that the eugenics movement included a multitude of groups who ranged across the political spectrum, from conservatives to radical feminists and socialists.33 Most, however, present a one-sided picture of the entire movement as reactionary and even proto-fascist. For example, Planert denounces a science

29 Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 10–45; Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge and New York, 1989), pp. 155–280. 30 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford, 1996), pp. 77–106; John C. Fout, “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2, no. 3 (1992), pp. 388–421; Edward Ross Dickinson, “The Men’s Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880–1914: Some Reflections on Politics, Sex, and Sexual Politics,” Journal of Modern History, 75, no. 1 (2003), pp. 105–30. 31 Ute Planert, “Der dreifache Körper des Volkes: Sexualität, Biopolitik, und die Wissenschaften vom Leben,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26, no. 4 (2000), pp. 539–76. 32 Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, pp. 539–76. 33 Ann Taylor Allen, “German Radical Feminism and Eugenics, 1900–18,” German Studies Review, 11, no. 1 (1988), pp. 31–56; idem, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review, 23, no. 3 (2000), pp. 477–506; Annette F. Timm, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (Cambridge and New York, 2010), pp. 1–34.

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that functioned “internally to stabilize political power and externally to support a foreign policy that aspired to world domination.”34 However, Foucault’s theory of “bio-power” also supports another view of this era—a view that emphasizes rebellion rather than control. The French philosopher rejected conventional views of the nineteenth century as an era of sexual repression and claimed that bio-power served not so much to repress as to define, even to elicit sexual transgressions and to bring them into various forms of discourse. By denouncing homosexuality, family limitation, and other forms of “degeneracy,” official pronouncements brought previously private behavior into public view, provided members of the targeted groups with a public identity and a claim to visibility, and provided the basis for new arguments, subjectivities, and forms of activism.35 Certainly many women activists made use of the publicity given to falling birth rates to formulate their own approach to reproductive politics. Widespread denunciations of the modern woman and her aversion to motherhood threatened all the gains made by women, particularly in the areas of education and professional opportunity. Feminist organizations responded to this threat less by completely rejecting the natalist position than by appropriating it. Women did indeed wish to be mothers, many asserted, but were deterred by the widespread ravages of poverty, disease, and outmoded prejudice that too often condemned both mothers and infants to death or to life-long weakness and disease. The solution was not to force women to bear children, but to provide governmental services that would benefit both families and the state by enabling mothers to rear healthy offspring. Thus women’s organizations played a conspicuous public role in one of the most important political processes of the era, the formation of a “welfare state” that took responsibility for providing services to its most vulnerable citizens, particularly women and children.36 Such reform agendas sometimes included bold, even radical claims to female autonomy. Among the best-known—though not the largest—feminist groups of the era was the Bund für Mutterschutz, a group originally founded in 1904 by a former schoolteacher, Ruth Bré, but reorganized in 1905 under the leadership of the well-known philosopher and reformer Helene Stöcker. Focusing the group’s philanthropic efforts on so-called “illegitimate” children, Stöcker condemned what she termed an outmoded sexual morality that, by condemning these children to legal disadvantage and social marginality, deprived the state of potentially valuable citizens. She and her colleagues attacked the sexual “double standard” and proclaimed a “new ethic” that made personal self-realization rather than religious precept the central principle of sexual morality. This agenda was part of an international movement for sexual reform that gained supporters throughout the Western world. In such a context, eugenic principles could support a radical vision of female reproductive autonomy, including access to birth control and even to abortion rights. Mothers who controlled their fertility, so the argument ran, would be far more likely to produce a healthy well-nurtured younger generation than those who were forced to bear children under unfavorable circumstances. This feminist version of eugenic theory was by no means unique to Germany, but German feminists were among its most vocal advocates. In fact, the main feminist organization, the

34 Planert, “Der dreifache Körper des Volkes”; Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, pp. 125–214; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 10–45. 35 Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis,” in Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, pp. 301– 29. For a general overview of recent works on this period’s reform movements, see Dickinson, “Not So Scary After All.” 36 Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, pp. 1–34; idem, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe 1890–1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York, 2005), 87–109; Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York, 1991).

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League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF)—an umbrella group that united a diverse group of organizations in 1894—actually discussed a legislative proposal that aimed to decriminalize abortion. Although the resolution was rejected, the very fact that German feminists debated it suggests that they were more willing to deal with reproductive and sexual issues than their counterparts in other countries, most of whom distanced themselves from such controversial topics.37 A similar cycle of repression and resistance produced the first movements that asserted the rights of a group who came to be known as “homosexuals.” Same-sex practices, which the criminal law defined as discrete acts, were attributed by the era’s sexual science (or sexology) to a genetically determined homosexual “personality.” These theories, used by conservative moralists to denounce gay people’s incorrigible depravity, served gay people themselves as a basis for a new, public identity. Germany’s “gay liberation” movement—the first in the world—came together at the turn of the century under the leadership of the Scientific- Humanitarian Committee, headed by the activist and researcher Magnus Hirschfeld and supported by some of the era’s well-known intellectuals, including Helene Stöcker. The committee used the accepted theory that homosexuality was an innate tendency to argue for tolerance. As homosexual orientation was not a choice but a destiny, they argued, it should not be defined as a crime. Hirschfeld and his colleagues also did some of the first research on homosexuality and other sexual behaviors. George Mosse, John Fout, and others explore the very mixed long-term results produced by a movement whose plea for tolerance was based on an apology for homosexuality as an innate and thus involuntary condition and for homosexuals as members of an aberrant Third Sex.38 Discussions of female homosexuality, however, advanced a more ambiguous and open- ended view of sexuality. The fact that female same-sex behavior was not criminalized in Germany (and in most other Western countries) in itself indicated male lawgivers’ uncertainty about the nature, indeed the very possibility, of sexual relations between female partners. At the same time, a small but conspicuous group of women, chiefly educated professionals, lived openly in same-sex partnerships, which did not yet carry the stigma of “unnatural” sexuality. Among these were Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, the leaders of the BDF.39 A proposal to include women in criminal prohibitions of same-sex acts called forth some of the world’s first defenses of the group that eventually called itself “lesbian.” On the one hand, these defenders defined female as well as male homosexuality as a hereditary trait. On the other hand, they argued that the proposed law might also target women of “normal” sexuality who lived in intimate same-sex relationships. This argument may, as Tracie Matysik points out, have undermined the homosexual woman’s quest for identity by making her invisible. It also suggested, however, that, at least among women, the boundaries between sexual and social behavior could be flexible, even indeterminate. This insight challenged the dominant view of homosexuality as a genetically determined and fixed identity.40 The vehemence with which this era’s authority figures denounced sexual “degeneration” testified to the effectiveness and public impact of these challenges to prescribed definitions

37 Allen, “German Radical Feminism and Eugenics”; idem, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain”; Timm, The Politics of Fertility, pp. 1–34. See also Edward Ross Dickinson, “Reflections on Feminism and Monism in the Kaiserreich, 1900–1913,” Central European History, 34, no. 2 (2001), pp. 191–230. 38 Fout, “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany”; Mosse, The Image of Man, pp. 98–102. 39 Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer: eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, 2000). 40 Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, 2008); idem, “In the Name of the Law: The ‘Female Homosexual’ and the Criminal Code in Fin- de-Siècle Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 13, no 1 (2004), pp. 26–48.

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of gender and sexual behavior. Reformers of this era initiated some of the century’s most important movements for reproductive self-determination, progressive social policy, and the acceptance of sexual minorities. Although in Germany some of these movements were doomed to short-term defeat, their memory survived to inspire later generations of reformers in the second half of the twentieth century.

Feminism: A Usable Past?

Historians of women and gender are still in search of a usable past. Like other feminist scholars of the 1970s, the first historians of women linked scholarship to activism and presented themselves as the “academic arm” of the women’s movements. The issues raised during this era concerning the feminist movement’s ideology, political agenda, and class composition are still central to the field. Because research into women’s history began earlier there than in Germany, some of the pioneering histories of German feminism emerged from the English-speaking world.41 Both the American Amy Hackett and the Briton Richard Evans judged the German feminists of the imperial era in relation to a model that was current chiefly in Britain and the United States during the 1970s. According to their definition, often implied rather than stated, only ideologies that foregrounded women’s entitlement to equality with men and questioned all gender differences deserved the name of feminism. By contrast, most German feminists of the imperial period, and especially the leaders of the BDF, adhered to theories of gender difference that identified women with qualities that they designated as specifically feminine, such as a special capacity for nurture and cooperation. Noting particularly the failure of the German activists to emulate British and American suffrage movements, Evans reproached them for their backwardness, and even Hackett, who showed much more understanding for the Germans’ differing priorities, called them “timid.” Both of these pioneering historians claimed that the defeat of the minority of radicals—represented by organizations such as the Women’s Welfare Union (Verein Frauenwohl) and the Union of Progressive Women’s Organizations (Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine)—by a more moderate majority in the BDF in 1910 marked the end of progressive feminism and the triumph of conservatism.42 It was not long, however, before deeper research into the history of feminism challenged these initial judgments. Viewing European feminisms in comparative perspective, the historian Karen Offen denied the universal validity of the British and American model, claiming that continental feminists, including the Germans, had created equally viable ideologies based on gender difference. Offen defined a “feminist” as any person who recognized women’s own interpretation of their experience, acknowledged the injustices perpetrated by men as a group against women as a group, and advocated the elimination of that injustice by challenging male prerogatives—a definition that left ample room for national, political, or personal variation.43 Barbara Greven-Aschoff, author of the first comprehensive German-language history, insisted that German feminists regarded emancipation less an

41 Hagemann and Quataert, “Gendering Modern German History,” pp. 11–18. 42 Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London and Beverly Hills, 1976); Amy Hackett, “The German Women’s Movement and Suffrage, 1800–1914: A Study of National Feminism,” in Robert J. Bezucha (ed.), Modern European Social History (Lexington, 1972), pp. 354–85. 43 Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,”Signs , 14, no. 1 (1988), pp. 119–57.

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end in itself than as a means to the reform of society through the empowerment of women.44 According to Ann Taylor Allen and Irene Stoehr, arguments based on gender difference and distinctively female gifts were much better adapted to the era’s cultural climate, and thus more effective, than egalitarian claims alone could have been. Indeed (as explained above) they justified most of women’s advances into education, professional work, and social reform. In addition, feminists developed a powerful critique of male-dominated culture, which they argued could be rescued from its destructive tendencies to violence and injustice only by the empowerment of women. A few broadened this demand for empowerment to include legalized access to contraception and abortion rights, and to state support for all mothers regardless of marital status.45 The group of German feminists who spoke out on these controversial issues certainly do not deserve the label “timid.” As Bärbel Clemens and others point out, most feminists of this era perceived no contradiction between claims to gender equality and to difference: to many, equality did not mean sameness, but the right to be different without suffering disadvantage.46 Class conflicts between women in the past and present still structure the history of German feminism. In the 1890s Clara Zetkin, a leader who enjoyed a high profile among socialist women in Germany and internationally, termed the feminist movement “bourgeois,” implying that it represented only the interests of the ruling class, and forbade socialist women to join it. Though most historians have shown their respect for Zetkin’s bright line by classifying mainstream German feminists (for example, members of the BDF) as “bourgeois,” the historian Marilyn Boxer has recently called this classification into question. The term “bourgeois,” Boxer asserts, has no precise meaning and has functioned for more than a century chiefly as a pejorative epithet to discredit feminism by identifying it as an elite movement that had (and still has) nothing to say to working-class women. Although this characterization served the interests of socialist parties that competed with the women’s movement for the allegiance of working-class women, it did not correspond to reality. No deep class divide separated the female élites of the feminist and socialist movements. Most leaders on both sides, including the former teacher Zetkin, came from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. Nor did the rank and file of the feminist movement match Zetkin’s picture of the “bourgeois” woman as the pampered wife or daughter of a rich man. Indeed, many feminists were single women whose incomes—gained from female professions such as teaching, clerical work, or social work—were more similar to those of their working-class counterparts than to those of “bourgeois” men. Boxer calls for “new histories of feminism that are no longer encumbered by problematic assumptions about women and putative class interests or by socialist politics of the past.”47 Zetkin’s ban on contact between socialist and feminist women did not prevent all forms of communication and cooperation. As Jean Quataert and others have pointed out, some of the most original socialist thinkers incurred their leaders’ disapproval by openly seeking areas of agreement with feminists, especially on social issues such as the state’s responsibility for the health and welfare of mothers, children, and women workers. Contrary to Zetkin’s

44 Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland: 1894–1933 (Göttingen, 1981), p. 190. 45 Irene Stoehr, Emanzipation zum Staat? Der Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein-Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnenverband, 1893–1933 (Pfaffenweiler, 1990), pp. 1–8; Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, pp. 229–44. 46 Bärbel Clemens, Menschenrechte haben kein Geschlecht! Zum Politikverständnis der bürgerlichen Frauenbewegung (Pfaffenweiler, 1988). 47 Marilyn J. Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism’,” American Historical Review, 112, no. 1 (2007), pp. 131–58 (quotation at 133).

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stereotype, not all feminists were anti-socialist; on the contrary, their opinions ranged from intense fear and opposition to strong support.48 The “radical” segment represented in the Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine supported not only welfare-state measures but also working women’s right to organize.49 Other feminists were ambivalent. During a visit to Britain, Alice Salomon commented on the ambiguity of the German word bürgerlich (corresponding to the French bourgeois), which could denote a specific class identity or simply citizenship, and proposed “civic women’s movement” as a more accurate term for the organization that she represented.50 New works show a refreshing tendency to leave old controversies behind and to focus on feminism as practiced by a variety of individuals and groups. Christina Klausmann’s local study of feminist organizations in Frankfurt, Patricia Mazón’s colorful account of the cultural repercussions of women’s admission to universities, Iris Schröder’s investigation of women’s philanthropic organizations, and Despina Stratigakos’ analysis of buildings designed by female architects to serve the needs of single, working women all show us the different ways in which women confronted the promise and peril of emancipation.51 The effect of women’s changing behavior on men’s experience of masculinity has hitherto received little attention. Studies of the organizations founded during this era tocombat women’s emancipation, and especially women’s suffrage, suggest that some men responded aggressively to this threat to traditional notions of masculinity, but these groups were small and probably did not represent the majority of men.52 Feminism shaped, and was shaped by, long-term changes in male–female relationships that historians have yet to integrate into their accounts of this period.

Religion: Obedience or Rebellion?

Most histories of religion and gender have been based on two familiar paradigms. The influential theorist Max Weber claimed that secularization and a decline in the power of religious organizations were inevitable consequences of modernization.53 Twentieth-century feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly denounced religion as a bulwark of patriarchy. Recent research challenges both these assumptions by showing that

48 Jean H. Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1979). 49 Greven-Aschoff,Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland: 1894–1933 (Göttingen, 1981), pp. 90–106. 50 Gisela Bock, Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte: vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2000), p. 167. 51 Despina Stratigakos, A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (Minneapolis, 2008); Christina Klausmann, Politik und Kultur der Frauenbewegung im Kaiserreich: das Beispiel Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt and New York, 1997); Iris Schröder, Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt: Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform 1890– 1914 (Frankfurt and New York, 2001); Patricia M. Mazón, Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865–1914 (Stanford, 2003). 52 Ute Planert, Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich: Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen, 1998); Diane J. Guido, The German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation: Antifeminism in Germany, 1912–1920 (New York, 2010). 53 Jonathan Sperber, “‘Kirchengeschichte’ or the Social and Cultural History of Religion?” Neue politische Literatur, 43 (1995), pp. 13–35.

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the majority of women remained deeply attached to religion and, despite the continuing power of male hierarchies, played an ever more active and influential role in their churches.54 Most early historians strongly implied that women who found comfort and inspiration in religion were at best old-fashioned and at worst deluded. Some portrayed women who adhered to their traditional faiths as reactionary and anti-feminist; for example, Richard Evans blamed the Protestant Women’s League for the defeat of progressive tendencies within the BDF after 1908.55 Other historians focused on groups of women who sought emancipation by loosening their ties to religion and turning to secularism. Marion Kaplan’s justly well-known works on the Jewish family culture of German Jewish women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries picture middle-class Jewish women as “more traditional, more Jewish-centered” than their husbands and describe their role in preserving Jewish traditions. Kaplan argues, however, that these traditions were superseded by new, more secular aspirations toward middle-class status, German citizenship, and humanistic education. The Jewish Women’s League, which included many civic and charitable groups, likewise redirected its energies from religious to secular activism.56 More recent works, however, challenge this Weberian equation of modernization with secularization. A major trend of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Germany and elsewhere, was a growth in women’s participation in both Christian and Jewish religious life. This, apparently, was a gender-specific trend, for although the authority structure of most religions remained male, the participation of laymen declined as that of lay women increased. Churches responded to the feminization of religion by creating women’s organizations, including the German Protestant Women’s League, founded in 1898, and the Catholic Women’s League, founded in 1903. Though certainly opposed to feminist goals such as women’s suffrage, these organizations often joined secular women’s groups in philanthropic and social-reform endeavors. To their members they offered opportunities for leadership and a broadened sphere of public activity. Another sign of feminization was the growth of female Catholic religious orders, which contrasted with the decline in male vocations. According to Relinde Meiwes, the appeal of religious orders lay largely in the opportunities that they offered for professional work in such fields as teaching, nursing, and charitable work—opportunities that were not yet widely available in the secular world. Though always subordinate to male authority, both lay and religious women changed the churches by expanding their charitable and educational activities—a change that has shaped the work of both Catholic and Protestant churches in present-day Germany.57 Religious belief, moreover, did not always encourage submission and obedience to authority, but could sometimes inspire tumultuous protest. David Blackbourn offers a compelling example. In 1876, local Catholics rushed to the village of Marpingen, where three little girls claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. Prussian officials, whose hostile view of Catholicism was expressed through the Kulturkampf, regarded this as an outburst of primitive superstition and a protest against the modern world. Blackbourn argues persuasively that, in fact, the cult of the Virgin may well have bolstered the confidence of women, to whom

54 Simone de Beauvoir, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, The Second Sex (New York, 2010); Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York, 1975). For a longer discussion of the issues raised here, see Ann Taylor Allen, “Religion and Gender in Modern German History: A Comparative Perspective,” in Hagemann and Quataert, Gendering Modern German History, pp. 63–85. 55 Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, pp. 145–74. See also Ursula Baumann, Protestantismus und Frauen-Emanzipation in Deutschland, 1894–1933 (Frankfurt, 1992). 56 Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991). 57 Relinde Meiwes, “Arbeiterinnen des Herrn”: katholische Frauenkongregationen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York, 2000); Schröder, Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt.

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it offered an affirmation of female dignity and worth, and a “respite from powerlessness.” The officials who forcibly dispersed the pilgrims were in his view not defenders of modern rationality, but rather of class and gender privilege.58 Religion in Germany as elsewhere cannot be dismissed as a relic of a bygone age or a bulwark of patriarchal tradition. Churches of this era mobilized women in many ways, often promoting the distinctly modern forms of behavior—such as broader participation in education, philanthropy, and professional work—that also engaged them in the secular world. What is lacking here, as in other areas, is a similar analysis of religious views of masculinity. Did the feminization of religion inspire a defensive reaction among the churches’ male clergy? Did churches attempt to win back their male members by a more forceful defense of male privilege? Such questions can only be answered by a new look at the changing place of religion in the lives of individual men and women.

The Militarization of Gender

The historian Volker Berghahn has criticized recent research on the German Empire for failing to come to terms with what he terms the “six-ton elephant”: the connection between the “domestic and international predicament of the German Empire toward 1914 and the decisions of its ‘governors’ to unleash World War I.”59 Although the field of gender history cannot provide an answer to this question, it can certainly offer new perspectives on the social crisis of the pre-war years; a crisis, historians often surmise, to which the European ruling classes responded by welcoming war as a pretext to enforce unity and to crack down on dissent. The German Empire defined citizenship in explicitly gendered terms, justifying the granting of suffrage rights as a reward for military service and thus confining it to men. During the imperial period the identification of male identity with military service, which had existed in theory in many Western societies since the French Revolution, for the first time became reality. In theory, all fit men of military age were required to serve: educated men for a period of one year and all others for three years. Although of course not all men were drafted, a great majority of the male generation passed through the barracks. The army—which the historian Heinrich von Treitschke called the “school of the nation”— became a mighty force in the construction of masculine identity. During the long period of peace from 1871 to 1914, most Germans (like other Europeans) conveniently overlooked the soldier’s real function—killing or being killed—and re-imagined military service as a way of initiating young men into the norms of civilian masculinity. These norms were class-specific. Educated young men, who after their one year of service could hope to join a prestigious reserve unit, affected the aggressively manly style that fitted them for commercial and professional success. Working-class men learned to be orderly, obedient, industrious, and thrifty. Ever more obsessed with threats to social order, military authorities enforced both political and gender conformity among their troops, condemning any hint of “effeminacy” almost as strongly as socialist political affiliations. Organizations for younger boys, such as

58 David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (New York, 1994). 59 Volker R. Berghahn, “The German Empire, 1871–1914: Reflections on the Direction of Recent Research,” Central European History, 35, no. 1 (2002), pp. 75–81 (quotation at 79).

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the Pfadfinder (Boy Scouts), and for adolescents, such as the youth movement, popularized this muscular and regimented masculine ideal.60 Though excluded from the armed forces, women also aspired to military service. As Jean Quataert and Ute Frevert have shown, women’s patriotic associations succeeded in organizing a much larger number of women than feminist organizations. These associations, which traced their origins to the Napoleonic Wars, enlisted female support for the armed services in many forms. Women could knit socks, embroider banners, and march in military parades. During the period of the Empire, these associations appealed to women’s new aspirations to education, paid work, and visibility outside the home by encouraging women to enter volunteer nurses’ training or engage in other forms of patriotic service, which highly placed aristocratic ladies often rewarded with medals similar to those worn by men. Military service, though in an auxiliary capacity, became the supreme test of the female as well as the male citizen.61 In relation to the militarization of civilian society, feminists found themselves in a quandary. Most were not uncritical nationalists: they recognized the military as an instrument of male domination and many bitterly protested the allocation of financial resources to military rather than civilian needs. More than most other civilian reformers, feminists of this era formed and supported international organizations such as the International Council of Women and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Leaders of these groups often spoke out for international understanding, denounced the aggressive tone of their governments’ foreign policies, criticized the arms race, and demanded the re-allocation of the state’s financial resources to peaceful ends.62 The book of the Austrian feminist and pacifist Bertha von Suttner, Lay Down Your Weapons, was translated into 27 languages and published in countless editions.63 The major aspiration of all these groups, however, was to citizenship on the same terms for both sexes, including both rights and duties. Their most effective response to the equation of citizenship with military service was to emphasize that women, though most adept in the arts of peace, were also ready and willing to serve in wartime. In Germany and elsewhere, some feminist organizations proposed a female equivalent of the male draft, a compulsory “service year” for all young women. The training, they insisted, must involve professional skills rather than simply household work.64 But what was the duty of women in wartime? The response of military leaders was brutally simple: women’s duty was to bear and nurture soldiers, a duty that the present generation, with its preference for small families, was catastrophically neglecting. Military leaders and their political supporters were thus among the most aggressive opponents of legalized birth control for women (though not for men, who as soldiers were provided with condoms). Though feminists often expressed scorn for this crassly exploitative view of motherhood, they also adapted their strategy to the patriotic climate by proclaiming their own commitment to improving the health and fitness of the younger generation. To this end, they demanded an increase in the state’s support of the health and welfare of mothers

60 Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford and New York, 2004), pp. 149–235. 61 Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor, 2001), pp. 208–11; Frevert, A Nation in Barracks. 62 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 63 Bertha von Suttner, Die Waffen Nieder! (Dresden and Leipzig, 1901). 64 Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, pp. 208–12; Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, pp. 111–15.

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and their children, a demand that almost all feminist organizations, including both liberals and socialists, supported in some way during the years before the war. Some female activists even identified motherhood as a female form of national service that should be rewarded, like its male equivalent, with a salary, although German feminists were far less enthusiastic about this proposal than their French counterparts. In Germany and elsewhere, feminists’ success in laying the foundations of European welfare states was largely due to their skilful manipulation of their rulers’ concerns about military readiness, which in this era depended on the number of available soldiers. The welfare state was also the warfare state.65 The outbreak of war temporarily silenced feminists as well as other reform movements. As Lida Gustava Heymann (who was one of very few pacifists) recalled, not even those women’s organizations that were “permeated with genuine pacifist fervor … protested against the great criminal enterprise of war.”66 The failure to protest raises some important questions about feminism itself. To what extent had its limited success in integrating women into the male world blunted its critique of masculinity and male domination? As Ute Daniel and Belinda Davis show, working-class women did not share this mood of patriotic exaltation. Many resisted integration into the workforce and, along with returning soldiers, supported and strengthened anti-war sentiment within the population at large.67 Historians must further investigate the impact of class differences on both the general responses of women to the First World War and the formation of different types of women’s movements: labor, feminist, pacifist, political. They must also analyze the impacts of the war on gender behavior and identity across lines of class, generation, politics, sexuality, and nationality. Another interesting question concerns the many ways in which memories of wartime experiences influenced conceptions of gender in the 1920s.

Conclusion: Challenging Master Narratives

Let us return to the question we asked at the outset: how do these new insights from the field of gender history add to, or change, our view of the imperial period and its place in a more general narrative of German history? In Germany, as elsewhere, the turn of the twentieth century was a turbulent era in which many forms of protest against accepted gender and sexual norms gained unprecedented support and visibility. These movements often met with harsh condemnation. Indeed, political, religious, intellectual, and scientific authorities often insisted that sexual degeneracy and gender disorder threatened the survival of civilization. Certainly some emancipatory initiatives were destined for short-term defeat. And yet reformers did not feel defeated, but viewed the new century optimistically. The women’s movement, wrote the socialist and feminist Lily Braun, was “revolutionary in the deepest sense,” and upon its outcome depended “the future, not just of women, but of the human race.”68 In the perspective provided by gender history, the imperial period, despite

65 Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, pp. 87–136. 66 Lida Gustava Heymann, Anita Augspurg and Margrit Twellmann, Erlebtes-Erschautes: Deutsche Frauen kämpfen für Freiheit, Recht und Frieden, 1850–1940 (Frankfurt, 1992), p. 138. 67 Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford and New York, 1997), pp. 231–72; Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000). 68 Lily Braun, “Einleitung,” in Adele Schreiber (ed.), Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter (Munich, 1912), pp. 1–5 (quotation at 4).

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the conservatism of its political and social structures, appears as a period of change, even of crisis, that paved the way for many important trends of the twentieth century. How does this story fit into Germany’s longer historical trajectory? As Eley and Blackbourn have commented, the answer to this question demands a comparative framework: what about this history makes it distinctively German, rather than more generally European or Western?69 Comparative gender histories—still comparatively few—most commonly compare Germany to the English-speaking world. These studies note that, in comparison to their German counterparts, American and British women gained earlier access to higher education, were more powerful in social reform movements, and organized more effectively to advocate women’s suffrage. All these comparisons might confirm Wehler’s picture of Imperial Germany as a distinctively authoritarian and conservative society.70 Many English- speaking feminists of the era, however, looked to Germany as the very model of modernity, especially in areas such as municipal services, welfare-state institutions for the benefit of women and children, and sexual reform.71 Comparisons to countries outside the anglophone world also confirm that Germany was in many ways relatively modern and advanced.72 In fact the mixture of advancement and conservatism, radicalism and reaction in Germany resembles what we also see in other Western countries during this era. Berghahn warns historians who deny the distinctiveness of German history that “at the end of this road there is still the big stumbling-block of the Third Reich.”73 But in the area of gender history the National Socialist era cannot be seen as the destined outcome of any distinctively German Sonderweg. Certainly the Nazis persecuted male homosexuals on the basis of gender and sexuality, in ways that show the continuing influence of the harsh homophobia that first surfaced at the turn of the twentieth century. But usually the Nazis classified and murdered their victims more on the basis of “racial,” ethnic, or medical status than of gender. For the large segment of the population that was not singled out for persecution, gender relations during the National Socialist era showed many of the same patterns that were prevalent elsewhere in the Western world. The regime’s policies in the area of gender and family life were by no means uniformly repressive or conservative; in fact many drew on the sexual reform movements of the imperial and Weimar eras.74 In the end, however, there is no way of fitting gender history neatly into existing paradigms of German or indeed any other national history, for such histories are based on a thoroughly male-oriented set of conventions. Traditional conceptions of the nation and its history recognize only a male “public sphere” of politics, government, warfare, and the state. By definition, this sphere excludes most women, whom historians have relegated to a “private sphere” of home and family—a sphere that these historians presume to be ahistorical and therefore without significance. So invisible are these excluded people that gender is not even a theme in traditional historical narratives, which often still accept the division between “public” and “private” as natural and not to be questioned. We cannot

69 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York, 1984). 70 For example, Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminist Movements in the United States and Germany: A Comparative Perspective, 1848–1933,” in Manfred Berg and Martin H. Geyer (eds), Two Cultures of Rights: The Quest for Inclusion and Participation in Modern America and Germany (Cambridge and New York, 2002), pp. 231–48. 71 Andrew Lees, Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor, 2002). 72 Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler and Susan Strasser, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca, 1998). 73 Berghahn, “The German Empire,” p. 76. 74 Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2005), pp. 10–63.

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simply apply concepts produced in this distorted context—such as “class,” “state,” “family,” “culture,” and others—to women and to gender history. We must first re-evaluate, criticize, and redefine these concepts. The historians whose work we have briefly examined here— and many others—have begun this process of revision. The result of this research will place the German story within broader regional, transnational, and global as well as national frameworks.75 This new research will transform rather than simply supplement the “master narrative” of German history.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Albisetti, James C. Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1988). Allen, Ann Taylor. Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991). —. Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe 1890–1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York, 2005). Beauvoir, Simone de, Borde, Constance and Malovany-Chevallier, Sheila. The Second Sex (New York, 2010). Berghahn, Volker R. “The German Empire, 1871–1914: Reflections on the Direction of Recent Research,” Central European History, 35, no. 1 (2002), pp. 75–81. Blackbourn, David. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (New York, 1994). — and Eley, Geoff. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York, 1984). Bleker, Johanna and Schleiermacher, Sabine. Ärztinnen aus dem Kaiserreich: Lebensläufe einer Generation (Weinheim, 2000). Bock, Gisela and Thane, Pat. Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York, 1991). Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex (New York, 1975). Daniel, Ute. The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford and New York, 1997). Davis, Belinda J. Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000). Dickinson, Edward Ross. “The Men’s Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880–1914: Some Reflections on Politics, Sex, and Sexual Politics,” Journal of Modern History, 75, no. 1 (2003), pp. 59–110. —. “Reflections on Feminism and Monism in the Kaiserreich, 1900–1913,” Central European History, 34, no. 2 (2001), pp. 191–230. Ehrenpreis, David. “The Figure of the Backfisch: Representing Puberty in Wilhelmine Germany,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 67, no. 4 (2004), pp. 479–508. Eley, Geoff.Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford and New York, 2002). Evans, Richard J. The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London and Beverly Hills, 1976).

75 Karin Hausen, “Das fragliche Allgemeine der allgeminen Geschichte,” in Medick and Trepp (eds), Geschlechtergeschichte und allgemeine Geschichte, pp. 23–55.

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Fout, John C. “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2, no. 3 (1992), pp. 388–421. Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge and Cambridge, MA, 1995). —. A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford and New York, 2004). Ganaway, Bryan. Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871– 1918 (Oxford and New York, 2009). Gerhard, Ute and Wischermann, Ulla. Unerhört: die Geschichte der Deutschen Frauenbewegung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1990). Greven-Aschoff, Barbara. Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland: 1894–1933 (Göttingen, 1981). Guido, Diane J. The German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation: Antifeminism in Germany, 1912–1920 (New York, 2010). Hagemann, Karen and Quataert, Jean H. Gendering Modern German History: Themes, Debates, Revisions (New York and Oxford, 2007). Herzog, Dagmar. Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2005). Heymann, Lida Gustava, Augspurg, Anita and Twellmann, Margrit. Erlebtes-Erschautes: Deutsche Frauen kämpfen für Freiheit, Recht und Frieden, 1850–1940 (Frankfurt, 1992). Kaplan, Marion A. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991). Klausmann, Christina. Politik und Kultur der Frauenbewegung im Kaiserreich: das Beispiel Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt and New York, 1997). Lees, Andrew. Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor, 2002). Mazón, Patricia M. Gender and the Modern Research University: The Admission of Women to German Higher Education, 1865–1914 (Stanford, 2003). Medick, Hans and Trepp, Anne-Charlott (eds). Geschlechtergeschichte und allgemeine Geschichte: Herausforderungen und Perspektive (Göttingen, 1998). Meiwes, Relinde. “Arbeiterinnen des Herrn”: Katholische Frauenkongregationen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York, 2000). Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York and Oxford, 1996). Planert, Ute. Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich: Diskurs, Soziale Formation und Politische Mentalität (Göttingen, 1998). Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1988). Quataert, Jean H. Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1979). —. Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor, 2001). Reagin, Nancy Ruth. Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (New York, 2007). Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ, 1997). Schaser, Angelika. Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer: Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, 2000). Schröder, Iris. Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt: Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform 1890–1914 (Frankfurt and New York, 2001). Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Schüler, Anja and Strasser, Susan. Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca, 1998).

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Stoehr, Irene. Emanzipation zum Staat? Der Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein-Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnenverband, 1893–1933 (Pfaffenweiler, 1990). Stratigakos, Despina. A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (Minneapolis, 2008). Suttner, Bertha von.Die Waffen Nieder! (Dresden and Leipzig, 1901). Sweeney, Dennis. “Reconsidering the Modernity Paradigm: Reform Movements, the Social and the State in Wilhelmine Germany,” Social History, 31, no. 4 (2006), pp. 405–34. Taylor, Tom. “Images of Youth and the Family in Wilhelmine Germany: Toward a Reconsideration of the German Sonderweg,” German Studies Review, 15 (1992), pp. 55–73. Weindling, Paul. Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge and New York, 1989). Zwicker, Lisa Fetheringill. Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890–1914 (Ann Arbor, 2011).

244 14 Religion

James e. Bjork

not so long ago, it would have been unremarkable to suggest that the role religion played in german society declined as the nineteenth century progressed. At the beginning of that century, after all, most germans lived in fairly religiously homogeneous states (overwhelmingly protestant or overwhelmingly catholic) within the residual structures of the holy Roman empire. many were the direct subjects of Roman catholic archbishops, bishops or abbots: church prelates who doubled as territorial princes. The napoleonic wars swept away these entities, combining uniformly catholic and protestant units into more diverse mid-sized states. German unification further consolidated this confessional mixing, ensuring that not only the new empire as a whole, but also most of its constituent states, including the over-sized , contained large religious minorities. The founding of the Kaiserreich also completed the slow emancipation of Jewish minorities in its constituent territories by guaranteeing civic equality to all citizens, regardless of religious affiliation. This decline in the legal significance of religion was, it seemed, paralleled by an erosion of both religious faith and religious practice. scientists could increasingly provide accounts of the natural world independent of supernatural explanation, while linguistic scholars could examine the holy scriptures as artefacts of a particular time and products of human creation, contributing to what Max Weber famously described as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. people shifting from agricultural to industrial employment became detached from the rhythms of the church calendar and holidays that had meshed with the passage of the seasons. migration from village to city separated them from familiar pastoral authorities and sacred spaces, exposing them to a variety of worldviews and alternative forms of sociability. more and more of human activity, in short, no longer seemed to require a formal grounding in or reference to religion. But over the past quarter century, this narrative of straightforward religious decline – often short-handed as a theory or theories of secularization – came under sustained critique by historians of modern germany, and by historians and social scientists more generally. Starting in the 1980s, and accelerating in the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, historiography underwent an unmistakable ‘religious turn’, as studies of politics, culture and society highlighted the resilience, perhaps even revivification, of religion in the lives of nineteenth-century germans. one historian of this generation went so far as to re- define the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a ‘second confessional age’.1 To a degree, this revisionist interpretation involved a straightforward, sceptical reassessment of the sweeping quantitative claims inherent in the secularization narrative: was it really true that familiar forms of religious expression were everywhere in inexorable decline? Careful scrutiny of familiar indices of piety – church attendance, reception of sacraments, religious

1 Olaf Blaschke, ‘Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000), pp. 38–75. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

vocations – revealed a more complicated picture, in which different patterns were evident for different religious communities, different regions and different periods of time. The main thrust of the ‘religious turn’, however, has involved consideration of ways in which modernity transformed, rather than simply reduced, the role of religion in people’s lives. Even as religion came to be increasingly understood as a discrete sphere of human life – rather than an all-encompassing framework for it – religious affiliations, beliefs and practices nonetheless permeated many other, ostensibly autonomous spheres. Study of mass electoral politics, the product of the rapid expansion of the democratic franchise in the late nineteenth century, provided one of the most important spurs for renewed interest in religion. Even as the introduction of equal male suffrage at the foundation of the German Empire made religion formally irrelevant to the voting process, religious issues quickly emerged as some of the most heated public policy questions of the day, and religious affiliation became one of the best predictors of voting behaviour. The persistence of religious influence in the sphere of intellectual life was often more subtle, but here, too, there were plausible arguments that changes represented a reconfiguration rather than abandonment of religious views. This was perhaps especially true within Protestantism. The Reformation had, after all, involved a far-reaching critique of religious authority and appeal to individual conscience, all in the name of a more genuine expression of religious faith. Why could more recent questioning of doctrine not also be understood in such terms? Changes in ritual and practice were similarly amenable to reinterpretation. Erosion in some forms of observance might be seen as evidence of a reconfiguration and relocation of religious practice, as well as shifts in who served as primary carriers of religious tradition, rather than simply religious decline. The widely discussed ‘feminization of piety’, for example, was often framed in negative terms as a ‘crisis’ of religious observance among men. But religious practice among women was not a static or residual phenomenon; it evolved in complex interaction with changing gender roles in society more broadly and was, indeed, one of the arenas where these changing roles were contested. Tracking the influence of religion across so many dimensions of Imperial German society requires maintaining a broad field of vision. But it also requires some sense of what ‘religion’ is and how far the term can or should be stretched. This chapter will examine three elements that, I would suggest, cumulatively make religion a distinctive phenomenon amenable to study. First, religion involves formally organized social groups. Admittedly, such a definition risks losing sight of religious views and actions that developed outside such a framework, as well as focusing disproportionate attention on the most structured and hierarchical religious groups. But it was precisely the heavily institutionalized nature of Imperial Germany’s major religious traditions, their power to mark and shape people’s social identities from birth to death, which made religion such an important dimension of German life in this era. Second, religion involved a distinctive set of beliefs about the supernatural order. The degree of formal elaboration of those beliefs and the space for differing interpretations of them varied within different traditions, of course, and the extent to which individuals living a century ago actually believed particular propositions about the supernatural order is exceedingly difficult to evaluate. But mooring the notion of religion to beliefs about a divine order is essential if we are to define religion as a discrete and potentially escapable realm. Including any worldview, and thus all of the various ‘isms’ of the modern era, under the category of ‘religion’ not only makes the subject unmanageably broad but also seems to rule out, in an unhelpfully a priori way, the possibility that people might abandon religion altogether, explaining the world in non-religious terms. Third, and finally, religion is assumed to involve some form of normative practice or observance. The nature and extent of those behavioural prescriptions varied, both across religious traditions and over time, but even those who insisted most strongly that religion should be a ‘private

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matter’ would have conceded that religious views and affiliations required some form of observable expression, which is, in turn, the only way the phenomenon becomes accessible to historical study.

Religion as Community

In Imperial Germany, formal identification with one of the three major religious traditions – Roman Catholicism, Protestantism or Judaism – was almost as inescapable and as fundamental to social order as identification as male or female. Centuries of Christianization, beginning in the early Middle Ages, had ensured that the overwhelming majority of the population (98.7 per cent at the time of unification) formally adhered to Christianity. The course of the Reformation and subsequent confessional conflicts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had established two forms of Western Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, each championed and cultivated by a number of sovereign princes within the Holy Roman Empire. Protestantism was a more heterogeneous phenomenon, with Lutheran and Calvinist theological and ecclesiological traditions, but these were understood to be sub-traditions of an overarching Reformation heritage. Although the two large confessions enjoyed roughly equal adherents across the entire German-speaking world, the Prussian-led unification process, excluding the Catholic German-speaking populations of the Habsburg Monarchy, had ensured that the Kaiserreich would have a solid Protestant majority: 62.3 per cent Protestant versus 36.2 per cent Roman Catholic (a small number of Orthodox and other Christians did not fit into this binary division). These proportions meant that, while Protestantism had a clear status as the new nation- state’s majority confession, it was a relatively narrow demographic advantage. Catholics constituted an overwhelming majority of the population across large swathes of the west, south and east, in regions such as the Rhineland, Bavaria and Silesia. And a variety of developments – from incorporation of new Catholic populations into the empire, to higher birth rates among Catholics, to internal divisions or indifference among Protestants – could have plausibly brought into question Protestantism’s overall predominance. Imperial Germany’s other major religious tradition, Judaism, occupied a very different structural position. Constituting only 1.2 per cent of the country’s total population, Jews were everywhere, even in large cities such as Frankfurt am Main or Berlin, where they were increasingly concentrated, emphatically a minority. They were, however, a relatively prominent and prosperous minority, and even in purely numerical terms, they dwarfed any other religious minority. In the Kingdom of Prussia, for example, 99.8 per cent of the non- Christian population was Jewish.2 It was the Catholic–Protestant divide within the country’s overwhelming Christian majority that would prove the most fateful for the development of Imperial Germany. Shortly after unification, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and his allies in the National Liberal Party launched the Kulturkampf, or ‘struggle for civilization’, in order to curtail the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and thereby foster the cultural and political unity of the new nation-state. Instead, these measures resulted in a decisive majority of Germany’s Catholic population rallying behind the church and against the state. For German nationalists of the time, as Margaret L. Anderson has written, it seemed that ‘the [Catholic] Church, like some

2 All statistics in this paragraph are from Statistisches Jahrbuch für das deutsche Reich (Berlin, 1881), p. 13.

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evil fairy godmother, had materialized at the baptism of the newborn nation-state … in order to bequeath to it a future cursed with continued division’.3 Recent historiography has also struggled with the question of why the loyalty of German Catholics to their ancestral church so readily trumped the attempts by Bismarck and his allies to frame the struggle as patriotic resistance against ‘ultramontanism’, an ostensibly alien ideology drawing its inspiration from ‘beyond the mountains’ (that is, papal Rome). The divide between Catholics and Protestants was, to be sure, a deep and long-standing one. Several centuries of confessionalization by both states and churches had ensured that most Catholics and Protestants lived in relatively homogeneous and endogamous communities, a pattern that survived the consolidation of smaller states into larger, religiously mixed ones in the early nineteenth century. But confessional loyalty was not simply a matter of inertia. Scholars such as Jonathan Sperber and Michael Gross have pointed to evidence of a mid-century religious revival, expressed in large public missions and pilgrimages, and encouraged by church leaders who were alarmed by the liberal political trends of the time.4 This revivification of engagement with the churches ostensibly laid the groundwork for the fierce partisanship of the Kulturkampf. Margaret Anderson has instead emphasized the immediate galvanizing effect of the moment of unification, which was combined with both the introduction of universal male suffrage and legislation aimed at the Catholic church. This fateful coincidence produced a new political party, the Centre, which not only defended the institutional prerogatives of the church but successfully voiced a wide range of grievances among the Catholic population, crystallizing a ‘Catholic cause’ that was defined in confessional terms but encompassed a much more extensive and complicated set of political, social, cultural and economic aims.5 Regardless of its ultimate roots and proximate causation, the confessional cleavage of the Kulturkampf era became one of the defining features of theKaiserreich , arguably the most dramatic and persistent of the new nation-state’s political, cultural and social divides. The sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius saw this confessional cleavage as part of a broader pattern, in which each of Imperial Germany’s main political currents was based on a distinct ‘socio- moral milieu’ (see Chapter 4 in this volume).6 This milieu concept subsequently became the focus of a substantial historiography, with the Roman Catholic milieu drawing particularly intensive scrutiny.7 Some of this scholarship, especially in early, pioneering studies such as that of Helmut Walser Smith, has concentrated on sketching out the fundamental contrast between a Protestant Germany and a Catholic Germany, emphasizing both the social distance between the two confessional communities and increasing internal integration within each community. Voluntary associations (Vereine) served as crucial vehicles for the development of Catholic and Protestant milieus and have provided historians with the most obvious

3 Margaret L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000), pp. 73–4. 4 Michael Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004); Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth- Century Germany (Princeton, 1984). 5 Margaret L. Anderson, ‘Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism’, Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991), pp. 681–716. 6 M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft’, in W. Abel (ed.), Wirtschaft, Geschichte, und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift Friedrich Lütge (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 371–93. 7 One summary of the literature counted over 100 monographs and articles on the Catholic milieu, or regional or local sub-milieus. See Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Münster, ‘Konfession und Cleavages in 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Erklärungsmodell zur regionalen Entstehung des katholischen Milieus in Deutschland’, Historische Zeitschrift, 120 (2000), pp. 358–95.

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indices for milieu breadth and density. The mass membership of the People’s Association for Catholic Germany and of Christian labour unions (whose memberships were, in practice, heavily Catholic) provided connective tissue between local Roman Catholic parishes and the Centre Party, while the Protestant League offered an institutional structure for a Protestant population with more diffused party-political loyalties. Reading habits and understandings of German history were similarly structured along religious lines. Periodicals often had an implicit or even overt confessional profile, and many books were also written fora confessionally specific audience.8 Formative and traumatic episodes in German history, such as the Thirty Years War, were predictably narrated in very different ways by Catholic and Protestant authors.9 But this tale of two Germanies, one Catholic, one Protestant, each cohesive and largely self-contained, has been plausibly critiqued from a number of directions. Some studies have questioned the cultural and social impermeability of the confessional divide and, in particular, the supposed isolation of the Catholic ‘ghetto’. Jeff Zalar, for example, examined the records of the lending libraries and reading rooms sponsored by the Association of St Charles Borromeo and discovered that, especially after the turn of the century, much of the material they distributed came from the mainstream German literary canon – Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kleist, Heine – as well as classics of world literature and recent publications on the natural sciences.10 Thomas Mergel argued that the Catholic upper middle class (Bürgertum) of the Rhineland continued to share the liberal outlook and mentality of their Protestant counterparts. To the extent that middle-class Catholics affiliated themselves with the Centre Party, it reflected the Bürgertum’s influence on the Centre as much as the hold of a clerical milieu on the Catholic middle class.11 Similar phenomena could be found among Catholics in Bavaria, especially in the capital city of Munich. In a state where the long-standing dynasty as well as the overwhelming majority of the population was Roman Catholic, the Catholic intelligentsia continued to sympathize with the more open and urbane ‘reform Catholicism’ associated with Professor Ignaz Döllinger, even as few followed his break with Rome over the doctrine of papal infallibility. As Derek Hastings has argued, this meant that many Roman Catholics in Bavaria remained highly sceptical of political Catholicism and open to various forms of nationalist appeal.12 And even as some authors have questioned whether ‘Catholic Germany’ was really so isolated from the mainstream of German culture and society, others have asked whether ‘German Catholicism’ could necessarily be so clearly delineated from other varieties of European Catholicism. Milieu studies have, after all, most often focused on a regional or local level, and these ‘meso’ or ‘micro’ milieus were not just straightforward sub-sections of a German-national ‘macro’ milieu. My own study of the region of Upper Silesia, for example, showed that a largely Slavic, partially Polish-literate Catholic population could in some ways and at some moments be strongly integrated into Catholic Germany and its

8 Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870– 1914 (Princeton, 1995). 9 Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, NE, 2007). 10 Jeffrey T. Zalar, ‘“Knowledge is Power”: The Borromäusverein and Catholic Reading Habits in Imperial Germany’, The Catholic Historical Review, 86 (2000), pp. 20–46. 11 Thomas Mergel, ‘Ultramontanism, Liberalism, Moderation: Political Mentalities and Political Behavior of the German Catholic Bürgertum, 1848–1914’, Central European History, 29 (1996), pp. 151–74. 12 Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford, 2010).

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political and social networks, while in other ways and at other moments could gravitate toward Polish Catholicism.13 Similar questions have been raised about the transnational dimensions of Protestantism in Germany, especially in borderlands such as Alsace.14 But on the whole, Protestantism tended to be much more closely associated with German nationalism. It was, after all, the religion of a clear majority of inhabitants of the Empire, as well as the religion of the ruling Hohenzollern dynasty and one that generally differentiated Germany from its main continental neighbours and rivals, France and Russia. But this identification of confession with nation could be a challenge as well as an asset. It meant that expressions of patriotism and membership of national-oriented associations could seem plausible substitutes for more explicitly confessional engagement. Belonging to the Navy League, Society for the Eastern Marches or Pan-German League, for example, would have signalled a patriotic identification broadly associated with cultural Protestantism, though none of these organizations was exclusively Protestant. Those with a stronger sense of confessional specificity would, in turn, have often been sceptical of umbrella organizations such as the Protestant League because they downplayed and tried to amalgamate the more particular traditions of and Calvinism. As a dominant/establishment religion, Protestantism was also ill-suited to serve as a vehicle for subcultural claims and grievances. While the Centre Party constantly struggled to reconcile the interests of its socio-economically diverse constituencies, it could plausibly claim to speak for a population that suffered systematic discriminationas Catholics and thus shared a concrete interest in promoting confessional ‘parity’ in areas like education and state employment. Protestant activists who tried to spearhead organized political movements – such as Adolf Stoecker and Friedrich Naumann – had a more difficult time balancing elements of social conservatism with calls for social reform. Stoecker’s Christian Social movement of the 1880s was largely defined by its antisemitism and enjoyed very modest electoral success, while Naumann’s more leftist National Social Association of the 1890s quickly merged with mainstream liberal parties. German Protestants, in short, very rarely ‘voted Protestant’ in any straightforward way; they instead divided their votes among conservative, liberal and socialist parties, depending on socio-economic and ideological profile. If Protestants were too large a majority community to coalesce as a socio-moral milieu, Jews were too small a minority to do so. They did, to be sure, participate enthusiastically in the associational fervour of the late nineteenth century, cultivating distinctively Jewish forms of public engagement. The Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, founded in 1893, eventually enrolled over 100,000 members, an impressive proportion of the total adult Jewish population, while several thousand local and regional Jewish associations attracted tens of thousands of additional members.15 But in civic life and even, to some extent, everyday sociability, Jews engaged in increasingly intensive interaction with non-Jews, demonstrating what Till van Rahden has described as ‘situational ethnicity’: a complicated mix of far-reaching integration and continued consciousness of being part of a particular community.16 It was not always an easy balance to strike or to maintain. Growing rates of

13 James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008). 14 Anthony J. Steinhoff,The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870– 1914 (Leiden and Boston, 2008). 15 Marion Kaplan, ‘Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany: Practices, Mentalities and Community’, Jewish Social Studies, 9 (2002), p. 9. 16 Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison, 2008).

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intermarriage, for example, could be seen as a measure of social integration into broader society. But to the extent that this meant that a Jewish spouse converted to Protestantism or (less commonly) Catholicism, or at least that the children of religiously mixed couples were raised as Christian, it could also be seen as heralding the gradual extinction of the community itself. Conversely, forms of integration could be interpreted by antisemites as symptomatic of Jewish ‘infiltration’ or ‘domination’. Parties such as the Left Liberals and Social Democrats, for example, that attracted votes among Jews and offered some Jewish individuals leadership roles, came to be coded as representing ‘Jewish’ interests. Religious difference, in other words, could be re-inscribed even as it was being effaced.

Religion as Belief

Although belonging to a religious community often had a strongly ‘ethnic’ dimension, hinging on shared customs and a sense of kinship or common descent, it was the element of belief that seems to many observers the most unique characteristic of religion. Indeed, in Imperial Germany, the most common term for religious affiliation was ‘confession’ (Bekenntnis), suggesting that it was an individual’s adherence to a particular set of propositions about the supernatural order that constituted the core of ‘religion’. This understanding of religion was in some ways distinctly Christian, or even peculiarly Protestant. Whereas the creedal content of other religious traditions such as Judaism could be seen as implicit and fairly straightforward (belief in a single omnipotent deity), the more elaborate doctrines of Christianity (the nature of the Trinity; the role of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection in the work of human salvation) were laid out in prescribed confessions of faith. The Nicene Creed and Apostles’ Creed articulated the shared doctrines of Western Christendom, while the more detailed doctrinal statements of the Reformation era, such as the of 1530, laid out the postulates of distinctive Protestant creeds. The debates about orthodoxy – right belief – that fuelled the religious conflicts of the early modern period had certainly not disappeared by the nineteenth century. Within the Protestant church, older tensions between Lutherans and Calvinists persisted, alongside newer fissures over the compatibility of rationalism and liberalism with fundamental articles of faith. Scholarly study of the origins of the scriptures, an endeavour simultaneously inspired by the Christian tradition and potentially corrosive of it, further fuelled questioning of old dogmas. Parallel debates within Roman Catholicism were more muted following the First Vatican Council’s endorsement (1870) of the doctrine that the pope was infallible when making declarations on core church teachings. A small but significant number of Catholics left the church altogether over the issue. Increasingly, however, among both Protestants and Catholics, the most pressing question was not how orthodoxy would be defined within particular religious communities but, instead, to what extent ordinary believers subscribed to these official belief systems. Some factors, it should be stressed, made the dissemination of formal doctrinal systems more potent than ever before. Near-universal religious instruction was embedded in Germany’s primary education system, making the state an effective partner of the churches in the confessional enculturation of new generations. Additional instruction administered directly by the clergy, such as that preceding a child’s first confession and communion in the Catholic church, provided additional opportunities for indoctrination. Religious publications also continued to expand throughout the imperial period, providing another mechanism for the dissemination of orthodox views. But if ordinary Catholics and Protestants were probably hearing and reading more than ever about the official doctrines of their churches, this was not all they were hearing and

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reading. Residents of Imperial Germany were exposed to a large and constantly expanding range of books and periodicals, albeit to a greater extent in urban than rural areas. Some of the ideas they encountered directly challenged church doctrine, potentially leading to the kind of loss of faith envisioned in classic secularization theory. The writings of Charles Darwin and the many authors inspired by his work provided a way of understanding organic development without the necessity of providential guidance. Marxism offered a purely materialist framework for interpreting historical development and contemporary economic problems and political struggles. Church authorities feared, and some anticlerical activists hoped, that this might lead to decisive rejection of church teachings. In fact, as we have seen, only a minuscule minority of residents of Imperial Germany renounced their religious affiliations categorically. The norm was not open apostasy but rather expanded possibilities for crafting individual views that drew on ideas from beyond one’s religious tradition as well as within it. Lucian Hölscher has described this as a growing divergence between ‘confession’ as a set of prescriptive religious doctrines and ‘belief’ as a highly personal and idiosyncratic phenomenon.17 An emphasis on direct individual experience of the divine could be said to have been a feature of Protestantism since the Reformation, though it had been further strengthened in Germany by the development of Pietism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This Pietist movement, which evolved into a more diffuse sensibility by the late nineteenth century, cautioned against an overly formalized and legalistic religiosity and stressed the importance of an inner living faith. While this counted in many ways as a potent form of religious revival, it might also be seen, especially in later manifestations, as laying groundwork for a kind of self-secularization: if the most authentic religious experiences were the most intensely personal and private, then indifference to, or even critique of, doctrinal orthodoxy could be understood as the ultimate expression of faith, rather than as an act of apostasy. But the development of more individualized and internalized belief systems was not the only challenge that the churches faced in their efforts to shape people’s understandings of the divine. An older but still potent phenomenon was popular religion, more pejoratively described as ‘superstition’ (Aberglaube). This encompassed beliefs in the supernatural that were often related to orthodox Christian (or, in some variations, Jewish) beliefs, but also drew on pagan traditions and folklore. Faced with the challenges of the ‘new paganism’ (liberalism and socialism), the Christian clergy tended to express less anxiety about remnants of the old one, either turning a blind eye to enduring ‘magical’ beliefs or interpreting them as compatible with Christianity. The Roman Catholic clergy often went further, cautiously embracing popular reports of miraculous occurrences that conformed to the basic tenets of the Christian faith. Reports of small miracles associated with local saints or holy sites – for example, spring water possessing healing powers – were common in Catholic Germany as elsewhere in Catholic Europe. But it was apparitions of the Virgin Mary, increasingly the central devotional figure of Roman Catholicism, that represented perhaps the most powerful and impressive symbiosis between bottom-up folk religion and top-down confessional mobilization. Such apparitions have been reported across Europe and across the centuries, but the apparition at Lourdes in the Pyrenees (1858) provided the template for a peculiarly modern wave of visions that occurred over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1876, an apparition of the Virgin near the village of Marpingen in the Saarland, shortly after the peak of the Kulturkampf, would become the most dramatic case reported in Imperial Germany (the ‘German Lourdes’). As David Blackbourn recounted in a classic study, when

17 Lucian Hölscher, ‘The Religious Divide: Piety in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 33–47.

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several young girls reported an appearance by the Virgin Mary, it inspired steadily growing waves of pilgrimage to the apparition site. Cautious endorsement of the reported miracle by the local parish priest, combined with attempts by government officials to suppress visits to the site, turned the episode into a dramatic microcosm of the Kulturkampf, with local clergy and laypeople largely in solidarity with one another in opposition to heavy-handed state intervention.18 While this kind of reported encounter with the supernatural could be seen today as a relatively benign manifestation of local solidarity and suspicion of authority, popular beliefs were sometimes directed at more vulnerable targets and took more violent forms. Helmut Walser Smith explored these dynamics in his study of a murder in the town of Konitz in West Prussia in 1901, which some local residents and outside agitators claimed was committed by Jews seeking Christian blood for the performance of rituals.19 This ‘blood libel’ had been a theme in medieval persecutions of Jews, but it regularly resurfaced in episodes spread across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such apparent atavisms suggested that modern antisemitism, while no doubt shaped by contemporary socio-economic anxieties and new racist ideologies, continued to draw on more specifically religious distrust and fear of Jews. Belief, while arguably at the core of religion, is ultimately an elusive quarry for scholars. Expressed as straightforward adherence to a tradition or to an official set of doctrines, it is difficult to distinguish from belonging to a religious community (discussed above)or forms of religious practice (discussed below). The aspect of belief that is most distinctive – idiosyncratic, often volatile, interior convictions about the nature of reality and, in particular, a supernatural order – is precisely what is most difficult to access with available sources. But even if our hypotheses about people’s beliefs are therefore inevitably tentative, it is nonetheless useful to maintain curiosity about and openness to the messy ambiguities, the doubts of believers and transcendental yearnings of sceptics, which often complicated people’s formal affinities.

Religion as Practice

The late nineteenth century was a golden age of statistics, and religious practices were among the many forms of human behaviour that were now counted and measured more systematically than ever before. Unlike formal adherence to a religious community, which was near-universal and very stable throughout this period, observance of various practices – reception of communion, church attendance, participation in or pilgrimages, joining religious orders – varied considerably by region and over time. These disparities and changes provided the possibility of telling more dynamic stories about the shifting role of religion in modern German society. Most religious statistics seemed to support a traditional narrative of religious decline, but some suggested that precisely the opposite was occurring: a revival and revivification of devotional practice that buttressed and mirrored the growth of religiously affiliated associational activities. Viewed in aggregate, these patterns pointed not only to varying degrees of decline and growth across different regions and different

18 David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (Oxford, 1993). 19 Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York and London, 2002).

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communities but also to qualitative changes in what kinds of practices were seen as the hallmarks of piety. In Roman Catholicism, fulfilment of one’s ‘Easter duty’ was the index most commonly counted and analysed as an indicator of religious observance. This actually referred to a sequence of related practices: offering confession to a priest during the Lenten season preceding Easter, receiving absolution for one’s sins, and thereby entering a state of grace allowing one to receive communion. The church in Germany did not compile Empire-wide statistics for Easter communion until 1915, though statistics had been collected at parish level for many years earlier. At the beginning of the First World War, 57 per cent of all Catholics in the Kingdom of Prussia fulfilled their ‘Easter duty’, with even higher rates in regions such as Bavaria. Taking into account the significant proportion of people who were not expected to confess or commune (such as pre-adolescent children or invalids), this translated into an effective rate of observance of 70–75 per cent. In more rural areas, this effective rate of observance was close to 100 per cent, while in industrial regions such as the Ruhr or Upper Silesia, it was around two-thirds of all obliged Catholics. The lowest rates – hovering around half of all obliged Catholics – could be found in Berlin, a metropolis where Catholics represented a relatively small minority, mostly composed of recent immigrants.20 From these patterns, one could hazard a reasonable estimation of recent changes over time: industrialization, urbanization and migration were almost certainly eroding religious observance among Roman Catholics, due to a (debatable) combination of pluralistic cultural influences and insufficient infrastructure (buildings and personnel). But this decline was happening only very slowly; most Catholics maintained or reconstituted pious habits as they moved into manufacturing jobs and/or urban neighbourhoods. And if relatively few Catholics in Imperial Germany were abandoning these foundational religious practices, many were intensifying their devotional engagement. One striking shift occurred in the early twentieth century, as the Vatican began to encourage the practice of frequent communion, leading to a huge increase in total annual communions. Some of this surge no doubt reflected the particularly intense piety of the few. But with average annual communions now passing ten per year in some dioceses, in particular in the Rhineland, the impact of these new devotional norms must have been fairly widespread.21 Other, more exceptional forms of religious practice – such as periodic popular missions conducted by religious orders or pilgrimages to sacred sites – generally attracted high turnouts across Catholic Germany throughout the period. Indeed, as noted earlier, a number of historians have argued that the mid to late nineteenth century witnessed a far-reaching religious revival among German Catholics, possibly providing the foundation for the later growth of associational life that characterized the mature Catholic milieu. While studies of Catholic religious observance have generally emphasized signs of ongoing vigour and/or reinvigoration, research on Protestant piety has tended to adhere more closely to familiar narratives of secularization. Statistics on total annual communions, which were compiled systematically from the 1860s onward, suggest that religious observance among Protestants was already very low in much of northern and eastern Germany and that it was declining steadily almost everywhere. In Berlin, the number of total communions was less than 20 per cent of the Protestant population; in some of the most industrialized parts of Saxony, the figure was less than 5 per cent.22 The contrast to the soaring number of total communions among Catholics was striking. But such direct

20 H.A. Krose (ed.), Kirchliches Handbuch für das katholische Deutschland (Freiburg, 1916). 21 Ibid. 22 Smith, German Nationalism, pp. 86–91.

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comparisons may be misleading, given the different role that reception of communion plays in Protestant and Catholic piety. As Anthony Steinhoff has pointed out, communion was not viewed as a vital annual obligation among Protestants, and frequent communion was not encouraged. Rites of passage such as baptism, first communion/confirmation, marriage and burial were instead seen as the most important markers of Christian observance, and data on these practices was more mixed. A majority (in most areas an overwhelming majority) of Protestant children continued to be baptized, and avoidance of church marriages or burials was only common in larger cities. Furthermore, some statistics pointed to revivals in these practices, at least in some periods and some areas.23 Such rites of passage were, to be sure, a less frequent and intensive form of engagement with a religious community, but they suggested that the rituals of the official church continued to play a role in shaping most Protestants’ understandings of their own life cycles and, in particular, the formation of families. Another sphere of activity that most Protestants – as well as many Catholics – would have understood as a way of ‘practising’ one’s faith was engagement in charity and other forms of social engagement. The Protestant church sponsored extensive forms of social welfare work (Diakonie), including the ‘inner mission’ network developed as a domestic counterpart to missionary activity directed outward at non-Christians. As discussed earlier in connection to Pietist influences on understandings of belief, such engagement with social work could be interpreted as compatible with a kind of creeping secularization, in which a focus on improvement of people’s lives in this world became an end in itself, increasingly delinked from a specifically religious cosmology. But there could be little doubt that most of those engaged in charitable work at the time viewed it as inextricably linked with their faith. For German Jews as well, piety came to be more closely associated with family tradition on the one hand and broader social engagement on the other, even as adherence to more formal, traditional and overtly ‘religious’ rituals was in decline. Regular attendance at synagogue (beyond the high holidays) became less common, and younger Jews in urban settings were less likely to observe the full range of Jewish dietary regulations or the strict ban on work on the Sabbath. By the turn of the century, barely half of German synagogues maintained a mikvah, or ritual bath. Although the labels of ‘Reform’ and ‘Orthodox’ were somewhat fluid, the former tendency clearly had the upper hand. By one estimate, only 15 per cent of German Jews could be considered Orthodox by the early twentieth century.24 But, similar to selectively observant German Protestants, liberal Jews could remain quite devoted to family traditions surrounding rites of passage (for example, bar mitzvah) or the festive meals of the high holidays. And new forms of associational life combined maintenance of local communities with assistance to Jews worldwide, such as those struck by natural disasters or targeted in the Russian pogroms of 1881 or 1903. A theme common to changes in religious practices across all three of Germany’s main religious communities was the ‘feminization of piety’. Religious institutions remained, to be sure, structurally patriarchal. Only men became priests, pastors or rabbis, let alone bishops or popes, and religious teachings on sexuality and the normative roles of men and women were, even in relatively liberal strands of religious discourse, quite restrictive. But with growing attention to the question of who was engaging in everyday religious practices and how intensively, it was becoming clear that women were disproportionately active in attending worship services, receiving communion, joining parish-based associations and

23 Anthony J. Steinhoff, ‘Religious Community and the Modern City’, in Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher (eds), Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft: Transcendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 115–43. 24 Kaplan, ‘Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany’, p. 9.

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doing volunteer work. This was certainly not entirely new, but the division of religious labour between men and women was undoubtedly shifting toward the latter. One striking example was the growth in female religious vocations: the number of Roman Catholic nuns in Germany grew from just under 8,000 in 1866 to nearly 50,000 in 1908, far outstripping growth in male religious orders or overall population growth.25 Parallel to this growing role of women in religious practice was a feminization of religious imagery, especially in Roman Catholicism. The Virgin Mary, long an important devotional figure in Christianity, became more closely associated than ever with ultramontane Catholicism and a general standardization of Catholic piety. A more diverse (and more male) array of local saints continued to attract veneration, of course, but as the miraculous apparitions of theera demonstrated, Mary’s was increasingly the ‘default’ face of divine intervention in the world. Images of Jesus also remained central to Catholic devotion, but the growing popularity of portrayals of the ‘Sacred Heart’, showing Jesus in a soft, vulnerable, almost maternal pose, only seemed to reinforce the perception of religious images of the time as privileging a feminine sensibility. Both forms of ‘feminization’ – of practice and of imagery – were often framed at the time and in subsequent scholarship in essentially negative terms, as evidence of a broader ‘crisis’ of religiosity among men and thus a harbinger of longer-term secularization. But while the association of feminization with decline was a genuine and important aspect of contemporary discourse, endowing much of the anti-religious (and especially anti- Catholic) rhetoric of the time with disturbingly misogynistic overtones,26 some scholars have suggested that Catholic leaders at least partially embraced the church’s association with femininity, defiantly critiquing more masculine and aggressive approaches as destructive and conducive to an unhealthy, distorted understanding of the German nation.27 Even if the (overwhelmingly male) representatives of religious communities were not always ready to make this case explicitly, there was no doubt a more diffuse understanding by the early twentieth century that the disproportionate piety of women, along with the broader appeal of feminine religious imagery, could represent a source of strength, as well as a sign of crisis.

Conclusion: A Religious Sonderweg for Imperial Germany?

Although historians have understandably grown weary of, and largely abandoned, narrowly framed debates about a German ‘special path’ leading to the catastrophes of the Third Reich, the question of a Sonderweg, more loosely and broadly defined, remains a salutary, indeed unavoidable, component of historical analysis. Rather than being symptomatic of a teleological fixation on the ‘road to Auschwitz’, this understanding of theS onderweg involves a simple but essential sensitivity to issues of comparison: to what extent were developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany similar to, and to what extent were they different from, developments elsewhere in Europe or in the rest of the world?28

25 Smith, German Nationalism, p. 94. 26 In addition to Gross, The War Against Catholicism, see Roisin Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston and Leiden, 2003). 27 Rebecca Ayako Bennette,Fighting for the Soul of Germany: Catholics and Their Struggle for Inclusion in the German Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2012). 28 These concluding observations owe a great deal to George Williamson’s thoughtful analysis in ‘A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany’, Church History, 75 (2006), pp. 139–56.

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The ongoing importance of religion in the social, cultural and political life of Imperial Germany was certainly nothing exceptional. The critique of extreme forms of the secularization thesis that is implicit (and sometimes explicit) in recent work on religion in Germany echoes a broader scepticism evident in recent work by sociologists and other social scientists, as well as historians.29 Catholicism in Imperial Germany, with its consistently high levels of devotional activity and well-developed associational system, perhaps bucked the ostensible norm of secularization as spectacularly as any example of the era. Largely due, it would seem, to the unique pressures that German Catholics faced as an embattled minority, they achieved a higher degree of mobilization than Catholics almost anywhere else in Europe and became something of a European-wide model, analogous to the role that German Social Democracy played on the European left. German Protestantism, by contrast, served as something of a cautionary tale in terms of the low rates of formal religious practice in many areas, though its vigour in other respects – such as theological innovation, charitable activities and a more diffuse impact on national culture – were certainly admired by Protestants abroad.30 The legacy of confessional division, of a centuries-long rivalry between Protestants and Catholics, has arguably been both the most prominent theme in recent historiography on religion in Imperial Germany and the element that looms as most unique to Germany. Among the larger countries of Europe, Germany’s roughly even confessional divide does, indeed, stand out: France, Italy and Spain have been divided into pro- and anticlerical camps but have populations that are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic by affiliation, while Great Britain and Russia have similarly decisive religious majorities, Protestant and Orthodox respectively. It is worth remembering, though, that other small to mid-sized countries such as the Netherlands, and Hungary have, like Germany, also had religiously divided populations since the Reformation, including large proportions of both Catholics and Protestants. Such confessional divides have no doubt been of central importance in the modern history of each country, but were the legacies necessarily negative? The formation of a minority Catholic milieu and the establishment of confessionally driven voting patterns in Imperial Germany seemed, to be sure, to signal a hardening of religious boundaries, a ‘second confessional age’ that could hardly bode well for national integration. But in Germany, as in the other confessionally divided societies of Central Europe, the development of nineteenth- century religious subcultures also laid the groundwork for pluralistic compromise, for forms of ‘living together’ as well as forms of ‘living apart’. As Margaret Anderson has emphasized, ‘the most important fact about the culture wars of the nineteenth century, even in Germany where they were fiercest, is that they weren’t wars’.31 Rather than a new era of religious conflict, the confessional mobilizations of the late nineteenth century seemed compatible with, perhaps even conducive toward, Protestant–Catholic rapprochement by the mid- twentieth century. But if the legacy of confessional rivalry in Germany was ultimately less dire than a witness to the Kulturkampf might have feared, the potential for violent exclusion of Jews from the German nation was greater than most late nineteenth-century observers could have imagined. Helmut Walser Smith has suggested that there were subtle but crucial differences

29 One of the earliest and most convincing arguments for the power of religion in the modern world was Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994). 30 For an interesting comparison of religious life in Berlin compared to other metropolises, see Hugh McLeod, Poverty and Piety: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914 (New York and London, 1996). 31 Margaret L. Anderson, ‘After Word: Living Apart and Together in Germany’, in Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews, p. 326.

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in the terms of different religious communities’ participation in the construction of national memories: Catholics and Protestants were given space to cultivate divergent memories (for example, of the Thirty Years War) within the context of a shared national belonging; Jews, by contrast, were required to suppress memories of past catastrophic violence.32 The question of whether and when religious difference impedes the creation of a shared civic life, and whether and when such a shared civic life is threatened by the fear of such differences, will no doubt continue to generate debate among historians of Germany, as well as among commentators on contemporary societies.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Allen, Ann Taylor. ‘Religion and Gender in Modern German History: A Historiographical Perspective’, in Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert (eds), Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography (New York, 2007), pp. 190–207. Altgeld, Wolfgang. Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz, 1992). Anderson, Margaret L. Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford, 1981). —. ‘Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism’, Journal of Modern History, 63 (1991), pp. 681–716. —. ‘Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany’, The American Historical Review, 98 (1993), pp. 1448–74. —. ‘The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth- Century Germany’, The Historical Journal 38 (1995), pp. 647–70. —. Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). — and Barkin, Kenneth. ‘The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf’, Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), pp. 647–86. Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Münster. ‘Konfession und Cleavages in 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Erklärungsmodell zur regionalen Entstehung des katholischen Milieus in Deutschland’, Historische Zeitschrift, 120 (2000), pp. 358–95. Bennette, Rebecca Ayako. Fighting for the Soul of Germany: Catholics and Their Struggle for Inclusion in the German Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2012). Bjork, James E. Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008). Blackbourn, David. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1994). Blaschke, Olaf. Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen, 1997). —. ‘Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000), pp. 38–75. — and Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael (eds). Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus, Mentalitäten, Krisen (Gutersloh, 1996). Busch, Norbert. Katholische Frömmigkeit und Moderne: die Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte des Herz-Jesu-Kultes in Deutschland zwischen Kulturkampf und Erstem Weltkrieg (Gütersloh, 1997).

32 Helmut Walser Smith, ‘On Catastrophic Religious Violence and National Belonging’, in idem, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 74–114.

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Casanova, Jose. Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994). Clark, Christopher M. The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford, 1995). — and Kaiser, Wolfram (eds). Culture War: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth Century Europe (New York, 2003). Evans, Ellen. The German Center Party, 1870–1933: A Study in Political Catholicism (Carbondale, 1981). Geyer, Michael and Hölscher, Lucian (eds). Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft: Transcendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland (Göttingen, 2006). Gross, Michael. The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004). Hastings, Derek K. ‘Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany’, European History Quarterly, 38 (2008), pp. 34–65. Healy, Róisín. The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Boston and Leiden, 2003). Heilbronner, Oded. ‘From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholic Society in Recent Historiography’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), pp. 453–95. Heitzer, Horstwalter. Der Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland im Kaiserreich 1890–1918 (Mainz, 1979). Hübinger, Gangolf. Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen, 1994). Kaplan, Marion. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford, 1991). —. ‘Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany’, Central European History, 34 (2001), pp. 474–501. —. ‘Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany: Practices, Mentalities and Community’, Jewish Social Studies, 9 (2002), pp. 1–33. Lehmann, Hartmut (ed.) Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen, 1997). Lepsius, M. Rainer. ‘Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft’, in W. Abel (ed.), Wirtschaft, Geschichte, und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift Friedrich Lütge (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 371–93. Liedhegener, Antonius. Christentum und Urbanisierung: Katholiken und Protestanten in Münster und Bochum, 1880–1933 (Paderborn, 1996). Loth, Wilfried. Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984). —. ‘Soziale Bewegungen im Katholizismus des Kaiserreichs’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 17 (1991), pp. 279–310. — (ed). Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne (Stuttgart, 1991). McLeod, Hugh. ‘Weibliche Frömmigkeit – männlicher Unglaube? Religion und Kirchen im bürgerlichen 19. Jahrhundert’, in Ute Frevert (ed.), Bürgerinnen und Bürger. Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988), pp. 134–56. —. Poverty and Piety: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914 (New York and London, 1996). —. Secularisation in Western Europe (Basingstoke, 2000). Mergel, Thomas. Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland, 1794– 1914 (Göttingen, 1994). —.‘Ultramontanism, Liberalism, Moderation: Political Mentalities and Political Behavior of the German Catholic Bürgertum, 1848–1914’, Central European History, 29 (1996), pp. 151–74.

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Nipperdey, Thomas. Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918 (Munich, 1988). Olenhusen, Irmtraud Götz von. Klerus und abweichendes Verhalten. Zur Sozialgeschichte katholischer Priester im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Erzdiözese Freiburg (Göttingen, 1994). —. Frauen unter dem Patriarchat der Kirchen: Katholikinnen und Protestantinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1995). Rahden, Till van. ‘Mingling, Marrying, and Distancing: Jewish Integration in Wilhelmian Breslau and Its Erosion in Early Weimar Germany’, in Wolfgang Benz, Arnold Paucker and Peter Pulzer (eds), Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik – Jews in Weimar Germany (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 197–222. —. Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison, 2008). Ross, Ronald. Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany (South Bend, 1976). Smith, Helmut Walser. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics 1870–1914 (Princeton, 1995). —. The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York and London, 2002). —. The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008). — (ed). Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany 1800–1914 (Oxford, 2001). Sperber, Jonathan. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 1984). —. ‘Kirchengeschichte or the Social and Cultural History of Religion’, Neue Politische Literatur, 43 (1998), pp. 13–35. Steinhoff, Anthony J. ‘Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter? Nachdenken über die Religion im langen 19. Jahrhundert’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 30 (2004), pp. 549–70. —. ‘A Feminized Church? The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in Alsace-Lorraine’s Protestant Churches, 1907–1914’, Central European History, 38 (2005), pp. 218–49. —. The Gods of the City: Protestantism and Religious Culture in Strasbourg, 1870–1914 (Leiden and Boston, 2008). Sun, Raymond. Before the Enemy Is Within Our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885–1912: A Social, Cultural, and Political History (Boston, 1999). Williamson, George. ‘A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany’, Church History, 75 (2006), pp. 139–56. Yonke, Eric. ‘The Problem of the Middle Class in German Catholic History: The Nineteenth Century Rhineland Revisited’, Catholic Historical Review, 88 (2002), pp. 263–80. Zalar, Jeffrey T. ‘“Knowledge is Power”: The Borromäusverein and Catholic Reading Habits in Imperial Germany’, The Catholic Historical Review, 86 (2000), pp. 20–46.

260 15 class

Dennis sweeney

class, as both a category of social analysis and a collective identity, was central to economic, cultural, and political developments in Imperial Germany. It figured in public debates about the economic situation, occupational status, and political identities and orientations of numerous groups, and became the key analytical category for the new discipline of sociology during this period of explosive capitalist industrialization. Class defined the largest socialist party in the world, the social Democratic party of germany (spD), which explicitly claimed to speak in the name of the working class; the movements of the Mittelstand (lower middle class), both the “old” middle class of artisans and retailers and the “new” middle class of white-collar workers and lower-level civil servants; and the appeals of nearly all of the right-wing political parties, including the catholic center party, the left-liberal parties, the national liberal party, and the free conservative party, whose sociology centered mainly on the Bürgertum, or middle class. indeed, the dominant political cleavage of the wilhelmine era was rooted in class antagonism: the rise of occupational interest groups and the expansion of mass politics propelled by the SPD produced after 1900 a determined effort to forge a political alliance of “bourgeois” concentration against the proletarian “threat”: a conflict that intensified and shifted in favor of the working-class socialist parties during the final stages of the First World War and ended with the collapse of the imperial government in 1918. for these reasons, historians have long been drawn to the study of class, including explicit attempts to theorize processes of class formation, in order to answer important questions about the course of modern german history: for instance, how do we account for the authoritarian nature of the imperial german government; the turn to imperialism and radical nationalism in the 1880s and 1890s; the decision to go to war in 1914; the collapse of the monarchy in 1918; or the post-war origins of german fascism? By the early 1980s, the most convincing answers to these questions were provided by two important interpretations of politics in the Kaiserreich centering on the relationship between class and politics. The first interpretation rested on the social-science version of the Sonderweg or “special path” thesis, which identified the origins of Nazism in the divergence of german social and political development from what were deemed the healthy trajectories of the “west” during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. leading exponents of this thesis, especially hans-Ulrich wehler, traced this divergence in part to the nature of class dynamics in the Kaiserreich: namely, the distinctive capacity of the german nobility, especially the east elbian Junkers, as a “pre-industrial” landowning class to maintain its hold on key positions of state power and to frustrate the establishment of a liberal parliamentary system compatible with “modernization”; the failure of the german bourgeoisie to push for the latter and for a system of “modern” industrial relations based on compromise and partnership between capital and labor; and the long-standing “politics of rallying” (Sammlungspolitik), forged in the 1870s under Bismarck and realized in a political “cartel” comprising the national liberal party, the german conservative party, and the free conservative party, which sustained a ruling class alliance of conservative industrialists and THE ASHGatE RESEarCH COMPaNION tO IMPErIaL GErMaNY

East Elbian landowners to the end of the Kaiserreich and beyond.1 The success of this right- wing alliance rested, Wehler and others argued, on its capacity to bring segments of the remaining bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie under its control by means of manipulative and compensatory strategies of domination (that is to say, nationalism and imperialism) aimed at halting the forces of emancipation, liberalism, and democracy.2 In a critique of this perspective, Geoff Eley offered the second major interpretation of the relationship between class and politics in the Kaiserreich.3 He examined the “changing structural conditions of political life” and pointed to the “novel expansion of the national ‘public sphere’” after 1890, when not only workers under the aegis of the trade unions and SPD, but also peasants, artisans, retailers, white-collar workers, and lower level civil servants formed their own interest organizations and pressure groups. This “mobilization of the subordinate classes,” according to Eley, challenged the narrow social and institutional bases of “notable politics” and the ruling “power bloc,” revealing the collapse of its “hegemonic capacity” and requiring it to “devise new ways of winning popular support.”4 In a careful analysis of the new nationalist pressure groups, Eley argued that the incorporation of key sections of the subordinate classes, especially artisans and retailers, into the main councils of the German right after 1909 actually transformed its general contours: from a state- supporting and elite cartel to an unruly “anti-democratic populist offensive,” which placed itself in opposition to the government and was “organized around the radical-nationalist counter-utopia” of a classless, ethnically unified, and hierarchically organized Volk or people.5 In contrast to Wehler, who emphasized the authoritarian stasis and blockages of the Imperial German political system, Eley pointed to its considerable flexibility, as well as its undercurrents of class volatility and ominous new ideological departures. Despite the power of these interpretations, analysis of this kind has largely receded from the historiographical agenda during the last 15 years. To be sure, recent collected works, short histories, and handbooks often refer to the Kaiserreich as a “class society,” and interest in the German Bürgertum and nobility as socio-cultural “formations” has exploded during the past 20 years. But in these accounts, class has been replaced by the term “formation” or “layer” (Schicht) and become primarily a descriptive term designating wealth and income inequality or differences in occupation, culture, and identity, rather than an analytical category embedded in a wider theoretical framework that might allow us to explain or interpret key developments in society and politics during the Kaiserreich. The waning of interest in class analysis and class theory can be traced to several political-ideological and scholarly developments since the 1980s: neo-liberal skepticism toward efforts to address structural economic and social inequalities or even to acknowledge their existence; the weakening influence and collapse of class-oriented trade unions and political parties of the left across Europe and North America; the emergence of the “new social movements,” which operate outside the languages of class and favor other forms of identity and politics; the scholarly embrace of new historical themes and topics related to the latter, including nationalism and identity, religion, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, popular culture, and so on, which are treated without class accents or as unrelated to class dynamics; and the methodological-epistemological critique now referred to generally as the “cultural turn” in

1 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, 1985). 2 Ibid.; and Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbände in der Spätphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Cologne, 1970). 3 Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (New Haven and London, 1980), p. 14. 4 Ibid. pp. 356, 354. 5 Ibid, p. 358.

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the discipline of history. The latter challenged a prevailing “model of social determination,” which insisted that culture and politics were the distilled outcomes of underlying material- economic structures, relations, and practices, and turned instead to the analysis of cultural or signifying systems—language, discourses, symbols, texts, or representations—and their role in the production of material-social life.6 Initially part of efforts to prompt more careful discussion of the relationship between the material-economic and cultural-political dimensions of class, the cultural turn has been followed by a general abandonment of class analysis in historical studies. In this chapter, I explore the contributions of recent research on class and suggest ways to think anew about class and class relations, their generative contexts, and their consequences for social and political life in Imperial Germany. I do so by assessing the important recent studies of German workers and the working class, which for a number of reasons have attracted the least amount of interest from historians during the last ten years; key works of scholarship on the German middle class or Bürgertum; and major new research on a social group once thought to be the secret to the “pathologies” of modern German history but rarely thoroughly investigated: the nobility. My overall aims will be to situate these studies in the wake of what became after 1990 a post-social, anti-Marxist “cultural turn” in historical writing related to class; examine what I think are their strengths and weaknesses; and propose a cultural-historical way of approaching the study of classes that might allow us to pose new questions about social and political life in the Kaiserreich.

German Workers and the Working Class

The earliest, explicitly theoretical recent work on class in Imperial Germany came from historians writing about German workers and working-class formation, not least because class was central to the self-understanding of organized workers in the Kaiserreich. During the 1970s and 1980s, social historians explored a wide range of material or structural conditions, including the growth of waged work, divisions of labor and skill, production regimes, labor relations, occupational structures, family organization, residential patterns, community life, and labor organizations, which helped to forge a working class in Imperial Germany. Nearly all of these studies were predicated on the assumption that a working class emerged from these conditions, which predisposed German workers to class-oriented forms of politics. By the late 1970s, the most influential approach bearing this assumption came from exponents of Weberian-oriented social-science history, especially Jürgen Kocka, who identified four inter-related “dimensions” or ascending “levels” of working-class formation: an economic dimension defined by the “emergence of labor markets and the restructuring of the production system”; a social dimension arising from the wage contract, which placed wage earners and their families in a “common class position” in contrast to the class position of employers; a cultural dimension encompassing “common experiences and dispositions” that gave rise to an awareness among workers of belonging to a class; and a political dimension manifested in collective action, trade union activity, and organized politics.7 The impressive series on “The History of Workers and the Labour Movement in Germany since the Eighteenth Century,” which included Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus

6 Geoff Eley,A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005), p. 11. 7 Jürgen Kocka, “Problems of Working-Class Formation in Germany: The Early Years, 1800– 1875,” in Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (eds), Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986), pp. 281–3.

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Tenfelde’s volume entitled Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871 bis 1914, exemplifies this perspective on working-class formation in Imperial Germany.8 By the 1990s, however, cultural historians had subjected this way of understanding working-class formation to sustained critical scrutiny for its tendency to assume ontological, rather than analytical, distinctions between different “levels” of social reality, and to suggest that economic conditions in the sphere of production entail or successively predispose in linear progression from level one to level four: wage earners to certain kinds of (class) identities and (socialist) politics. This critique emerged from three broad, overlapping currents, all of which now fall within the broad category of cultural history: women’s and feminist history; the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte); and the “linguistic” or “cultural turn.” The result has been a series of shifts in the way historians approach the study of German workers and class relations in Imperial Germany. Feminist historians have demonstrated the ways in which previous social and “social- science” histories of labor and the labor movement were centered on an “ideal type” of worker—the urban, industrial, and male wage earner or proletarian—and obscured the role of women in the making of the German working class. The most influential historian in this regard is Kathleen Canning, whose path-breaking studies of the discourses or languages of labor in the textile industry of the Rhineland and Westphalia show how all four levels of the social-science approach to working-class formation were structured in sexual difference. In relation to levels one and two, Canning examines the discourses about textile work during and after the transition from home or small workshop to factory production and demonstrates that work tasks, notions of skill, wages, the organization of work, the separation of home and work, and labor markets, were all shaped by a set of masculine assumptions and norms. The latter assigned men to higher skilled work and managerial positions within the factory, and identified the male worker as a “breadwinner” with a long-term commitment to the job; the female worker was designated a “supplementary” earner, whose work was interrupted by family responsibilities and who focused her efforts on the home. In relation to levels three and four, which pertain to work identities and class consciousness, Canning demonstrates that women textile workers developed a strong sense of their own occupational ethos (Berufsethos), and even established long-term commitments to their factory jobs despite the double burden of waged and household work. It is not surprising, therefore, that women textile workers articulated an often militant sense of class solidarity, which put them at the forefront of numerous wildcat and union-supported strikes in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the two decades before 1914. In these strikes women often asserted their own set of interests, pertaining to wages but also to shift hours allowing housework to be done, sexual assaults by foremen, and protections for pregnant women. Moreover, they often became active within the Social Democratic German Textile Workers’ Union, where they demanded the right to hold meetings separate from men, pushed for their own supplement to the union newspaper, and repeatedly called on the leadership to increase the number of women in the “higher echelons of the union administration.”9 In all of these ways, Canning argues, women both “resisted and transformed the ideology of class” by inserting their distinctive demands and identities into what became a newly hybridized working-class unity over time. From this perspective, the German working class during the imperial era was forged in discourse and through contests over the meanings of class between men and women, and class formation

8 Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn, 1992). 9 Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca, 1996), p. 317.

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as a process should be understood historically “as a series of makings and re-makings” marked by “short-lived resolutions, new destabilizations, and redefinitions in which gender both shapes and contests class.”10 The second important current of critique emerged out of Alltagsgeschichte, a cultural- anthropological approach that focuses on the experiences of “ordinary people” in their local settings and criticized the social-science emphases on “objective” social processes, large-scale structures, and impersonal society-wide determinations in class formation.11 Practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte have drawn our attention instead to the diverse “informal structures” of work life, the complexities of neighborhood and community, the divisions and commonalities among various populations of wage earners, and the multiple forms of individualized “everyday insubordination” and self-assertion, or what Alf Lüdtke calls Eigen-Sinn, all of which called the structural givenness of the working class in the sphere of production into question. Thomas Lindenberger demonstrates the fruitfulness of this broad-ranging critique for generating new understandings of working-class formation in his important study of the altercations between ordinary Berliners and police officers from 1900 to 1914. He does so by charting the sociology, geography, and modalities of “street politics,” defined as the bodily, extra-procedural, and “collective articulation and defense of interests against legally sanctioned authority,” in the imperial capital.12 Lindenberger canvasses, quantifies, and classifies an extraordinarily diverse range of encounters but divides them into three general kinds of street politics: the “low-level warfare (Kleinkrieg) between the police and the public,” which included protests against evictions, attacks against publicans or property owners, acts of “popular justice,” and collective resistance to the ever-widening control of the police; “strike excesses” occasioned by labor conflicts and official support of employers; and organized demonstrations, especially the SPD-led marches against the restricted Prussian franchise from 1906 to 1910. In this way, he is able to explore the relationship between long- standing forms of plebeian protest and the emergence of distinctively class forms of street politics during this period as the SPD began to organize the protests and appeal to wage earners and their families as members of the working class, and as the police intervened on behalf of employers and violently suppressed working-class dissent: a process superbly illustrated in his account of the Moabit “disturbances” of September 1910. By taking an everyday life approach to the study of politics, Lindenberger is able to demonstrate the importance of the street as a “location of class action” and, with the help of E.P. Thompson’s insights, to identify the relational and historical dimensions of class making: its contingent, not simply structural, formation in the context of political antagonism. This effort to complicate our understandings of the German working class by taking analysis beyond the workplace and into the streets has been most systematically pursued by practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte working on women and gender, who have drawn our attention to the importance of consumption as a crucial arena of class politics. In an earlier study of “working-class women” during the First World War, which examined the consequences of increasing state intervention into family life in relation to work, social assistance, food, and propaganda, Ute Daniel identified the pre-eminent role of women in the development of anti-war protest. She showed that primarily working-class women, as

10 Kathleen Canning, “Gender and the Politics of Class Formation,” American Historical Review, 97 (1992), p. 768. 11 Alf Lüdtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995). 12 Thomas Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik. Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 bis 1914 (Bonn, 1995), p. 70.

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industrial workers and housewives, participated in the formation of a “counter-public,” by gathering “in queues in front of stores and government offices, the notice boards where army reports were publicly posted, and train compartments,” which escaped state and other organized efforts, including those of the SPD and trade unions, to control the “meaning-endowment” of the war.13 This counter-public, Daniel suggested, came together as women directly linked struggles in the workplace with the battle over everyday items of consumption, especially as it related to the perceived unjust distribution of food. If Daniel complicated her analysis of class with an insistence on the moments when gender displaced class in women’s wartime experiences, she also opened up an important new perspective on working-class formation by pointing to the class action and consciousness—recognized by both protesters and state officials—that evolved out of the wartime street protests over food and food allocation and its role in undermining the legitimacy of the German state. This line of analysis was picked up by Belinda Davis, whose study of “women of lesser means” and street politics in Berlin offers a richly textured and empirically convincing account of working-class women’s agency in shaping processes of “political decision making” during the war.14 Davis explores women’s everyday struggles over food—bread, potatoes, butter, meat, and so on—and the rationing system, and maps out the circuits of communication, extending from women in marketplaces, at shops, and local government offices to the police, the press, military officials, and government ministers, who carefully monitored the mood of women shoppers and realigned food allocation policy in accordance with shifting popular attitudes. In this way, a wide-ranging debate over the equalization of wartime sacrifice, the nature of state intervention, and the organization of social provision took place which revealed the salience of class to the politics of food. Davis notes the clear distinctions in these discussions and the organization of welfare (for example, public kitchens) between the working class, the Mittelstand, and the middle class proper, but also notes a shift over time: the increasing impoverishment of larger sectors of the population and the use of the term “women of lesser means” allowed a gradual convergence of discontent across the “productionist boundaries” dividing the working class from the Mittelstand and helped to create a “new class,” or, we might say, a new class coalition.15 This contributed to the widespread discontent of 1917 and 1918, when especially working-class women facilitated the merger of food protests with industrial strikes in the explosion of anti-war sentiment, and played an important role in the street demonstrations and left-revolutionary activity—especially within the Independent Social Democratic Party—that swept away the monarchy in November 1918. The third major current of critique aimed at previous social-historical approaches to the study of the working class comes from the linguistic or cultural turn in labor history, which grew skeptical of approaches that assumed that class inhered in the economic structures associated with capitalism and insisted instead on exploring the ways that “class emerged historically as a set of discursive claims about the social world seeking to reorder the latter in terms of itself.”16 The first major study to take seriously the role of language inthe construction of the working class was Kathleen Canning, whose research on textile workers in the Rhineland and Westphalia emphasizes the public debates over female factory labor—

13 Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford and New York, 1997), pp. 241–2. 14 Belinda Davis, Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War One Berlin (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), p. 5. 15 Ibid., p. 57. 16 Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor, 2007), p. 19.

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in social reform circles, among the political parties, and in the Reichstag—but also trade union and shop-floor debates in the shaping of both middle- and working-class identities. In particular, Canning stresses the role of public debates over morality, hygiene, and domesticity in relation to women’s work outside the home and their translation into social and labor legislation and institutional practices, which in part “demarcated the boundaries of the working class.”17 The second major study inspired by this new interest in language or discourse is Thomas Welskopp’s monumental treatise on the early history of German Social Democracy. Not strictly speaking concerned with the imperial era, Welskopp nevertheless offers a model for understanding the shifting meanings of “working class” as a category of political identity and analysis. He demonstrates that German Social Democracy, like early French socialism and British Chartism, was a “people’s movement of small producers” (small craftsmen and journeymen), forged in a dense network of associational life and committed to a political solution to their economic plight. Welskopp argues that early socialists deployed the category of “working class” in democratic and expansive ways during the 1860s and 1870s, mainly to refer to the “totality of producers.” After the 1870s, when formally political conflicts over rights and constitutional order were uncoupled from economic and social conflicts, the term “working class” came to define a narrower, more exclusive “social class” of wage earners.18 One of the many virtues of Welskopp’s study is the way he demonstrates these changes as they take place within the debates of the movement and thus treats socialist discourse as a form of social practice. Finally, my own study of social change in the industrial Saar region from the 1870s to 1914 similarly treats discourses or ideologies of workplace organization in the mining, steel, and glass-making industries as social practices, rather than as merely thought or texts. It traces the emergence of social reform and then socialist and Christian labor movements, their challenges to company paternalism by means of competing class languages after 1900, and the response of employers in the form of a new discourse of industrial corporatism. This class struggle within language took place simultaneously in the everyday encounters between labor organizers and employers and their representatives.19 Aside from these few studies, however, cultural historians interested in language or discourse—and historians in general—have largely abandoned the study of the German workers and the working class. During the last 20 years, we have benefited from some new research on the relationship between the working class and consumption, which has mostly followed in the wake of women’s and social history. In this regard, the studies of Michael Prinz and Brett Fairbairn on workers’ consumer cooperatives as the “third pillar” ofthe Social Democratic movement demonstrate that the sphere of consumption was also a site of working-class formation and a field of class conflict during the Kaiserreich, for the workers’ cooperatives encountered resistance from liberal and Catholic federations and the Mittelstand movement of artisans and retailers, who objected to the competition posed by cooperatives and successfully lobbied the government to limit their scope and activity.20 Klaus Tenfelde and other scholars have examined “class-specific patterns of consumption” during theKaiserreich

17 Canning, Languages of Labor, p. 127. 18 Thomas Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz (Bonn, 2000), esp. pp. 642–5. 19 Dennis Sweeney, Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor, 2009). 20 Michael Prinz, Brot und Dividende. Konsumvereine in Deutschland und England vor 1914 (Göttingen, 1996); and Brett Fairbairn, “The Rise and Fall of Consumer Cooperation in Germany,” in Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda (eds), Consumers Against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 (Lanham, MD, 1999), pp. 267–302.

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and reveal the distinctive everyday rhythms (meal times and dining practices), spatial dimensions (kitchen-centered apartments), consumption patterns (clothing and alcohol preferences), and gendered social arrangements (women as workers and income managers) that defined the working-class household in contrast to the household of the bourgeoisie, with its home-centered meals, shorter workdays (six hours), spatial disaggregation (kitchen and bedrooms removed to a “private sphere”), and “representational” activity (visits, soirees, and so on) involving extended family, friends, and business associates.21 In addition to these studies, Jürgen Schmidt and others have explored the “relationships” (Beziehungen) between workers (Arbeiterschaft) and the middle classes (Bürgertum) in Imperial Germany. Schmidt’s study of Erfurt, which draws on Weberian definitions of class and M. Rainer Lepsius’ concept of “milieu,” examines the working class and middle classes across several domains of social life (family life, workplace, political activity) and in relation to each other to demonstrate the centrality of class as a lived reality, a social and political identity, and a central factor in the political life of Erfurt.22 Finally, some scholars continue to write about German industrial workers and labor movements, often from a milieu-based perspective in the mode of previous models of materialist social history, in ways that focus on workers’ trade unions and political organizations, but without reference to class as an analytical category or class analysis.23 If recent work on society, culture, and politics in the Kaiserreich does address workers or the SPD, however, it usually does so by minimizing the importance of class and class analysis—a trend illustrated by Leighton S. James’ comparative study of miners in South Wales and the Ruhr, which attributes differences between the politics of these two regions primarily to religion, ethnicity, and political doctrine, rather than class or the balance of class forces in each region.24 The declining salience of class and the general neglect of workers and the working class in most recent scholarship appears to be a product of methodological and theoretical choices and of a diminishing interest in the study of wage earners as historical actors among historians during the past decade.

The Bürgertum or Middle Classes

If the study of German workers, the working class, or the “little people” has declined precipitously, interest in the German Bürgertum, or middle classes, has exploded since the mid-1990s. This interest was prompted by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley’s successful critique of the prevailing social-science version of the Sonderweg thesis, which traced the origins of Nazism partly to the failure of the German bourgeoisie to secure cultural and political hegemony and a liberal parliamentary order in the nineteenth century. It opted instead, according to the thesis, to embrace the “feudal” values and politics of the “pre- capitalist” and backward-looking aristocrats, especially the East Elbian Junkers, and assisted

21 Klaus Tenfelde, “Klassenspezifische Konsummuster im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” in idem, Arbeiter, Bürger, Städte. Zur Sozialgeschicthe des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 93–110 (originally published in 1997). 22 Jürgen Schmidt, Begrenzte Spielräume. Eine Beziehungsgeschichte von Arbeiterschaft und Bürgertum am Beispiel Erfurts 1870–1914 (Göttingen, 2005). 23 See especially Georg Goes, Arbeitermilieus in der Provinz. Geschichte der Glas- und Porzellanarbeiter im 20. Jahrhundert (Essen, 2001). 24 Leighton S. James, The Politics of Identity and Civil Society in Britain and Germany: Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales 1890–1926 (Manchester, 2008).

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the latter in blocking the forces of “modernity.”25 In addition to debunking the teleology, unsustainable comparisons, and “class-reductionism” of this (liberal) modernization paradigm, Blackbourn and Eley insisted on the social and political strengths and accomplishments of the German bourgeoisie during the imperial era: its role in the creation of a nation-state with central institutions, the institutional and legal foundations of a capitalist economic system, the development of social reform and social policy, rationalized municipal administration, and the flourishing of local civic activity and associational life, which enabled the formation of a vigorous public sphere.26 In response, historians in West Germany established two important scholarly initiatives: a special research project on the “Social History of the Modern Bourgeoisie” at the University of Bielefeld; and a smaller project at the University of Frankfurt on the “City and the Bürgertum in the Transition from Traditional to Modern Society.”27 If the latter has produced mostly studies of the legal, economic, and institutional foundations of the Bürgertum during the first half of the nineteenth century from a social-historical perspective, the Bielefeld project has taken the cultural turn, drawing on models of class or “social group” formation derived mainly from the work of Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. The overall findings of both projects have confirmed the arguments of Blackbourn and Eley by rejecting the once- dominant “feudalization” thesis and portraying the German Bürgertum as a pre-eminent social class or “formation,” which was forged in distinctive forms of sociability and political organization, expressed through specifically bourgeois ideals, norms, and cultural practices, and confronted by a “crisis” only during the transition to mass politics and mass culture in the late imperial period and beyond. Much of the new research locates the formation of the Bürgertum partly in processes of what Weber called “sociation” (Vergesellschaftung) taking place mainly in the locality or city, which is deemed the primary field of its political activity during the Kaiserreich. Understood as the middle strata representing property and education (Besitz und Bildung), which included the “economic bourgeoisie” (industrialists and bankers), the “educated bourgeoisie” (civil servants, lawyers, doctors, professors/teachers, journalists, and so on), and the “petty bourgeoisie” (shopkeepers, artisans, white-collar workers), the Bürgertum of the late nineteenth century evolved out of the ranks of the former Bürgerschaft, a category of town dwellers defined by legal rights to property ownership and public office well into the early nineteenth century. Most recent studies suggest, however, that the pre-eminence of an early-modern “patriciate” as well as artisans and small traders in city affairs gave way to the leadership of industrialists, merchants, bankers, and educated civil servants and professionals in local public life during the Kaiserreich.28 This shift, which Lothar Gall described in terms of a transition from “bourgeois civil society” to “bourgeois class society,” relegated small retailers and artisans to the status of what Jürgen Schmidt calls a “peripheral bourgeoisie” (Randbürgertum) by the turn of the century.29 The associative factors contributing to the formation and reformation of the Bürgertum were many. Hans-Walter Schmuhl details the high rates of inter-marriage, familial ties, and

25 Wehler, The German Empire. 26 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984). 27 Jürgen Kocka, Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, vols 1–3 (Munich, 1988); Lothar Gall (ed.), Stadt und Bürgertum im Übergang von der traditionellen zur modernen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1993). 28 See especially Ralf Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main. Ein besonderer Weg von der ständischen zur modernen Bürgergesellschaft 1760–1914 (Munich, 1996). 29 Schmidt, Begrenzte Spielräume, p. 76.

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webs of friendship linking factions of the Bürgertum, especially the economic and educated bourgeois factions, in his study of Nuremberg and Brunswick. Studies by Manfred Hettling, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Michael Schäfer, Jürgen Schmidt, Schmuhl, and others examine the key institutions of bourgeois sociability—voluntary associations (Vereine) in the form of reading societies, masonic lodges, casinos and social clubs, occupational organizations, and cultural, educational, charitable, and reform institutions—as the dense infrastructure of bourgeois social cohesion, professional networking, and urban leadership in German cities and towns.30 Despite evidence of social distance between the “high bourgeoisie” (industrialists, merchants, bankers), on the one hand, and the educated and petty bourgeoisies (civil servants, educated professionals, small merchants, and artisans), on the other,31 most studies still indicate that these groups were held together locally in an unstable unity. This relative cohesion, which did not preclude shifts over time that progressively marginalized the Kleinbürgertum in many cities, was secured most effectively in the arena of urban self-government, where the ranks of the bourgeoisie dominated the Magistrat and municipal councils and were protected by plutocratic or “three-class” voting systems that largely excluded the working class. Most recent studies have analyzed these associative factors of middle-class formation and point to its enabling conditions in a “class location,” usually understood in Weberian terms as a structural position determined by privileged access to markets and wealth, but they privilege the role of “bourgeois culture” (Bürgerlichkeit) as the most important element in the cohesion of the German middle class. This culture is defined as some combination of “values,” norms, emotions or affects, ritual practices, and a distinctive “habitus”: Bourdieu’s term for describing the set of structured and structuring dispositions or “generative schemes” that are “implicitly and explicitly learned” and determined each individual’s lifestyle (Lebensführung) and behavior. The values and norms vary across different studies but usually relate to an emphasis on or commitment to individual achievement, independence and responsibility, freedom, education (Bildung) and the formation of selfhood, hard work, duty, rationality, orderliness, cleanliness, moral probity, and romance or love. In their effort to historicize these terms and insist on their lived—as opposed to their essential—qualities, Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann argue that this ensemble is best understood as a “firmament of values,” which allowed individual Bürger to orient themselves to them in a process of “life orientation” (Lebensführung) and “meaning endowment” (Sinnstiftung). In this process, which Hettling, Hoffmann, and their collaborators trace in relation toa range of emotions and affective attachments, bourgeois values shaped the emotional worlds of Bürger, binding the latter to each other and to social and political institutions, but also providing the resources for individual self-making.32 The most important sites for the enactment of these values in everyday ritual were the domains of the family or household, work or professional life, and civic engagement. Feminist historians were the first to note the centrality of women and familial relations to the formation of Bürgerlichkeit. As the bourgeois family took on its rigid sex-role division during the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Gunilla Budde, women became the primary agents for the articulation and transmission of Bürgerlichkeit as “cultural capital”: they taught children appropriate “table manners, forms of greeting, ways of speaking, rules of conversation, consumption practices, and fashion codes,” and they

30 See the Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of this chapter. 31 Morten Reitmayer, Bankiers im Kaiserreich. Sozialprofil und Habitus der deutschen Hochfinanz (Göttingen, 1999); and Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum. 32 Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (eds), Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel. Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2000), pp. 7–16.

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inculcated in their children the virtues—career-mindedness, an appreciation for education and hard work, diligence, orderliness, and so on—that formed the core of the bourgeois habitus.33 Moreover, the household became the location of bourgeois “self-presentation” via the re-organization of interior space and its deliberate “staging” (Rauminszenierung)— that is, kitchen and bedrooms relegated to the “private” sphere and a semi-public parlor or gute Stube, usually equipped with a piano, pictures, busts, art objects, books, decorations, and heavy drapery carefully arranged in an eclectic historicist style—and the regular rounds of highly stylized and ritualized social events, visits, soirees, and so on.34 Cultural capital acquired through formal education and professional and economic activity was also a crucial medium of bourgeois class cohesion: a process that Morten Reitmayer explores in his study of big bankers, whose desire for official decorations and titles as well as noble status emerged from their bourgeois “purposive-rational” efforts to translate cultural and symbolic capital into social and economic capital as bankers, rather than their “feudalization” as proponents of the Sonderweg thesis once argued.35 Finally, numerous studies point to the central role of civic engagement and public institutions for the enactment and staging of Bürgerlichkeit and the acquisition of cultural capital: in local charities and welfare organizations, festivals and celebrations, the sponsorship and ceremonial dedications of monuments, and the funding, founding, layout, and representational practices of museums and exhibitions. As Thomas Großbölting suggests, this kind of activity went well beyond the locality to include the celebration of industry, the “staging of the commodity and the aestheticization of objects” in national and industrial and trade exhibitions.36 This emphasis on cultural forms, and the move away from the economic dimensions of class, has been accompanied by a definition of Bürgerlichkeit as a (vague) political philosophy or model of social order, a perspective prefigured in Kocka’s early association of bourgeois culture with values such as “tolerance, capacity for conflict and compromise, skepticism toward authority, and love of freedom,” and in Lothar Gall’s notion of a “bourgeois civil society,” but reinvigorated by debates in the 1990s over the importance of “civil society” to the functioning of “democracies.”37 These shifts from Bürgertum to Bürgerlichkeit to bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which draw on the double meaning of the German term Bürger as both bourgeois and citizen, are most baldly registered by Wehler, who seeks to redefine bourgeois society as a “utopian aim” with roots in the Enlightenment. As an “outline of the future,” Wehler writes, “bourgeois society” was “understood as an association of legally-free, politically-empowered,” property-owning, and educated individuals, “who established the common weal, forged in the shape of legislation, by means of reasoned discussion in the medium of the public sphere or in the forum of parliament as a free market place of ideas.” It was to be a kind of rule based on law,

33 Gunilla-Friederike Budde, “Bürgerinnen in der Bürgergesellschaft,” in Peter Lundgreen (ed.), Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Bürgertums. Eine Bilanz des Bielefelder Sonderforschungsbereichs (1986–1997) (Göttingen, 2000), p. 258. 34 Adelheid von Saldern, “Rauminszenierungen. Bürgerliche Selbstrepräsentationen im Zeitenumbruch (1880–1930),” in Werner Plumpe and Jörg Lesczenski (eds), Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Mainz, 2009), pp. 39–58; and Steffen Raßloff, Flucht in die nationale Volksgemeinschaft. Das Erfurter Bürgertum zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Diktatur (Cologne, 2003), p. 109. 35 Reitmayer, Bankiers. 36 Thomas Großbölting, “Im Reich der Arbeit”. Die Repräsentation gesellschaftlicher Ordung in den deutschen Industrie- und Gewerbeausstellungen 1790–1914 (Munich, 2008). 37 Jürgen Kocka, “Bürgertum und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. Jahhundert. Europäische Entwicklungen und deutsche Eigenarten,” in idem, Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, pp. 26–33.

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not “monarchical-aristocratic will,” and its “optimal form of government,” according to Wehler, was the republic. From this perspective, which reprises central elements of liberal modernization theory, bourgeois society is understood as an inherently self-correcting utopia, for “it was the ideas of this utopia itself that bourgeois self-critique or arguments from outside could call upon to question those traditions and norms which could not be reconciled with the true intentions of its universal catalogue of values.”38 In his comparative study of Breslau and Basel, Hettling introduces a parallel definition of “political Bürgerlichkeit,” which he traces in the writings of bourgeois liberals, as the reasoned balancing of the relationship between “individual freedom and obligation to the general public (Allgemeinheit).” This balance or tension, according to Hettling, shifted toward an emphasis on the collective “pole” of this spectrum and came undone after 1900, when the appeal to special interests dialectically called forth a (totalitarian) emphasis on the nation or nationalism and favored “antibourgeois” political movements and parties.39 And even in his less celebratory comparative study of the middle classes in Leipzig and Edinburgh, Schäfer assesses the politics of the Bürgertum in the period of “crisis”—defined by the profound economic and political changes of “modernity”—from the 1890s to 1920s according to a model of bourgeois society defined by “state-free self- help and self-organization, voluntary social and cultural engagement, subsidiarity and individual responsibility.”40 As these latter two studies suggest, defining the core features of Bürgerlichkeit has prompted analysis of the changes associated with what most of the historians refer to as “the modern” or “modernity,” which induced this sense of crisis among the ranks of the middle classes during the late Kaiserreich. These changes included tendencies toward concentration and monopoly within the economy, which undermined the much-vaunted independence of the single “entrepreneur,” as well as increasing state intervention in the economy and social life, especially new welfare programs, which sidelined bourgeois self- help strategies and institutions. They also included the expansion of consumption, mass commercial culture, and secessionist art movements, which subverted bourgeois strategies of cultural distinction, cultural authority, and ideals of “harmony” central to (bourgeois) art.41 In the political sphere, the emergence of mass-democratic politics in the shape of the socialist labor movement and the women’s movement struck at the heart of bourgeois notions of individualized forms of political expression and polite deliberation, hierarchies of political “rationality” and representation in the public sphere, and the gendered inequalities of bourgeois familial and socio-political order. Perhaps most threatening, according to some historians, was the rise of “anti-bourgeois” cultural criticism and movements from within the Bürgertum itself, ranging from life reform to youth to radical-right or völkisch movements, in search of new forms of community and the “new man” around the turn of the century. All of these changes were compounded by the economic privation of the wartime years from 1914 to 1918, when the very material conditions for bourgeois existence seemed to be threatened by inflation and declining wealth and incomes.

38 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Die Zielutopie der ‘Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’ und die ‘Zivilgesellschaft’ heute,” in Peter Lundgreen (ed.), Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Bürgertums. Eine Bilanz des Bielefelder Sonderforschungsbereichs (1986–1997) (Göttingen, 2000), pp. 86–7. 39 Manfred Hettling, Politischer Bürgerlichkeit. Der Bürger zwischen Individualität und Vergesellschaftung in Deutschland und der Schweiz von 1860 bis 1918 (Göttingen, 1999). 40 Michael Schäfer, Bürgertum in der Krise. Städtische Mittelklassen in Edinburgh und Leipzig von 1890 bis 1930 (Göttingen, 2003), p. 15. 41 Klaus Tenfelde, “Stadt und Bürgertum im 20. Jahrhundert,” in idem, Arbeiter, Bürger, Städte, pp. 282–99; Andreas Schulz, Lebenswelt und Kultur des Bürgertums im 19. und 20. Jah2rhundert (Munich, 2005), pp. 25–9.

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These transformations have generated new debates about whether or not the German Bürgertum and bourgeois culture remained intact to the end of the Kaiserreich. According to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the “antibourgeois” movements—in particular nationalism, Nazism, and “left totalitarian ideologies”—temporarily suppressed the Bürgertum, but the latter “resurfaced like a phoenix out of the ashes in the Federal Republic after 1945,” along with its “utopian” project of a bourgeois or “civil society” anchored in a “merit-based” liberal market economy, basic civil rights protected by a “firmly anchored constitutional state,” “canon of values,” and “reasonable legislation” emerging from a self-correcting parliamentary system allowing for “free public discussion.”42 Manfred Hettling also sees long-term continuity in what he regards as the three core dimensions of Bürgerlichkeit, despite the challenge of “modernity”: its commitments to self-organization, Bildung, and critical reflection over matters of meaning. From a different perspective, Andreas Schulz points to the “fragmentation of the Bürgertum” by the 1920s and 1930s as a result of the challenges of the turn of the century, especially the dialectic of bourgeois self-critique arising from the new life reform movements, but regards its later re-emergence as a more complicated series of adjustments to the mass consumer society of the Federal Republic.43 By contrast, Werner Plumpe maintains that Bürgerlichkeit as a relatively coherent cultural system dissolved into its individual elements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the pluralization and transformations associated with the onset of “mass- democratic modernity” rendered its ensemble of values, norms, and lifestyles no longer binding.44 In a more critical vein, Schäfer also draws attention to the process by which “bourgeois civil society” came undone and the bourgeoisie dismantled (Entbürgerlichung) in Leipzig as its social and political hegemony came under attack. Thus, bourgeois elites violated their “theoretical postulate of openness” and “principle of bourgeois equality” as workers sought to win the franchise, and saw their socio-economic position and political pre-eminence eroded by the mounting challenges of the SPD and then decisively broken by the democratization of city government after the First World War.45 We might extend this critique further by noting that arguments about Bürgerlichkeit as a relatively static and, in some accounts, self-correcting ensemble of idealized norms, values, and practices derive from a definition of the Bürgertum as a self-contained and self- originating socio-cultural phenomenon, which was forged in seemingly apolitical associative relationships and processes of boundary drawing (Abgrenzung),46 and thus obscure the political and relational dimensions of bourgeois class (re)formation in the Kaiserreich. Not only was Bürgerlichkeit or bourgeois class cohesion predicated on the subjugation of women and the subordination of the petty bourgeoisie; it was also forged in hierarchically structured, interdependent, and mutually constitutive relations with workers or the working class. In the case of industrialists, merchants, bankers, business owners, and their managers, these relations were established at the workplace and in the wider sphere of civic life, where employer-led or directed organizations and activities, ranging from company- sponsored social clubs, occupational organizations, charity work, and festivities and celebrations, served as arenas of both reforming ambition and bourgeois class definition in

42 Wehler, “Die Zielutopie,” pp. 90–92. 43 Schulz, Lebenswelt und Kultur, pp. 45–52. 44 Werner Plumpe, “Einleitende Überlegungen: Strukturwandel oder Zerfall: das Wirtschaftsbürgertum 1870 bis 1930,” in idem and Jörg Lesczenski (eds), Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Mainz, 2009), pp. 10–13. 45 Schäfer, Bürgertum in der Krise, pp. 405, 408, 414. 46 Thomas Mergel, “Die Bürgertumsforschung nach 15 Jahren,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 41 (2001), pp. 515–38.

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relation to, and domination over, workers.47 In the case of many Bildungsbürger, the contours of Bürgerlichkeit evolved out of encounters with workers and their families in the context of charitable activities, social reform initiatives, and social welfare programs. This is superbly illustrated in Jens Wietschorke’s recent study of the Social Working Group Berlin-East (Soziale Arbeitsgemeinschaft Berlin-Ost, or SAG), a settlement organization created by the Protestant pastor Friedrich Siegmund-Schulze in 1911 and modeled after similar efforts undertaken by Toynbee Hall in East London. Designed as a forum to “reduce class hatred” by establishing “the closest possible connection to the worker population,” the SAG sponsored middle-class students to take up residence around the Schlesischer Bahnhof in East Berlin, set up social clubs for proletarian children, and conducted surveys of workers’ attitudes on the folkways of poor residents in what they constructed as “dark Berlin.”48 Through the lens of this “colonizing gaze” and the dynamics of reverse mimicry, they confirmed their superior bourgeois habitus in relation to the “rough” and “dissolute” lifestyles of workers, acquired new cultural capital as experts of working-class life, and claimed a new role for themselves as “mediators” between classes at a time when the cultural authority of the educated bourgeoisie was in sharp decline.49 Finally, as recent post-colonial and transnational studies suggest, this kind of colonizing activity took place simultaneously, though with different motivations and effects, in the extra- European world, where Bürgerlichkeit and bourgeois class hegemony were founded anew upon rule over colonized proletarians. The German colonial missions to Africa and Asia were largely bourgeois class projects, which were propelled by middle-class organizations like the German Colonial Society and the Pan-German League, strategies of capital accumulation supported by Wirtschaftsbürger, and scientific knowledge generated by Bildungsbürger in ways that were designed to remake colonial societies and colonized subjects. This direct, violent intervention into the lives of various African peoples in particular, especially efforts to transform the spheres of production and reproduction in accordance with the “rule of colonial difference,” bio-racialized prevailing forms ofBürgerlichkeit and brought them back to the metropole after 1900. These class relations and dynamics suggest we should pay more attention to the coercive and exclusionary aspects of Bürgerlichkeit and focus on its radicalization after 1900. We might begin by recognizing the intimate connections between the ideological and practical dimensions of bourgeois culture: its unacknowledged universalizing of particular values and lifestyles, their exclusionary logics, and the compulsions necessary to induce others—workers, women, and colonial subjects—to embrace or conform to them. The legal exclusion of most working-class residents, Social Democrats, and women from the municipal franchise in Prussian cities was predicated not on a self-correcting mechanism of political accommodation, but rather on related and explicit bourgeois prescriptions regarding the qualities necessary for exercising the vote and representing the “public” interest, and the limits of public-political speech, which disqualified forms of proletarian and “feminine” political expression and explicitly rejected democracy. Moreover, the strong emphasis on the Bürgertum’s individualism and “personal independence” has come to obscure its simultaneous investment in militarism and nationalism throughout most of the nineteenth century. With this in mind, it makes more sense to interpret the turn-of- the-century life reform movements and “cultural critique” as efforts not necessarily to reject but to reclaim core bourgeois “virtues” of selfhood and self-making in the recharged

47 See Sweeney, Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism, pp. 22–36, 49–67, 175–80. 48 Jens Wietschorke, Arbeiterfreunde. Soziale Mission im dunklen Berlin 1911–1933 (Frankfurt and New York, 2013), pp. 12, 48. 49 Ibid., pp. 237, 242, 388.

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form of Persönlichkeit, hard work in the name of “performance,” education as “intellect,” cultural authority in the guise of the avant-garde, social “harmony” in the figure of the unified nation (Volksgemeinschaft), and political-cultural hierarchy in the distinction between leader (Führer) and followers. These terminological shifts emerged from the ranks of the German Bürgertum, and were elaborated into a political vision by members of the German radical or völkisch right, in efforts to build new political coalitions and movements that would defend the class of Besitz und Bildung from threats to its hegemony. This process is examined well in recent studies of the Bürgertum as a “socio-cultural milieu” and central category of political mobilization from the late Kaiserreich to 1933. In varying ways, Helge Matthiesen, Joachim F. Tornau, and Steffen Raßloff, drawing on earlier studies by Rudy Koshar and Helmut Bieber, demonstrate that this defense was forged in the politics of bourgeois Sammlung in the cities of Gotha, Brunswick, Hanover, and Göttingen, begun before the First World War but dramatically radicalized during the post-war revolution.50 It was precisely in the bourgeois realm of the locality and in defense of “pre-political” bourgeois “virtues,” as Tornau so trenchantly observes, that the middle classes radicalized their “moral” visions and prepared the ground for the Nazis.

The German Nobility

This trajectory of research has generated important new perspectives on the changing class politics of the Bürgertum, but perhaps the most novel research on classes or social groups in Imperial Germany has come recently from historians exploring the German nobility (Adel). This extraordinarily small group of people, comprising roughly only 0.2 percent of the total population in 1900, once figured centrally in the Sonderweg interpretation of modern German history as the “pre-industrial” ruling or “power elites” most responsible for the failed “modernization” of the Kaiserreich. Centered on the research project led by Heinz Reif entitled Elitenwandel in der Moderne, research on the nobility has rapidly expanded in the past decade to include a whole host of new studies of the economic or “entrepreneurial” endeavors, social life, “mentalities,” subjectivities, ideological orientations, and political activities of nobles and their families across Germany and in comparison with the nobilities of the rest of Europe.51 As Reif points out, perhaps the most important impetus behind this new research has been the outpouring of studies of the German Bürgertum, which has drawn attention to the nobility by virtue of the questions it poses about the relationship between nobles and Bürger while simultaneously embracing the cultural turn in historical writing; an ensemble of methods and theoretical approaches that seems well-suited to making sense of the highly aestheticized forms of self-representation and performance or “habitus” that secured the social cohesion of the nobility in Imperial Germany.52 Most recent studies concentrate on four areas of noble activity: aristocratic economic pursuits; participation in government and civil service; noble social life and “noble culture” (Adeligkeit); and political organization. The overall balance of research has called into question arguments about a “feudal” aristocracy blocking the forces of “modernization,” and drawn attention instead to

50 See the Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of this chapter. 51 See the two key volumes by Heinz Reif (ed.), Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland. Band I. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000); and idem (ed.), Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland. Band II. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2001). 52 Heinz Reif, Adel im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2012), pp. 120–21.

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the ways in which German nobles were able to adapt to, and retain or secure their political relevance amidst, the transformations of “modernity.” While historians have long recognized the transformation of landed noble estates into capitalist enterprises and of large landowners into “agrarian capitalists” during the first half of the nineteenth century, many still maintain Hans Rosenberg’s thesis that aristocrats held to “feudal” or backward-looking understandings of economic order and were ambivalent about or hostile toward the imperatives of the “modern, market-oriented economy of capitalism,” even if they managed to adapt and engage in economic pursuits.53 In a recent update of this position, Hartmut Berghoff assembles a series of statistics and information from some local and regional studies to argue that the number of aristocrats involved as entrepreneurs and board members of industrial enterprises, as board members of financial firms, or as investors in the stock market were small relative to the numbers of middle-class entrepreneurs and financiers, with whom they had few social connections. Exceptions to this rule, according to Berghoff, were unsuccessful business owners over the long term, like the multi-millionaire magnates from Upper Silesia, recently ennobled bourgeois, aristocrats with unusual technical training, or successful magnates who nevertheless accumulated large landed estates, built , and maintained a distinctive aristocratic lifestyle, like the successful Bavarian pencil manufacturer Alexander von Castell-Rüdenhausen. When certain aristocrats, therefore, criticized trading on the stock market as a “stock market game” or “competition,” which was responsible for the “volatility of shares and the collapse of grain prices,” they demonstrated a crude “lack of understanding of the central connections of the market economy.” In the case of the German nobility, Berghoff concludes, “anti-capitalist codes of honor, a residual economic style, sheer incompetence and narrow-mindedness went hand in hand.”54 By contrast, Jacob Thierry’s study of the nobility in Saxony, which is based on a careful investigation of family archives, demonstrates that nobles thoroughly transformed their estates into industrial-capitalist enterprises. According to Thierry, Saxon nobles engaged in competitive production for profit; invested routinely in businesses, especially in the sugar industry, railroads, mining, and banks; earned an increasingly large portion of their overall wealth—as much as 35 percent, or 50 percent in some cases—from the stock market; and established new businesses, particularly in the extractive industries. If they were not as attracted to more speculative investments in real estate or trade, Thierry notes, their business or investment decisions differed very little from those of nearby bourgeois landowners. But three aspects of this activity indicate only “a partial economic adaptation of the nobility” to the imperatives of capitalism and point to interests other than the “desire for profit and economic modernisation”: the local and regional concentration of their business and investment interests; the tendency to re-direct business profits into the expansion of their own estates and renovation of their castles; and the widely shared desire to secure the long- term status of their families by providing inheritances to their children. Taken together, these business and investment practices and non-business aims suggest that nobles developed pre-existing strategies in new directions in order to support what Thierry calls traditional

53 Reif, Adel und Bürgertum, vol. I, p. 23. 54 Hartmut Berghoff, “Adel und Industriekapitalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Abstoßungskräfte und Annäherungstendenzen zweier Lebenswelten,” in Heinz Reif (ed.), Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland. Band I. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000), pp. 234–5, 270.

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and modern aims—a “compromise between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’” that amounted to the creation of a “specific form of noble capitalism.”55 René Schiller’s study of aristocratic landowners in Brandenburg seems to share several of these views. In a comprehensive analysis of the economic performance of East Elbian landed estates, Schiller is able to debunk long-standing arguments about noble “narrow- mindedness” or “incompetence” in economic affairs. The overall number of noble estates fell by one-third over the course of the nineteenth century, but aristocratic landowners still retained ownership over the largest and most prestigious estates and even increased their percentage of the latter after 1885. Moreover, if just under half of the large landed estates in Brandenburg by 1902 were burdened with significant debt, the latter was not a product of extravagant lifestyles but rather incurred through land sales and inheritance. Schiller also shows that the problems of indebtedness and falling prices for agricultural goods after 1880 were addressed by means of political agitation in favor of tariffs, economic re-organization, and productivity gains, especially in the area of the forestry industry. Comparisons with bourgeois landowners in Brandenburg reveal low rates of inter-marriage between noble and bourgeois estate owners, but Schiller documents increasing contacts between nobles and bourgeois in agricultural associations and interest groups as well as political parties. He nevertheless remains convinced that aristocratic landowners were able to maintain themselves economically while holding to a set of aristocratic norms and values, or Adeligkeit, concerned with a distinctive style of “rule over land and people,” especially over agricultural workers, which marked the “noble habitus” off from its bourgeois counterpart.56 The most sustained challenge to this thesis of a lingering noble habitus in economic affairs comes from Wolfram Theilemann, whose study of the Prussian forestry service, estate ownership, and hunting in the East Elbian provinces explores the deepening interconnections between noble and bourgeois in the agricultural industry. Theilemann traces the dramatic growth in the forestry industry, which was re-organized with the help of bourgeois experts and generated huge profits, especially in the sale of lumber, despite the expansion of the aristocratic hunt. He even speaks of the successful development of a “forest-industrial complex” on the estates of old Prussian noble families, who benefited from the increasing integration of bourgeois and noble elites in the administration of forest and agricultural resources in this rapidly expanding sector of capitalist production.57 If Theilemann sees the emergence of a “forest milieu” comprising nobility and bourgeoisie, he certainly sees no bourgeois embrace of “traditional” aristocratic values; rather, in various areas of mutual engagement, he records a certain embourgeoisement of the nobility.58 This study of forestry economic practices at the heart of Junkerdom can be read alongside earlier studies of nobles in other regions, who were equally engaged in most of the areas of wealth accumulation opened up by industrial capitalism (Rhineland-Westphalia and Upper Silesia), as well as more recent studies of nobles in Württemberg, Franconia, and Mecklenburg which have rounded out this picture.59

55 Jacob Thierry, “Das Engagement des Adels der preußischen Provinz Sachsen in der kapitalistischen Wirtschaft 1860–1914/18,” in Heinz Reif (ed.), Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland. Band I. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000), pp. 318–19, 330. 56 René Schiller, Vom Rittergut zum Grossgrundbesitz. Ökonomische und soziale Transformationsprozesse der ländlichen Eliten in Brandenburg im 19. Jahrhnudert (Berlin, 2003). 57 Wolfram Theilemann, Adel im grünen Rock. Adliges Jägertum, Großprivatwaldbesitz und die preußische Forstbeamtenschaft 1866–1914 (Berlin, 2004), p. 343. 58 Ibid., p. 43. 59 See Ivo Cerman and Lubos Velek (eds), Adel und Wirtschaft. Lebensunterhalt der Adeligen in der Moderne (Munich, 2009).

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Research on the nobility and public office—the second major theme of recent studies—is also beginning to change the way we view the influence of “feudal” holdovers and aristocratic class power in Imperial Germany. The Sonderweg thesis held that German nobles stymied the introduction of “modern” parliamentary government in Germany and successfully buttressed their own and the Kaiser’s “traditional” authority, even after the dissolution of noble privileges and policing powers (Herrschaftrechte), by virtue of their predominance at court, in the military, and in the civil bureaucracy. One recent study, Hartwin Spenkuch’s history of the Prussian House of Lords (Herrenhaus) from 1854 to 1918, holds to this view. The predominance of nobles in this body and successful efforts to filter all bourgeois appointments to it (25 percent of all members came from the upper Bürgertum and another 8 per cent came from the recently ennobled ranks of the Bürgertum), Spenkuch argues, frustrated constitutional reform in Prussia in the direction of British-style parliamentary government and thus blocked the arrival of “political modernity” in the Kaiserreich.60 Less beholden to normative liberal assumptions about what constitutes “modernity,” however, Mark Stoneman’s research on the officer corps provides a very different perspective on noble influence in state institutions. The German military, with its high percentage of noble officers, he argues, looked less like an “exotic feudal remainder” than a modern profession in terms of its formal schooling and exclusivity, clearly specified promotional ladders, discipline- specific knowledge (Militärwissenschaften), and national scope. Moreover, its so-called long- standing traditions, Stoneman suggests, were “invented” as the military was transformed after 1866–71—a process facilitated by the Kaiser’s order for selection criteria based “not on the nobility of birth” but on a “nobility of sentiment” in 1890. These factors enabled the career trajectory of an officer like General , who succeeded on the basis of his bourgeois habitus, even if class-cultural differences between nobles and bourgeois within the upper echelons of the officer corps still obtained.61 Similarly, Theilemann not only identifies the growing numbers of nobles after 1890 entering the Prussian forest academies and forestry service, where they joined a majority of bourgeois students and officials to study the science of modern forestry management, an eminently bourgeois undertaking; he also argues that noble and bourgeois students and civil servants forged an “esprit de corps” and “milieu”—with shared “passions,” a common sense of property ownership, commitment to a rural lifestyle, and a certain level of education—that reflected bourgeois influences, rather than aristocratic legacies.62 More recently, Patrick Wagner has overturned previous claims about long-standing Junker control over regional and local government. In an empirically dense and carefully theorized study of the relationship between regional governors (Landräte) and landowners in East and West Prussia and middle Silesia during the nineteenth century, Wagner demonstrates that the county (Kreis) reforms of 1872 and subsequent re-ordering of relations between the central state and local government fundamentally transformed the nature of “rule” (Herrschaft) in the eastern provinces by 1900. Noble estate owners were displaced from their former dominant positions within the main councils of county government (Kreistage), which were elected on the basis of three bodies that included town residents and smaller property owners; they no longer controlled the selection of the Landrat; and they lost all remaining policing authority on their estates. Drawing

60 Hartwin Spenkuch, Das Preussische Herrenhaus. Adel und Bürgertum in der Ersten Kammer des Landtages 1854–1918 (Düsseldorf, 1998). 61 Mark Stoneman, “Bürgerliche und adlige Krieger: Zum Verhältnis zwischen sozialer Herkunft und Berufskultur im wilhelminischen Armee-Offizierkorps,” in Heinz Reif (ed.), Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland. Band II. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2001), pp. 25–63. 62 Theilemann, Adel im grünen Rock, p. 487.

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on Bourdieu’s concept of the state as a bureaucratic “field” and his understandings of the exercise of power according to the ability to accumulate and deploy various form of “capital” (economic, social, cultural, and symbolic), Wagner convincingly shows how the Landräte became the key “brokers” of power in most eastern provinces, successfully mediating between the resources of the state and local estate owners in ways that won the allegiances of the latter. They did so in a way that secured the regional hegemony of the state-friendly Conservative Party with the support of both noble and bourgeois landowners and many peasants, and transformed the basis of noble power in the east: the latter was now anchored in the ability of landowners to form interest groups, engage politically in the Conservative Party, and seek assistance from the Landrat.63 By contrast, the third area of noble activity, noble social life and culture (Adeligkeit), a term coined by socio-cultural historians as a way to describe the shared values, norms, behaviors, practices, institutions, or habitus that secured noble distinction and social cohesion in the Kaiserreich, has generally been treated in terms of the remnants of long-standing traditions or as more self-conscious re-workings of the latter. Numerous recent studies suggest that Adeligkeit derived from, or was performed in, specific social sites—at the landed estate or manor; at the ball; during the hunt; in the military academy or regiment; at court; in the extended family—and drew upon a range of value systems, mental predispositions, or ideological orientations that distinguished the nobility from the bourgeoisie. In his path- breaking research on the transformation of the German nobility in the early twentieth century, Stephan Malinowski examines the formation of Adeligkeit in relation to the distinctive features of the noble family: life on the landed estate in conscious rejection of the big city; an anti-intellectual emphasis on “character” at the expense of Bildung and formal education; an anti-materialist “culture of sparseness” or stinginess; and a claim to exclusive possession of the qualities of “leadership” (Führertum) and the right to rule.64 Eckart Conze and Monika Wienfort similarly identify a range of values—including a sense of duty or service to the family and state, a willingness to sacrifice, toughness, steadfastness, honor, chivalry, and superiority—which were inculcated in practices of childhood socialization, ritualized in forms of aristocratic sociability, and expressed in routines of bodily comportment, bearing, and gesture in ways that (re)fashioned an elite dedicated to state service.65 Conze’s study of the Counts von Bernstorff from the Kaiserreich to the Adenauer era offers a rich illustration of the local forms of Adeligkeit. This noble culture was also gendered in specific ways. In his research on military clans within the Prussian lower nobility, Marcus Funck has explored the formation of a masculinized “warrior ethos” after 1890. Developed within the distinctive memory culture and child-rearing practices of individual East Elbian families, this ethos celebrated martial virtues, such as self-sacrifice, toughness in battle, ruthlessness in the application of violence, a willingness to take risks, and fearlessness in the face of death, in ways that molded noble culture to the imperatives of the officer corps and reinforced the service ethic of the lower nobility.66 Indeed, in George Steinmetz’s brilliant study of German colonialism, this ethos,

63 Patrick Wagner, Bauern, Junker und Beamte. Lokale Herrschaft und Partizipation im Ostelbien des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2005). 64 Stephan Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer. Deutscher Adel und Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 2003). 65 Eckart Conze and Monika Wienfort (eds), Adel und Moderne. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2004). 66 Marcus Funck, “The Meaning of Dying: East Elbian Noble Families as ‘Warrior-Tribes’ in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Greg Eghigian and Matthew Paul Berg (eds), Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany (Arlington, 2002).

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with its claim to expertise in war-making and the “arts of coercive command,” proved to be a decisive feature in the ongoing “intra-elite class conflict” between aristocratic governors and officers and their counterparts from the Bildungsbürgertum over who would govern German colonies. Here, the formation of an aristocratic “warrior ethos” was also a product of processes of cross-cultural identification: thus, aristocratic generals like Lothar von Trotha forged a military ethos of annihilatory savagery as he imagined and identified with an “imago” (cultural representation) of his colonized enemy in German Southwest Africa, the Herrero.67 Research on aristocratic women and femininity is still in its early stages, but we now have important work that similarly suggests the adaptability or transformation of Adeligkeit during the Kaiserreich. Monika Kubrova’s study of the life stories of women nobles through their autobiographies, for example, argues that the less “polarized,” pre-bourgeois relations of sexual difference and hierarchy within the world of the nobility, which also imbued women with militaristic values, imposed wider “social obligations and representative tasks” on women—as lady of the manor (Gutsherrin), diplomat’s wife, officer’s wife, and member of high society and court life—and made available opportunities for female agency. The latter allowed many noblewomen, including especially “outsiders” who did not perform the conventional roles associated with the aristocratic wife, effectively to adapt to, and find sources of agency within, the social and political changes of the imperial era.68 Monika Wienfort’s research also shows how certain noblewomen, who defied family expectations by securing an academic education and engaging in artistic pursuits or professional activity, were broadly oriented around the values and norms of Adeligkeit but nevertheless found ways to participate in the expanding field of “modern” bourgeois women’s associations, cultural life, and social and political engagement.69 This willingness to engage in modern forms of associational and professional activity suggests that the noble culture was less the remnant of a centuries-old set of traditions and more an “invention of tradition” specific to theKaiserreich : a claim that Theilemann makes in relation to several of the practices and pursuits identified as distinctively aristocratic. Thus, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “noble” hunt, according to Theilemann, was not only transformed by new forestry practices, hunting laws, and hunting organizations and practices; it also evolved away from its previous role as a “late-baroque theater of distinction” and platform for “early romantic idylls of escape,” and took on a new meaning as a site of relaxation, a rite of passage, and a proving ground for men, where hunters could escape the baleful influences of the city, build “toughness,” and practice the arts of domination.70 As Theilemann suggests, the culture of the hunt and “hunterdom” (Jägertum) became a meeting ground of nobles and upper bourgeois, who formed elite networks with a common interest in a “romanticized and close-to-nature hunter ideal.” This transformation was especially visible in the commercialized and exotic “hunting tourism” that drew nobles and bourgeois to the colonies, where the culture of hunting and bourgeois–noble common activity in the colonial administration and army were most fully developed. It is precisely this aspect of the German nobility—its adaptation or renewal in response to the rapid economic and social transformations associated with “the modern”—that has been the focus of recent research on noble politics and has challenged key aspects of the

67 George Steinmetz,The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in , Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007). 68 Monika Kubrova, Vom guten Leben. Adelige Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2011), p. 258. 69 Monika Wienfort, “Adlige Handlungsspielräume und neue Adelstypen in der ‘Klassische Moderne’ (1880–1930),” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 33 (2007), pp. 416–38. 70 Theilemann, Adel im grünen Rock, pp. 116–48, 481.

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Sonderweg thesis. The most important study in this regard is Malinowski’s Vom König zum Führer, which explores noble culture and politics in general but concentrates on the fortunes of the Prussian lower nobility—or “noble proletariat”—and its political and ideological efforts to resist social decline amidst the “dissolution of traditional aristocratic lifeworlds” during the Kaiserreich. Malinowski traces these efforts in the organized activity of the German Nobles’ Cooperative (Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft, or DAG), a self-help association for all nobles created in 1874 that came to be dominated by the “materially threatened, Protestant lower nobility in north and northeastern Germany”;71 and in the growing involvement of nobles in the nationalist pressure groups, including especially the Agrarian League and the Pan-German League. This turn to the radical right brought nobles into the field of bourgeois politics, facilitated their embrace of more radical or plebeian forms of antisemitism, shaped their hostility toward the high nobility and the Kaiser, and informed their fundamental redefinitions of political order after 1890. In terms of the latter, they participated inthe debates over the importance of creating a “new aristocracy” of “performance,” conviction or intellect, and race; and over “leadership” (Führertum), which came to be understood in terms not of absolutist sovereignty and “pre-modern” forms of rule but rather of distinctive modern definitions of a popular and racially gifted “leader,” who knows and feelsthe sufferings of the people (Volk), organized as an organic and hierarchically organized race-community.72 It was this transformation, especially after the economic crisis and revolutionary events set in motion by the First World War, which allowed German nobles to embrace the post-war radical right and ultimately the Nazis. In contrast to the Sonderweg thesis, therefore, Malinowski demonstrates that it was the socially déclassé lesser nobles, rather than members of the high nobility, who joined the radical right in large numbers, and that they did so only by departing from backward-looking aristocratic “traditions” and helping to invent new and “modern” political visions.73 Indeed, it might be that what is most relevant about the German nobility was not its distinctive capacity to cling to the dominant positions of power or its failure to form a new composite “elite” with the leading stratum of the Bürgertum, which recent comparative work on European nobilities and many studies emanating from, or influenced by, the project organized by Heinz Reif now suggest, but rather its re-composition as a class or a class faction during the Kaiserreich. Despite attempts to portray nobles as incompetent in the ways of capitalism, most of the studies indicate that most German nobles successfully adjusted to the new imperatives of an economy based on private property, competitive production, and wage labor, even if we do not yet have a comprehensive study of labor relations on the East Elbian estates that would round out this picture. Moreover, numerous studies of the radical right and right-wing intellectuals reveal that the invention of new visions of socio-political order premised on a “new aristocracy” and “leadership,” the taming of the “masses,” the rescue of “personality,” natural inequality, and masculine competitive struggle took place primarily within the ranks of the Bürgertum, and not the nobility. The latter were involved to the extent that they participated in radical-right activities orchestrated by middle-class organizations like the Pan-German League. Accordingly, it might make more sense to treat the nobility increasingly as a distinctive faction within an expanded bourgeois or capitalist class. This might make all the more sense in view of the findings of Malinowski’s study, which notes the very real fear of social decline among members of the lower Prussian nobility in

71 Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer, pp. 15, 151. 72 Ibid., pp. 110–17, 299–320. 73 Ibid., p. 608.

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particular as the key to their abandonment of “traditional models of conservatism.”74 Many of these nobles joined their bourgeois counterparts within the German right in a panicked defense of the class of Besitz und Bildung on the eve of the First World War, when the SPD became the largest party in the Reichstag, and especially in 1918, when popular insurgencies involving workers and socialists overthrew the monarchy and appeared ready to shift the balance of class forces and dismantle the hegemony of the ruling classes by overturning capitalism and democratizing the entire social and political order.

Conclusion

These reflections on the nobility are not meant to bring us back to a social-determinist model of class or class relations in the Kaiserreich, but rather to point to the relevance of a different understanding of class, even to what seems to be the most un-class-like social group. For if the class crisis at the end of the Kaiserreich took hold among radical nationalists, including those with noble titles, who most routinely claimed to be operating outside the languages of class, then surely we must re-direct our analysis to the study of a subject—class relations— that has been muted during our own era defined by an allegedly “classless” post-Fordist, neo-liberal society. I would like, therefore, to offer some suggestions for re-engaging with class and class analysis in the wake of the cultural turn in order to ask some new questions about society, culture, and politics during the Kaiserreich. First, in view of the increasing turn toward “culture,” including terms such as “cultural capital,” in studies of the Bürgertum and the nobility, it might be useful to focus our analyses of class and class dynamics back to the economic realm, where they seem most relevant. This need not mean dispensing with cultural analysis; rather, it might mean exploring the formation of classes in language or discourse related to the dynamics of the economy, the distribution of resources, and material inequality. Second, our analyses of class might take more seriously E.P. Thompson’s injunction, which he derived from Marx, that “class is a relationship, and not a thing,” formed when some people decide they have common economic interests that differ from those of others. From this perspective, our discussion of class or classes in Imperial Germany should avoid analysis of classes in isolation and as the outcomes of de-politicized processes of formation, as much of the literature on the Bürgertum, nobility, and even (recently) the working class has done, and should trace their shared conditions of formation and structural interdependency: that is to say, approach classes not simply as forms of collective self-expression or identity but also as the outcomes of social relations of exploitation and domination, which bound classes together in conflicting ways and general forms of contestation that were central to the political culture of the Kaiserreich. This might very well help us to explain the transformations in culture and politics during the last decade before the First World War and the gathering forces of an anti-socialist Sammlung in 1913, when the rise of the SPD committed to “emancipating” the working class seemed to threaten the social and political hegemony of the dominant classes, as well as the conditions for capital accumulation for industrialists, merchants, bankers, shopkeepers, and landowners. Third, in order to do this and to expand the areas of class analysis, we might re-situate class and classes within the broader field of practices, relations, and institutions invoked by the term capitalism. In view of the explosive and highly volatile expansion of the global

74 Ibid., p. 15.

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capitalist economy during this period and the involvement of all classes in its operations, this would allow us to explore anew the evolution of class relations over the course of the Wilhelmine period as a way of understanding the conditions of emergence of new mass movements, the changing structures of interest group representation, the alterations in party-political coalitions, and the expanding scope of German imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, it would potentially open up new areas for research by encouraging us to explore dimensions of capitalism during the Kaiserreich that still require attention: for example, the relationships between class and finance (or what Marx called money capital) and between class and consumption. This kind of analysis might draw on emerging work on the cultural geography and spatial dynamics of capital accumulation, as well as the important cultural- theoretical work on the commodity form and spectacle. But there is no reason, as Geoff Eley and Keith Nield have so convincingly argued, that these approaches should avoid analysis of what they call the non-discursive “regularities of the production and circulation of goods, services, opportunities, and wealth under capitalism.” The task will be to bring analysis of language or culture as social practices relating to class, on the one hand, and of non- linguistic structures and compulsions, on the other, together in an analysis of class relations. This would involve exploring the “presence of class structure” within political languages, literary or other textual forms, and the classed “subjects themselves,” “in the form of dispositions, desires, beliefs and affects.”75 Above all, these two directions of research—on money capital and consumption—might broaden our understandings of class relations in the Kaiserreich by taking into account transnational dynamics of capital accumulation and entering into the exploration of commodity culture and its production of class subjectivities. These areas seem particularly relevant for our times.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Augustine, Dolores L. Patricians and Parvenus: Wealth and High Society in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford and Providence, 1994). Biggeleben, Christoph. Das “Bollwerk des Bürgertums:” Die Berliner Kaufmannschaft 1870–1920 (Munich, 2006). Blackbourn, David and Evans, Richard J. (eds). The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century (London and New York, 1991). Budde, Gunilla. Auf dem Weg ins Bürgerleben. Kindheit und Erziehung in deutschen und englischen Bürgerfamilien, 1840–1914 (Göttingen, 1994). —, Conze, Eckart and Rauh, Cornelia (eds). Bürgertum nach dem bürgerlichen Zeitalter. Leitbilder und Praxis seit 1945 (Göttingen, 2010). Clemens, Gabriele B., König, Malte and Meriggi, Marco (eds). Hochkultur als Herrschaftselement. Italienischer und deutscher Adel im langen 19. Jahhundert (Berlin and Boston, 2011). Conze, Eckart, Meteling, Wenke and Schuster, Jörg (eds). Aristokratismus und Moderne. Adel als kulturelles und politisches Konzept, 1890–1945 (Cologne, 2013). Crossick, Geoffrey and Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard. The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe 1780–1914 (London, 1995). Dobson, Sean. Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910–1920: The Story of a Relationship (New York, 2001).

75 Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, trans. Gabriel Ash (London and New York, 1914), p. 11.

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Dorrmann, Michael and Arnhold, Eduard (1849–1945). Eine biographische Studie zu Unterhehmer und Mäzenatentum im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Berlin, 2002). Eifert, Christiane. Paternalismus und Politik. Preussische Landräte im 19. Jahrhundert (Münster, 2003). “Forum: Class in German History.” German History, 30 (2012), pp. 429–51. Frevert, Ute. “Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann.” Geschlechter-Differenzen in der Moderne (Munich, 1995). — (ed.) Bürgerinnen und Bürger. Geschlechterverhältnisse im 19. Jahrhundert, foreword by Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen, 1988). Funck, Marcus and Malinowski, Stephan. “‘Charakter ist alles!’ Erziehungsideale und Erziehungspraktiken in deutschen Adelsfamilien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Christa Berg and Peter Dudek (eds), Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung, vol. 6 (Bad Heilbrunn, 2000). —. “Masters of Memory: The Strategic Use of Autobiographical Memory by the German Nobility,” in Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (eds),The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana, 2002). Gerstner, Alexandra. Neuer Adel. Aristokratische Elitekonzeptionen zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Nationalsozialismus (Darmstadt, 2008). Grzywatz, Berthold. Stadt, Bürgertum und Staat im 19. Jahrhundert. Selbstverwaltung, Partizipation und Räpresentation in Berlin und Preußen 1806 bis 1918 (Berlin, 2003). Harvey, David Allen. Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace, 1830–1945 (Dekalb, 2001). Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918, trans. Tom Lampert (Ann Arbor, 2007). Huerkamp, Claudia. Bildungsbürgerinnen. Frauen im Studium und in akademischen Berufen, 1900–1945 (Göttingen, 1996). Jansen, Christian (ed.) Der Bürger als Soldat. Die Militarisierung europäischer Gesellschaften im langen 19. Jahrhundert: ein internationaler Vergleich (Essen, 2004). Jensen, Uffa. Gebildete Doppelgänger. Bürgerliche Juden und Protestanten im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2005). Kaplan, Marion A. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York and Oxford, 1991). Kelly, Alfred (ed.) The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987). Kocka, Jürgen. Klassengesellschaft im Krieg. Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 1973). —. “Arbeiterbewegung in der Bürgergesellschaft. Überlegungen zum deutschen Fall,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 20 (1994), pp. 487–96. — and Fry, Manuel. Bürgerkultur und Mäzenatentum im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1998). Kraus, Elisabeth. Die Familie Mosse. Deutsch-jüdisches Bürgertum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1999). Kruse, Wolfgang. “Krieg und Klassenheer. Zur Revolutionierung der deutschen Armee im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 22 (1996), pp. 530–61. Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael. Bürgerlichkeit und Religion. Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrer in Baden 1860–1914 (Göttingen, 2002). Kuhn, Bärbel. Familienstand: Ledig. Ehelose Frauen und Männer im Bürgertum (1850–1914) (Cologne, 2000). Labouvie, Eva (ed.) Adel in Sachsen-Anhalt. Höfische Kultur zwischen Repräsentation, Unternehmertum und Familie (Cologne, 2007). Lessig, Simone. Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2004).

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Linden, Marcel von der. “Vorläufiges zur transkontinentalen Arbeitergeschichte,”Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 28 (2002), pp. 291–304. Lüdtke, Alf. Eigen-Sinn, Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg, 1993). Marburg, Silke and Matzerath, Josef (eds).Der Schritt in die Moderne. Sächsischer Adel zwischen 1763 und 1918 (Cologne, 2001). Matthiesen, Helge.Bürgertum und Nationalsozialismus in Thüringen. Das bürgerliche Gotha von 1918 bis 1930 (Jena and Stuttgart, 1994). Maynes, Mary Jo. Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill and London, 1995). Menning, Daniel. Standesgemäße Ordnung in der Moderne. Adlige Familienstrategien und Gesellschaftsentwürfe in Deutschland 1840–1945 (Munich, 2014). Mergel, Thomas. Zwischen Klasse und Konfession. Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland 1794– 1914 (Göttingen, 1994). Müller, Dirk H. Adliges Eigentumsrecht und Landesverfassung. Die Auseinandersetzung um die eigentumsrechtlichen Privilegium des Adels im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel und Pommerns (Munich, 2011). Raßloff, Steffen. Flucht in die nationale Volksgemeinschaft. Das Erfurter Bürgertum zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2003). Reagin, Nancy R. Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 2007). Sarasin, Philipp. Stadt der Bürger. Bürgerlichkeit und städtische Gesellschaft: Basel, 1846–1914 (Göttingen, 1997). Schäfer, Michael. Geschichte des Bürgertums. Eine Einführung (Cologne, 2009). Schmuhl, Hans-Walter. Die Herren der Stadt. Bürgerliche Eliten und städtische Selbstverwaltung in Nürnberg und Braunschweig vom 18. Jahrhundert bis 1918 (Gießen, 1998). Schulz, Günther and Denzel, Markus (eds). Deutscher Adel im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (St Katharinen, 2004). Sweeney, Dennis. “Cultural Practice and Utopian Desire in German Social Democracy: Reading Adolf Levenstein’s Arbeiterfrage (1912),” Social History, 28 (2003), pp. 174–201. Tacke, Charlotte. “‘Es kommt darauf an, den Kurzschluss von der Begriffssprache auf die politische Geschichte zu vermeiden.’ ‘Adel’ und ‘Adeligkeit’ in der modernen Gesellschaft,” Neue Politische Literatur, 52 (2007), pp. 91–123. Tenfelde, Klaus and Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (eds). Wege zur Geschichte des Bürgertums. Vierzehn Beiträge (Göttingen, 1994). Thies, Ralf. Ethnograph des dunklen Berlin. Hans Ostwald und die “Großstadt-Dokumente” (1904– 1908) (Cologne, 2006). Tornau, Joachim F. Gegenrevolution von unten. Bürgerliche Sammlungsbewegungen in Braunschweig, Hannover und Göttingen 1918–1920 (Bielefeld, 2001). Umbach, Maiken. German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890–1924 (Oxford, 2009). Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Dritter Band. Von der “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995). Welskopp, Thomas. “Ein Modernes Klassenkonzept für die vergleichende Geschichte industrialisierender und industrieller Gesellschaften. Kritische Skizzen und theoretische Überlegungen,” in Karl Lauschke and Thomas Welskopp (eds), Mikropolitik im Unternehmen. Arbeitsbeziehungen und Machtstrukturen in industriellen Großbetrieben des 20. Jahrhunderts (Essen, 1994). —. “Klasse als Befindlichkeit? Vergleichende Arbeitergeschichte vor der kulturhistorischen Herausforderung,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 38 (1998), pp. 301–36.

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Werner, Michael. Stiftungsstadt und Bürgertum. Hamburgs Stiftungskultur vom Kaiserreich bis in den Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 2011). Ziegler, Dieter (ed.) Grossbürger und Unternehmer. Die deutsche Wirtschaftselite im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2000).

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cornelius Torp

far from being an ‘invention’ of the late twentieth century, globalization is of much older historical provenance.1 This is an idea that has increasingly taken hold over the last few years. it was initially embraced by economic historians and economists with an interest in history, but historians in general and scholars in other disciplines were soon to follow, their views shaped by an awareness of transnational political networks, imperialism and cross-border cultural transfers.2 Such a perspective allows us, first, to link recent processes of globalization with tendencies towards global economic integration since the early modern period, as elaborated by the likes of fernand Braudel and immanuel wallerstein.3 second, it opens up to the historical gaze the new quality of developments from around the mid-nineteenth century: developments we might refer to as globalization in the narrower sense. what also emerges here is the erratic nature of the integration process. Two waves of globalization stand out. The first began around 1850 and culminated in the golden era of the world economy around the turn of the twentieth century, but then suffered a serious reversal as a result of the World Wars and the Great Depression. The second wave of globalization gradually gained traction after the second world war, has increasingly gathered pace since then and is still unfolding today. The scale and dynamism of global economic integration before the first world war, which is my primary concern here, continue to impress. global trade grew so rapidly and steadily that, shortly before the globalization backlash suffered by the world economy as a result of the ‘second Thirty years’ war’, global trade had already reached a level of intensity comparable with that of the 1970s and 1980s. This explosion in the volume of world trade was flanked by a radical convergence of international commodity prices, which highlights

1 This chapter is a translation of ‘Im Zangengriff der Globalisierung: Deutsche Handelspolitik vor 1914’, in Rainer Klump and Miloŝ Vec (eds), Völkerrecht und Weltwirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Baden- Baden, 2012), pp. 71–87. I would like to thank Alex Skinner for doing a great job of translating my text. 2 See Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA, 1999); idem, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’, European Review of Economic History, 6 (2002), pp. 23–50; Michael D. Bordo et al. (eds), Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago, 2003); Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel and Nils P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, 2005); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2009); Cornelius Torp, The Challenges of Globalization: Economy and Politics in Germany 1860–1914 (New York, 2014); Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2010); Ronald Finlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, 2007). 3 see fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3 (New York, 1984); immanuel wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols (New York, 1974/1980/1989); idem, Historical Capitalism (London, 1983). The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

the emergence of a highly integrated global market.4 At the same time, in the second half of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, new global investment opportunities propelled capital mobility to a level that even surpasses present conditions in some respects.5 Finally, in the years between 1850 and the First World War, mass migration reached a level unsurpassed to this day. If we look at European emigration overseas in connection with transnational migration within Europe, which also ran to the millions, and the entirely novel dimensions of increasing migration within individual countries, it seems reasonable to think in terms of a late nineteenth-century global labour market featuring a globalized wage structure.6 Clearly, such a fundamental change in global parameters was not without consequence for nation-states and their politics. This applies to mass migration, the resulting upheaval in traditional ways of life and values, and its repercussions for nationality laws and the discourse of nationalism, but perhaps even more to the field of tariff and trade policy. Here the global economy and the politics of nation-states rubbed up against one another more directly than in any other field. Globalization, which advanced with great rapidity, made a profound impact on the national economies of the nineteenth century, upending familiar realities. The absolute and relative prices of goods and production factors changed at a breathtaking pace; new social and political conflicts emerged; and those affected negatively by global market integration became organized and launched campaigns of mass mobilization. Across the world, foreign trade policy was soon one of the leading topics of political debate. Most countries responded to the new situation by erecting protectionist barriers. Of the larger countries, only the UK remained true to free trade – though even here there was a protectionist movement with considerable clout. From the late 1870s onwards, meanwhile, despite differences in the detail, almost all of continental Europe turned to protectionism, which intensified until the First World War. Much the same applied to the Latin American states and those British colonies that had gained independence; during the same period, these countries introduced protective tariffs for their industries that mostly exceeded European levels. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, the US was a stronghold of protectionism. Even here, though, tariffs on industrial products increased greatly from the 1860s.7 Precisely because tariff and trade policy was one of the most important and most contested fields of political conflict in pre-1914 German history, historians were quick to study it, often

4 See Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Late 19th Century Anglo-American Factor Price Convergence: Were Heckscher and Ohlin Right?’, Journal of Economic History, 54 (1994), pp. 892– 916; Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘Commodity Market Integration, 1500–2000’, in Bordo et al. (eds), Globalization in Historical Perspective, pp. 13–62; Jan Tore Klovland, ‘Commodity Market Integration 1850–1913: Evidence from Britain and Germany’, European Review of Economic History, 9 (2005), pp. 163–97. 5 Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor, ‘The Great Depression as a Watershed: International Capital Mobility in the Long Run’, in Michael D. Bordo et al. (eds), The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1998), pp. 353–402; Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor, Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis and Growth (Cambridge, 2004); James R. Lothian, ‘Capital Market Integration and Exchange Rate Regimes in Historical Perspective’, in Iftekhar Hasan and William C. Hunter (eds), Research in Banking and Finance, vol. 1 (New York, 2000), pp. 139–73. 6 See, for example, Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘The Evolution of Global Labor Markets Since 1830: Background Evidence and Hypotheses’, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), pp. 141–96; idem, ‘Globalization, Labor Markets and Policy Backlash in the Past’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (1998), pp. 51–72; O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History, pp. 119–66. 7 See Paul Bairoch, ‘European Trade Policy, 1815–1914’, in Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 8: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 1–160; Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (Chicago, 1993).

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ascribing to it a central role within the competing interpretations of the Empire. Historians who otherwise disagree are largely united in their view of the key stages of German foreign trade policy and in their superficial assessments of it. There is no dispute about the fact that the German customs tariff of 1879, whose protective tariffs were expanded over the course of the 1880s following a quarter of a century of advancing trade liberalization, marks a clear turning point. Following the trade-friendly interlude of the trade treaties concluded under imperial chancellor Caprivi, which were associated with the lowering of agricultural tariffs, historians agree that, through the so-called Bülow Tariff of 1902, German tariff and trade policy returned to the protectionist approach begun under Bismarck. At the same time, because of the break with the principles of Caprivi’s trade policy and new tariff increases that took them above the levels of the Bismarck era, historians see the German Empire making a transition to high protectionism. The various narratives on the German Empire differ markedly in their explanations and evaluations of German protectionism. One highly influential perspective can be traced back to Berlin historian Eckart Kehr, who died in 1933; a perspective that was later developed and expounded to great effect by Alexander Gerschenkron, Hans Rosenberg and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. On this view, the driving force behind German tariff and trade policy was the long-standing political alliance between heavy industry and big agrarians.8 From the late 1870s, so the argument goes, this alliance between ‘rye and iron’, briefly interrupted by the Caprivi years, determined the fate of German foreign trade policy and set in motion a class-based and anti-consumer protectionism.9 Very much in line with this, these historians saw the Bülow Tariff of 1902 as the result of a classical link-up between agriculture and industry, whose guiding philosophy we might sum up as follows: protective tariffs for the Junkers, the battle fleet for the bourgeoisie.10 This wide-ranging interpretive approach has not gone uncontested. James Hunt was quick to show that it was not just big agrarians who benefited from agricultural protectionism, but also farmers with small and medium-sized farms who were supposedly manipulated by them.11 Other historians – above all Richard J. Evans, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley – have criticized in a more general way the influence that Wehler and others have attributed to the elites of the German Empire and have questioned the durability and stability of the agrarian- industrial alliance.12

8 See Eckart Kehr, Battleship Building and Party Politics in Germany 1894–1901 (Chicago, 1975); idem, Der Primat der Innenpolitik, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Berlin, 1965); Alexander Gerschenkron, Bread and Democracy in Germany (Ithaca 1989; first published 1943); Hans Rosenberg, Große Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Frankfurt, 1976; first published 1967); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985; first published 1973). 9 See Cornelius Torp, ‘The Coalition of “Rye and Iron” Under the Pressure of Globalization: A Reinterpretation of Germany’s Political Economy Before 1914’, Central European History, 43 (2010), pp. 401–27. 10 See Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbände in der Spätphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Cologne, 1970), pp. 14, 111; Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preußischer Konservativismus im wilhelminischen Reich (1893–1914) (Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1975), pp. 241 f.; Wehler, German Empire. The locus classicus is Kehr, Battleship Building. 11 See James C. Hunt, ‘Peasants, Grain Tariffs, and Meat Quotas: Imperial German Protectionism Reexamined’, Central European History, 7 (1974), pp. 311–31. 12 See Richard J. Evans (ed.), Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978); Geoff Eley, ‘Sammlungspolitik, Social Imperialism and the Navy Law of 1898’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 15 (1974), pp. 29–63; idem, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (Ann Arbor, 1991; first published 1980); David Blackbourn, Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg Before 1914 (New Haven, 1980); David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984).

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Despite the differences between the explanation of German protectionism that emphasizes the dominance of the agrarian-heavy industrial power cartel, and the critics of this view, who refrain from developing a similarly comprehensive alternative interpretation, both perspectives have one thing in common. In attempting to explain decisions and tendencies associated with German tariff and trade policy, they focus entirely on the constellation of social and political forces within the German Empire. This corresponds to the national historical perspective to which not just traditional political history but also the socio- historical and other alternative approaches have remained attached. The nation-state was and often still is considered the self-evident analytical unit of historical research. This goes hand-in-hand with an endogenous conception of development: the notion that it is possible to produce causal explanations of social and political realities and processes in light of the structures and conflicts within national societies. In contrast, I view the first wave of globalization as a key explanatory variable, a factor that transcends the boundaries of the nation-state. My aim here is neither to advocate an economic reductionism nor to suggest that we must rewrite the history of German foreign trade policy from the perspective of globalization. At the same time, I aim to do more than merely supplement the established national historical perspective with a few transnational insights. Instead I seek to link the increasing integration of the world economy causally with economic, social and political processes within the German nation-state. What emerges is that much of what historians have discovered about German protectionism, and interpreted as the result of endogenous forces, is merely an aspect of a global response to the challenge of nineteenth-century globalization. Of course, if we want to explain the specifically national character of this response, we must examine national historical factors. In what follows, through seven key steps, I seek to explain the connection between globalization and German politics before the First World War and to elaborate the perspective proposed here. 1. The economy of the German Empire was highly integrated into the global economy during its belle époque before the First World War. This is particularly true of global trade. As the second-largest trading nation before 1914, Germany accounted for a steadily growing share of world trade and challenged the global leadership of the UK, which was increasingly losing ground. Conversely, foreign trade was becoming increasingly important to the German economy. Because both imports and exports were growing more quickly than gross national product, with a foreign trade rate of 35 per cent, in the five-year period before the First World War, Germany’s integration into the world market reached an unprecedented level.13 On the one hand, this meant that the German economy was more dependent than ever before on obtaining foodstuffs, raw materials, and semi-finished and finished industrial products from abroad. On the other hand, exports constituted a demand factor of crucial importance to German industry. Over the long term and as a whole the German national economy benefited massively from its integration into the world market, but over the short and medium term this integration had a highly variable impact on different groups within the German nation- state. Among the winners of globalization were those parts of German industry – above all machine building and the mechanical and electrical industries, though there were others – that were dependent on imports of raw materials and intermediate goods and that sold many of their products abroad. Service sectors such as foreign trade and shipping were entirely dependent on the expansion of international trade relations. Among the beneficiaries of globalization, finally, were consumers, for whom the reduced prices of foodstuffs and other

13 Torp, Challenges, p. 24.

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consumer goods brought about by international competition meant a significant increase in real income. The losers of globalization and beneficiaries of protectionist measures, meanwhile, included those branches in which there was strong import competition, for example, much of the German spinning industry. Sectors such as heavy industry and the soda industry could also profit from tariffs. They were highly competitive in the world market, but they had also formed functioning cartels that allowed for effective price differentiation between the domestic and world markets.14 Most negatively affected by the forces of globalization and therefore most interested in protectionist measures, meanwhile, was German agriculture. Despite major advances in productivity, at the end of the nineteenth century large parts of German agriculture could not keep pace with their international competitors and their cheaper goods under free-market conditions. This applies especially to cereal producers, who faced a spectacular fall in the prices of their products from the mid-1870s, and with some qualification to livestock breeders as well.15 2. Because there was so much at stake for both the losers and winners of increasing world market integration, globalization became one of the key forces driving the development of economic interest organizations. As in many other countries, in Germany before the First World War the most important economic interest groups emerged within the context of foreign trade policy conflicts and reflected the antagonisms within them. The process of their formation not only demonstrates how economic interests shape the structure of politics; it also shows that producers keen on protectionist measures had a structural organizational advantage over those circles that would benefit from the free exchange of goods. The incentive to get organized in order to ensure the imposition of certain trade restrictions was greater than the impulse to get together to prevent them, because as a rule their protective effect brought palpable benefits to a definable group of producers and made an impact within a short period of time, while their negative consequences tended to be indirect and widely spread.16 The relatively uniform interests found within German agriculture provided the most favourable point of departure for the formation of an influential protectionist organization. It is no coincidence that the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte) became by far the most powerful and successful interest organization in the producers’ camp. In industry, too, protectionist interests initially enjoyed an organizational advantage. Over the course of time, however, as is most clearly evident in the run-up to the customs tariff of 1902, the divergent interests within industry became ever more palpable, hindering the formulation

14 See Steven B. Webb, ‘Tariff Protection for the Iron Industry, Cotton Textiles and Agriculture in Germany, 1879–1914’, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 192 (1977), pp. 336–57; idem, ‘Tariffs, Cartels, Technology, and Growth in the German Steel Industry, 1879 to 1914’,Journal of Economic History, 40 (1980), pp. 309–29; Ulrich Wengenroth, Enterprise and Technology: The German and British Steel Industries 1865–1895 (Cambridge, 1993); Rainer Fremdling, ‘The German Iron and Steel Industry in the 19th Century’, in Etsuo Abe and Yoshita Suzuki (eds), Changing Patterns of International Rivalry: Some Lessons from the Steel Industry (Tokyo, 1991), pp. 113–36. 15 See Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning, ‘Produktionskosten und Preisbildung für Getreide in den letzten Jahrzehnten des 19. Jahrhunderts’,Z eitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie, 25 (1977), pp. 214–36; Gerhard Kempter, Agrarprotektionismus. Landwirtschaftliche Schutzzollpolitik im Deutschen Reich von 1879 bis 1914 (Frankfurt, 1985), pp. 185 ff.; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich, 1995), pp. 685 ff; Kevin H. O’Rourke, ‘The European Grain Invasion, 1870–1913’, Journal of Economic History, 57 (1997), pp. 775–801. 16 See Bruno S. Frey, International Political Economics (Oxford, 1984); Hannelore Weck-Hannemann, Politische Ökonomie des Protektionismus. Eine institutionelle und empirische Analyse (Frankfurt, 1992), pp. 58 ff.; Heinrich Ursprung, ‘Die Modellierung endogener Handelspolitik: “The Rake’s Progress”’, Aussenwirtschaft, 55 (2000), pp. 85–119.

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of a uniform and sharply defined trade policy position with strong organizational backing. Even those organizations dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal trade policy make little difference to this overall picture of organizational weakness, which included trade as well as industry. At odds internally and defensive in orientation, founded too late and without the broad appeal needed to achieve mass mobilization, they were never in a position to exercise a decisive influence on the foreign trade policy decision-making process.17 3. Overall, the consequences of globalization did much to fragment the society and politics of the German Empire along the lines of socio-economic conflict. From the beginning of the 1890s onwards, the content and style of political disputes underwent a fundamental change. Increasingly the government lost – to the propaganda machines of right and left – the capacity to determine the key themes of elections. On one side of the political spectrum the tone was set by the highly organized agricultural protest movement, which had taken off through a complex interplay of rural self-mobilization and the leadership of key organizations, and demanded the fencing-off of agriculture from the world market. On the other side, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) engaged in a campaign of mass mobilization against calls for protective agricultural tariffs. Even before the turn of the century, it increasingly took on the mantle of the consumers’ party. Tariff and trade policy had now become one of the dominant fields of conflict within German domestic politics. At the same time, the latent conflict of interest between rural producers and urban consumers was endowed with a lasting political charge.18 The second major socio-economic gulf that opened up under the pressure of world market integration was that between the agricultural and industrial sectors. The trade policy alliance that had existed between heavy industry and agriculture since 1878–79 was shattered in the controversies over Caprivi’s trade treaties of the 1890s. The ‘politics of rallying together’ (Sammlungspolitik) launched in the late 1890s under the aegis of Prussian finance minister Johannes von Miquel managed to patch up this breach over the short term. But in the build-up to the passing of the Bülow Tariff of 1902, it became clear that this alliance was profoundly unstable: in key areas, the coalition partners’ foreign trade interests conflicted radically.19 There appears to have been no ‘do-ut-des’ pact between industry and agriculture strategically linking the customs tariff bill and naval law of the kind repeatedly evoked by historians in the wake of Eckart Kehr. Neither the negotiations on the customs tariff in the Reichstag nor the decision-making process within the Prussian-German ministerial bureaucracy are indicative of such horse-trading. 4. The chasm within German society between the losers of globalization, who were pressing for policies to hold back the forces of the world market, and those in favour of globalization, who advocated an export- and consumer-friendly trade policy, was duplicated within the Prussian-German executive. Far from being a homogenous entity, in the thrust of its tariff and trade policy it was in fact deeply divided. The fronts within the ministerial bureaucracy cross-cut the division between the Prussian and imperial level: the Prussian ministry of agriculture pursued a more protectionist course, seeing itself as the champion of agrarian interests, along with the Prussian finance ministry and imperial ministry of the interior. The imperial foreign ministry, imperial treasury and the Prussian ministry of trade and commerce advocated a moderate system of protective tariffs – in view of the balance of

17 See Torp, Challenges, pp. 146–66. 18 See Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 212–40; Brett Fairbairn, Democracy in the Undemocratic State: The German Reichstag Elections of 1898 and 1903 (Toronto, 1997), pp. 45–68, 209–40. 19 See Torp, ‘The Coalition of “Rye and Iron”’.

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domestic political forces, this, rather than a truly liberal trade policy, was the alternative at the turn of the century. The result of the escalating conflicts within the Prussian-German ministerial bureaucracy, particularly in the run-up to the Bülow Tariff, was a compromise in which the moderately protectionist departments, and particularly the trade experts of the foreign office, were able to achieve certain key aims. The German government ultimately advocated a tariff and trade policy far less protectionist than the one favoured by most members of the Reichstag. Had it been entirely down to the parliamentary majority, the customs tariff, especially its agrarian section, would have been far more protectionist than it actually was. So the government, far from being an eager instrument of high protectionist interests, was more successful in meeting the interests of the export industry, trade and consumers than their own organizations and representatives in parliament. But this protectionist gulf between legislative and executive was not a feature special to the late German Empire; it was a pattern seen again and again both internationally and intertemporally. For political economists, the most prominent example is undoubtedly the role played by the American Congress in the genesis of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which marked a new apogee in the long history of American high protectionism.20 The structural reason for the much greater protectionist tendencies of parliamentary institutions lies in the fact that deputies are far more directly and existentially exposed than the executive to interest groups aiming to force through trade-restricting measures. Conversely, because of this it is no great surprise that it was the export-friendly wing of the ministerial bureaucracy that sought to shut the Reichstag out of the foreign trade policy decision-making process as much as possible, and keep to a minimum the influence of economic interest groups. 5. Advancing globalization, not just in Germany but in every other state as well, threatened certain social groups with a serious loss of income. This prompted them to demand state protection from foreign competition, and from the late 1870s triggered the development of a worldwide protectionist counter-movement that soon gained its own momentum. Tariff increases in one country frequently provoked corresponding measures among trading partners. Quite often, this culminated in an upward spiral of protectionist measures, an extreme example being the Russo-German Tariff War of 1893, which saw the escalating use of retaliatory tariffs. Overall, the dynamic of the international trade system prior to the First World War may be described as a tariff arms race. This is very much in line with contemporaries’ perceptions. That tariffs and other trade policy instruments mutated into ‘weapons’ and ‘arms’ to be used in the impending ‘tariff battles across the world’, to quote some of the bellicose language used,21 was testimony to a widespread Social Darwinist worldview and also influenced political action. Often the mere anticipation of tariff increases in agiven country was enough to set in motion similar revisions in another country’s tariff policies to preventative ends, further propelling this spiral of protectionism. Almost every customs tariff entailed numerous tariffs exclusively intended to serve as bargaining chips in trade treaty negotiations. This method had unintended protectionist effects. The introduction of

20 See Jagdish Bhagwati, Protectionism (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 22 f., 41 f.; Barry Eichengreen, ‘The Political Economy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff’, Research in Economic History, 12 (1989), pp. 1–35; Douglas A. Irwin, ‘From Smoot-Hawley to Reciprocal Trade Agreements: Changing the Course of US Trade Policy in the 1930s’, in Bordo et al. (eds), Defining Moment, pp. 325–52; Elmer E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressures and the Tariff: A Study of Free Private Enterprise in Pressure Politics as Shown in the 1929– 1930 Revision of the Tariff (New York, 1935). 21 For just one example, see the Reichstag debate on Germany’s trade relations with the UK in June 1899: Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Deutschen Reichstags 1898–1899, pp. 2602, 2609, 2611 f. (17 June 1899).

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a tariff on purely tactical grounds aroused protectionist desires among domestic producers that might benefit from it, despite them having no need of protection; such attitudes then acquired a momentum of their own, and these protective tariffs were suddenly subject to passionate defence. Ultimately, the ‘customs tariff arms race’, the ‘tactic of upping tariffs for use as bargaining chips’, as the Prussian agricultural ministry put it with hindsight in 1912, ‘undeniably led to an enduring increase in the general level of tariffs’.22 6. Before the First World War, German trade policy found itself increasingly exposed to the pincer movement of globalization – directly through increasing dependency on foreign trade, and indirectly via the conduit of domestic political conditions, which were changing under the influence of globalization and the dynamics unleashed by it within the system of international relations. In the half-century before the First World War, the Prussian-German government’s room for manoeuvre in the trade policy field narrowed dramatically. A potted history might run as follows. World market integration and the pressure of economic interests played no major role in the reorganization of German trade policy along free-trade lines in the 1860s and early 1870s. The key factor here was the ideological triumph of the free-trade idea, which was fostered but not caused by economic developments, and the instrumentalization of this idea by the Prussian power elite as it strove to attain hegemony within Central Europe.23 The change in global economic parameters – the world economic crisis that began in 1873 and the flooding of Europe with overseas cereals that began a little later, but whose consequences could scarcely have been predicted – was a prerequisite for the protectionist turn of 1879. The specific genesis of the customs tariff of 1879, however, shows that all of this did no more than create the possibility for a protectionist shift; it established a new political constellation whose outcome was still open. It is also clear that Bismarck was the ‘big hitter’, the architect of the shift towards protectionism, and it was essentially down to his constant interventions that the consistently fissiparous groupings of tariff supporters pulled together until the end. Bismarck’s key role is also apparent in the relatively large room for manoeuvre still enjoyed by the executive under the circumstances of the day, which allowed the chancellor to pursue extensive and autonomous financial and domestic policy objectives that extended far beyond the field of foreign trade policy per se.24 Fifteen years later – as is clearly evident in the conflict over the Caprivi trade treaties – this degree of political freedom was no longer possible due to the pressures of globalization. It now became increasingly difficult for German trade policy to steer a course through the minefield of economic interests and globalization-induced political problems. Just how dangerous this situation could be is evident in the fact that, despite comprehensive compensatory measures in the agricultural field, Caprivi was unable to escape the maelstrom unleashed by advocates of agricultural interests which led to his political demise. When concluding trade treaties, foreign policy considerations had still played at least a secondary role for the second German imperial chancellor, but from the turn of the century even this last remnant of freedom of movement, namely the ability to instrumentalize tariffs and trade policy to other ends, had disappeared. During the serious domestic political conflicts over the customs tariff reform of 1902, all the imperial leadership really wished to

22 Memorandum by the Ministerium für Landwirtschaft, Domänen und Forsten, ‘Zur Revision des Zolltarifs’, sent on 16 January 1912, Bundesarchiv (BA), R 43, 324, fol. 131. 23 See Helmut Böhme, Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht. Studien zum Verhältnis von Wirtschaft und Staat während der Reichsgründungszeit 1848–1881 (Cologne, 1966), pp. 100–66; Hans-Werner Hahn, Geschichte des Deutschen Zollvereins (Göttingen, 1984), pp. 165–88. 24 See Rosenberg, Große Depression; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Frankfurt, 1985; first published 1969), pp. 61–111; Böhme, Deutschlands Weg, pp. 341–586; Ivo N. Lambi, Free Trade and Protection in Germany 1868–79 (Wiesbaden, 1963), pp. 73–149.

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do was to somehow rid itself of this conflict-laden subject without being crushed between the millstones of different interests. Every long-term political strategy – whether that of the ‘politics of rallying together’ or that of the ‘middle way’ – increasingly fell by the wayside in favour of a policy of muddling through. There was no longer any room to pursue political goals beyond the field of tariff policy: even obvious and pressing fiscal problems were subordinated entirely to the effort of satisfying the diverging foreign economic interests – though the government was not remotely successful in this regard.25 In the trade treaty negotiations that followed the adoption of the Bülow Tariff, it became apparent just how much world market integration had now curtailed the German government’s room for manoeuvre with respect to foreign trade policy. A clear example can be seen in German trade policies towards the two most important trading partners of the German Empire, namely Russia and the US. In view of the massive pressure from agricultural protectionists within German domestic politics, the government felt it could neither accept reductions in its own system of agricultural protection nor risk German exports by triggering retaliation from an already highly protectionist Russia. Because of this the imperial leadership saw only one way of achieving the urgently needed treaty with Russia: by exploiting favourable international conditions – in other words, Russia’s precarious predicament in the war with Japan – in order to persuade the Russian government to relent.26 It thus used ‘grand politics’ to serve the needs of trade policy, turning on its head the hierarchical relationship between these two political fields, a hierarchy entrenched in contemporaries’ mentality. That trade policy was able to gain primacy over traditional foreign policy, at least for a time, points to the key importance of foreign economic policies as a result of the first wave of globalization. At around the same time, trade relations between Germany and the US revealed just how much autonomy of action the nation-state had lost with respect to international economic policy before the First World War. Germany believed it was in a weaker position than the US economically because of the structure of German–American trade – crucial imports of American industrial raw materials on the one hand, German finished goods exports that were fairly easy to replace on the other – and, in contrast to Russia, it possessed no effective foreign-policy lever that might have helped free it from its predicament. In essence, therefore, the German government allowed the US to dictate the conditions of their trade relations,27 while domestically it struggled to resist the sweeping demands of the various interest groups.

25 For a general examination of the Caprivi trade treaties and the Bülow Tariff, see Torp,Challenges . See also Rolf Weitowitz, Deutsche Politik und Handelspolitik unter Reichskanzler Leo von Caprivi 1890–1894 (Düsseldorf, 1978); Derek M. Bleyberg, ‘Government and Legislative Process in Wilhelmine Germany: The Reorganization of the Tariff Laws under Reich Chancellor von Bülow 1897–1902’, PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1979. 26 See Bismarck to Lucanus, 28 July 1904, BA, R 43, 305 b, fol. 70, 74; Barbara Vogel, Deutsche Rußlandpolitik. Das Scheitern der deutschen Weltpolitik unter Bülow 1900–1906 (Düsseldorf, 1973), pp. 174 ff.; Dietmar Wulff, ‘Der russisch-deutsche Handelsvertrag von 1904. Hintergründe und Motive seines Abschlusses’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte der sozialistischen Länder Europas, 32 (1988), pp. 129–45; Robert Mark Spaulding, Osthandel and Ostpolitik: German Foreign Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer (Providence, 1997), pp. 81 ff. 27 The synopsis provided by state secretary at the imperial ministry of the interior, Arthur Graf von Posadowsky-Wehner, embodies this fact perfectly: the Germans could not ‘deny the fact that we are the weaker party in any tariff conflict with the United States’. The US was ‘holding all the cards’. It was thus necessary to ‘find a way forward that allows us to avoid a conflict with the United States at all costs’. Meeting of the Prussian state ministry on 12 February 1906, BA, R 43, 308, fol. 78. For very similar sentiments, see Commissarial advisory meeting on the stance to be adopted in the negotiations with the United States of America, 16 December 1899, BA, R 1501, 103090, fol. 256–264; Mühlberg, Posadowsky and Stengel to Bülow, 4 February 1906, BA, R 901, 4671.

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7. As a whole, the response of German foreign trade policy to the challenge represented by the high phase of economic globalization before the First World War presents an ambivalent picture. On the one hand, this policy went a long way to accommodating the protectionist demands of those social groups for whom world market integration meant a marked worsening in their income prospects and who were effective in pursuing their aims. From 1879 onwards, this meant a significant increase in the nominal tariff burden, particularly on agricultural products – initially over the course of the 1880s and then, when the Caprivi treaties (which resulted in a temporary reduction) had ceased to apply, once again through the Bülow Tariff. At the same time, the agriculturalists achieved comprehensive packages of non-tariff measures, which either protected them from world market competition or compensated them for loss of income. Together, over the long term, these two measures fixed German prices for agricultural products significantly above world market prices. Though attempts to quantify the various consequences of German agricultural protectionism are beset by methodological difficulties, from a national economic perspective there is no doubt that these were negative overall. All measures to support agricultural prices were pure maintenance subsidies that artificially kept alive those parts of German agriculture no longer competitive on the world market. This meant not only forgoing the advantages of the international division of labour, but also the costly slowing of an ultimately inexorable shift in the overall economic structure. Tariffs and other state interventions diverted copious economic resources into inefficient factor combinations. Against the long-standing myth, it was not just Prussian landowners but also farmers in the rest of Germany, though to differing degrees, who benefited from large-scale social redistribution, pocketing anat times substantial producer’s surplus. In hindsight, it is probably also true that around the turn of the century agriculturalists managed to erect a protectionist wall that went beyond what was economically necessary to secure the survival of German agriculture in the face of foreign competition. A number of indicators, such as the increase in the profitability of agricultural firms, the degree of mortgage debt, the development of commodity prices and the decreasing number of forced sales, suggest that most farmers – especially large estate owners – were again doing very well in the final decade before the First World War.28 This no doubt had to do with the fact that world market prices of agricultural products started to increase again enduringly from the end of the 1890s, but was also due in significant part to generous state support measures. It was consumers who picked up the tab. In comparison to the UK, with its commitment to free trade, in Germany agricultural protectionism raised living costs markedly.29 Going by the calculations of contemporary economists, the cereals tariffs included in the Bülow Tariff alone cost urban working-class families more than 2 per cent, and often more than 3 per cent, of their household income.30 Social democratic and liberal critics before the First World War – and in their wake, recent historical research – have already pointed this out and have thus been sharply critical of German tariff and trade policies.

28 See Klaus Heß, Junker und bürgerliche Großgrundbesitzer im Kaiserreich. Landwirtschaftlicher Großbetrieb, Großgrundbesitz und Familienfideikommiß in Preußen (1867/71–1914) (Stuttgart, 1990), p. 306 and passim; Volker Hentschel, Wirtschaft und Wirtschaftspolitik im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Organisierter Kapitalismus und Interventionsstaat? (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 199 f.; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 696. 29 See Carl von Tyszka, Löhne und Lebenskosten in Westeuropa im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1914), pp. 259–90. 30 These are my own calculations, based on Wilhlem Gerloff, ‘Verbrauch und Verbrauchsbelastung kleiner und mittlerer Einkommen in Deutschland um die Wende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine konsum- und finanzstatistische Studie’, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 35 (1908), pp. 1–44, 145–72, at 35.

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A very different question from that concerning the economic appropriateness of a less comprehensive system of agricultural protection is that regarding its political feasibility. And here there are reasons for doubt. The entire prehistory of the Bülow Tariff suggests that even if it had seriously tried to do so, the Prussian-German government would not have succeeded in enforcing a significant reduction in agricultural protection (some of which was already in place, some merely projected) in the face of the public pressure exerted by agricultural interest groups and a staunchly protectionist Reichstag majority. Here we have to consider the fact that historical actors at the turn of the century could not have anticipated the lasting reversal in the downward trend in the price of agricultural products, which had persisted across the world from the 1870s onwards. They could only have worked this out a few years later, when the increased tariffs had been in place for more than a decade, as stipulated in the new trade treaties. It is also important to bear in mind that in Germany around the turn of the century, almost 40 per cent of workers were still involved in agriculture. In contrast to the UK, where this applied only to a minority of less than 10 per cent, in the German Empire a substantial portion of the population thus suffered a major blow to their income prospects as a result of the globalization of the agricultural market. At the time, systems of social security and other mechanisms of compensation for the losses suffered as a result of world market integration were still underdeveloped. So even without the pronounced political influence of the Prussian landed aristocracy, there would likely have been no realistic alternative to providing state protection for the losers of globalization and reducing the pressure of international competition through protectionist measures (this is evident if we look at French agricultural protectionism, which was very similar to its German counterpart).31 Anything else would have placed a massive question mark over social peace and the stability of the political system. In a sense, agricultural protectionism, with its socially pacifying function, was the price that German foreign trade policy had to pay for its concurrent ability – and this is the other side of the coin – to respond to Germany’s status, on the threshold of the twentieth century, as one of the most developed export nations, one highly dependent on the world market. So far, historians have been happy to concede this point with respect to Caprivi and the trade treaties concluded under his aegis, but have firmly denied it for the subsequent period. A lot of evidence suggests that we must revise this picture and place greater emphasis on the continuities in German foreign trade policy from the early 1890s until the First World War, continuities that point to an enduring focus on export interests and world market integration. Above all, the basic principles of Caprivi’s trade policies remained in force even after the turn of the century. This was evident, first of all, in the continuation of the policy of long-term trade treaties, which were concluded partly on the basis of the Bülow Tariff and again entailed comprehensive tariff reductions. Through them the German Empire remained at the centre of the European network of trade treaties; up until the First World War, then, it played the role it had taken over from France in the early 1890s. Second, despite massive attacks by the agriculturalists, the German government held to the principle of unlimited most-favoured-nation clauses, which prevented the disadvantaging of German exports in other countries and generalized the tariff reductions of the German conventional tariff. Third, though the champions of agricultural interests managed to achieve binding minimum rates for the four main types of cereals, even in the case of the customs tariff reform of 1902 the fundamental decision was in favour of a flat tariff whose rates could be lowered within the context of trade treaty negotiations without a fixed lower limit. Sticking to these fundamental elements of traditional trade policy met the demands made by all the

31 See Rita Aldenhoff-Hübinger, Agrarpolitik und Protektionismus. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 1879–1914 (Göttingen, 2002).

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organizations of trade and industry; here they were explicit and unanimous, regardless of how else they differed. Often, the stability of basic conditions, guaranteed primarily by the conclusion of long-term trade treaties, seems to have been more important to their members than tariff levels. The thesis of the continuity of German foreign trade policy in the quarter of a century before the First World War is also backed up by the development of the average tariff burden of German imports during this period. If we use this as the measure of protectionism, we see that in the 25 years before 1914 the actual (in contrast to the nominal) level of German protectionism hardly changed. Because of the movement in world market prices, absolute tariff changes between 1889 and 1913 were not reflected in any corresponding development in the relative tariff burden of dutiable imports. After 1890 – in other words, as a result of the Caprivi treaties – there was neither any reduction in the level of protectionism nor any increase after the Bülow Tariff came into force in 1906. The average tariff burden of total imports actually decreased slightly (1895–99: 10 per cent; 1909–13: 8.6 per cent). This even applies to the field of foodstuffs and luxury consumables, which saw the biggest increase as a result of the new German customs tariff, though this merely kept pace with similar price trends in the world market. So their tariff burden also remained virtually unchanged (1895–99: 23.6 per cent; 1909–13: 23 per cent).32 In international comparison, with this tariff level the German Empire was at best in the lower middle range prior to the First World War. Whether we assess the level of protectionism in light of the average tariff burden on total imports or use an indicator based onthe Heckscher-Ohlin model of the openness of economies, the same picture always emerges:33 the German Empire was more protectionist than Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK and at about the same level as Austria-Hungary, France and Sweden. The tariff level was higher, sometimes markedly so, in most other continental European states. The undisputed leaders of the protectionist hierarchy were the US and Russia. In light of this and other factors, there is little reason to label pre-1914 German foreign trade policy ‘highly protectionist’. We should instead think in terms of a moderate protectionism brought about by the process – highly conflictual in domestic political terms – of adaptation to the impulses emanating from globalization.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bairoch, Paul. ‘European Trade Policy, 1815–1914’, in Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 8: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 1–160. Bayly, Christopher A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004). Berghahn, Volker R. Imperial Germany, 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics (New York, 1994). O’Rourke, Kevin H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G. Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

32 These are my own calculations, based on Statistisches Handbuch für das Deutsche Reich, ed. Kaiserlich Statistisches Amt, 2. Teil (Berlin, 1907), p. 588; Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, 31 (1910), p. 314; Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, 35 (1914), p. 364. 33 See Bairoch, ‘European Trade Policy’, pp. 76, 139; Antoni Estevadeordal, ‘Measuring Protection in the Early Twentieth Century’, European Review of Economic History, 1 (1997), pp. 89–125.

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Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2009). Pierenkemper, Toni and Tilly, Richard. The German Economy During the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2004). Topic, Steven C. and Wells, Allen. ‘Commodity Chains in a Global Economy’, in Emily S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2012), pp. 591–812. Torp, Cornelius. The Challenges of Globalization: Economy and Politics in Germany 1860–1914 (New York, 2014). Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich, 1995).

301 This page has been left blank intentionally 17 Agricultural labour

simon constantine

scholars and students with an interest in the agricultural workforce of the empire can now turn to an extensive body of research, both on the labouring families of the peasant villages and on the migrant and resident workers on the estates. A generation of scholarship, characterized by an interest in agency and noteworthy for its focus on female labourers, has revealed just how adaptive these people had to be as they responded to changing patterns of demand in both agriculture and industry. This was visible, above all, in the mobility of the workforce. Rural society in the empire was characterized by both a high rate of out-migration and a yearly influx of seasonal workers; by the practice of commuting and, for many others, an annual change of employer and home. This movement connected rural areas with urban centres and, through emigration, with the wider world. While studies have confirmed that there was much that separated the lives of rural workers from that of their urban counterparts, it is now also clear that few communities in germany’s countryside resembled the common stereotype of a rural backwater, bypassed by modernization and untouched by change.

Labour and Worker-Peasants in the Peasant Villages farms of all sizes hired workers from the lower social strata of germany’s peasant villages (Bauerndörfer), those settlements characterized by a mixed population of well-off peasants, small holders, cottagers (Häusler, Büdner or Kätner) and labourers without property (Einlieger), the latter renting accommodation and land in the villages. Both the cottagers and, to a greater extent, the labouring families usually depended on wage labour in agriculture to make ends meet. however, as both contemporary studies and subsequent historical research have revealed, it was common for these groups to take on numerous other kinds of work as and when this became possible. in mecklenburg-schwerin, for example, many Einlieger and cottagers worked on neighbouring estates for part of the year, with their wives also accompanying them at harvest time, but it also became standard practice to work in forestry or as platelayers on the railways, or to find short-term employment as bricklayers or in factories. here many also worked at the docks in hamburg and Rostock, a weekly commute made possible by the expansion of the railways and the advent of cheap fares.1 in maudach, in Bavaria, villagers also alternated between factory work and agricultural employment over the course of their working lives, commuting to factories in , firstly on foot and then by train as the rail network developed.2 ‘worker-peasants’ like these, based

1 Richard ehrenburg, ‘Die häusler im mecklenburg-schwerinischen Domanium’, Archiv für exakte Wirtschaftsforschung, 5 (1913), p. 42; Bernhard von Oertzen, ‘Kleinsiedlung und Landarbeit in mecklenburgischen Bauerndörfern’, Archiv für exakte Wirtschaftsforschung, 5 (1913), pp. 79–90. 2 Cathleen S. Catt, ‘Farmers and Factory Workers: Rural Society in Imperial Germany: The example of maudach’, in Richard J. evans and w.R. lee (eds), The German Peasantry: Conflict and The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

in the countryside but with contacts amongst the urban workforce, have also attracted the attention of historians for the role they played in Social Democratic agitation in rural areas. They were one reason why, in Protestant areas of the countryside within reach of its urban strongholds, the party was able to make some gains, despite the concerted campaign waged by Conservatives and the landowning elite against them.3 The extent to which the rural population combined agricultural and other forms of employment becomes particularly clear when we shift our focus from farm workforces to the rural household, as Jean Quataert has shown in her research on the Saxon Oberlausitz. Here wives, husbands and older children all relied on the subsistence security provided by their own livestock and plot of land, but also worked, variously, as hand weavers, agricultural workers, vegetable sellers, and in textile factories or in construction. Balancing the need to work with the maintenance of the home and smallholding also generated an unusual pattern of male and female responsibility in this area, with some husbands assuming the main responsibility for household and children over the winters, while their wives worked in the mills.4 More usual was the reallocation of work encountered by David Blackbourn in his study of Marpingen in the Saarland. By the mid 1870s around half of adult males here were employed outside of the village, most in the coalfields of the Saar basin, tramping some four hours across country at dawn each Monday. With men away at the pits for the week, the women managed the household, but now also took over traditionally male tasks like ploughing, sowing, reaping and other heavy work connected with the family smallholding, as well as playing a more prominent role in the network of relationships that connected households with each other, and villagers with officialdom. It added up to an overburdening of female farm workers, something more recently highlighted by Elizabeth Jones in her study of Saxony.5 Both separation and the reallocation of work and status placed a strain on marriages, and also altered the relationship between parents and their children, Blackbourn suggesting that the increased disciplinary role played by mothers in the absence of fathers may have engendered a closer emotional relationship between fathers and their children, despite (or perhaps because of) their less frequent contact.6

Child Labour and Service

Children themselves contributed in no small measure to the rural economy. Unpaid labour for the household was simply a fact of life, but, as Annika Boentert has recently reminded

Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (London, 1986), pp. 129–57. See also, for the Saxon Province, Hainer Plaul, Landarbeiterleben im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1979), pp. 121–5. 3 In rural areas in Reichstag elections the SPD polled 14 per cent in 1898 and 17 per cent in 1903 (their highest total in the Kaiserreich). For discussion of SPD agitation and the response, see Klaus Saul, ‘Der Kampf um das Landproletariat. Sozialistische Landagitation, Großgrundbesitz und preußische Saatsverwaltung 1890 bis 1903’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 15 (1975), pp. 163–208; Holgar Rüdel, Landarbeiter und Sozialdemokratie in Ostholstein 1872 bis 1878 (Neumünster, 1984); Simon Constantine, Social Relations in the Estate Villages of Mecklenburg c.1880–1924 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 87–105. 4 Jean Quataert, ‘Combining Agrarian and Industrial Livelihoods: Rural Households in the Saxon Oberlausitz in the 19th Century’,Journal of Family History, 10 (1985), pp. 145–62. 5 Elizabeth B. Jones, Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany, 1871–1933 (Farnham, 2009), pp. 17–51. 6 David Blackbourn, The Marpingen Visions: Rationalism, Religion, and the Rise of Modern Germany (Oxford 1993).

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us, children were also employed as additional wage labour on a remarkable scale. A survey conducted by the Imperial Office for Statistics in 1904, which saw no fewer than nine million questionnaires sent to the Empire’s elementary schools, revealed that 20 per cent of children (1.7 million) had undertaken paid work in agriculture in the previous year, with many working long hours from a very young age.7 Unlike in industry, child labour in agriculture was never subject to legal restriction during the Empire, with the argument that work outside was good for body and soul, along with pressure from landowners and the interests of working families themselves, proving decisive. There were, of course, those who were not persuaded. One teacher on an estate in Pomerania singled out a four-week period in which his pupils, some aged only eight, worked for twelve hours each day on the beet crop, this on top of early morning schooling. They were left exhausted, susceptible to illness and far too tired to learn.8 As Boentert indicates, the use of child workers as paid labour cannot be viewed as a traditional practice on the wane. It became more, not less, important to agricultural production over the lifetime of the Reich, and is to be understood as an intrinsic part of its modernization, something visible in the particularly extensive deployment of children in areas like the Saxon Province where farming was geared to the profitable, but labour-intensive, beet crop.9 The children of cottagers and labourers left school to go into service, a lengthy transitional phase between childhood and marriage in which they were to accrue the skills, status and savings necessary to establish their own household.10 Young women were often taken on before their 14th birthday, and these maidservants accounted for some of the child workers surveyed in 1904. Farm servants were contracted for a year at a time, and usually also changed employer, and often the village where they worked, each year. Most were integrated into the employer household, sleeping under the same roof and eating at the same table, although on the estates, separate living and eating quarters were normal. ‘Servants Codes’ (Gesindeordnungen) placed these workers in a legal position greatly inferior to that of non-contracted labourers, and to workers in industry. They were designed to tie labour to the workplace and ensure obedience; servants had no legal right to withdraw their labour; to do so amounted to breach of contract punishable by imprisonment or fine. Employers also retained the right to hit servants for minor infractions. Contracts drawn up on the basis of these codes usually stipulated that servants should perform any task designated by their master, and devote all their time and energy to the household, which they were not permitted to leave without permission. They also facilitated the swift dismissal of troublesome or unproductive workers, including those who had contracted illnesses that might require costly treatment. In Mecklenburg this could be anyone incapacitated for longer than a fortnight, or who through ‘affliction or frailty’, including mental illness, had otherwise become unfit for work.11 Pregnancy was

7 Annika Boentert, Kinderarbeit im Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Paderborn, 2007), pp. 380–90. 8 Gossow, ‘Kommt bei uns auf dem Lande eine übermäβige, Gesundheit und Erziehung schädigende Ausnutzung schulpflichtiger Kinder zu landwirtschaftlichen Arbeiten vor?’, Pommersche Blätter für die Schule und ihre Freunde, 11 (Stettin, 1887), pp. 102–6, in Jens Flemming, Klaus Saul and Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Quellen zur Alltagsgeschichte der Deutschen vom Mittelalter bis Heute. Vol. 7: 1871–1914 (Darmstadt, 1997), pp. 133–45. 9 Boentert, Kinderarbeit, pp. 384–6, 403. On sugarbeet production in the Saxon Province, see Hans-Heinrich Müller, ‘Landwirtschaft und industrielle Revolution’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Sonderheft, 1989), pp. 103–4. 10 Regina Schulte, ‘Peasants and Farmers’ Maids: Female Farm Servants in Bavaria at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Evans and Lee, The German Peasantry, pp. 158–73. 11 Das mecklenburgische Gesinderecht nach der Gesindeordnung von 9.4.1899 (Schwerin, 1899). For discussion of the Saxon variant, see Jones, Gender and Rural Modernity, pp. 60–67.

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usually also grounds for dismissal. Women who had children whilst in service, and who remained in work, were obliged to place them in the care of relatives, since it was not possible to be both a servant and a mother.12 Given such constraints, the near absence of free time or personal space, and also the poor wages that servants received, it is not surprising that so many sought out other employment, or left the countryside altogether. This exodus was probably the biggest single manifestation of discontent amongst farm workers of all kinds, but it was not the only one. Elizabeth Jones has uncovered documents from legal disputes between employers and servants, including a number of ‘grievance petitions’ filed by female servants against their employers. They demonstrate the willingness of some women to protest through legal channels, and voice their complaints, variously, at abusive treatment (including sexual harassment), at being made to take on heavy work when they had not agreed to it, and at their employers either retaining reference books or providing them with poor references.13

Estate Workers

Servants, along with resident workers, migrants and additional hired labour from peasant villages, made up the bulk of the workforce on the landed estates, most prevalent in Mecklenburg and the eastern Prussian provinces. Here landownership and power were concentrated in the hands of one person, the estate owner, who, through the management of the manorial farm, and often also in their capacity as local authority, largely determined the day-to-day existence of those who lived here. Like the servants, the resident workers were also on annual contracts, and although managements were prepared to renew these for a dependable core of workers each year, they released other workers, hiring new ones in their place. This prevented too many acquiring domiciled status through continued residency of two years, and with this the right to potentially costly poor relief. Legally, resident workers were also in a similar position to servants. Rural workers in Prussia’s eastern provinces were not permitted to organize,14 and estate workers throughout Germany had no right to strike, facing fines or jail should they do so.15 The extent to which resident labourers depended upon the estate also greatly disempowered these workers. They lived in estate-owned housing, and relied on their employer to keep this in good repair, and, because much of their wage was paid in kind, also depended on the estate for food and fuel. In the early years of the Empire they received a large part of their wages this way, though the proportion varied greatly across Germany, and was to decrease everywhere over the period.16 Some, as sharecroppers, were entitled to a small percentage of the grain

12 Schulte, ‘Peasants and Farmers’ Maids’, p. 170. 13 Jones, Gender and Rural Modernity, pp. 81–9. 14 Saul, ‘Der Kampf um das Landproletariat’, pp. 205–7. 15 Although the tactic of ‘slow work’ was not uncommon: see Constantine, Social Relations, pp. 71–7. As a result, unions aimed specifically at farm workers did not appear until the immediate pre- war years, and did not recruit widely until after 1918. The SPD-affiliated Verband der Land-, Wald- und Weinbergsarbeiter und -arbeiterinnen Deutschlands was formed in 1909 (from 1912 Deutscher Landarbeiter- Verband). Its newspaper, Der Landarbeiter, is an important historical source for the immediate pre-war and war years. The Catholic Zentralverband der Forst-, Land- und Weinbergarbeiter Deutschlands, with its mouthpiece Die Rundschau, began in 1913. 16 Schiller cites a figure of 70 per cent for Brandenburg in the 1870s, diminishing to 45 per cent by 1914. In East Prussia in 1914, 82.5 per cent of estate workers’ wages were still paid in kind. In Silesia and Saxony the proportion had dropped below 20 per cent. René Schiller, Vom Rittergut zum Großgrundbesitz.

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they harvested (for their own use and to sell), but this practice became less common, and by the 1890s most resident workers were on fixed-wage contracts, working for a cash sum and a contractually agreed amount of grain, firewood, allotment space and livestock. Estate workers also depended upon their employer to fund medical care in the event of illness or injury, whether in the form of a loan (leading to the further dependency of indebtedness), through an estate charitable fund or, in their capacity as local authorities, through the poor relief system. This too acted as a great disincentive to any worker who wished to challenge estate management. Agricultural workers were not to benefit from the Empire’s health insurance programme – and the culture of entitlement it fostered – until the early twentieth century, and even then, as Martin Krieger has shown, take-up was gradual in peasant villages and negligible on estates.17 Even when membership of health insurance funds finally became compulsory in 1914, many owners took advantage of an opt-out clause, exempting them where they agreed to provide equal or better terms than those available through insurance.18 Resident labourers were often obliged to employ and house extra workers. Traditionally these ancillary workers (Hofgänger or Scharwerker) had been the estate worker’s own children. However, it was these young people that were leaving for the cities in the greatest numbers, and so recruitment from outside the community became more common. In parts of the country, deals were reached between estates and prisoner welfare societies to channel ex-prisoners towards ancillary work on the estates. This was symptomatic of a general willingness by estate managements to recruit or lease workers from penal institutions, a practice which helped pave the way for the mass deployment of POW labour in agriculture during the Great War.19 Historians have depicted relations between resident labourers and their ancillary workers as exploitative, replicating within the worker’s household the master–servant relationship that existed between estate owner and resident labourer.20

Migrant Workers

From the beginning of the Wilhelmine period, more and more estates began to meet their demand for labour by employing migrant workers. Partly, they did so because the local labour pool was insufficient. Overseas emigration in two large waves between 1864–73 and 1880–93, and, thereafter, the exodus to Germany’s urban centres, meant that rural populations grew too slowly to meet the needs of an increasingly labour-intensive production.21 Seasonal labour was also attractive to owners because it was more cost- effective than local labour; female and young male workers formed the majority of the recruits, and both could be paid at a lower rate to men. Migrants could also be housed in barracks, sent home over the winters when they were not needed, and there was no

Ökonomische und soziale Transformationsprozesse der ländlichen Eliten in Brandenburg im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2003), p. 77. 17 Martin Krieger, Arme und Ärzte, Kranke und Kassen: ländliche Gesundheitsversorgung und kranke Arme in der südlichen Rheinprovinz (1869 bis 1930) (Stuttgart, 2008), pp. 187–211. 18 Constantine, Social Relations, p. 51. 19 Simon Constantine, ‘Correction in the Countryside: Convict Labour in Rural Germany 1871– 1914’, German History, 24 (2006), pp. 39–61. 20 Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Bonn, 1992), p. 226. 21 Peter Marschalk, Bevölkerungsgeschichte Deutschlands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 45–52.

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obligation to provide them with health care. For their part, the migrants came because wages were much higher than those where they lived, particularly where piece work potentially left the extent of earnings in their own hands. They were prepared to endure the hardship on the estates because they could save money for land or a dowry, and because such work – physically unsustainable in the long term – was conceived as temporary, most workers making the journey only two or three times.22 The arrivals in the spring of 1914 were to have a different experience. When it became obvious that their labour was indispensable to the German war effort, they were prevented from returning home and were deployed as forced labour alongside POWs for the duration of the war, many under grossly exploitative conditions.23 In his efforts to ‘germanize’ Prussia’s eastern provinces, Bismarck had made the recruitment of workers from Russian-Poland and Austria-Hungary illegal. The migrants of the first two decades, relatively few in number, were thus largely drawn from areas within the Empire’s borders. With Bismarck’s departure from office, and under renewed pressure from landowners, this ban was lifted. Demand increased greatly thereafter and by 1914 some 430,000 foreign migrants were crossing into Germany for agricultural work.24 The mass recruitment of Polish workers (both foreign and Reich subjects) provoked a hostile reaction from German nationalists who regarded their annual arrival as corrosive of German culture, despite the fact that they were usually housed separately from local workers and, in the case of non-nationals, were not permitted to stay in Germany over the winters.25 Migrants were subject to the same restrictions as servants and resident labourers, and had no right to stop or leave work of their own accord. But illegal job-switching in search of better pay and conditions was common, despite the threat of imprisonment and loss of wages held back as security. Such ‘contract-breaking’, which was also encouraged by agents who received a commission each time they supplied new hands, became a major problem in some areas and various measures were implemented in response. Names and descriptions of fugitives were printed in state ‘wanted’ bulletins, and pass books were introduced which had to be stamped before workers could be hired elsewhere. Later, in an effort to prevent foreign migrants re-registering in other parts of the country, a central database was also established. Migrant workers were able to counteract these efforts by carrying multiple sets of identification papers in different names, and were thus able to re-register and find new employment as documented workers. Often, however, this tactic was not necessary, since, with the labour market predominantly in their favour, there were always employers prepared to take them on with or without the correct papers.26

22 William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Boston, 1918), vol. 1, p. 199 and vol. 2, p. 67 fn. 23 Simon Constantine, ‘Agency and Protest: Migrant Labourers in Northern Germany 1890–1924’, Labor History, 47 (2006), pp. 326–30. 24 The largest contingent were Poles from the (270,000), then Ukranians (Ruthenen) (70,000) and Poles from Austria-Hungary (60,000): see Lother Elsner and Joachim Lehmann, Ausländische Arbeiter unter dem deutschen Imperialismus 1900–1985 (Berlin, 1988), pp. 26, 385. 25 Most prominently, Max Weber claimed that eastern Germany was being ‘de-nationalized’, predicting that the German ‘standard of culture, the diet and requirements of the rural population’ would be ‘forced down to the standards of a lower, more eastern level of culture’. Max Weber, ‘Die Ländliche Arbeitsverfassung’, Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik (hereafter SVSP), 58 (1893), p. 72. 26 Richard Ehrenburg, ‘Kontraktbruch als Massenerscheinung’, Landarbeit und Kleinbesitz, 1 (1907), pp. 1–70; Constantine, ‘Agency and Protest’, pp. 319–41.

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A World Apart?

The absence of restrictions on child labour, the punitive nature of contracts, the ban on strikes and unions, and the exclusion of rural labour from the health insurance programme, all indicate that separate rules applied in the countryside. In some respects research on the attitudes and behavioural norms of those who lived here has also emphasized distinctiveness. As Regina Schulte has demonstrated, aspects of a peculiarly rural worldview can be discerned in the statements provided by witnesses and the accused in court cases where the moral codes followed by villagers clashed with those enforced in law. Examining case documents of women tried for infanticide in Bavaria in the 1890s, Schulte describes how they concealed their pregnancy, both to keep their employment and as a way of denying to themselves that they were to give birth; a denial of the life of the baby which she sees completed in the ‘staging and experiencing’ of the birth itself as an act of defecation, or as ‘a kind of late abortion’, carried out before the mother–child relationship could begin, and on creatures viewed as soulless before baptism. It seems this behaviour did not conflict greatly with attitudes prevalent in the rural communities, amongst whom there was a general unwillingness to condemn the killings; partly, it seems, because the death of infants was simply seen as the normal order of things.27 In his study of the Catholic village of Marpingen, David Blackbourn has also made good use of the documentation generated by a confrontation between state and village;28 in this case drawing on the records of an official investigation, involving magistrates, police and local officials, into claims by three children that the Virgin Mary had appeared close to the village. Blackbourn traces the manner in which villagers as well as the visionaries themselves became ‘authors of the story’, embellishing the original accounts, bringing them into line with what apparitions were expected to look like, and hereby promoting Marpingen as a site of pilgrimage, not least because there was money to be made. This they did whilst also continuing to believe that the apparitions were genuine, a conviction the author attributes to the particular potency of the blend of orthodox Catholicism and folk beliefs characteristic of the Catholic revival, and to the mood of desperation brought on by economic depression and state persecution during the Kulturkampf. Such attitudes, and indeed the regulations governing the employer–worker relationship, might be taken to indicate the persistence of pre-modern conventions and beliefs in the countryside, but there are some problems with this line of interpretation. As Blackbourn reminds us, modernization is not synonymous with secularization, and in this case religious fervour also appears to have been fostered by modern cyclical capitalism. On the question of rural distinctiveness we also need to exercise some caution. Although modes of perception or behaviour that were particular to areas of the countryside may be thrown into relief by ‘collisions’ between village and state, their prominence at the point of collision may conceal the extent to which rural and urban Germans held broadly similar attitudes and conformed to a shared set of norms. Given the continual intermingling of rural and urban populations and the similar pattern to socialization across the country in school, service and the military, this could hardly have been otherwise. If some contemporary observers emphasized the peculiarity or backwardness of rural life, others did not. Hecht’s study of three villages in Baden in 1895, for example, noted the near extinction of superstitious beliefs, and underscored the extent to which villagers were connected to national cultural and political life, and to the

27 Regina Schulte, Das Dorf im Verhör. Brandstifter, Kindsmörderinnen und Wilderer vor den Schranken des bürgerlichen Gerichts (Reinbek, 1989); in English as The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide, and Poaching in the Court Records of (Cambridge, 1994). 28 Blackbourn, Marpingen.

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world beyond. Here, some 45,000 letters were sent or received in the course of one year alone, and every household, including the poorest, subscribed to at least one newspaper per week.29

Sources

Historians working on rural society have recourse to a wide array of contemporary published materials. Statistical information on the size of the rural workforce can be gathered from the three occupational censuses conducted in 1882, 1895 and 1907;30 and regional studies which draw on these, and which also incorporate statistics on farm size, production and profits, have followed.31 As Gabriele Rieger has indicated, some care is needed with these numbers, given the undercounting of children during the first census, and the fact that those that followed both understated the significance of agricultural work relative to other forms of employment and concealed the true scale of female labour.32 Of particular importance are the contemporary surveys of the rural workforce, chiefly those undertaken by Theodor von der Goltz (1875), the Verein für Socialpolitik (1892),33 the Evangelisch-Sozialer Congress (1899–1903),34 and the Standing Committee for the Improvement of the Interests of Female Workers (1914–18).35 Together

29 Moritz Hecht,Drei Dörfer der badischen Hard. Eine wirtschaftliche und sociale Studie (Leipzig, 1895), in Flemming et al, Quellen, pp. 202–6. 30 For 1882, see Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, vol. 2 (1884) and vol. 4.3 (1884); for 1895, vol. 111 (1899); and for 1907, vol. 203 (1910). 31 The GESIS-Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften has digital copies of key texts by E. Bittermann, Die landwirtschaftliche Produktion in Deutschland, 1800 bis 1950 (Halle, 1956); and Hans Wolfram Graf Finck von Finckenstein, Die Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft in Preußen und Deutschland, 1800–1930 (Wurzburg, 1960). See http://www.gesis.org/histat/de/data/themes/21. 32 Some respondents claimed non-agricultural work – with higher social status – as their main employment, classed female employment as secondary, even when it was their main source of paid employment, or simply failed to record it. See Gabriele Rieger, ‘Die Statistik der landwirtschaftlichen Betriebe sowie der in der Landwirtschaft tätigen Bevölkerung’, in Christoph Borcherdt et al (eds), Führer durch die Agrarstatistiken der südwestdeutschen Länder 1850–1939 (St Katharinen, 1989), part 1, pp. 39–282, at 220–23. 33 Karl Kaerger, ‘Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in Nordwestdeutschland’, and Hermann Losch, ‘Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in Württemberg, Baden und Elsaβ-Lothringen’, SVSP, 53 (1892); Kuno Frankenstein, ‘Die ländlichen Arbeitsverhältnisse in Hohenzollern, Regierungsbezirk Wiesbaden, Thüringen, Bayern, Groβherzogtum Hessen, Regierungbezirk Kassel, Königreich Sachsen’, Friedrich Groβmann, ‘Die ländlichen Arbeitsverhältnisse in der Provinz Schleswig-Holstein, den Provinzen Sachsen und Hannover, sowie den Herzogtümern Braunschweig und Anhalt’, and Otto Anhagen, ‘Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in der Rheinprovinz und im oldenburgischen Fürstentum Birkenfeld’, SVSP, 54 (1892); Max Weber, ‘Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter in ostelbischen Deutschland’, SVSP, 55 (1892). 34 Salli Goldschmidt, Die Landarbeiter in der Provinz Sachsen sowie den Herzogtümern Braunschweig und Anhalt (Tübingen, 1899); A Grünenberg, Die Landarbeiter in den Provinzen Schleswig-Holstein und Hannover östlich der Weser sowie in den Gebieten des Fürstentums Lübeck und der freien Städte Lübeck, Hamburg und Bremen (Tübingen, 1899); Alfred Klee, Die Landarbeiter in Nieder und Mittelschlesien und der Südhälfte der Mark Brandenburg (Tübingen, 1902); Feliz Gerhardt, Die Landarbeiter in der Provinz Ostpreußen (Königsberg, 1902); Karl Breinlinger, Die Landarbeiter in Pommern und Mecklenburg (Heidelberg, 1903). 35 Hans Seufert, Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse der Frauen in der Landwirtschaft in Württemberg, Baden, Elsass-Lothringen und Rheinpfalz (Jena, 1914); Elly zu Putlitz, Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse der Frauen in der Landwirtschaft in Brandenburg (Jena, 1914); Hermann Priester, Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse der Frauen in der Landwirtschaft in Mecklenburg (Jena, 1914); Gertrud Dyrenfurth, Ergebnisse einer Untersuchung über die Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse der Frauen in der Landwirtschaft (Jena, 1916); Rosa Kemp, Arbeits- und Lebensverhältnisse der Frauen in der Landwirtschaft Bayerns (Jena, 1918).

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they offer a remarkable degree of both geographical and chronological coverage, and are an invaluable source of information on regional and local patterns of labour recruitment, and more broadly on social relations in the countryside. The Verein für Socialpolitik publications, compiled on the basis of over 2,500 questionnaires, provide local detail on the different categories of worker employed, the employment and origin of migrant workers, and the extent to which workers were leaving the sector, as well as on contractual obligations, wage levels, the provision of welfare and cultural amenities, and the extent of child employment. In his recent work on estates Scott Eddie has also demonstrated the value of the Parey directories. For properties above 100 hectares in size, these list the owner’s name and address and the size of the property, the area of land under cultivation, the extent of woodland and uncultivated land, and also the number of enterprises on the property (including flour mills, saw mills, brickworks and distilleries), the latter indicative of the surprising variety of work that took place on estates.36 Generally speaking, historical research on the estate villages has been hampered by the absence of surviving records from the estate managements themselves, which, in eastern Germany, were often destroyed in the process of expropriation and agricultural reorganization that took place in the first years of the GDR. A significant exception are the Gutsarchive held at the Wernigerode archive in Sachsen-Anhalt, some 177 of which contain documents from this period, including local election returns, examples of contracts, records from veterans’ associations, files concerning Social Democracy, registers of crimes and correspondence between estate authorities and district courts, and between management and owners, as well as numerous records pertaining to farm production. Historians have made little use of this material to date, although it seems likely to improve our understanding of life in estate villages significantly. A number of the estate archives here also contain wage books, which, as Barbara Greve has shown for Hesse, can be a much richer source than one might imagine. For servants and resident workers they show how much of their total remuneration was paid in cash or in kind, and what the different elements of the latter amounted to. Most commonly these included staple foods, but also wood and, in the case of female servants, wool, thread and cloth, often put aside as part of a dowry. They sometimes indicate where workers had money deducted in lieu of a fine, or to cover court costs, or that the mother or father of the servant collected the cash or wood delivery; a reminder that servants’ wages were often a contribution towards the total income of their family household. Some also reveal when and for what purpose servants requested money as an advance (to be subtracted from a cash wage paid at the end of the contract); chiefly the repair and purchase of clothing and tools, but also visits to local festivities.37 The questionnaires composed by the Verein für Socialpolitik were sent to landowners, and those used in the Evangelisch-Sozialen Congress survey were sent to village clergymen. Although they were the subject under investigation, the opinions of rural workers themselves were not canvassed. However, as we have seen with the petitions and statements left in legal case files, the voices of rural workers themselves are by no means absent in the historical record. Recent studies of rural poor relief and health care in Prussia’s have also utilized poor relief requests submitted by farm workers, along with the correspondence generated through

36 Paul Ellerholz (ed.), Handbuch des Grundbesitzes im deutschen Reiche (Berlin, 1879–). For a discussion of their value, see Scott M. Eddie, Landownership in Eastern Germany Before the Great War (Oxford, 2008), pp. 6–53. 37 Barbara Greve, ‘Schwälmer Gesinde-Vertragsabschluβ, Lohnzahlung und Lohnnutzung zwischen 1871 und 1919’, in Siegfried Becker and Max Matter (eds), Gesindewesen in Hessen. Studien zur historischen Entwicklung und sozialkulturellen Ausprägung ländlicher Arbeitsorganisation (Marburg, 1987), pp. 131–43.

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the processing of such claims.38 As the authors demonstrate, these documents can reveal the strategies adopted by claimants, including the modes of speech they employed, as well as those used by the officials who rejected or approved assistance. They also shed light upon the material circumstances, self-perception and stigmatization of claimants, and, where the requests pertain to ill health, upon the poor’s perception of illness and its impact.39 There are also a number of published autobiographical accounts which repay close attention. Among the better known are those by ‘Otto’, discharged from a Berlin workhouse and then hired as an ancillary worker in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and by Franz Rehbein, a German migrant from eastern Pomerania.40 Much less well known, but also valuable, are the accounts by Franz Lüth, and by the migrant workers Johannes Mühlradt and ‘Wladek’, whose recollection of work on a Pomeranian estate was included in Thomas and Znaniecki’s seminal work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.41 To these we can add a number of shorter texts, including the writer and Communist Paul Schrader’s (1900–1962) ‘memory’ of being left out in the fields in a thunderstorm as a baby after his mother had been ordered out to the fields,42 and the recollections of the writer, August Scholtis (1901–69), the son of agricultural labourers in Upper Silesia.43 The autobiography of maverick radical Max Hoelz (1889–1933), the son of resident workers at Hirschstein, Piesterwitz and Leutewitz in Saxony, is also instructive, highlighting as it does the crippling effect of work and childcare on his mother, as well as the early beginning of his own working life and its incompatibility with proper schooling. He also draws our attention to the frequency with which resident labouring families switched employer, in this case on their own initiative, in search of better treatment.44 Also noteworthy is the material left to us by the pastor Ludwig Schlee (1872–1928), who went undercover to record the schnapps-fuelled existence of the itinerant workers that followed the threshing machines in Schleswig-Holstein.45 Deserving of special mention, in that it connects us more directly with the perceptions of its author, are the responses of one ‘Frau Hoffmann’ compiled from a series of interviews

38 Katrin Marx-Jaskulski, Armut und Fürsorge auf dem Land: vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1933 (Stuttgart, 2008); Krieger, Arme und Ärzte. 39 It may be that different social and political environments changed claimant strategy. The appeal cases of estate workers held in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are one of a number of collections which may provide a useful point of comparison. Mecklenburg-Schwerinsches Ministerium des Innern (05.12.03/01), Aktengruppe L.001.006., M.1.6 Rekurse und Beschwerden bezüglich Armenunterstützung. 40 Franz Rehbein, Das Leben eines Landarbeiters (Jena, 1911); August Bebel (ed.), Hofgängerleben in Mecklenburg: Selbsterlebtes und Selbsterschautes von einem Berliner Arbeitslosen (Berlin, 1896). Translations of some sections are in Alfred Kelly (ed.), The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley, 1987). 41 Franz Lüth, Aus der Jugendzeit eines Tagelöhners (Berlin, [1910]); Johannes Mühlradt, Aus dem Tagebuche eines Sachsengängers aus der Heide (Grünthal, 1915); Wladek, ‘Life Record of an Immigrant’, in Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant, vol. 3, pp. 89–400. 42 Paul Schrader-Körner, ‘Das Vergessene Kind’, in Wolfgang Emmerich (ed.), Proletarische Lebensläufe. Autobiographische Dokumente zur Entstehung der zweiten Kultur in Deutschland, 2. 1914–1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1975), pp. 46–8. 43 August Scholtis, Ein Herr aus Bolatitz. Lebenserinnerungen (Munich, 1959). 44 Max Hoelz, Vom weißen Kreuz zur roten Fahne (1929), in Emmerich (ed.), Proletarische Lebensläufe, 1, pp. 305–10. 45 Ludwig Schlee, ‘Wohlfahrtspflege für Drescharbeiter’, Schleswig-Holsteinisches Kirchenblatt, 23 (4 June 1911), pp. 221–5, excerpted in Flemming et al, Quellen, pp. 135–7; Ernst Schlee, ‘Wanderarbeiter in Dithmarschen zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Nach Aufzeichnungen von Ludwig Schlee’, in Nis R. Nissen, Menschen, Monarchen, Maschinen (Heide, 1988), pp. 13–77.

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with the pastor, Carl Moszeik, in 1909.46 Hoffmann, 69 years of age when interviewed, lived in the small rural town of Stallupönen in East Prussia, close to the border with the Russian Empire. Her account contains a good deal of detailed information on the specifics of agricultural work and, in particular, on the knowhow needed to feed a family on meagre earnings. Moszeik admitted censoring some of her remarks, and her Low German dialect has mostly been translated into High German. Nevertheless the transcription of much of the text as stream of consciousness suggests a close relationship with the respondent’s replies. We see this in the following remarkable passage, a household inventory, which also manages to convey the history of its painstaking assembly and care, an understanding of the value and use of each item, and her vision of its improvement:

Especially valuable for a poor person are beds where he can rest. They are the main thing even; there are also people who do not have a pillow. I only have to make the bed up twice but I wash the covers thoroughly; that’s why they say ‘Mrs Hoffmann does it right’ (‘Die Hoffmannsche hat’). If you work hard you can collect chairs gradually; if needs be you can do without. You can also squat down on a log. That applies to all households. You can knock a table together from planks. But mind to clean the table and chairs. A chest of drawers is especially nice. I wouldn’t get any ornaments, but flowers I would. Books? No, my son has a book. Plain furniture. Pictures, his pictures, I would buy soldiers, the Kaiser and princes.47

Hoffmann’s interview and the account by Hoelz are good sources of information about the strategies for survival that were adopted in crises when work and money dried up, and allow us to see the official requests for relief as only one course of action amongst many. Hoffmann refers to people selling pilfered off-cuts, coal and sand, and also begging, which she regarded as the only option for some elderly women with no other income (despite the fact that it was a criminal offence). ‘In some places the first Saturday of the month is begging day. All the women who can no longer work put on rags to provoke pity … you can learn how to beg from the Gypsies.’ In hard times, Hoelz recalls that he would be sent by his parents to buy dried-out bread that could not otherwise be sold, but told to say that he was buying it to give to a beggar. Both accounts also reflect the normality of violence in daily life: the corporal punishment of children at home, school and work, and (in Hoffmann’s account) domestic violence – and a kind of fatalistic acceptance of it amongst the women who suffered.48 Like Blackbourn and Schulte, drawing on a source base produced by a collision of cultures, Silke Wehner has pointed to the way in which German emigrants writing home compared their new circumstances with those they had left behind. Using letters from the archive of emigrant letters in Gotha, she highlights the comments of female servants who contrasted new found freedoms in the United States with the restrictive nature of work in the old country. (Here the wages and food were better, there was no need to register or carry pass books, and one did not always need a dowry to marry.) The published collections of

46 Carl Moszeik (ed.), Aus der Gedankenwelt einer Arbeiterfrau. Von ihr selbst erzählt (Berlin, 1909). Sections are translated in Kelly, German Worker, pp. 351–69. 47 Moszeik, Gedankenwelt, pp. 4–5. Note the contrast with the brief description of workers’ improved circumstances by one landowner surveyed in 1892: ‘Sofa instead of the previous wooden bench; floorboards instead of bare floor, flowers in the window’: Groβmann, ‘Die ländlichen Arbeitsverhältnisse’, p. 601. 48 Moszeik, Gedankenwelt, pp. 6–7, 41–55, 90; Max Hoelz, Vom weißen Kreuz. This section in Emmerich (ed.), Proletarische Lebensläufe, 1, pp. 305–10.

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letters from this archive indicate that more can be gleaned in this way, even if one is also left wishing that more letters from relatives in Germanyto emigrants were available.49 In a similar fashion, in her work on domestic servants, Karin Walser has identified the arrival and acculturation of women from rural areas in cities as a phase where rural norms and behaviour stuck out, and, consequently, become more visible in the historical record.50 Both Walser and the scholars working on the emigrant letters demonstrate a welcome sensitivity to the language used by these migrants, something that was clearly central to their identity. As Frau Hoffmann put it, with reference to her Platt dialect: ‘Our language accompanies us through our whole life.’51 ‘Ego-sources’, which allow us to construct histories incorporating the worldview and agency of workers themselves, can, of course, be deployed in tandem with those produced by observers ‘looking in’ at rural society. Reports by medical experts perhaps deserve special attention here for their illumination of social conditions, attitudes and the impact of disease and work on the bodies of rural people. In their excellent collection of sources, Flemming, Saul and Witt include reports on an outbreak of dysentery – a catastrophic consequence of poor sanitation and overcrowding – and on the spread of sexually transmitted disease in one rural community. Both texts indicate the chasm that existed between medical strategies for identifying, containing and treating disease, and the local understanding of threat and response. Medical sources like these also offer us precision when it comes to documenting the physical shock of agricultural work on the human body, as another such report, on migrant workers, makes clear.52

Directions for Future Research

Looking ahead, it seems reasonable to assume that growing awareness of humanity’s destructive impact on the planet will produce more historical research centring on the relationship between humans and their environment. Recent studies of Germany which have adopted an environmental historical approach suggest that research on the rural landscape and the farming communities within it can be particularly rewarding. Studies of wood shortage and the commercialization of woodland, of the draining of moorland and its impact on biodiversity, as well as of the regulation of rivers and the rationalization of the boundaries of land under cultivation have appeared in recent years, but surprisingly few have focused

49 Silke Wehner, ‘German Domestic Servants in America 1850–1914’, in Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagler (eds), People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective 1829–1930 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 267–93. The Nordamerika-Briefsammlung currently contains over 10,000 letters. For this period, see Wolfgang Helbich, Walter D. Kamphoefner and Ulrike Sommer (eds), Briefe aus Amerika. Deutsche Auswanderer schreiben aus der Neuen Welt 1830–1930 (Munich, 1988), and the English edition: News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, 1991). 50 Karin Walser, Dienstmädchen, Frauenarbeit und Weiblichkeitsbilder um 1900 (Frankfurt, 1986), pp. 84–5. 51 Moszeik, Gedankenwelt, p. 55. 52 Gertrud Dyrenfurth, ‘Die Ruhrepidemie im Kreise Bütow’, Zeitschrift für Medizinal-Beamte (hereafter ZMB) (August 1895), pp. 645–51; R. Thomalla, ‘Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten auf dem flachen Lande und in kleinen Städten’,Z MB, 19 (1906), pp. 9–17; Dr Schilling, ‘Die Krankheiten der Sachsengänger und ländlichen Arbeiter’, ZMB, 12 (1899), pp. 8–15, in Flemming et al., Quellen, pp. 645– 51, 163–71. Schilling lists complaints resulting from excessive working hours and poor living conditions and diet, also remarking that ‘many 18–20 year old girls fail to menstruate during their half to three- quarter year stay in this area, without being pregnant’.

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on the period 1871–1914 to date.53 One might also fuse environmental and social historical approaches for further enquiry into past outbreaks of disease in trees, plants and livestock, and the attempts to contain the threat that these posed, including, for example, the closure of markets for foot-and-mouth disease, and the cross-border cooperation needed for the resolution of such crises. New interpretations of urban expansion, and the incorporation of surrounding rural settlements into the administrative order and physical structure of cities, might also follow. Further, I would suggest that German archives can reveal much more about the changes that occurred to the ownership and management of resources at the local level, and the conflict that this produced. More work could be done, for example, onthe local administration of water courses, and on the social effects of woodland privatization. We also know very little about coastal communities during this period and the way that fishing villages managed the resources at their disposal. Of course, in some cases the research proposed would not be conducted in entirely new territory, but it might be expected that current discourse, including that surrounding food and water shortage, the depletion of natural resources, species extinction and ‘natural’ disasters, will generate new perspectives. The current scholarly interest in the history of rural poor relief and health care may also lead to further research on the correctional and curative institutions which dotted the countryside, both on the experience of inmates and patients, and on the relationship such institutions had with the wider rural society and economy. Equally welcome would be further studies into the way in which regional identity and ethnicity were defined in the countryside, as well as into relations between different ethnic groups, not least the economic ties that existed between farmers and Jews as cattle traders and moneylenders, and between rural communities and ‘Gypsies’, both as horse dealers and entertainers.54

Suggestions for Further Reading

Becker, Siegfried and Matter, Max (eds). Gesindewesen in Hessen. Studien zur historischen Entwicklung und sozialkulturellen Ausprägung ländlicher Arbeitsorganisation (Marburg, 1987). Blackbourn, David. The Marpingen Visions: Rationalism, Religion, and the Rise of Modern Germany (Oxford, 1993). Constantine, Simon. Social Relations in the Estate Villages of Mecklenburg c.1880–1924 (Basingstoke, 2007). Elsner, Lothar and Lehmann, Joachim. Ausländische Arbeiter unter dem deutschen Imperialismus 1900–1985 (Berlin, 1988).

53 See Frank Uekötter, Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2007), pp. 7–14, 79– 81. Blackbourn does discuss the social and environmental impact of dam construction in the Second Empire in his study of landscape change: David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London, 2006), pp. 179–238. See also Karl Ditt, Rita Gudermann and Norwich Ruesse (eds), Agrarmodernisierung und ökologische Folgen. Westfalen vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 2001). Few studies of any kind have appeared on forestry workers. See Ekkehard Schwartz, Arbeits- und Lebensbedingungen der Waldarbeiter im 19. und zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Gross-Umstadt, 1998); and Reinhold Skarupke, Die Waldarbeiter in Sachsen-Meiningen 1871–1914 (PhD dissertation, University of Halle, 1982). 54 On the failure of attempts to boycott Jewish cattle traders in Hesse, see Jacob Toury, ‘Antisemitismus auf dem Lande. Der Fall Hessen 1881–1895’, in Monika Richarz and Reinhard Rürup (eds), Jüdisches Leben auf dem Lande (Tübingen, 1997), pp. 173–88.

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Evans, Richard J. and Lee, W.R. (eds). The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (London, 1986). Flemming, Jens, Saul, Klaus and Witt, Peter-Christian (eds). Quellen zur Alltagsgeschichte der Deutschen vom Mittelalter bis Heute. Vol. 7 1871–1914 (Darmstadt, 1997). Herbert, Ulrich. A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers, Forced Laborers, Guest Workers (Ann Arbor, 1990). Jones, Elizabeth B. Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany, 1871–1933 (Farnham, 2009). Kelly, Alfred (ed.) The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley, 1987). Krieger, Martin. Arme und Ärzte, Kranke und Kassen: ländliche Gesundheitsversorgung und kranke Arme in der südlichen Rheinprovinz (1869 bis 1930) (Stuttgart, 2008). Marx-Jaskulski, Katrin. Armut und Fürsorge auf dem Land: vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1933 (Stuttgart, 2008). Saul, Klaus. ‘Der Kampf um das Landproletariat. Sozialistische Landagitation, Großgrundbesitz und preußische Saatsverwaltung 1890 bis 1903’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 15 (1975), pp. 163–208. Schildt, Gerhardt. ‘Die Landarbeiter im 19. Jahrhunderts: Eine unvollendete Klasse’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 36 (1996), pp. 1–26. Schulte, Regina. The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide, and Poaching in the Court Records of Upper Bavaria (Cambridge, 1994).

316 18 The environment and environmentalism

Thomas Rohkrämer

with the emergence of ‘green’ politics in the 1970s and 1980s, environmental history emerged as a fashionable sub-discipline of history. while the impact humans have on their environment has reached unprecedented levels since 1945, current concerns have also made historians increasingly aware of the importance of past societies’ relationships with the natural world around them. environmental history has not experienced the same dramatic expansion as, for example, women’s history, but it has undoubtedly established itself as an important perspective on the past. german history has been particularly slow in promoting genuine environmental history and studies of space and place, because such arguments were largely tarnished by being regarded as no more than precursors of nazi ‘blood-and- soil’ ideology, but over time the field has gradually established itself with a wide variety of studies of considerable sophistication.1 while early research has frequently countered the long prevalent grand narrative of progress with equally sweeping narratives of apocalyptic doom and clearly defined villains, more differentiated histories have emerged based on a realisation of the difficult continued historical struggle to secure human existence ina sustainable way.2 There are two key difficulties in writing a chapter on environmentalism in the German Empire, both of which are connected with defining the boundaries of the topic. First, the environment is not delineated by political boundaries or political dates: mountain ranges or rivers extend beyond nations, and changes with dramatic environmental impact – such as the increased use of fossil fuels, the regulation of rivers or new methods in agriculture and industry – do not follow the same chronological pattern as the politics of national unification, war and revolution. Secondly, almost all human activities have an environmental impact, in particular all technological and economic activities. it might well be that at some point environmental concerns will be considered more adequately in these sub-disciplines of history; until this is the case, however, a chapter on the environment is appropriate.

1 David Blackbourn, ‘A Sense of Place: New Directions in German History’, in The 1998 Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute London (london, 1999). 2 For useful overviews of environmental history, see Frank Uekötter,Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (munich, 2007); Verena winiwarter and martin Knoll, Umweltgeschichte. Eine Einführung (Cologne, 2007); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Tschernobyl, 26. April 1986, die ökologische Herausforderung (munich, 1999); Thomas lekan and Thomas Zeller (eds), Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (new Brunswick, 2005); christof mauch (ed.), Nature in German History (new York, 2004). See also the discussion on ‘The Nature of German Environmental History’ by Dorothee Brantz, Bernhard Gissibi, Thomas Lekan, Paul Warde, Verena Winiwarter and Thomas Zellerin German History, 27 (2009), pp. 113–30. For the early debates about methodology, see, for example, Jörg Calließ et al. (eds), Mensch und Umwelt in der Geschichte (Pfaffenweiler, 1989); Günter Bayerl et al. (eds), Umweltgeschichte – Methoden, Themen, Potientale (Münster, 1996); Werner Abelshauser (ed.), Umweltgeschichte. Umweltverträgliches Wirtschaften in historischer Perspektive (Göttingen, 1994); Rolf Peter Sieferle (ed.), Fortschritte der Naturzerstörung (Frankfurt, 1988). The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

At first, following Green eco-fundamentalists, the argument was put forward that the distinguishing feature of environmental history should be a break with an anthropological perspective. Instead of putting humans first, the environmental historian should identify with nature.3 Such an approach met, however, with insurmountable problems. Nature as such does not exist for humans, and all living forms have different interests. Belief in an optimal ecological equilibrium has largely been discredited, as nature is much more dynamic and can exist in a wide variety of forms.4 And at least in the context of the history of Central Europe, one encounters practically no untouched nature. Since the beginning of agriculture, humans have had a strong influence on the environment. Whatever the value of the ideal of ‘wilderness’ might be in the American context,5 it clearly is inappropriate for the ‘cultural landscape’ in Europe.6 The ideal cannot be a nature untainted by humans, but a responsible human interaction with the environment.7 Although the concept of sustainability is dangerously vague as it allows for an inherently precarious material use of nature to its absolute limits,8 it is still the most useful framework for environmental history; that is, the history of human activities as they have to take account – in humans’ own long- term interests – of the limits set by their natural surroundings. This history is political and conflict-ridden because it is characterised by constant negotiation and strife over different usages of natural resources. Modern history is marked by a dramatic expansion and testing of the limits set by the natural world. The dramatically increased use of fossil fuels in the nineteenth century meant that humanity had unprecedented energy at its disposal: not only the energy produced by the sun in the present, but also the energy stored up over millions of years; that is, mainly coal at first and later increasingly oil.9 There had been a recurrent fear about a shortage of wood from the pre-modern time up to the nineteenth century. While it is controversial to what extent this fear was justified,10 it shows that humans had a clear sense of the limits of natural resources, and it is telling that such fears did not feature strongly again in public debate until the oil crisis and the Club of Rome Report, The Limits to Growth, in 1972. The new fossil energy sources provided a sense of abundance and of unlimited power, and it is not

3 This argument was particularly strong within American environmental history. In the context of German history, Arne Andersen and Rolf-Peter Sieferle were the main proponents, while Franz- Josef Brüggemeier and Joachim Radkau were the main opponents. For a summary of the arguments, see Frank Uekötter, ‘Confronting the Pitfalls of Current Environmental History: An Argument for an Organisational Approach’, Environment and History, 4 (1998), pp. 31–52. 4 This was revealed early by Ludwig Trepl’s study of the history of ecology, Geschichte der Ökologie. Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 1987). 5 Even in the American context the argument has been made persuasively that the challenge is to turn wilderness and cities into attractive ‘homes’: William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in idem, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996), pp. 69–90. 6 An excellent overview of the changes to the landscape is provided in Hansjörg Küster, Geschichte der Landschaft in Mitteleuropa. Von der Eiszeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1995). See also Helmut Jäger, Einführung in die Umweltgeschichte (Darmstadt, 1994). 7 Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge, 2008), chapter 1. 8 See, for example, Donald Worster, ‘Auf schwankendem Boden: Zum Begriffswirrwarr um nachhaltige Entwicklung’, in Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), Der Planet als Patient (Berlin, 1994), pp. 95–121. See, more generally, Paul Warde, ‘The Invention of Sustainability’, Modern Intellectual History, 8 (2011), pp. 153–70; Winiwarter and Knoll, Umweltgeschichte, chapter 11. 9 For an instructive systemic analysis of this change, see Rolf Peter Sieferle, Rückblick auf die Natur. Eine Geschichte des Menschen und seiner Umwelt (Munich, 1997), chapter 3. 10 See the literature review in Uekötter, Umweltgeschichte, pp. 51–4.

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by accident that the steam train rushing forward became a key symbol of industrialisation. Coal became the key basis for the industrialisation that took off in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not only did production increase dramatically; so too did the population. In 1816, about 25 million people lived within the borders of the later German Empire, in 1871 it was 41 million and before the First World War the number had grown to nearly 65 million. While it was an impressive achievement that growing numbers could be fed, the environmental impact was enormous. The demand for agricultural products expanded, and cities gained a wholly new dimension. The changes of the nineteenth century were not only material, but also cultural. In the wake of the Enlightenment the idea of progress emerged: the belief that the future was open for the development towards better times.11 Humans no longer felt bound by traditions, customs or a divine order, but wanted to shape the world according to human reason. They felt that they were moving into a new, modern time in which they would give the world a new and better shape. This belief in progress was the ideological basis for adramatic increase of human control over nature, but it also led to the increase of human-made risks.12 The first project in the nineteenth century that had a sudden dramatic impact on the appearance of the landscape was river regulation. ‘A German of 1915 or 1940, transported back to 1750, would have been astounded at how different the “natural” landscape looked.’ In particular, large areas of the North German plain were ‘dark and waterlogged, filled with snaking channels half-hidden by overhanging lianas and navigable only in a flat- bottomed boat, these dwelling places of mosquitoes, frogs, fish, wild boar and wolves’. Rivers meandered, flowed fast or slow according to the season, and ‘along the river for miles on either side lay wetland forests, which had not yet given way to farmland and industrial installations’.13 In the nineteenth century, civil engineers set out to change this completely. In a process frequently called ‘rectification’ or ‘amelioration’, they set out to make the rivers flow faster to reduce health risks; to turn them into convenient waterways by straightening them and removing natural obstacles; and to gain land by forcing the water into a clearly delineated river bed. The result was that modern rivers came to resemble canals, forced into a fairly straight line by dams. The Rhine, for example, was shortened by about 100 kilometres, and the depth of the shipping channel was standardised to about 2.5 meters. Fishermen fought against the destruction of their livelihood, but the advantages seemed to outweigh the price of a dramatic reduction in wildlife. The other major development which started around 1800, but continued to have a huge impact on the environment in the German Empire, was the revolution in agriculture. Food production nearly doubled from 1800 to 1850, and during the German Empire it further increased by 73 per cent. Cropping systems changed, newly bred plants were introduced and the use of artificial fertilisers increased. The land used for agriculture increased from 30 million hectares in 1800 to 36.7 million hectares in 1878 which meant a reduction of uncultivated land by two thirds from 10.6 to 3.4 million hectares.14 The privatisation of common land and farm consolidations led to larger fields, which also meant the

11 Reinhard Kosellek and Christian Meier, ‘Fortschritt’, in Otto Brunner et al. (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 351–424. 12 Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt, 1986). 13 David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, 2006), pp. 1 f. See also Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle, 2002). 14 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3: 1849–1914 (Munich, 1996), pp. 1266 and 685 ff.

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disappearance of hedges and trees that had provided living space for wildlife. The rural landscape became more rationally organised; the amount of monocultures increased.15 In 1913, the cultural critic Ludwig Klages described the development: ‘Fields are combined, that is divided into rectangular and square pieces; ditches are filled, blooming hedges are cut down, ponds surrounded by reeds are dried out’; and water has to run in a straight line. ‘To put it briefly: the appearance of our country is gradually turning into a Chicago with a little bit of agriculture in between.’16 On one level, the agricultural revolution was a success story: production did not only keep up with a growing population, but the level of food provision per head of the population actually increased. However, the price was less bio- diversity and a more monotonous landscape. The first steps were taken towards intensive farming, with its negative impact on the environment. A similar development happened with respect to forests. The many traditional usages of the forest, including the collection of firewood and forest pastures, were gradually replaced by a single use: the growth of timber. This promoted the expansion of high forests and conifer forests at the price of bio-diversity. Foresters gained control over the woods and fought against the many forms in which the forest had been used in the pre- modern period.17 The main development from the middle of the nineteenth century to the First World War, however, was the shift from an economy dominated by agriculture to one dominated by industry. Conflicts about emissions, concerns about hygienic conditions in cities and the growing use of resources can be found throughout the twentieth century, but they gained a wholly new dimension: what used to be sporadic, geographically isolated problems reached a new critical level with rapid industrialisation and technological change.18 This is the reason why Frank Uekötter uses Reinhard Koseleck’s term Sattelzeit to characterise the German Empire: a period of fundamental environmental transformation or even a turning point in environmental history.19 The anti-modern tendencies in German history have long been emphasised so strongly20 that it is necessary to point out that the prevalent attitude in the second half of the nineteenth

15 For the environmental impact of this development, see above all Johannes Bracht, ‘Umweltgeschichte der Landwirtschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, Newsletter des Arbeitskreises für Agrargeschichte, 16 (2005), pp. 4–8; Arne Bauernkämpfer, ‘The Industrialization of Agriculture and Its Consequences for the Natural Environment: An Inter-German Comparative Perspective’, Historical Social Science Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 29 (2004), pp. 124–49; Karl Ditt et al. (eds),Agrarmodernisierung und ökologische Folgen: Westfalen vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 2001); Frank Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld. Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft (Göttingen, 2010). 16 Ludwig Klages, ‘Mensch und Erde’, in idem, Sämtliche Werke (Bonn, 1974), vol. 3, pp. 614–36, quotation on p. 620. 17 For an overview, see Hansjörg Küster, Geschichte des Waldes. Von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1998). For a guide to further literature, see Uekötter, Umweltgeschichte, pp. 101–3. 18 For an early overview, see Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher (eds), Besiegte Natur. Geschichte der Umwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1989); Ulrike Gilhaus, ‘Schmerzenskinder der Industrie’. Umweltverschmutzung, Umweltpolitik und sozialer Protest im Industriezeitalter in Westfalen 1845–1914 (Paderborn, 1995); Klaus-Georg Wey, Umweltpolitik in Deutschland. Kurze Geschichte des Umweltschutzes in Deutschland seit 1900 (Opladen, 1982). 19 Uekötter, Umweltgeschichte, p. 14. Also see more generally Frank Uekötter,The Turning Points of Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 2010). 20 See, for example, Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft (Meisenheim, 1970); George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1981); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, 1961). A particularly problematic form of this argument is put forward by Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (New Haven, 1989).

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century was a jubilant acceptance of progress.21 As the writer Stefan Zweig remembered in his memoirs about the mood of the time of his youth before the First World War:

This belief in a perpetual, irresistible ‘progress’ had for those times really the power of a religion; one believed in this progress more than in the Bible, and its content seemed to be irrevocably proven on a daily basis by the new miracles of science and technology. It was true that a general improvement became increasingly apparent at the end of this peaceful century, as progress constantly gained in speed and scope. The streets were no longer lit by dim lights but by shining electricity, the shops with their tempting glamour expanded from the high streets into the suburbs and humans could already speak into the distance thanks to the telephone. Now they moved ahead with unprecedented speed in horseless cars and realised the dream of Icarus by taking off into the air. The technological comfort moved from noble houses to the bourgeoisie: no longer was it necessary to get water from the well or from a central tap; no longer did one have to light a fire in the stove. Hygienic conditions gained ground, and the dirt disappeared.22

The dirt might have disappeared from middle-class neighbourhoods, but only because the problem was transposed to other places. The ever-increasing use of coal was taken as a sign of progress, and smoking chimneys became the symbol of industrial work and wealth. But while the top priority was undoubtedly industrial growth, people at the time were fully aware of the pollution that factories caused. There was no doubt that smoke not only caused smell, but also damage. Courts accepted the cases of foresters and farmers about the effects of smoke on vegetation, and experiments about the effect of SO2 on trees showed that even tiny amounts could cause damage. On the other hand, the scientists did not commit themselves to recommending a limit, and there was no technical solution for resolving the problem. Without clear guidance, a wide variety of local decisions was reached, but with no overall reduction in the emissions. The belief in the free use of one’s property and the importance of industrial growth dominated. Compensation had to be paid when the damage caused could be proved, yet the result was not a reduction in emissions but the building of higher chimneys. This was supposed to limit the damage, but mainly led to a general pollution for which nobody could be blamed. According to court decisions people had to accept pollution customary to a specific locality; it was thus hopeless to fight emissions in industrial regions anyway. The fiercest conflicts about air pollution thus took place in Saxony, not inthe biggest centre of heavy industry, the Ruhr District. These were, however, only differences in degree. Despite some attempts to limit the damage, ultimately smoke was accepted as an inevitable evil of industrial growth and a rising standard of living.23

21 Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (Paderborn 1999), especially Parts One and Two. 22 Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt, 1970; first published 1944), pp. 16. f. See also Michael Salewski, ‘Technik als Vision der Zukunft um die Jahrhundertwende’, in Michael Salewski (ed.), Moderne Zeiten. Technik und im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1994), pp. 77–92. 23 Arne Andersen, Historische Technikfolgenabschätzung am Beispiel des Metallhüttenwesens und der Chemieindustrie 1850–1933 (Stuttgart, 1996); Arne Andersen and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, ‘Gase, Rauch und Saurer Regen’, in Franz-Josef Brüggemeier et al. (eds), Besiegte Natur. Geschichte der Umwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1987), pp. 64–85; Franz Josef Brüggemeier, Das unendliche Meer der Lüfte. Luftverschmutzung, Industrialisierung und Risikodebatten im 19. Jahrhundert (Essen, 1996); Michael Stolberg, Ein Recht auf saubere Luft? Umweltkonflikte am Beginn des Industriezeitalters (Erlangen, 1994); Frank Uekötter, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970

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The biggest qualitative change regarding the environment in which people lived during the German Empire was the result of urbanisation, in particular the move to the new and rapidly growing industrial centres. Here, environmental problems were experienced literally with all the senses: people had to contend with the noise, the air was filled with smog, one could smell the pollution, and the body suffered under the strain. On the other hand, communities invested heavily to achieve improvements, and not without success: while life expectancy was much lower than in the countryside at first, this soon changed.24 The greening of the urban environment with parks was the most visually apparent attempt to bring a little bit of nature to city dwellers, and public transport made it easier to escape the concrete by enabling a Sunday excursion. From a hygiene perspective, however, water was the crucial issue, especially in the fight against cholera. Altogether, the cities in the German Empire made huge investments to provide access to clean water. Water reservoirs and pipe systems were built to bring water from the far distance to urban households. Germany lagged behind Britain by about two decades, but in Berlin, for example, about 90 per cent of households were connected to the sewage system by 1885. An intensive debate preceded the decision for the waterborne sewage system that would flush waste out of the cities, as the question was not only connected with different scientific theories and a clash of interest between city and the surrounding countryside, but also required high investment for the new infrastructure. By 1877, only twelve cities in Prussia had a sewage system, but in the 1880s the new technology came to triumph over older methods of transporting waste out of the cities. From an urban perspective it was a hygienic achievement, especially as it tended to be combined with a systematic rubbish disposal system, but it was probably the most momentous environmental decision in the German Empire, as its consequences were literally set in stone. The consumption of water increased dramatically. Waste was not dealt with where it was produced, but was dispersed. Waste water was usually washed through disposal fields in front of the city walls; some reached the rivers completely untreated. Sewage treatment plants remained a rare exception, and people downstream suffered the most.25 The city of Mannheim, for example, used the Rhine as its sewage dump eight miles up from the city of Worms, which needed the Rhine to supplement its drinking water. After a long legal battle, the city of Mannheim maintained the right to dump its faeces virtually untreated into the river, while Worms was forced to construct a costly filtration system or find another water source.26 Water quality was not only spoilt by sewage, but also by the waste water from industry, most seriously by the synthetic dye industry which grew dramatically during the German

(Pittsburgh, 2009). While the availability of end-of-the-pipe technology was clearly limited, electrical filters were rarely used when they became available. See Hans-Joachim Braun, ‘Konstruktion, Destruktion und der Ausbau technischer Systeme zwischen 1914 und 1945’, in Wolfgang König (ed.), Propyläen Technikgeschichte, vol. 5: Energiewirtschaft, Automatisierung, Information (Berlin, 1992), pp. 9–279, at 217. 24 Richard Birkefeld and Martina Jung, Die Stadt, der Lärm und das Licht. Die Veränderung des öffentlichen Raumes durch Motorisierung und Elektrifizierung(Seelze, 1994); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier et al. (ed.), Blauer Himmel über der Ruhr, Geschichte der Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet 1840–1990 (Essen, 1992); Anne. I. Hardy, Ärzte, Ingenieuere und städtische Gesundheit. Medizinische Theorien in der Hygienebewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 2005); Gottfried Hösel, Unser Abfall aller Zeiten. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Städtereinigung (Munich, 1987). 25 Jürgen Büschenfeld, Flüsse und Kloaken. Umweltfragen im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (1870– 1918) (Stuttgart, 1997); Thomas Kluge and Engelbert Schramm,Wassernöte. Zur Geschichte des Trinkwassers (Cologne, 1988); John H. Simson, Kanalisation und Städtehygiene im 19. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1983); Peter Münch, Stadthygiene im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1993); Richard Evans,Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987). 26 Kluge and Schramm, Wassernöte, pp. 119–121.

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Empire. People living on the River Wupper could determine what dyes were produced on a particular day by the colour of the water, and the mayor of Elberfeld still declared in the 1920s: ‘We can only gladly welcome the colours which the factories discharge into the river, for only as long as the Wupper is dirty, is there still work to be found.’27 As with the air, the more industrial a region was, the less consideration was given to the state of the water. An extreme case was again the heavy industrial region of the Ruhr. Following a rather unscrupulous industrial logic, two rivers were used for complementary purposes: the Ruhr was the main source of fresh water for the whole region, while the used water was pumped into the Emscher. The water source was thus kept comparatively clean, while the Emscher was basically degraded to a sewage system – in the words of a Prussian parliamentarian, ‘the river of hell’.28 It received the waste from one million humans, 150 coal mines and 100 factories. In the end, about half of its water came from those sources. Much of the water came from steam engines so that the temperature reached dangerous levels. One consequence was a typhoid outbreak that killed 300 people. Unless you lived near the Emscher or otherwise cared about the river, the system worked well until the Ruhr’s annual water deficit (around 150 million cubic metres in 1900) started to show. Summer shortages were becoming the rule, and during droughts the water quality dropped dramatically. An increasing number of dams needed to be built to overcome the shortage, among them the huge Möhnetalsperre completed in 1913 with 134.5 million cubic metres. With the dams, the water needs were met, but only by wholly re-arranging the natural water system. The Emscher was the most extreme case, but all major rivers in the German Empire deteriorated through industrial use. While water experts of the time preached belief in the alleged self-cleaning capacities of rivers, water conditions worsened until cleaning efforts started in the 1970s. Further, rivers also became a resource for hydro-electricity during the German Empire. For Martin Heidegger, the philosopher and cultural critic, even such a clean use was an instrumentalisation of nature. In a thoughtful, yet passionate and enraged tone, he described this as a new way of seeing nature solely as a resource:

The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electric energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is spoken by the two titles: ‘The Rhine’, as dammed up into the power works, and ‘The Rhine’, as uttered by the art work, in Hölderlin’s hymn by that name. The possible

27 Quoted in Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, ‘The Ruhr Basin’, in P. Brimblecome and Christian Pfister (eds), The Silent Countdown: Essays in European Environmental History (Berlin, 1990), pp. 221–43, at 224. See also Arne Andersen and Gerd Spelsberg (eds), Das blaue Wunder. Zur Geschichte der synthetischen Farben (Cologne, 1990); Ralf Henneking, Chemische Industrie und Umwelt. Konflikte um Umweltbelastungen durch die chemische Industrie am Beispiel der schwerchemischen Farben- und Düngemittelinudstrie der Rheinprovinz (Stuttgart, 1994); Karl Otto Henseling, Ein Planet wird vergiftet. Der Siegeszug der Chemie: Geschichte einer Fehlentwicklung (Reinbek, 1992). 28 Quoted in Kluge and Schramm, Wassernöte, p. 102.

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objection that the river can be both useful and perceived as beautiful, is brushed aside with the short remark: ‘Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.’29

So far we have been concerned with changes in the use of natural resources and the effects this had on the natural environment. The new ways of using nature provoked many conflicts, but these conflicts were mainly about a clash of interests: it was not the state of the natural environment that was at stake in the many legal disputes, but a struggle over different material usages of natural resources, or at least the demand for compensation if new economic innovations had negative side effects for others. But the German Empire was also a Sattelzeit because an early form of ‘green concerns’ and a ‘green movement’ emerged.30 The emphatic emphasis on ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ featured in two ways in Wilhelmine Germany. First, there was a growing concern that civilisation and human existence had moved too far away from nature and a natural existence. The call was thus for a turn towards a lifestyle in tune with one’s nature. The ‘life reform movement’ (Lebensreformbewegung) did not want to turn back to a distant past, but to realise a more natural style of life in innovative ways. This new ‘naturism’31 promoted, for example, different diets such as vegetarianism and teetotalism; different types of foods, such as muesli; wider, less confining clothes; physical activities such as gymnastics; and a closer exposure to nature through hiking and nudism. Growing organic food and the search for natural remedies against illnesses were also part of life reform, as was the promotion of a more holistic lifestyle by doing crafts or growing one’s own food. While large sections of the life reform movement, especially the youth movement, preached a rather asexual comradeship between the sexes within the movement, at the more extreme, counter-cultural end of the scale, the call for an existence closer to nature could also include a more libertarian lifestyle in harmony with human instincts.32 While the life reform movement was largely middle class, the Naturfreunde (Friends of Nature) was an international Socialist organisation with a predominantly working-class membership that also promoted hiking trips into the countryside.33 The other dimension of ‘naturism’ was a growing sense that nature and the traditional landscape needed protection. While the wilderness had traditionally been seen as an inhospitable and terrifying place, with Romanticism it became perceived as grand, awe- inspiring and morally uplifting. With the rapid process of modernisation, traditional landscapes were also increasingly appreciated: modern society could appear as unfamiliar, cold, alienating; in contrast, the traditional communicated a sense of home and belonging. With industrialisation the fear of an overwhelming nature diminished, and the concern for it increased. Nature came to be seen less as threatening and more as threatened. For those

29 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1953), in David F. Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (London, 1978), pp. 283–318, at 297. 30 For broad overviews of early environmental thought, see Rolf Peter Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1984); Jost Hermand, Grüne Utopien in Deutschland. Zur Geschichte des ökologischen Bewußtseins (Frankfurt, 1991); Ulrich Linse, Ökopax und Anarchie (Munich, 1986). 31 John A. Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford, 2007), pp. 1 f. 32 Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke (eds), Handbuch der Deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880–1933 (Wuppertal, 1998); Kai Buchholz et al. (eds), Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, 2 vols (Darmstadt, 2001); Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne?, Part II. 33 Jochen Zimmer, Mit uns zieht . Die Naturfreunde. Zur Geschichte des alternativen Verbandes in der Arbeiterkulturbewegung (Cologne, 1984); idem et al. (eds), Wir sind die grüne Garde. Geschichte der Naturfreundejugend (Essen, 1996).

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who did not engage with nature on a daily basis in order to secure their material existence, it became possible to imagine nature as idyllic, innocent and vulnerable. An early example of nature preservation was animal protection, most powerfully present in bird protection. At first, attempts were made by experts around 1800 to promote the protection of ‘useful’, insect-eating birds, but in 1875 a general concern for all birds had become so strong that an association for the protection of birds was founded (in that year the Deutscher Verein zum Schutze der Vogelwelt, from 1899 the Bund für Vogelschutz). The association succeeded in getting a national law for the protection of birds passed; it campaigned against the use of feathers for fashion; and it established the Romantic perspective of birds as our ‘feathered friends’ in general discourse. While and the inhabitants of other Mediterranean countries were accused of an inhumane attitude towards birds, bird-loving came to be associated with German-ness.34 Not only animals came to be protected, but also areas of natural beauty and the traditional appearance of the countryside. The world far away from city and industry, from the place of living and working, from highly developed modern, alienating civilisation came to be seen as an ideal in need of protection. In contrast to the instrumental attitude of industry, technology and modern science (or perhaps also as the other, compensatory side of the coin), a nostalgia for the traditional and natural gained ground. In this atmosphere that had become quite powerful at the turn of the century, two organisations emerged at roughly the same time that saw it as their purpose to preserve the natural beauty of Germany: an association for the protection of the homeland (Bund deutscher Heimatschutz); and an organisation to identify and protect places of natural interest and beauty (Staatliche Stelle für Naturdenkmalpflege).35 It is important to emphasise the differences between these organisations and the post- 1970s environmental movement. It was not primarily the state of the environment as such that was at issue. It was not the pollution of the water of the Emscher that gave the decisive impetus for founding the organisations, nor was it the smoke over the Ruhr or the cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892. It was not the worst environmental deprivation that motivated those calling for the protection of nature and the homeland, but the threat to particularly beautiful places. The ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences helps us to understand the motivation for these new initiatives.36 Space is not simply a neutral container in which historical events take their course. It is at least partially socially constructed and invested with a wide variety of meaning. Space is not uniform: there are spaces which command

34 Friedemann Schmoll, ‘Schönheit, Vielfalt, Eigenart. Die Formierung des Naturschutzes um 1900, seine Leitbilder und ihre Geschichte’, in Hans-Werner Frohn and Friedemann Schmoll (eds), Natur und Staat. Staatlicher Naturschutz in Deutschland 1906–2006(Bad Godesberg, 2006), pp. 13–84, at 31–43. 35 Andreas Knaut, Zurück zur Natur! Die Wurzeln der Ökologiebewegung. Landschafts- und Heimatschutz im wilhelminischen Zeitalter (Greven, 1993); Willi Oberkrome, ‘Deutsche Heimat’: nationale Konzeption und regionale Praxis von Naturschutz, Landschaftsgestaltung und Kulturpolitik in Westfalen-Lippe und Thüringen (1900–1960) (Paderborn, 2004); William H. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918 (Ann Arbor, 1997); Friedemann Schmoll, Erinnerung an die Natur: Die Geschichte des Naturschutzes im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt, 2004); Hans-Werner Frohn and Friedmann Schmoll (eds), Natur und Staat: Staatlicher Naturschutz in Deutschland 1906–2006 (Münster, 2006); Matthew Jefferies, ‘Heimatschutz: Environmental Activism in Wilhelmine Germany’, in Colin Riordan (ed.), Green Thought in German Culture: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 42–55. 36 For a general introduction with reference to further literature, see Thomas Rohkrämer and Felix Schulz, ‘Space, Place and Identitities’, History Compass, 7 (2009), pp. 1338–49. A pioneering study of landscape in a cultural perspective was Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1996). For some instructive case studies, see David Blackbourn and James Retallack (eds), Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe 1860–1933 (Toronto, 2007).

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little emotional attachment and respect, while others can be emotionally charged or even sacred. For Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–97), a widely read Professor in Cultural History, for example, the whole landscape had social meaning. Following the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, he was convinced that human cultures closely correspond with their natural environments. The multitude of landscapes in Germany allegedly provided the basis for a complex social structure and the ‘flexibility, richness and sensitivity of German spiritual culture and habitus’.37 Forests and the rural countryside stood for stability and the now dangerously weakened old order, he argued, giving the view a strong conservative political twist, while cities promoted democracy and change. More generally within German culture, the Rhine or forests were regarded as key national symbols; agrarian romanticists emphasised the inherently conservative nature of the countryside; areas such as the Lüneburg Heath stood for Romantic sentimentality, the North Sea for hardiness and a quiet determination, and Lake Constance for plenty. National symbols associated with nature and the traditional landscape existed in abundance,38 and – as Germany was ‘a nation of provincials’ – the landscape in every state and region was symbolically charged.39 Nature and the landscape were thus deeply connected with people’s identities (political and social as well as cultural), and in consequence the protection of nature and the traditional countryside was intrinsically linked with the endeavour to maintain a sense of identity in times of rapid change. Cherished places of high symbolic significance could give a sense of stability and belonging, while threats to such places could provoke strong reactions of anxiety and anger. These places did not need to be close to home; they could also be connected with, say, childhood memories, holiday retreats or activities ranging from scientific studies to mountaineering. An example of this can be found in the life of Ernst Rudorff who played a key role in founding the German Heimatschutz movement. Strongly influenced by Romanticism, this introvert musician who taught at the Berlin Academy of Music became outraged when modernisation reached his country refuge, the little village of Lauenstein in Lower Saxony. Quite typically, it was not conditions in Berlin that motivated his environmental activities, but the countryside where he liked to hike and relax. His particular outrage was directed against the land consolidation that had also reached his village:

Every tip of forest reaching into the fields is shaved off in favour of a straight line; every meadow which reaches into a wooded area is being planted; no clearance or meadow on which game could graze is tolerated within the forest. The streams that have the bad habit of meandering along in a curved flow have to agree to follow a straight bed. Country tracks … have ceased to exist in the real world … By arranging the fields in rectangular shapes, all the hedges, single trees and bushes become victims to the axe. The immediate consequence of privatising the commons is that shepherd and sheep disappear. This removes the need for protecting meadows and fields – that is the need for new hedges. This ensures that neither the hiker nor the worker can find

37 Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Land und Leute (Stuttgart, 1954), p. 37. For Riehl, see Jasper von Altenbockum, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehe 1823–1897: Sozialwissenschaft zwischen Kulturgeschichte und Ethnographie (Cologne, 1994). 38 Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885– 1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 39 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Martina Steber, Ethnische Gewissheiten: die Ordnung des Regionalen im bayerischen Schwaben vom Kaiserreich bis zum NS-Regime (Göttingen, 2010).

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a nice, shady place where they can rest, nor the songbird a place where it can build a nest.40

Rudorff did not reject all developments, but he argued vehemently against a development solely driven by economic considerations. Other factors should be considered as well: above all, the beauty of the countryside, but also the social and ecological consequences of changes to nature and the landscape. He rejected, for example, the fight against allegedly ‘harmful’ animals, but he was even more concerned about hordes of tourists, or features of modern architecture such as flat roofs and large windows spreading into the countryside. In principle, he accepted the need for industrialisation, but he insisted that the traditional character of localities should be maintained. And this was all the more true for the Bund Heimatschutz association which was founded in 1904: the association did not want to turn back the wheels of time or stop modernisation, but wanted a modernity that also considered the non-material dimensions of aesthetics and respect for nature, in particular the preservation of a peculiarly German and regional character of the countryside. Protection of nature was not the key to their concerns, but it was part and consequence of it. Heimatschutz encouraged a traditionalist and even parochial taste in fighting modernist aesthetics, but it also inspired and came to connect with activist landscaping. While the Bund Heimatschutz was most active in maintaining old buildings, influencing architecture and stopping advertisements in the countryside, it did organise the first major campaign to preserve a place of natural beauty: the rapids of the upper Rhine in Laufenburg.41 It was a place of singular beauty. Right in the middle of the medieval town, directly below the houses, the water of the Rhine rushed through a narrow gorge between blocks of granite. There followed some more twists and turns, before the river bed became wide and straight again. This beautiful place contained everything the Bund Heimatschutz cherished: the combination of wild nature and historical sites, and a historical culture that had adapted to natural circumstances. All this was threatened by the decision to build a hydro-electric power plant. The rocks were to be blown up and removed; a lake and a dam would replace the natural rapids. The Bund Heimatschutz started a campaign, and they found many prominent supporters from the intellectual elite such as Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Friedrich Naumann and Georg Dehio. They initially tried to stop the building plans completely, and when that proved unrealistic, they suggested alternative plans that would preserve the rapids, but divert some of the water for hydro-electricity. In the end, the whole struggle was in vain: the only concession made was that the owners of the power station paid for a painting of the rapids before they were destroyed. The only thing left of this place of singular beauty was the memory kept alive by a painting. This story is symptomatic, both in the attempts of theBund Heimatschutzto find a balance between economic development and maintaining natural as well as historic beauty, and in the ultimate dominance of material interests. The attempt to protect the character of the landscape and old towns tended to find sympathetic ears, but only as long as it did not clash with economic growth. The Bund Heimatschutz gained influence on aesthetic decisions, but the modernisation of agriculture and industry proceeded unhindered.

40 Ernst Rudorff, ‘Über das Verhältnis des modernen Lebens zur Natur’, in Preußische Jahrbücher, 45 (Berlin, 1880), pp. 261–76, at 262 f. 41 Ulrich Linse, ‘“Der Raub des Rheingoldes”. Das Wasserkraftwerk Laufenburg’, in Ulrich Linse et al. (eds), Von der Bittschrift zur Platzbesetzung. Konflikte um technische Großprojekte (Berlin, 1988), pp. 11–132.

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In comparison with the Bund Heimatschutz, the governmental office for nature conservation, founded in Prussia in 1906, was more pragmatic, more modest and more focused. Its aim was to preserve places of natural beauty and importance within the process of industrialisation, but its ambitions were quite limited. While the United States established national parks of huge dimensions, the nature conservation office talked about ‘natural monuments’: scattered across Germany, ‘ideally in every part of the country, smaller areas of different kinds in their original condition: Here a lake or a branch of a dead stream, there a marsh area, a dune or a sunny hill, here an erratic boulder, a part of an end moraine or a group of rocks, there a little moor, heath, wood and so on.’42 Such ‘natural monuments’ were supposed to serve scientific studies and keep the memory of original nature alive. They were not supposed to cost the state anything, but any money needed would be acquired from donations. Radical voices immediately criticised this concept as a cabinet of natural curiosities rather than real preservation. Not only did it ignore most parts of nature, it also begged the question whether it was viable to maintain such small and isolated areas in their original form. However, Hugo Conwentz, the head of the office, did succeed in finding acceptance for nature preservation and in establishing more protected areas than all his critics with their powerful arguments. It was, and is, easy to see the limited and in many ways inadequate nature of Conwentz’s programme, but his modest ambitions also meant that he provoked little opposition. Private organisations went further in their demands than the government office. The Verein Naturschutzpark, founded in 1909, pushed for larger preservation areas in the Alps, in Germany’s lower mountain ranges and on the North German plains. The different types of landscape were to be protected, but within larger, ecologically sustainable dimensions. The association was concerned about the protection of nature, but it was not as suspicious of mass society as Rudorff and the Heimatschutz: suggestions were made about access to the national parks and even about the income that tourism would provide to the regions. A step towards modern regional planning was taken in the plans of this association whose petition was supported by such prominent figures as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ludwig Ganghofer, Ferdinand Zeppelin, Max Liebermann and Paul Wallot.43 And for once, the initiative achieved some success: private donations, lottery money and local support made it possible to secure 4,000 hectares of land on Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony which acquired protected status in 1921–22. Towards the end of the German Empire, a whole network of organisations concerned with the protection of nature and the landscape had emerged. The Bund Heimatschutz and the governmental office for nature preservation were the most prominent, but awhole range of other organisations meant that nature preservation reached far into the fabric of society: for example, the single-issue organisation Verein Naturschutzpark; associations for organising leisure-time activities such as the Naturfreunde or the Alpenverein (concerned with protecting the Alps),44 regional history and nature societies; and tourist boards. While material progress remained society’s key priority, there was wide acceptance that preserving nature and the traditional landscape was also a worthy concern serving the public good. The

42 Hugo Conwentz,Die Gefährdung der Naturdenkmäler und Vorschläge zu ihrer Erhaltung. Denkschrift für den Minister der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinal-Angelegenheiten in Preußen (Berlin, 1904), p. 82. 43 Verein Naturschutzpark e.V. (ed.),Naturschutzparke in Deutschland und Österreich. Ein Mahnwort an das deutsche und oesterreichische Volk (Stuttgart, 1910). 44 Corinna M. Peniston-Bird, Thomas Rohkrämer and Felix Robin Schulz, ‘Glorified, Contested and Mobilized: The Alps in the Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein from the 1860s to 1933’, Austrian Studies, 18 (2010), pp. 141–58.

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desire to maintain a sense of home and belonging as well as a national and regional identity dominated, but scientific, ethical and social reasons all played a role in the move towards protecting parts of nature and the traditional landscape. The reasons were varied, but an active concern for the environment took shape. The strong emphasis on homeland and belonging has frequently led to an association of Wilhelmine nature preservation with National Socialism, and undoubtedly there were connections. The concept of Heimat radicalised in the Weimar Republic; it became increasingly defined in racist and xenophobic terms. The nature preservation movement as a whole greeted the Third Reich with enthusiasm and high hopes: they largely fell for the Nazi ideology of ‘blood and soil’, agrarianism and a celebratory emphasis on German traditions.45 But this radicalisation in the wake of the First World War was not unique to environmentalists; after all, large sections of society, including many engineers and their association, fell for the promises of National Socialism.46 Furthermore, this later development should not detract from acknowledging the political openness of the movement in the German Empire. While one can certainly find a sense of German superiority and racist prejudices before 1914, it was still largely marked by a concern about the environment and a non-xenophobic desire for a sense of belonging in an aesthetically pleasing environment. An aesthetic approach to nature preservation has often been seen as deficient in comparison with the later ecological approach, but this is partly due to the spurious belief that ecology offers a scientific basis to environmentalism. In contrast, early environmentalism was more open in its value judgements and in stating the non-material use it wanted to get out of nature. The real weakness of an attitude towards nature that was dominated by considerations of beauty and identity was, however, that it ignored those aspects of the environment that were deemed intrinsically ugly, above all modern cities and industrial regions. The fight for hygiene, more habitable cities, less pollution, clean rivers and a blue sky over the whole of Germany remained largely separate issues from nature preservation in the German Empire. Town halls were successful in creating healthier conditions in the cities, albeit mainly by polluting the water. The solution became, as so frequently in environmentalism, the next problem. And the same was true for industry. Higher chimneys were built so that the atmosphere would take care of the pollution, and other waste was directed into rivers and the sea for dispersal, but the hope that nature could deal with all this turned out to be wishful thinking. Society’s impact on the environment was not nearly as dramatic as with the ‘economic miracle’ and the move towards a consumer society after 1945,47 but it certainly increased dramatically in comparison with pre-industrial times. Despite a growing acceptance that nature needed protection, industrial growth took precedence over the desire for natural beauty and the need for a sustainable use of natural resources. Environmental history has come a long way since the early 1980s. Stories of doom and the hope for redemption in a natural, non-anthropocentric state, of evil villains such as industry and shining heroes, have been replaced by more differentiated stories which take account of the inevitability of a strong human impact on their environment, as well as the limited

45 Steber, Ethnische Gewissheiten; Oberkrome, ‘Deutsche Heimat’; Franz-Josef Brüggemeier et al. (eds), How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens, 2005); Joachim Radkau and Frank Uekötter (eds),Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus(Frankfurt, 2003). 46 Thomas Rohkrämer, ‘Die Vision einer deutschen Technik: Ingenieure und das “Dritte Reich”’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Utopie und politische Herrschaft im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit (Munich, 2003), pp. 287–307; Thomas Rohkrämer, Die fatale Attraktion des Nationalsozialismus. Zur Popularität eines Unrechtregimes (Paderborn, 2013). 47 Christian Pfister (ed.), Das 1950er Syndrom. Der Weg in die Konsumgesellschaft (Bern, 1994).

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freedom and knowledge of historical actors. While we have to accept that humanity is bound to change the environment in intended and unintended ways, awareness has also grown that we can never escape our dependence on nature. These two developments are leading to an increased understanding that environmental history needs to be embedded within a more general history, and that a general history needs to incorporate an environmental dimension. Environmental history is not only expanding its scope by exploring a wider range of topics such as the urban environment, landscape management, humans’ relationship to animals or leisure-time activities and the environment, but also by paying closer attention to the role the environment plays, for example, in creating a sense of place and belonging, as well as for national, regional and personal identities. While the question of sustainability is clearly a key issue as human existence depends on it, the fact that there is not one ideal state of nature means that questions of cultural preferences and political choices regarding the quality of life need to occupy a growing space in environmental history. Environmental history is not only about carving out a material existence in a sustainable way, but also about the political, cultural and emotional dimensions of human existence within the natural and humanly changed environment.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Abelshauser, Werner (ed.) Umweltgeschichte. Umweltverträgliches Wirtschaften in historischer Perspektive (Göttingen, 1994). Andersen, Arne. Historische Technikfolgenabschätzung am Beispiel des Metallhüttenwesens und der Chemieindustrie 1850–1933 (Stuttgart, 1996). — and Spelsberg, Gerd (eds). Das blaue Wunder. Zur Geschichte der synthetischen Farben (Cologne, 1990). Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990). Bergmann, Klaus. Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft (Meisenheim, 1970). Birkefeld, Richard and Jung, Martina. Die Stadt, der Lärm und das Licht. Die Veränderung des öffentlichen Raumes durch Motorisierung und Elektrifizierung(Seelze, 1994). Blackbourn, David. ‘A Sense of Place: New Directions in German History’, in The 1998 Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute London (London, 1999). —. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, 2006). — and Retallack, James (eds). Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German- Speaking Central Europe 1860–1933 (Toronto, 2007). Bramwell, Anna. Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (New Haven, 1989). Brantz, Dorothee, Gissibi, Bernhard, Lekan, Thomas, Warde, Paul, Winiwarter, Verena and Zeller, Thomas. Discussion on ‘The Nature of German Environmental History’, German History 27 (2009), pp. 113–30. Brimblecome, Paul and Pfister, Christian (eds). The Silent Countdown: Essays in European Environmental History (Berlin, 1990). Brüggemeier, Franz‑Josef. Das unendliche Meer der Lüfte. Luftverschmutzung, Industrialisierung und Risikodebatten im 19. Jahrhundert (Essen, 1996). — et al. (eds). Besiegte Natur. Geschichte der Umwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1987). Buchholz, Kai et al. (eds). Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, 2 vols (Darmstadt 2001).

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Büschenfeld, Jürgen. Flüsse und Kloaken. Umweltfragen im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (1870–1918) (Stuttgart, 1997). Cioc, Mark. The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle, 2002). Ditt, Karl et al. (eds).Agrarmodernisierung und ökologische Folgen: Westfalen vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 2001). Evans, Richard J. Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987). Frohn, Hans-Werner and Schmoll, Friedemann (eds). Natur und Staat: Staatlicher Naturschutz in Deutschland 1906–2006 (Münster and Bad Godesberg, 2006). Gilhaus, Ulrike. ‘Schmerzenskinder der Industrie’. Umweltverschmutzung, Umweltpolitik und sozialer Protest im Industriezeitalter in Westfalen 1845–1914 (Paderborn, 1995). Hardy, Anne I. Ärzte, Ingenieuere und städtische Gesundheit. Medizinische Theorien in der Hygienebewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 2005). Henneking, Ralf. Chemische Industrie und Umwelt. Konflikte um Umweltbelastungen durch die chemische Industrie am Beispiel der schwerchemischen Farben- und Düngemittelinudstrie der Rheinprovinz (Stuttgart, 1994). Hermand, Jost. Grüne Utopien in Deutschland. Zur Geschichte des ökologischen Bewußtseins (Frankfurt, 1991). Hösel, Gottfried. Unser Abfall aller Zeiten. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Städtereinigung (Munich, 1987). Kerbs, Diethart and Reulecke, Jürgen (eds). Handbuch der Deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880– 1933 (Wuppertal, 1998). Kluge, Thomas and Schramm, Engelbert. Wassernöte. Zur Geschichte des Trinkwassers (Cologne, 1988). Knaut, Andreas. Zurück zur Natur! Die Wurzeln der Ökologiebewegung. Landschafts- und Heimatschutz im wilhelminischen Zeitalter(Greven, 1993). Küster, Hansjörg. Geschichte der Landschaft in Mitteleuropa. Von der Eiszeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1995). —. Geschichte des Waldes. Von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1998). Lekan, Thomas. Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2004). — and Zeller, Thomas (eds). Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (New Brunswick, 2005). Linse, Ulrich. Ökopax und Anarchie (Munich, 1986). — et al. (eds). Von der Bittschrift zur Platzbesetzung. Konflikte um technische Großprojekte (Berlin, 1988). Mauch, Christof (ed.) Nature in German History (New York, 2004). Münch, Peter. Stadthygiene im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1993). Oberkrome, Willi. ‘Deutsche Heimat’: nationale Konzeption und regionale Praxis von Naturschutz, Landschaftsgestaltung und Kulturpolitik in Westfalen-Lippe und Thüringen 1900–1960 (Paderborn, 2004). Radkau, Joachim. Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge, 2008). — and Uekötter, Frank (eds). Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus(Frankfurt, 2003). Riordan, Colin (ed.) Green Thought in German Culture: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Cardiff, 1997). Rohkrämer, Thomas. Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (Paderborn, 1999). — and Schulz, Felix. ‘Space, Place and Identities’, History Compass, 7 (2009), pp. 1338–49. Rollins, William H. A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918 (Ann Arbor, 1997).

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Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory (London, 1996). Schmoll, Friedemann. Erinnerung an die Natur: Die Geschichte des Naturschutzes im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt, 2004). Sieferle, Rolf Peter. Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1984). —. Rückblick auf die Natur. Eine Geschichte des Menschen und seiner Umwelt (Munich, 1997). — (ed.) Fortschritte der Naturzerstörung (Frankfurt, 1988). Simson, John H. Kanalisation und Städtehygiene im 19. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1983). Stolberg, Michael. Ein Recht auf saubere Luft? Umweltkonflikte am Beginn des Industriezeitalters (Erlangen, 1994). Trepl, Ludwig. Geschichte der Ökologie. Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 1987). Uekötter, Frank. Umweltgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2007). —. The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970 (Pittsburgh, 2009). —. Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld. Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft (Göttingen, 2010). —. The Turning Points of Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 2010). Wey, Klaus-Georg. Umweltpolitik in Deutschland. Kurze Geschichte des Umweltschutzes in Deutschland seit 1900 (Opladen, 1982). Williams, John A. Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford, 2007). Winiwarter, Verena and Knoll, Martin. Umweltgeschichte. Eine Einführung (Cologne, 2007). Zimmer, Jochen. Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit. Die Naturfreunde. Zur Geschichte des alternativen Verbandes in der Arbeiterkulturbewegung (Cologne, 1984). — et al. (eds). Wir sind die grüne Garde. Geschichte der Naturfreundejugend (Essen, 1996).

332 19 population: Demography and mobility

steve hochstadt

During the short life of the Kaiserreich, the german population broke out of the demographic mold of past centuries and created a structure that was unprecedented, and came to be called “modern.” This sudden shift from a rural agricultural demography to an urban industrial one may be taken as a model for other national transformations, which usually happened more slowly or in stages. Between 1871 and 1914 everything happened at once in Germany. The powerful forces of industrialization, urbanization, and scientific progress transformed a rural agricultural population, with traditional practices of marriage and family, into an urbanized and industrialized population. At the same time that both fertility and mortality fell, the germans became much more mobile, reaching extraordinary rates of exchange between cities and countryside around 1900. Demography is often treated as inherent in a population or as something that happens to people. The medical advances which allowed many more babies to survive their first year and reduced the diseases that killed adults might fit this way of thinking about demographic change. But most of the demographic transformation described here represents conscious shifts in collective german behavior, at home and at work. Because the role of individual will, aggregated across society, is most apparent in decisions about migration, much attention here will be directed at changes Germans made in their mobility. At the founding of the german empire in 1871, about two-thirds of germans lived in communities with fewer than 2,000 people and only 5 per cent in large cities over 100,000. Birth, marriage, and death retained familiar patterns established over centuries of agricultural life. According to the sparse data from before 1870 there had been little change in mortality in Germany before then. About one quarter of babies died before their first birthday, and life expectancy was less than 40 years. Fertility had changed little in the decades before 1871. John Knodel described “a plateau of relatively high and constant fertility for at least a century or so preceding 1870.” That translates into a marital fertility rate between 200 and 225, one birth every four to five years per married woman. Germans had never been immobile, but their annual rates of migration hovered around 5 per cent, or five migrations per year per 100 people.1 economic and demographic processes were already changing the german landscape by 1870, but at a measured and predictable pace. The german population grew at a steady 1 per cent a year. As they had been for centuries, germans were slowly moving out of agricultural employment; by 1870 about half of the population still depended on agriculture and forestry, while most of the rest produced industrial products. such work

1 For discussions of demographic patterns in Germany before 1870, see Arthur E. Imhof, Die gewonnenen Jahre: von der Zunahme unserer Lebensspanne seit dreihundert Jahren oder von der Notwendigkeit einer neuen Einstellung zu Leben und Sterben (munich, 1981); steve hochstadt, “migration in preindustrial germany,” central european history, 16 (1983), pp. 195–224; John e. Knodel, The Decline in Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939 (princeton, 1974), pp. 38–50, quote on p. 50. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

was typically done in the home, which was also usually on the farm. But in a few regions, in Saxony, around Berlin, and along the Ruhr, factory production was spreading and the population was becoming more concentrated in cities. That led to changes in mobility: in the Düsseldorf district (Regierungsbezirk) annual migration rates had already risen from 3 per cent in 1825 to 10 per cent in 1865.2 Arthur Imhof traced the changing life expectancy from the sixteenth century through the twentieth, demonstrating that the modern conquest of death in Germany began after 1871. Infant mortality in the first year of life fell nearly 30 per cent by 1910. An even greater decline in mortality, nearly 60 per cent, occurred between the ages of one and 15. After centuries of stable or just slightly improving life chances, life expectancy jumped suddenly after 1871: at birth from 37 years to 47; at age one from 48 to 57; at age 15 from 58 to 63. The stability at high mortality rates, which had characterized traditional German, and European, society, was transformed into rapid improvement in life expectancy, which continued through the 1920s, and then slowed down through the 1950s.3 The effect on family life of the cumulative improvement in life expectancy across all ages was startling. Since the sixteenth century, about 20 per cent of people survived to age 70. By 1910, that percentage had jumped to 30 per cent: half again as many Germans survived into their seventies. John Knodel has written the standard study of the changes in fertility during the imperial period. After 1875, and especially after 1890, the fertility of both married and unmarried women dropped precipitously in every area of Germany, reaching a new low point in the early 1930s. About half of the decline occurred during the imperial period: according to Knodel’s data, between 1871 and 1910, marital fertility fell about 30 per cent. Virtually every European nation experienced a similar decline in fertility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Illegitimate fertility in Germany also fell, but not quite as rapidly and slightly later.4 At the same time, marriage was becoming more widespread among young Germans. The typical age at first marriage fell slightly for both men and women, as did the proportion of men and women who never married. More and earlier marriages accompanied the declining number of children per family, although the causal connections between these two trends are not certain. While the decline in fertility of Germans was universal across the Empire, social and economic differences in fertility persisted. Knodel concluded that marital fertility in rural areas had been higher than in urban areas before the onset of fertility decline, and remained higher. Wealthier families tended to have lower fertility than poorer ones. Catholics had the highest fertility, followed by Protestants, and then Jews with the lowest. Every type of German family in every type of community experienced fertility decline, but these social differences persisted well into the twentieth century. Imhof summarizes a whole set of demographic changes in one table tracing the “fundamental changes” in family life, especially in the lives of women.5 Before 1871, women typically married at age 29 and lived to be 64. By the early twentieth century, they married at 25.5 and survived to 69, thus lengthening the average marriage from 35 years to 44. Married women had their first child at 27 years rather than 30. Although they had fewer births, more

2 Steve Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820–1989 (Ann Arbor, 1999), pp. 67–8. 3 Imhof, Die gewonnenen Jahre, pp. 80–82. 4 John Knodel and Steve Hochstadt, “Urban and Rural Illegitimacy in Imperial Germany,” in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith (eds),Bastardy and Its Comparative History (London, 1980), pp. 284–312. 5 Imhof, Die gewonnenen Jahre, pp. 164–5.

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children now survived their first year. Married women lived an average of 32 years after their final birth, instead of 23. Because the fall in mortality preceded the decline in fertility by a decade or so, the yearly rate of population growth jumped from 1 per cent before 1871 to 1.5 per cent between 1895 and 1914, the fastest rate of growth in the modern era. The population of Imperial Germany increased from 41 million in the 1871 census to 65 million in the 1910 census. Between 1816 and 1871, population density in the area of the former West Germany had increased 49 per cent. Then in the 40 years after 1871, density grew by 74 per cent. After 1910, growth slowed again: between 1910 and 1976 density increased 72 per cent.6 During the lifetime of the Kaiserreich, the number of Germans living in communities with less than 2,000 inhabitants remained at about 26 million. All the population growth went to larger communities, with explosive expansion of the biggest cities—the Grossstädte with over 100,000 people—which increased their population from two million in eight cities to 13.8 million in 48 cities. Table 19.1 shows clearly how the German population shifted from rural to urban.7

Table 19.1 Proportions of German population by size of community

Under 2,000 2,000–20,000 20,000–100,000 Over 100,000 1871 64% 24% 8% 5% 1880 59% 25% 9% 7% 1890 53% 26% 9% 11% 1900 46% 26% 13% 16% 1910 40% 25% 13% 21%

The growth in the urban population and stagnation in the rural population were naturally accompanied by the growing importance of industrial occupations. Over the life of the Kaiserreich, the proportion of Germans dependent on agriculture fell from nearly half to about one quarter. Klaus Bade called this shift “the transformation from an agrarian state with strong industry to an industrial state with strong agricultural basis.”8 The static snapshots of population in the censuses, which in Imperial Germany were highly developed and thoroughly carried out, provide as accurate information as is available for that period about a national population and its communities. But the data we need to understand migration are not provided by censuses. Census questions about birthplace and previous residence, which offer remarkable detail about how a geographically diverse population is composed at any one moment, cannot answer how it got that way. Censuses measure the results of migration, not migration itself. Although a migration registration system for the entire country was never developed by the imperial government, a wide variety of local systems, especially in large cities, offers some of the best migration data in the world for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These local data allow us to see how mobility, like other demographic behaviors, changed radically between 1871 and

6 Ibid., p. 100. 7 The statistics in Table 19.1 are adapted from Knodel, Decline in Fertility, p. 207. 8 Klaus J. Bade, “Bevölkerung,” in idem (ed.), Auswanderer, Wanderarbeiter, Gastarbeiter: Bevölkerung, Arbeitsmarkt und Wanderung in Deutschland seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern, 1984), p. 74.

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Figure 19.1 Migration rate in Grossstädte 1881–1927 the First World War. The transformation of Germany from a rural agricultural to an urban industrial nation was carried on the backs of millions of migrants. At the same time as births and deaths declined to historically low levels, Germans became more mobile than ever.9 The rise in migration did not begin in 1871. The Düsseldorf district government was already trying to measure all migration in the 1820s. A center of new industrial manufacturing and advanced farming at the juncture of the Rhine and Ruhr rivers, mobility in that region more than tripled between 1825 and 1865. But in Düsseldorf and in the few large cities elsewhere that counted migrations, rates were 10 per cent or less before 1870. During the life of Imperial Germany, no regional data set exists, but increasing numbers of Grossstädte counted migrations, until nearly all cities over 100,000 were covered by 1910. By 1881, when a sufficient number of large cities registered migrations to describe a national pattern, Grossstadt migration rates averaged over 15 per cent. By 1912, the average for all Grossstädte was 19 per cent, an extraordinary annual rate of migration across a nation’s cities. Figure 19.1 plots the uneven path of rising mobility in the Kaiserreich.10 The periodic peaks and valleys represent migration’s close correspondence with economic cycles. The recessions of the early 1890s, 1901–1903, and 1906–1908 brought migration rates of Germans down for short periods. The differences among the peaks are negligible. From 1890 to the beginning of the First World War, migration rates for German cities hovered between 15 and

9 While migration rates before 1800 can only be calculated on a local level, it is clear that pre- industrial mobility in Germany was not higher than 10 per cent, and was usually about 5 per cent. See Hochstadt, “Migration in Preindustrial Germany,” pp. 195–224. The following discussion of migration rates is taken from Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity. 10 This figure is adapted from figure 24 in Hochstadt,M obility and Modernity, p. 277. The methods used to estimate migration rates for all Grossstädte based on incomplete data are explained on pp. 116– 20, 219–26, 275–6.

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19 per cent, a high but stable rate of mobility. The uniqueness of internal migration during the Kaiserreich is apparent from the precipitous decline in migration rates during the 1920s. After one more peak in 1918–19 due to the return of soldiers from the front, the mobility to cities dropped to levels not seen since the 1860s. This pattern was characteristic of individual cities too: James H. Jackson has plotted a nearly identical graph for Duisburg between 1845 and 1914.11 The data cited thus far refer to in-migrations or moves into large cities. Every year, a tide of migrants nearly one fifth as large as the whole city arrived in each German city. A key element of this migration structure is that most of them soon left. Characteristic of German migration at any time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the equivalence of in- and out-migration: every year, nearly the same number of moves out of communities was recorded as moves in. The best estimate for large German cities is that annual out-migration reached about 95 per cent of in-migration. In-migration and out-migration grew together during the Kaiserreich. Thus the net result of migration was not mainly community growth, but a whirlwind of movement through communities. This pattern was caused by the relatively brief persistence of urban in-migrants. Across German cities, from one third to one half of a year’s cohort of in-migrants were already gone by the end of the year, staying an average of less than six months. Berlin’s excellent migration data, coordinated with census results, shows that most of a year’s cohort of in- migrants quickly disappeared: after three years about one third were still there; after five years, only one quarter of male migrants, but nearly half of female migrants, were left. In other cities, in-migrant persistence was significantly lower: in Breslau and Düsseldorf, fewer than 20 per cent were left after five years; Bremen and were below 20 per cent within three years of arrival. Migration researchers theorized for decades that migration in societies like Imperial Germany proceeded in a stepwise pattern of rural-to-urban movement, migrants typically moving towards larger and larger places. This hypothesis appeared to gain credence by the use of census data to measure migration. However, German registration statistics reveal a very different pattern. Over 90 per cent of migrants who came to big cities from smaller places then went back to smaller places again. Dieter Langewiesche has therefore urged that internal migration be seen as a “pulsating exchange of influx and outflow between countryside and city.”12 To reconstruct migration patterns for the whole German population, we must get beyond city boundaries, even if the data sources fall off sharply in quantity and quality. Among Grossstädte, size made little difference: in the period 1908–12, the six cities over 500,000 averaged an in-migration rate of .15; each of the groupings from 50,000 to 100,000, 100,000 to 200,000, and 200,000 to 500,000 averaged .19. The evidence we have indicates that the migration rates shown for Grossstädte also characterized smaller German communities. Although the data on cities between 10,000 and 50,000 is sparse and scattered, it conforms closely to what has been shown for larger cities. The peak of mobility was reached about 1900, after which rates were stable and ranged between .10 and .25. Smaller towns down to 4,000 people had slightly lower rates at that peak, between .06 and .16 annually. Rural communities, usually defined in German sources as those with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, remain relatively uncharted for the Kaiserreich. Two sources of data from

11 James H. Jackson, Jr, Migration and Urbanization in the Ruhr Valley, 1820–1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997). 12 Dieter Langewiesche, “Wanderungsbewegungen in der Hochindustrialisierungsperiode. Regionale, interstädtische und innerstädtische Mobilität in Deutschland 1880–1914,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 64 (1977), pp. 1–40, quote on p. 19.

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immediately before and immediately after demonstrate the ubiquity of mobility into the smallest villages. In the 192 communities of the Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf between 1848 and 1853, there was little relationship between size and rate. Across all of Prussia in 1920– 22, urban communities had an average in-migration rate of .14, as opposed to .15 in rural villages. At that time, agricultural provinces such as Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein had higher rates than the industrial regions of the Rhineland and Westphalia.13 On the basis of all known migration data we must assume that the high rates of migration which characterized German cities during the Kaiserreich were also characteristic of German villages. Like other demographic events, migration depends heavily on age. Children under 15 and adults over 50 were the least likely to move. Young adults between 20 and 30 had migration rates seven or eight times as great as those age groups. Most of these young adults traveled alone, although they might have been married. Across many large cities which kept such records, only 20 to 25 per cent of in-migrants arrived in families. While only three cities kept adequate statistics on family status, their data are in agreement: family migration rates hovered between 5 and 10 per cent, while single rates ranged from 30 to 50 per cent. For two cities migration rates can be distinguished for those born in that city and those born elsewhere. In Breslau in 1885 and in Berlin for the entire period 1866–85, the in- migration rates for natives were 3 to 4 per cent, while for non-natives the rates were many times higher, at 19 to 23 per cent. The migration rates for natives are comparable to the family migration rates cited above. This is not coincidental: natives resided overwhelmingly in family units in the cities, while in-migrants were much more likely to live apart from the nuclear family. Counter to the widespread assumption that big city dwellers are more modern, and therefore more mobile than everyone else, Grossstadt natives were much less mobile than the migrants from smaller communities who poured into their cities and then out again. The native populations of big cities, who had either remained since birth, or left and come back, were structurally different from the migrants. The migrations of millions of Germans formed a clearly defined structure in the Kaiserreich. Although urban communities in Germany were of many different types and sizes, the patterns of migrations to those cities were predictably regular. Complementing this migration picture was a structure of persistence among those migrants based on equally predictable patterns of longevity at their urban destinations. Both structures involved very high rates of movement for young, single people swarming into and out of cities, whose native population looked quite different, clustered in stable families. Yet their combined action produced a net residue which much more closely resembled the native population. As an immigrant cohort gradually dispersed, the older adults, the families, the better-off tended to stay behind, blending more easily into the native population. Urbanization is a concept that appears simplistic in the light of migration history. The term implies a one-way process with no end in sight, when in fact it is shorthand for a complex dynamic whose result was a larger number and proportion of city people. That process was not magnetic attraction or a gravitational force, metaphors often used to describe urbanization. A more accurate image is of a river of migrants flowing through cities, slowly depositing a sediment of new permanent residents, as most rush in and out. Because this migratory flow grew rapidly during the Kaiserreich, the number of people at any moment living in cities also grew, but many of them would soon be gone, replaced by other newcomers.

13 Calculated from data in Statistisches Jahrbuch für den Freistaat Preussen, vols 19–20 (Berlin, 1923– 24).

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The total mobility of Germans is measured not only by these rates of in- and out- migration across city borders, but also by the even more ubiquitous movements within Grossstädte. There were more than twice as many moves within large city boundaries as across them every year. But the trend during the Kaiserreich was downwards, from a peak around 1890 (or possibly before), when there were half as many moves as people every year, to 1912, when the rate had fallen by over 25 per cent. Again the curves of migration follow the curves of economic activity, with movements lower during recessions. As in the case of other demographic measures, the Kaiserreich represents a unique phase in German migratory history. After peaking at nearly 20 per cent between 1890 and 1910, internal migration rates in Germany fell precipitously after the First World War and then continued to decline more gradually since 1920 to just over 5 per cent, a level comparable to the early nineteenth century. Disproportionate attention is usually paid to the minority of migrants who cross national borders. Over the lifetime of the Kaiserreich, nearly three million Germans left the country, mainly on their way to the United States. Although this represents an extraordinary level of Auswanderung, that total is small in comparison to over ten million migrations every year within Germany, as well as several million intra-city moves each year. German Auswanderung fluctuated much more powerfully than the more predictable forms of internal migration. During the nineteenth century there were three peaks or waves of emigration from Germany: 1846–57, in the wake of the disastrous economic conditions of the late 1840s (total emigrants about 1.3 million); a somewhat lesser peak in 1864–73 (about one million emigrants); and the largest wave in 1880–93 (1.3 million). After 1893, Auswanderung fell back to about 30,000 per year, never again to reach such volumes. During the Kaiserreich, total immigration to the United States from Germany was significantly higher than from any other country. Unlike emigration before 1871, which came primarily from southwestern Germany, emigration from the Kaiserreich was overwhelmingly from the northeast. This also represented a shift in the socio-economic status of the emigrants, from peasant families with small landholdings to landless day laborers, servants, and non-inheriting peasant children in a mixture of families and single movers. Even as hundreds of thousands of Germans were leaving the country for the New World, foreigners crossed into Germany looking for work. While Berlin was experiencing unprecedented volumes of movements into and out of the city, the German government became alarmed at the relatively small numbers of Poles who arrived every year for seasonal agricultural and industrial labor. Before 1914 workers from the Russian Empire were forced to return home for the winter because of the state’s political fears of “Polonization.” This enforced seasonality created annual border crossings reaching nearly one million migrations after 1910. When war broke out, these immigrants were not allowed to leave the country; those from Austria-Hungary were permitted to return only if they were liable for military service. The end of the war freed these labor prisoners. Although foreign workers represented only a small proportion of total migration, their yearly movements across the German borders also dropped sharply at the end of the Kaiserreich. The annual number of foreign workers registered with the Deutsche Arbeiterzentrale fell to 300,000 immediately after the war and dipped under 200,000 by 1930.14 The unusually high rates of geographic mobility in Germany during the period of rapid industrialization were not the result of fundamental shifts in behavior toward a “modern”

14 Klaus J. Bade, “Massenwanderung und Arbeitsmarkt im deutschen Nordosten von 1800 bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Überseeische Auswanderung, interne Abwanderung und kontinentale Zuwanderung,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 20 (1980), pp. 265–323.

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mobile society, as has often been assumed and asserted by scholars. The gradual mobilization of the German population into new migratory patterns throughout the nineteenth century, peaking about 1900, can be explained by those economic changes at the national level which encouraged temporary forms of migration. High rates of temporary mobility were a specific reaction to the particular circumstances of early and rapid industrialization in Germany: when those circumstances disappeared, so did high levels of migration. In the conjuncture of rapid population increase, agricultural transformation, and industrialization over more than a century, a new chapter developed in the history of Germany migration. The nineteenth-century changes had their roots in social and economic processes that began long before 1800. The growth of an agricultural underclass, an incipient rural proletariat, was already a problem in the late Middle Ages. Population increase in agricultural areas between 1750 and 1850 created unprecedented pressures on land and employment. Rural population growth meant an increase in those who did not control enough property to provide for their subsistence. They had many names, often regionally dependent: landless Tagelöhner; owners of Zulagerstätten created out of the division of the commons; or Frederick the Great’s colonists in eastern Prussia, called Büdner. The underclass in peasant society—land-poor and landless peasants, servants, and hired laborers—which already formed a majority in some areas, expanded precipitously, while the number of self-sufficient landholdings remained relatively constant. For example, in the area around Magdeburg called the Börde, between 1756 and 1805, farmers with sufficient land to support a family decreased by 9 per cent, those with insufficient landholdings increased by 81 per cent, while servants grew by 64 per cent and landless Einlieger by 167 per cent. Population pressure and agricultural underemployment were mutually reinforcing mechanisms in the transformation of traditional German agricultural society. The existence of surplus labor in rural communities was the prerequisite for the recruitment of the rural poor for industrial labor in their own homes, the growth of proto-industrialization. Proto-industrialization allowed rural German society to absorb population growth in the eighteenth century without forcing migration. The anchoring effects of rural industry can be seen in the rare migration statistics for the Düsseldorf district in 1821: annual migration rates were about 50 per cent lower in cottage industrial communities than in either agricultural villages or cities. In the first half of the nineteenth century the number of rural Germans increased by about 50 per cent, then remained at this unprecedented level throughout the Kaiserreich, and only began to fall after the First World War. Statistics for the village of Halsdorf in Upper Hesse demonstrate how an eighteenth-century problem became a nineteenth-century crisis. In 1785, 27 per cent of all farms were less than one hectare, while 23 per cent were one to five hectares; five hectares was generally considered to be the minimum to support a family. By 1894, 58 per cent were under one hectare, with 19 per cent one to five hectares. At the same time, the proportion of the population which was landless grew from 20 to 50 per cent. The proportion of families in Halsdorf who could support themselves on their own property had fallen during the nineteenth century from about one half to one sixth. The 1907 agricultural census explains the high rates of mobility across Germany: peasants with plots under two hectares were the majority among landholders; every region had a majority of smallholders; 58 per cent of German farms were considered as a secondary occupation (Nebenbetrieb).15 Thus population growth in the nineteenth century further tipped the balance of the rural population toward those classes of people dependent for subsistence upon earnings outside of their own property. Rapid population growth was, however, only

15 Data from the 1907 census published in Statistik des Deutschen Reiches, vol. 212, part 1 (Berlin, 1909).

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one component of a more fundamental transformation of the social and technical basis of agriculture. This restructuring involved changes in the relationship of people to land, in the kind and timing of work done, and in relations among the rural classes. Agriculture is inherently a seasonal labor process determined by soil, crops, and climate, as well as the social and technological organization of farming. Traditional three- field farming was structured to spread work throughout the year as evenly as possible, minimizing the seasonal unemployment which plagued peasant producers on the edge of subsistence. The changeover from extensive to intensive cultivation, which occurred nationwide during the life of the Kaiserreich, greatly imbalanced seasonal differences: three- field agriculture was improved by planting forage crops on fallow land and employing new rotations with root crops, such as potatoes and sugar beets, increasing the intensity of summer work. While the relationship of summer to winter work in the three-field system was about 1.4 to 1, it reached 2.6 to 1 for Rübenwirtschaft. Continued technical progress in plant selection and farming methods after 1850 further concentrated the workload by shortening the sugar beet season from about 110 days in the 1870s to 70 after 1900. At the same time, the onset of mechanization replaced the major winter work of hand threshing. The thresher was the most common labor-saving machine before the First World War, which could reduce winter work to less than 15 per cent of summer work. The rural labor market became seasonalized to an unprecedented extent by 1900. Agricultural employers replaced their year-round labor force with short-term workers in peak seasons. Demographically, this was represented in the replacement of servants (Gesinde) by day laborers (Tagelöhner). Max Weber’s first book in 1892 summarized the recent history of agricultural labor in eastern Germany as the replacement of workers who had participated in the fortunes of a particular estate by hired workers whose economic interests clashed with those of the landowners.16 In 1907, the majority of all non-family laborers who had done agricultural work during the previous twelve months were hired temporarily. Throughout Germany increasing numbers of peasants with insufficient plots and laborers with seasonal underemployment sought non-agricultural income. At this moment the familiar recourse of needy peasants—cottage industry—was disappearing. Proto- industrialization expanded right up to the founding of the German Empire: the number of looms used in part-time weaving in Prussia nearly doubled between 1816 and 1858. Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning estimated that the number of Germans employed in various forms of Verlagswesen grew from about one million to 1.5 million from 1800 to 1850.17 But the backbone of German rural industry, linen production, then nearly disappeared in the late nineteenth century. After reaching its high point in 1850 at 250,000 hectares, the acreage in flax fell to 215,000 by 1872, and then collapsed to 17,000 by 1913. The virtual disappearance of the cottage linen industry was part of a much broader transformation of industrial production. The expansion of the rail network broke the barrier of high transport costs which had nurtured rural industrial production of all kinds. The transformation of Germany from a primarily agrarian to a primarily industrial nation not only represented an increase in total industrial jobs, but also a considerable shift in the location of existing jobs—a geographical concentration in urban areas. German rural historians write of a “re- agrarianization” of the land during the Kaiserreich. The new industrial jobs were overwhelmingly temporary. Construction—especially railroad building, which doubled its workforce during the Kaiserreich—was based on

16 Max Weber, “Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter in ostelbischen Deutschland,” Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 55 (Leipzig, 1892). 17 Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning, Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914 (Paderborn, 1973), p. 130.

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seasonal migratory labor. The building of cities depended on the production of bricks, an overwhelmingly seasonal occupation. Seasonal jobs in construction, construction materials, and sugar production accounted for about 22 per cent of total employment in the secondary sector in Germany in the early twentieth century, representing about five times as many jobs as in 1850. Factory labor before the First World War was also overwhelmingly temporary. Studies of workers at particular enterprises—whether mines or metal factories for men, or textile factories for women—show a rapid turnover in workforce: in Düsseldorf’s metal and machine factories in 1906–1907, the annual turnover rate was 90 per 100 workers; in the chemical industry it was 170 per 100. Numerous local studies make clear that the migrant workers who filled the temporary jobs in German industry were drawn from the rural underclass previously described. On the day of the agricultural census in June 1907, only 25 per cent of the male heads of household on these small farms were present. Of the 2.7 million plots under two hectares being worked in June of 1907, half were tended by a woman alone. The term worker-peasant draws attention to the family strategies used by large numbers of rural poor to accommodate seasonal migration and non-agricultural wage labor into an agricultural life. One of the difficulties in generalizing about households which bridged the gap between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural labor is the great variety in forms of labor, seasonal timing, and even gender division of labor. Depending on a region’s landholding patterns, proximity to urban work, and cultural traditions of production, highly specialized combinations of urban and rural income sources flourished and then disappeared. For example, families in Lippe were separated for eight or nine months a year, as the adult males left to make bricks. They could be spared from the farms because the plots were so tiny, usually less than half a hectare, that women and children alone could utilize intensive gardening techniques to grow potatoes and vegetables. In winter, cottage production of textiles and wooden shoes added to household income.18 In such families, men were workers and women were peasants: the term worker-peasant properly refers to the entire family economy. Temporary migration allowed these families to preserve their rural base, despite the changes wrought by modern economic processes. Such households had much in common with the families of Sachsengänger in eastern Germany, although the nature of migratory work was agricultural rather than industrial, the seasons varied, and the products manufactured at home were different.19 Both household types developed out of the nineteenth-century conjuncture of population growth, parcelization of land, agricultural innovation, and early industrialization. Both disappeared as the twentieth century brought rationalization of industrial and agricultural production and the de-seasonalization of labor. Millions of German migrants preserved some aspects of traditional agriculture by doing city labor and transformed rural life by their absence. It is possible that the mobility peak around 1900 witnessed the historical high for worker- peasants in Germany. Germans in increasing numbers were mobilized by abstract and impersonal economic forces to move to those sources of temporary employment, and then move again. Mobility became the primary response to the nineteenth-century crisis of employment for the rural underclass. The result was the high rates of mobility that characterized German communities at the turn of the twentieth century. Only the further process of agricultural and industrial

18 Fritz Fleege-Althoff, Die lippischen Wanderarbeiter (Detmold, 1928), pp. 253–55, 306–8; Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea, trans. Donald A. Bloch (London, 1987), pp. 193–4. 19 Martin Lezius, Heimatsgebiete der Sachsengänger in Brandenburg, Posen und Schlesien (Neudamm, 1913).

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development during the twentieth century was able to relieve the elemental pressure of the rural underemployed and thereby reduce mobility to “normal” levels. A fundamental cause of the explosion of temporary migration was the peasantry’s determination to return home. From the perspective of the peasant village, the historical observer sees migrants leaving temporarily so that they can come back permanently. When textile factory work slowed at the end of the “season”, when cold weather closed construction sites, or when the sugar beet Campagne was over, German peasants hurried back to their plots. Rural Germans struggled against international economic forces to maintain an agricultural livelihood. By the 1920s, that struggle was over. The expedients of cottage industry, seasonal agricultural labor, and temporary industrial jobs disappeared. Rural migration at its quantitative peak was less an entry into the modern world than a desperate resistance to it. As other contributions to this volume demonstrate, the economic transformation of Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was extraordinary in its speed and breadth. Demographic transformation was an integral part of this socio-economic revolution. Medical advances and public hygiene prolonged life. Germans abandoned family practices which had been relatively stable for centuries. They married younger and had fewer children. They left home for temporary jobs, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles, and then came back, only to repeat that cycle again and again. The so-called demographic transition in fertility and mortality is by now accurately measured and clearly described; the peaking of mobility during the Kaiserreich is less well understood. The turnover of populations within communities affected every aspect of human life: the production of food; the nature of factory workforces; the ability of unions to represent workers and struggle against capital; the number of voters who fulfilled residency requirements; the organization of individuals into affinity groupings outside of the family; and the nature of the family itself.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bade, Klaus J. “Massenwanderung und Arbeitsmarkt im deutschen Nordosten von 1800 bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Überseeische Auswanderung, interne Abwanderung und kontinentale Zuwanderung,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 20 (1980), pp. 265–323. —. “‘Preußengänger’ und ‘Abwehrpolitik’: Ausländerbeschäftigung, Ausländerpolitik und Ausländerkontrolle auf dem Arbeitsmarkt in Preußen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 24 (1984), pp. 91–162. Bergmann, Klaus. Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft (Meisenheim am Glan, 1970). Bleek, Stephan. “Mobilität und Seßhaftigkeit in deutschen Großstädten während der Urbanisierung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 15 (1989), pp. 5–33. Dillwitz, Sigrid. “Die Struktur der Bauernschaft von 1871 bis 1914. Dargestellt aufder Grundlage der deutschen Reichsstatistik,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte, 9 (1973), pp. 47–127. Fleege-Althoff, Fritz. Die lippischen Wanderarbeiter (Detmold, 1928). Heberle, Rudolf and Meyer, Fritz. Die Großstädte im Strome der Binnenwanderung (Leipzig, 1937). Henning, Friedrich-Wilhelm. Die Industrialisierung in Deutschland 1800 bis 1914 (Paderborn, 1973). —. “Industrialisierung und dörfliche Einkommensmöglichkeiten,” in Hermann Kellenbenz (ed.), Agrarisches Nebengewerbe und Formen der Reagrarisierung im Spätmittelalter und 19./20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 155–73.

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Herbert, Ulrich. A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers, trans. William Templer (Ann Arbor, 1990). Hochstadt, Steve. “Migration in Preindustrial Germany,” Central European History, 16 (1983), pp. 195–224. —. Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820–1989 (Ann Arbor, 1999). Hoerder, Dirk and Nagler, Jörg. People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1829–1930 (Cambridge, 1995). Imhof, Arthur E. Die gewonnenen Jahre: von der Zunahme unserer Lebensspanne seit dreihundert Jahren oder von der Notwendigkeit einer neuen Einstellung zu Leben und Sterben (Munich, 1981). Jackson, James H., Jr. Migration and Urbanization in the Ruhr Valley, 1820–1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997). Kamphoefner, Walter D. The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton, 1987). Knodel, John E. The Decline in Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939 (Princeton, 1974). —. Demographic Behavior in the Past: A Study of Fourteen German Village Populations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1988). — and Hochstadt, Steve. “Urban and Rural Illegitimacy in Imperial Germany,” in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith (eds),Bastardy and Its Comparative History (London, 1980), pp. 284–312. Langewiesche, Dieter. “Wanderungsbewegungen in der Hochindustrialisierungsperiode. Regionale, interstädtische und innerstädtische Mobilität in Deutschland 1880–1914,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 64 (1977), pp. 1–40. Lezius, Martin. Heimatsgebiete der Sachsengänger in Brandenburg, Posen und Schlesien (Neudamm, 1913). Lucassen, Jan. Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea, trans. Donald A. Bloch (London, 1987). Marschalck, Peter. Bevölkerungsgeschichte Deutschlands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1984). Niethammer, Lutz with Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef. “Wie wohnten die Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 16 (1976), pp. 61–134. Perkins, J.A. “The German Agricultural Worker, 1815–1914,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 11 (1984), pp. 3–27. Quataert, Jean H. “Combining Agrarian and Industrial Livelihood: Rural Households in the Saxon Oberlausitz in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Family History, 10 (1985), pp. 145–62. Schwarz, Karl. Analyse der räumlichen Bevölkerungsbewegung, vol. 58, Veröffentlichungen der Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung (Hanover, 1969). Weber, Max. “Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter in ostelbischen Deutschland,” Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, vol. 55 (Leipzig, 1892).

344 pART V international Relations, militarism and war This page has been left blank intentionally 20 international Relations

Andreas Rose

Anyone who studies the history of imperial germany’s foreign relations is tempted to postulate inevitabilities. Built on the battlefields of three ‘wars of unification’ (1864, 1866, 1870–71), the belated first German national state was ruined in the trenches of the First World War just 47 years later.1 Ever since, the rise and fall of the German Kaiserreich and the deterioration of the European state system after decades of peace and stability have been a pivotal theme of modern historiography. This is especially so for the last 20 years when the ‘bygone Empire’2 and its international relations have enjoyed a revival in interest. The starting point for this lay outside academia. Far from putting an ‘end to history’,3 germany’s re-unification, the end of the Cold War and the return of a multipolar global state system led to a renaissance in the historical study of international relations, making it one of the richest seams within modern historiography. Beyond these external influences, political historiography also underwent a series of highly intriguing methodological upheavals from the early 1990s onwards, which revitalized and to some extent replaced the previous diplomatic history with its ‘maps and chaps’. This ‘New International History’ seeks to combine cultural, political, ideological, social and economic dimensions which have long been treated separately.4 As a consequence of this more global and multinational outlook, historians studying international relations in the decades before the First World War have moved away from the primary focus on Germany and its alleged aggression. Instead, they pay more attention to Germany’s constraints; its political, as well as financial and military, limitations; to the actions, motives and options of the other great powers, irrespective of the sabre-rattling of the Wilhelmstrasse;5 to the interdependence not only of foreign and domestic affairs, but also of the extra-European dimension in the age of imperialism.6 Aided by an apparently

1 Sebastian Haffner, Von Bismarck zu Hitler. Ein Rückblick (Munich, 1987), p. 47. 2 Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich. Deutsche Außenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler, 1871–1945 (Stuttgart, 1995). See, most recently, Andreas Rose,Deutsche Außenpolitik in der Ära Bismarck (1862–1890) (Darmstadt, 2013); idem., Die Außenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs (1890–1918) (Darmstadt, 2013). 3 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, 16 (1989), pp. 3–18. 4 See Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Internationale Geschichte. Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten (Munich, 2000). 5 Konrad Canis, Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik. Deutsche Außenpolitik 1890–1902 (Berlin, 1997); idem., Bismarcks Außenpolitik, 1870–1890 (Paderborn, 2004); idem., Der Weg in den Abgrund. Deutsche Außenpolitik 1902–1914 (Paderborn, 2011); Andreas Rose, Zwischen Empire und Kontinent. Britische Außenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2008); Stefan Schmidt, Frankreichs Außenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ausbruchs des Ersten Weltkrieges (Munich, 2009); Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Günther Kronenbitter, ‘Krieg im Frieden’. Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreichs-Ungarns 1906–1914 (Munich, 2003); Friedrich Kießling, Gegen den ‘großen Krieg’? Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen 1911–1914 (Munich, 2002). 6 Bernd Heidenreich and Sönke Neitzel (eds), Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1890–1914 (Paderborn, 2011); Sönke Neitzel, Kriegsausbruch. Deutschlands Weg in die Katastrophe 1900–1914 (Zurich, 2002). The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

never-ending flow of sources, the new methodological openness has created fresh perspectives, questions and approaches. As a result, the infamous war-guilt question has been largely superseded by the question of how and why the state system failed.7 Recent research has significantly qualified long-standing orthodoxies: Germany’s primary, if not sole, responsibility for the outbreak of the Great War; its alleged Sonderweg; the primacy of domestic policy; or the inevitability of Anglo-German antagonism.8 Instead, historians have emphasized Germany’s comparatively normal development towards modernity.9 With regard to international relations, current research has arrived at a far more nuanced view not only of Berlin’s foreign policy, but also of pre-1914 great power politics in general.10 In order to delineate the countless results of the last two decades of intensive research, as well as to indicate possible directions for future research, this chapter will have to narrow its focus. The period is usually divided into four distinct phases: the age of Bismarckian security policy from 1871 to 1890, in which continental issues were predominant; the stage of Weltpolitik, or world policy, from the mid-1890s to 1902–1904, when European relations appeared relatively relaxed; the years of rising tensions up to the outbreak of war in 1914; and finally, the still rather neglected period of wartime diplomacy between 1914 and 1918. For reasons of space, the latter phase is excluded from this analysis.11

Foreign Policy Under Otto von Bismarck: The Dilemma of a ‘Semi-Hegemonic Position’

The German victory over France, and the proclamation of the German Empire in January 1871, found the councils of Europe surprisingly ill-prepared. Therefore it was rather disingenuous for Bismarck to convey the impression that he had founded the Reich ‘against the guns of the rest of Europe’.12 Russia had adopted a position of benevolent neutrality and thus repaid Bismarck’s aid against the Polish insurrection in the 1860s; Austria-Hungary had still to recover from its defeat to Prussia five years earlier; and Britain remained largely passive, much to the annoyance of Benjamin Disraeli. As Leader of the Opposition, and in contrast to the many English politicians who had called for a Prussian-led German unification,13 he proved to be ahead of his time when criticizing the lethargy of his own government: ‘This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French revolution of last century … You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope … The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.’14

7 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012). 8 See, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985). 9 Frank-Lothar Kroll, Geburt der Moderne. Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Bonn, 2013), pp. 7–10. 10 William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2010). 11 For more details of Germany’s wartime diplomacy, see Hildebrand, Reich, pp. 302–82. 12 Quoted in Eberhard Kolb, Otto von Bismarck (Munich, 2009), p. 133. 13 Klaus Hildebrand, No-Intervention. Die Pax Britannica und Preußen 1865/66–1869/70. Eine Untersuchung zur englischen Weltpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1997); Frank L. Müller, Britain and the German Question: Perceptions of Nationalism and Political Reform, 1830–63 (London, 2002). Markus Mösslang et al. (eds), British Envoys to Germany, 4 vols (Cambridge, 2000–2010) is also a rich source of information. 14 Benjamin Disraeli, 9 February1871, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, ser. III, vol. 204 (February– March 1871), pp. 81–2.

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However, this was no prophecy of inevitable Anglo-German tensions or of a predestined end for the Reich, as many historians have used this famous quotation to suggest. Rather, it reflected a deep understanding of the continental state system and of British worldwide interests. Disraeli was already anticipating a shift in the global balance of power following the French collapse in the Franco-Prussian war. He saw Russia and the United States as the greatest beneficiaries of France’s defeat. While the US had nothing to fear from anybody, Russia would no longer concentrate on the vacuum of central Europe but would rather look to the east for expansion. As a consequence, London would be left alone without French assistance to restrain St Petersburg.15 In the 1870s and 1880s this was still a long way off. For the time being it was clear that the founding of the German Empire, right in the middle of an increasingly dynamic continent, meant an upheaval in the European great power system. There was simply no ‘considerable state, not fundamentally modified’, because of the French defeat at Sedan.16 Against all expectations, Prussia had sensationally defeated two established great powers in a row. It was thus anticipated that it would become the new dominant factor on the continent. Otto von Bismarck had succeeded in channelling the German national movement of 1848.17 By using the so-called ‘Crimean War constellation’ of enduring tensions between Great Britain, France and Russia,18 he had remarkably managed to fight the ‘wars of unification’ without any foreign interference or major peace settlement. However, Germany had not replaced France as the hegemonic power. It still remained unclear how the new German Empire could be reconciled with the European state system. Prussia had been the weakest of the five great powers after the Congress at Vienna, which had made the German Confederation a playground for all sorts of great power influence. Where the Confederation had been paralysed by the Austro-Prussian dualism, Prussia had been constantly overshadowed by the Russian colossus, doomed to be its junior partner and threatened by France in the west. This was Bismarck’s background and he was only too well aware of the limits of German power. His first step after his glorious return to Berlin, therefore, was to declare Germany ‘satiated’ (saturiert). From the start, the Empire’s Achilles’ heel was its geostrategic position. Notwithstanding Germany’s military success, its excellent economic potential and its demographic prospects which became obvious in the so called Gründerzeit (‘age of the founders’) between 1871 and 1873, the simple facts of geography opened the way to hostile coalitions. While Russia only had to take care of its western frontier, France its eastern frontier, and Great Britain was surrounded by sea, the central European powers had to look in all directions at once. Since the Seven Years War (1756–63), when Prussia had faced an encircling coalition of Austria, Russia and France, German statesmen had suffered from a cauchemar des coalitions. This was particularly true of Bismarck.19 While the Peace of Frankfurt with Austria had left the possibility of future cooperation between Berlin and Vienna open,20 the case against

15 Mulligan, Origins, pp. 38–9. 16 William Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, 1843–1878 (London, 1879), vol. 4, p. 197. 17 Christian Jansen, Einheit, Macht und Freiheit. Die Paulskirchenlinke und die deutsche Politik in der nachrevolutionären Epoche, 1849–1867 (Düsseldorf, 2009). 18 Andreas Hillgruber, Otto von Bismarck. Gründer der europäischen Großmacht Deutsches Reich (Göttingen, 1978), p. 107; Klaus Hildebrand, ‘Die “Krimkriegssituation”: Wandel und Dauer einer historischen Konstellation der Staatenwelt. Eine Skizze’, in Jost Dülffer et al. (eds), Deutschland in Europa: Kontinuität und Bruch. Gedenkschrift für Andreas Hillgruber (Berlin, 1990), pp. 37–51. 19 Rainer Schmidt, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). Realpolitik und Revolution. Eine Biographie (Stuttgart, 2004), pp. 191–5. 20 ‘Bismarck wanted Austria to survive – not as a future ally, which is a myth, but as a vulnerable great power controlling south eastern Europe’: Paul W. Schroeder, ‘International Politics, Peace and

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France, the hereditary enemy from the Napoleonic era, was quite different. Not only had both powers used every effort to mobilize national sentiments against each other during the Spanish succession crisis,21 but the French had always seen themselves as being the continent’s natural hegemonic power. Their sense of honour and national pride was deeply affected by defeat in 1870. As early as August of that year, Bismarck had begun to think that further conflicts with Paris were likely, and he decided to annex Alsace-Lorraine as a result. But instead of gaining a cordon sanitaire against future French revanchism, he created an enduring symbol of the Franco-German antagonism. With such a permanent obstacle towards improved bilateral relations, German diplomacy was severely handicapped, if not altogether ‘immobilized’, as Friedrich von Holstein concluded.22 The Franco-German antagonism was certainly one of the major pillars of the post- 1871 international system that all other great powers could exploit. International relations were characterized by two further strained relationships: the traditional Anglo- Russian rivalry and the rising antagonism between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. Whereas tensions between London and St Petersburg could work to Germany’s advantage – especially Anglo-Russian tensions resulting from the Peninsula War (1853–56) – the growing expansion of Russian pan-Slavism in the Balkans and Vienna’s post-1866 reorientation towards this powder keg in south-eastern Europe soon proved detrimental to German diplomacy. Consequently, while the new German Empire was undoubtedly capable of defeating great powers like France and Austria individually, and even of severely wounding Russia, its central position and the enmity with France meant it was not able to stabilize the whole system like a new hegemon. As a result of its overwhelming and unexpected military success, moreover, Berlin was viewed with deep suspicion. The Kaiserreich, therefore, had adopted the role of a so-called ‘half-hegemon’, strong enough to cause trouble but neither powerful enough to control the system, nor to safeguard its own existence.23 Historical research generally defines three major foreign policy options open to German diplomacy. The first entailed a preventive strike against France to destroy once and for all a future risk from the west and to achieve a fully hegemonic position. In the so-called ‘War-in-Sight’ Crisis of 1875, Bismarck had indeed tried through press leaks to challenge France’s status as a great power.24 Whereas Bismarck’s press campaigns during the mid-1870s have recently been the subject of two thorough analyses,25 his overall behaviour and use of certain press organs like the Post and the Neue Preußische Zeitung, as well as his relations to journalists like Moritz Busch or Lothar Bucher,26 or indeed to public opinion in general, still needs to be examined. The same is true for the growing international importance of the press in general, which Josef Maria von Radowitz had correctly identified as a ‘great power in its own right’ during the Congress of Berlin in

Stability, 1815–1914’, in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: Europe 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 158–209, at 178–9. 21 David Wetzel, A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871 (Madison, 2003). 22 Holstein to Hatzfeldt, 1886, cited in Hildebrand, Reich, p. 22. 23 Ludwig Dehio, ‘Deutschland und die Epoche der Weltkriege’, Historische Zeitschrift, 173 (1952), pp. 77–94, at 80; Andreas Hillgruber, Bismarcks Auβenpolitik (Freiburg, 1972), p. 131. 24 Johannes Janorschke, Bismarck, Europa und die ‘Krieg-in-Sicht’-Krise von 1875 (Paderborn, 2010); James Stone, The War Scare of 1875: Bismarck and Europe in the Mid-1870s (Stuttgart 2010). 25 Ibid. 26 Christoph Studt, Lothar Bucher (1817–1892). Ein politisches Leben zwischen Revolution und Staatsdienst (Göttingen, 1992).

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1878.27 With regard to the diplomatic crisis between Paris and Berlin in 1875, Great Britain and Russia taught Bismarck a striking lesson and thus formed another ingredient of the new great power system: the integrity of France. From now on, while a preventive strike still remained an option, it was a very distant one. When the German general staff tried to convince Bismarck of a preventive strike against Russia in the mid-1880s, he repeatedly called them to order.28 A second option reflected Bismarck’s famous memorandum from June 1877, the so- called ‘Kissinger Doctrine’. In this he advocated the isolation of France and the creation of circumstances in which all the other powers would regard Germany as indispensable for the stability of the state system: to be, in other words, its pivot. This could be achieved either through acting as an arbitrator – as in the Eastern Crisis when Bismarck offered himself as an ‘honest broker’ between Britain and Russia – or by making Germany the centre of an alliance system. While the Congress of Berlin (1878) had taught him a second lesson – that arbitration for a central power could pay off – he tried to safeguard Germany’s position through alliances. In a system of five powers, the best option for Germany, he concluded, would be on the side of three. Since the Three Emperors’ League of 1873 had suffered a breakdown during the Congress of Berlin, Bismarck started a dual alliance with Austria-Hungary. Thus he managed to kill two birds with one stone. After deliberately exacerbating tensions with Russia through economic measures, he first convinced Wilhelm I to conclude the defensive Dual Alliance with Vienna (1879). Though this was a secret treaty, the rapprochement between Berlin and Vienna was a striking development for all the major powers. It appeared as if a new power bloc had emerged at the centre of Europe. Bismarck’s long-term aim, however, remained a new three-power combination with Russia. Therefore, he secondly used his direct wire to the Ballplatz to bridge the Austro-Russian gap in south-eastern Europe. In the following years he used the Dual Alliance more than once to control Vienna’s Balkan ambitions and to force Austria back into an unwilling partnership with Russia. With regard to Russia, he repeatedly used economic pressures and an open rapprochement towards London to bring St Petersburg back into line, re-founding the Three Emperors’ League in 1881. This new grouping lasted until 1887 and represented Bismarckian diplomacy at its zenith. Thirdly, the Wilhelmstrasse persistently tried to divert continental tensions from the European centre to its periphery. Bismarck used both the enduring eastern question as well as rising colonial ambitions among the great powers to promote French colonial interests in Africa. At the height of his international influence and reputation during the mid-1880s he even adopted a colonial policy for Germany. Although this only remained a short episode, motivated by a range of domestic, economic, electoral, dynastic as well as foreign political reasons,29 he again succeeded in playing the role of international arbiter at the Congo Conference in Berlin in 1884.30 In the end, however, he left no doubt that Germany’s first priority was to take care of its European frontiers.31 In March 1885 the comparatively Germanophile French government

27 Radowitz, cited in Hajo Holborn (ed.), Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Botschafters Joseph Maria von Radowitz, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1925), p. 34. The author is currently working on a study of ‘“The Seventh Great Power”: The International Press and the Congress of Berlin 1878’. 28 For Bismarck’s military relationships, see Michael Schmid, Der ‘Eiserne Kanzler’ und die Generäle. Deutsche Rüstungspolitik in der Ära Bismarck (1871–1890) (Paderborn, 2003), pp. 273–335. 29 For this, see Axel T.G. Riehl, Der ‘Tanz um den Äquator’. Bismarcks antienglische Kolonialpolitik und die Erwartung des Thronwechsels in Deutschland 1883 bis 1885 (Berlin, 1993). 30 For the Congo Conference, the best work is still Stig Förster et al. (eds), Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition (Oxford, 1988). 31 Bismarck to Eugen Wolf, 5 December 1888, cited in Horst Gründer, Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien, 3rd edn (Paderborn, 1995), p. 59.

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led by Jules Ferry fell, and Paris turned back towards its policy of revenge. The result was the so-called ‘double crisis in east and west’, triggered on the one hand by the advent of Paul Déroulède’s League of Patriots demanding an aggressive course against Berlin, and on the other hand by the return of the eastern question over Bulgaria. As a consequence Bismarck’s alliance system fell into pieces. In the face of growing western pressure, eastern security became all the more important. However, confronted by enduring tensions in south-eastern Europe, all his efforts to bridge the Austro-Russian tensions proved in vain. To secure the Reich, Bismarck more and more sought salvation in a ‘policy of expedients’. Whereas in the 1870s and early 1880s he had generally exploited given international constellations, he now increasingly tried to manipulate international relations, to keep Russia and France apart and to avoid a choice between Germany’s eastern neighbours.32 A further option, namely to simply rely on a central European power bloc with Austria-Hungary and to face the risk of a war on two fronts against the Franco- Russia alliance, was anathema to Bismarck. This would, of course, become the reality of Germany’s position in the later Wilhelmine period.

The ‘Policy of Expedients’

To remain on the side of three in a system of five, Bismarck’s primary aim was to avoid having to choose between Austria and Russia. As natural as it had seemed to reconcile Germany with both its former ‘holy allies’, by 1887 he had to admit his failure and to prove his inventiveness. The combination that now followed was Bismarck’s most elaborate and artificial, the epitome of his policy of expedients. While renewing the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy, he encouraged an Anglo-Italian agreement for maintaining the status quo in the Mediterranean, which Austria later joined. Thus he managed to draw Britain as close to Austria as it would ever go in a commitment to resist a Russian advance in south-eastern Europe.33 In June 1887 he completed this arrangement with the famous with Russia. This treaty ultimately mirrored the restraint with which Bismarck conducted foreign policy. In January 1887, he had rejected a Russian proposal in which St Petersburg offered its neutrality in the case of a Franco- German war in exchange for German neutrality in an Austro-Russian war. This would have been contradictory to the Dual Alliance. Instead he warned Vienna not to go to war over Bulgaria, and told the German General Staff to rule out any German assistance in such a war.34 Early in June 1887, he revealed the terms of the Dual Alliance to his Russian friend Count Paul Shuvalov, indicating that Germany would not stand by if Russia launched an attack on Austria-Hungary. Thus Bismarck used the alliance talks to restrain both Vienna and St Petersburg. When, on 18 June 1887, the Reinsurance Treaty was signed, it stipulated that Germany and Russia would adopt a stance of benevolent neutrality if either power were to fall victim to an aggressive attack by a third power.

32 All these policies can now be examined thoroughly through the new and ongoing document collections published by the Otto-von-Bismarck-Foundation in Friedrichsruh. Otto von Bismarck, Gesammelte Werke. Neue Friedrichsruher Ausgabe, ed. Konrad Canis et al., 6 vols (so far) (Paderborn, 2004– 11). 33 The only work on the neglected Mediterranean Agreements is still Cedric J. Lowe, Salisbury and the Mediterranean, 1886–1896 (London, 1965). 34 Bismarck to Reuß, 16 December 1887, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes Berlin, R 10877.

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However, if either Germany or Russia were to launch an aggressive attack on a third party, then the terms of the bilateral agreement would not apply. Additionally, in a ‘very secret’ additional part, Bismarck offered German support for Russian interests in Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia and the Straits. This additional part served to divert Russia further south, away from the Balkans and Austria-Hungary. Contemporaries like Friedrich von Holstein and the chancellor’s own son criticized Bismarck’s diplomacy of expedients on a number of counts. Holstein thought the tangle of treaties, especially the Reinsurance Treaty and the Dual Alliance, contradictory. Herbert von Bismarck thought it a senseless measure against Russian pressure. In case of war, he concluded, it would hold back Russia by six weeks at most. Historians, too, have reflected on the intrinsic contradictions within the entanglements. Not only were the Dual Alliance and the Reinsurance Treaty contradictory, but also the encouragement of Russian expansion in the seemed at odds with the Mediterranean Agreement between Great Britain, Italy and Austria-Hungary, safeguarding the status quo. Furthermore, all these measures reflected mere expedients, offered no long-term solutions and promoted even more tensions within the state system. Bismarck, it is often said, appeared like the sorcerer’s apprentice, creating difficulties rather than solutions.35 However, this critique overlooks Bismarck’s dialectic understanding of foreign policy and his view of international relations in general. Though the German chancellor promoted contrary policies, these were meant to balance themselves and keep Germany as the arbiter. Through contradictory agreements Bismarck aimed at preventing the casus foederis and the casus belli altogether. Therefore, although the stipulations of the Reinsurance Treaty seem to violate Germany’s commitment to the Dual Alliance, it nevertheless served the purpose of keeping an overall peace. While Bismarck pushed Russia towards the Straits, the Mediterranean agreement, together with the Triple and Dual Alliance, kept Russia in check. Germany left both sides – Austria as well as the other powers – uncertain and thus prevented international relations from deteriorating. Bismarck understood international relations as being in perpetual flux. He had learned, moreover, that absolute security was neither possible nor worth striving for. It would only end in the so-called security dilemma, which means that absolute security of one power leads to an absolute insecurity of all the others, and therefore of the whole system. Though Bismarck had frequently used political and economic pressure, and even threats of war, his policy always aimed at security and stability. In the end, however, his system of entangling alliances and restraints appeared increasingly artificial and fragile. Bismarck only recognized antagonistic relationships among the powers and missed opportunities to create peaceful cooperation through economic ties, for example.36 He knew perfectly well that the Reinsurance Treaty would only win him time. What he counted on was his experience that everything in diplomacy – even the next crisis – could offer new power constellations to exploit. For this, however, it was necessary that, in case of emergency, Berlin remained prepared to abandon Austria- Hungary: Bismarck’s successors not only lacked his experience and mastery, but also his willingness to drop Vienna.

35 Lothar Gall, Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, 2 vols (London, 1986). 36 Studies of alternative foreign policy options based on economic cooperation are still rare. See Cornelius Torp, Die Herausforderung der Globalisierung. Wirtschaft und Politik in Deutschland 1860–1914 (Göttingen, 2005); Andreas Rose, ‘Otto von Bismarck und das (außen)politische Mittel der Handels- und Schutzzollpolitik’, in Michael Epkenhans and Ulrich von Hehl (eds),Otto von Bismarck und die Wirtschaft (Paderborn, 2013), pp. 77–96.

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The Foreign Policy of Wilhelmine Germany: The ‘New Course’

When Wilhelm II finally ‘dropped Germany’s pilot’ in March 1890,37 it was undoubtedly a major caesura; not only for the Kaiserreich, but for European international relations in general. What seems in hindsight like a fatal decision was approved of with relief throughout Germany.38 For too long the Iron Chancellor had fostered domestic tensions and hampered social integration. But even in foreign affairs his approaches seemed too sophisticated for his successors and rather dated for a young German nation overflowing with energy. The juvenile and popular Kaiser, on the contrary, appeared to represent far better a new age marked by modern technology, economic upheaval and imperial ambitions. Wilhelm II pledged glorious times, and his subjects – especially from the middle class – were only too keen to take him at his word. The historians Friedrich Meinecke, Max Lenz, Hans Delbrück and Heinrich von Treitschke all recognized imperial competition as a ‘natural law’ among the great powers. The sociologist Max Weber thought the founding of the Reich merely a ‘youthful escapade’ if it did not lead to world power status.39 However, these quotations, repeatedly cited as proof of German aggression, represented a simple adaptation of what was common among all great powers, rather than a dangerous Sonderweg. In France, Jules Ferry and Eugene Étienne spoke of a mission civilisatrice and assumed only too naturally a dominant role for the Grande Nation. People like Paul Déroulède and Maurice Barres demanded an active nationalism to the detriment of Germany and a new French hegemony over Europe.40 In Russia, an aggressive pan-Slavism won the day; Italy dreamt of altera sponda and its own African Empire; and the United States claimed the whole western hemisphere as its sphere of influence. Even in Great Britain, already by far the largest empire the world had ever seen, people were caught up in the belief that only a ‘Greater Britain for the British Race’ could save them from becoming a ‘dying nation’, as Lord Salisbury told an audience in May 1898.41 Of all the great powers, only Austria- Hungary thought more about its golden past than a promising future.42 This widespread imperial ideology, or Weltreichslehre, was generally marked by a strong belief in Social Darwinism. It expected that the twentieth century would witness a process of natural selection between ‘dying’ and ‘living’ nations, bolstered by economic, scientific, technological and military progress.43 With regard to foreign affairs, this imperial Zeitgeist, which had in the 1870s and 1880s originally served as a safety valve for international politics, became a risky scramble for a dwindling number of territories. At first it only encouraged diplomatic risk-taking on the periphery. Eventually, however, it led to repercussions for European great power relations, as the crisis over Fashoda (1898), the South African War (1899–1902), the Venezuela Crisis (1902–1903) and the disputes over the Baghdad Railway (1903 onwards) indicate. As if diplomatic tensions were not hard enough to resolve, especially against the background of an expanding media and a public sphere highly interested in international issues, adventures abroad began to further diminish diplomatic options for

37 This phrase is borrowed from the well-known Punch cartoon, first published 29 March 1890. 38 See, for example, the valuable depictions by the Baroness Spitzemberg in March 1890: Rudolf Vierhaus (ed.), Das Tagebuch der Baronin Spitzemberg, 3rd edn (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 270–76. 39 Cited in Rose, Außenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs, pp. 14–15, 39. 40 Martin Mayer, ‘Drei Konzeptionen von Frankreichs Rolle in der Welt im neuen Jahrhundert’, in Sönke Neitzel (ed.), 1900: Zukunftsvisionen der Großmächte (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 99–126. 41 Salisbury at the Royal Albert Hall, 20 May 1898, reported in the Daily Mail, 21 May 1898, p. 5. 42 For the great powers and their expectations, see Neitzel (ed.), 1900: Zukunftsvisionen. 43 See Sönke Neitzel, Weltmacht oder Untergang. Die Weltreichslehre im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Paderborn, 2000).

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mediation.44 While orthodox interpretations have long portrayed Weltpolitik as a series of ‘wanton provocations’ emanating from Berlin, recent studies have rather sought to explain German diplomatic behaviour as part of a general tendency in the age of imperialism.45 When the Prussian general Count Leo von Caprivi took over as chancellor from Bismarck, he instantly felt that he could not manage the European state system as his predecessor had done. Counselled by Friedrich von Holstein and other leading diplomatic figures, Caprivi decided on a ‘new course’. As a result, Germany abstained from renewing the Reinsurance Treaty, even though Russia had offered to sacrifice the ‘very secret additions’ concerning the Straits. Bismarck’s diplomacy, however, was generally considered too complex and even duplicitous. His successors thought the Reinsurance Treaty contrary to the Dual Alliance and favoured a more logical alignment, especially as they were concerned about becoming entangled in the eastern question. Instead, Holstein pleaded for a closer relationship with Great Britain, even at the risk of a Franco-Russian counter agreement. In the summer of 1890, London and Berlin did agree on a territorial deal, exchanging for , but this did not lead to Germany’s desired realignment with the British Empire. Holstein had completely misread the agreement as a prelude to a firmer continental commitment of England to the Triple Alliance.46 While the Wilhelmstrasse hoped for a further easing of her geopolitical dangers, Lord Salisbury had never intended anything more than the resolution of some specific colonial problems. In fact, Berlin’s turning away from Russia diminished Germany’s attraction as a partner to London, especially as it had become clear that the ‘new course’ would lead to a greater dependence on Austria-Hungary. Salisbury was quick to realize that the Reich’s greater commitment to the Dual Alliance meant that German interests would be compelled to balance not only French but also Russian power, and thus to take over England’s traditional role in safeguarding European stability. London’s adherence to the Mediterranean Agreement no longer seemed necessary as a result, and Britain henceforth drew back from the near-eastern question, choosing instead to concentrate on colonial and imperial matters.47 Meanwhile, Caprivi tried to use Germany’s commercial power as a means of conducting foreign policy. While he succeeded in concluding free-trade treaties with Austria, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Serbia and Romania, this only damaged the rapprochement with London since intensified commercial activity also led to a greater rivalry with British interests.48 In the Near East, for instance, British and German interests clashed over the Anatolian railway. In Egypt, Berlin did everything to make life difficult for London, only to prove the value of a bilateral agreement; and even in Siam, Berlin tried to benefit from Anglo-French rivalries. Thus a general asymmetry of interests between the British Empire and the central European Kaiserreich came to the fore. When, in the meantime, Russia responded to the ending of the Reinsurance Treaty with an alignment with Paris (1891–94), Berlin’s old cauchemar des coalitions was realized. In the face of a Franco-Russian military and political alliance, together with the failure of an Anglo-German rapprochement, German

44 Kießling, Gegen den ‘großen Krieg’?; Dominik Geppert, Pressekriege. Öffentlichkeit und Diplomatie in den deutsch-britischen Beziehungen 1896–1912 (Munich, 2007), pp. 387–420. 45 Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power, revised 2nd edn (London, 2009), p. 183. See also Canis, Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik; Neitzel, Kriegsausbruch; Schroeder, ‘International Politics’, especially pp. 190–200. This broadened focus also characterizes and contributes to the enormous success of Clark’s Sleepwalkers. 46 Canis, Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik, pp. 53–70. 47 Keith Wilson, ‘Constantinople or Cairo: Lord Salisbury and the Partition of the Ottoman Empire 1886–1887’, in idem (ed.), Imperialism and Nationalism in the Middle East: The Anglo-Egyptian Experience 1882–1982 (London, 1983), pp. 26–55. 48 Anon., ‘England and Germany’, in the Saturday Review, 11 September 1897, pp. 278–9.

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diplomats sought to return to Russian friendship. However, strengthened by the Entente with France, Tsar Alexander III demanded Germany’s outright subordination, and the best the Wilhelmstrasse could reach was a bilateral trade agreement. By the mid-1890s, therefore, German diplomats were left with an unholy mess.49 The only remaining option appeared to be to safeguard Berlin’s vital security needs through military means. German armament expenditure doubled between 1886 and 1893, and Caprivi thought a war against Paris or St Petersburg (or both) would be inevitable, sooner or later. It was at this time that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, , began to develop his famous but dangerously wrongheaded strategy for a simultaneous war on two fronts.50 Towards the end of the nineteenth century German diplomacy appeared to follow a rather erratic course between east and west. During the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) Berlin again tried to approach Russia, but without success. Indeed it resulted in even closer ties between Paris and St Petersburg and a further estrangement from Britain. There is no doubt that in these years Wilhelmine diplomacy was ‘clumsier than others’, as Bernhard von Bülow himself admitted in 1917.51 The primary aim was to acquire international acceptance and avoid exclusion, but it often had the contrary effect. Wilhelm’s famous telegram of 3 January 1896, congratulating the President of the Transvaal, Paul Kruger, on arresting the British irregulars led by Leander Starr Jameson, is a case in point. Instead of gaining international credit, the Kaiser triggered an Anglo-German crisis which has long been seen as the starting point of an Anglo-German antagonism which persisted right up to 1914.52 Needless to say the telegram appeared gratuitous and offensive to Queen Victoria, the British government and the enraged British public. However, the orthodox view of this episode has too readily accepted that British imperial rights and privileges constituted a natural order, in the light of which German objections appeared to be wanton provocations. Recent historical studies have arrived at a more balanced view.53 From this vantage point, the German action still appears as a bungled piece of diplomacy, but no more and no less. Earlier that year there had been tensions between London and Berlin over the building of a German-financed railway linking the landlocked Transvaal with Delagoa Bay in Portuguese Mozambique. Britain had threatened a fait accompli by annexing Delagoa Bay and the British Ambassador, Edward Malet, had even spoken of war if Germany refused to back down. When Jameson tried his raid on the Transvaal, Wilhelm recognized a chance for a tit-for-tat response to British arrogance. After a damaging press war on both sides of the Channel, Germany ultimately shied away from a confrontation with Britain over southern Africa. The real importance of the affair was twofold: on the one hand, the Kaiser’s ham-fisted behaviour had triggered an enormous public outrage and thus revealed the press and the public to be a significant political actor;54 on the other hand it had become clear to everyone, especially in Germany itself, that the Reich lacked the means to enforce its imperial aspirations.55 Berlin was offered another chance to improve relations with Britain in 1898 when the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, suggested alliance talks. However, it is still open

49 Rainer Lahme, Von der Gleichgewichtspolitik des ehrlichen Maklers zur Allianzstrategie des Neuen Kurses (Münster, 1988), p. 499. 50 Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1871–1918 (= Enzyklopädie Deutscher Geschichte, vol. 2), 3rd rev. edn (Munich, 2008), p. 26. 51 Cited in Canis, Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik, p. 382. 52 Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980), pp. 205–22. 53 Clark, Wilhelm II, pp. 181–3. 54 Geppert, Pressekriege, pp. 91–3. 55 Schroeder, ‘International Politics’, p. 196.

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to debate how seriously these suggestions were meant.56 For Britain an alliance might have been attractive because of the Anglo-French crisis over Fashoda, Anglo-Russian tension in the Far and Middle East, and rising tensions in South African with the Boers. The fact that the German government had remained neutral in the Boer War, even though its public was agitated about British ‘methods of barbarism’, could only have improved such a prospect. Even so, the alliance talks which continued until 1901 came to nothing. The main reason for this is that Chamberlain was more or less on his own with his idea of an Anglo-German defensive alliance, while Berlin felt betrayed by Lord Salisbury who had at first appeared to offer a bargain over the remaining Portuguese colonies in Africa, only to promise Lisbon British support soon afterwards.57

The Policy of the ‘Free Hand’ and the Exclusion of Germany

From all these rather disappointing experiences the new Foreign Secretary, Bernhard von Bülow, together with the Secretary of State for the Navy, Alfred von Tirpitz, concluded that Germany had little option but to take care of its own security. It was a widely held belief in the 1890s that only the possession of a powerful maritime force could confirm great power status. Therefore it seemed self-evident that the Kaiserreich needed its own high seas battle fleet to enforce its imperial aspirations and foster its diplomatic acceptance. However, both Bülow’s policy of the ‘free hand’ – which eschewed international alignments and sought to cash in on others’ disputes – and Tirpitz’s plan to build a naval fleet which would teach Britain not to treat Germany as a quantité négligéable, were based on major fallacies. While it might seem legitimate for a growing economic and trading power to secure itself against the supremacy of the Royal Navy, and even logical to improve one’s own attraction as a naval power and potential ally, in practice it only increased the existing mistrust among the other powers towards the German parvenu. The fact that Germany was already regarded as the greatest military power on the continent increased this mistrust still further. Second, the whole plan was based on the assumption that Britain would be unable to reach any meaningful agreement with her traditional rivals, France and Russia. A clandestine rearmament in the shadow of these rivalries, as Tirpitz had intended, soon proved to be unrealistic. Third, it proved fatal to make use of a massive naval propaganda and thereby feed public expectations, which then increasingly demanded diplomatic successes to justify the rising expenditure. In fact, Germany had neither the naval tradition nor the geography to become a great maritime power. It was unable to meet production targets in the given timeframes, let alone build battleships of sufficient quality.58 Thus Tirpitz’s ‘risk theory’ was a failure from the outset, and the propaganda of the Imperial Naval Office failed to make its mark internationally too. The main reason for this was the highly linked nature of the transnational public sphere. It was simply not possible any more to shield the English from the German public. While Berlin tried to win the German public’s support for increasing naval expenditure through an anti-English propaganda campaign, this proved detrimental to improving Anglo-German

56 While older research was convinced that Germany had missed a great opportunity, today’s historians are more doubtful. See Friedrich Meinecke, Geschichte des deutsch-englischen Bündnisproblems, 1890–1901 (Munich 1927, republished Darmstadt, 1972); Canis, Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik, pp. 356–95. 57 Kennedy, Anglo-German Antagonism, p. 235. 58 Andreas Rose, ‘“The Writers, Not the Sailors” – Großbritannien, die Hochseeflotte und die “Revolution der Staatenwelt”’, in Heidenreich and Neitzel (eds), Kaiserreich, pp. 221–40.

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relations and undermined any assurances given to the British public, who appeared more and more concerned by the ‘German peril’. This mood was in turn exploited by English scaremongers.59 The established pattern of interpretation for Germany’s international relations inthe decade prior to the outbreak of the First World War has long been as follows: by the end of the 1890s, Germany had embarked on the construction of a battle fleet, which left Great Britain with little choice but to react to this ‘unique German threat’ on her own doorstep by reorganizing the Royal Navy and starting a hitherto unprecedented programme of ship- building.60 By launching ‘all-big-gun-ships’ of the -type, Britain followed the assumption of the American naval theorist, Alfred T. Mahan, according to which only capital ships counted in securing the British Isles and the vital ‘command of the sea’. Furthermore, the supposed German naval threat is said to have conveyed to London’s political and diplomatic elites the need to abandon its policy of ‘splendid isolation’ altogether.61 In other words, as one eminent political historian observed: ‘It was without doubt the construction of the German battle fleet’ which forced Britain’s hand to respond and ‘contributed significantly to the revolution of the state system before 1914’.62 In recent years, however, naval as well as political historians have challenged this commonly held notion of German action and inevitable British response.63 Instead of focusing mainly on Germany – truly an unspoken assumption among many historians – and simply extrapolating Great Britain’s naval policy from German aims,64 they have given fresh prominence to the complex British context of financial pressures, naval thought, technological innovations and grand strategy.65 Though it is well known that ‘Admiral von Tirpitz did indeed think of challenging the Royal Navy’,66 it has become clear that Germany’s High Seas Battle Fleet was a political rather than military weapon. Therefore it is still open to doubt whether it represented such a revolutionary challenge to the state system as has hitherto been accepted. Recent research has confirmed in more than one way Paul W. Schroeder’s dictum that it is ‘one thing to show that Germany blundered and had dangerous aims; quite another to prove that these really caused the outcome, or that, had Germany not made them, the overall outcome would have been drastically changed’.67

59 Geppert, Pressekriege, pp. 233–55; Rose, Empire und Kontinent, pp. 69–101. 60 Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions (London, 1973). 61 Fritz Fischer, ‘Die Außenpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland und der Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in Gregor Schöllgen (ed.), Flucht in den Krieg. Die Außenpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland (Darmstadt, 1991), pp. 25–67, at 26. 62 Klaus Hildebrand, ‘Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk. Akteure und System der europäischen Staatenwelt vor 1914’, in Hans Ehlert et al. (eds), Der Schlieffenplan. Analyse und Dokumente (Paderborn, 2006), p. 28. 63 See, for example, Ruddock Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford, 1973); Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (Boston, 1989); Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr, ‘The Origins of the Dreadnought Revolution: A Historiographical Essay’, International History Review, 13 (1991), pp. 246–72, at 263. 64 A typical example of a study that extrapolates Britain’s naval policy from German sources is Magnus Brechtken, Scharnierzeit 1895–1907. Persönlichkeitsnetze und internationale Politik in den deutsch- britisch-amerikanischen Beziehungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Mainz, 2006), especially p. 58. 65 See Schmidt, Frankreichs Aussenpolitik; McMeekin, Russian Origins; Clark, Sleepwalkers; Kronenbitter, ‘Krieg im Frieden’; Rose, Empire und Kontinent; Canis, Weg in den Abgrund. 66 Zara Steiner and Keith Neilson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2003), p. 53. 67 Schroeder, ‘International Politics’, p. 196.

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As the works of Konrad Canis have shown, the Wilhelmstrasse suffered from a severe lack of alternatives and this unfavourable position was not entirely self-imposed.68 After Russia had offered only a subordinate role, and Great Britain’s uninterested response, the German leadership could see only two ways to escape international exclusion: either to attempt to solve the Empire’s international problems through a policy of force, or to follow a course of accommodation and détente. In practice, both were followed intermittently, and it was the interplay between them which characterized German foreign policy before 1914. At first Germany tried the policy of accommodation. In 1902–1903 the German government tried another rapprochement towards England by cooperating during the Venezuela Crisis and negotiations on the Baghdad railway. Although Arthur Balfour and Lord Lansdowne praised Germany’s conciliatory behaviour, a widespread anti-German press campaign forced Whitehall to abstain from any deeper cooperation.69 By the summer of 1904, when England and France had set aside their colonial rivalry with the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale, Germany’s international position was substantially worse than it had been when Bismarck left office. Though neither the Entente Cordiale nor the subsequent Anglo-Russian Entente (1907) were originally directed against Germany, Berlin felt itself increasingly isolated. Two options were identified to extricate Germany from this unhappy state of affairs: either Berlin could try to approach Russia and thus weaken the alliance between St Petersburg and Paris; or it could exploit a favourable moment to weaken the new Anglo-French Entente. As was so often the case, the German leadership tried to do both, but clumsily and ultimately without success. When war broke out in early 1904 between Russia and Japan, Berlin – and especially the Kaiser – saw a chance to make a diplomatic new beginning. In fact Wilhelm tried in person to win Russia and, if possible, France for a continental alliance when he met the Tsar at Björkö on 24 July 1905. However, Wilhelm’s hopes were to be dashed, for neither his own Chancellor Bülow nor the Russian government agreed to accept the Björkö commitment. The Russian Foreign Minister, Count Lambsdorff, thought the agreement contradictory to the coalition with France, while Bülow thought it was useless because it was limited to European affairs.70 The policy of force was pursued when France tried to take control of Morocco in January 1905. The German Foreign Office had long been watching French activities in the North African state and was determined not to allow any expansion without compensation. Since an international agreement of 1881 had recognized Morocco as an area of multilateral interests, the German viewpoint not only had some legitimacy but also international law on its side. The ultimate motive, however, was to test the strength of the Entente. Though unconvinced by the strategy of the Wilhelmstrasse, the Kaiser agreed to make a demonstrative visit to Tangier. Britain and France were outraged by this interference in their horse-trading. While they vociferously claimed the right to intervene when Germany cooperated with the still sovereign Ottoman Empire to build the Baghdad railway, London and Paris were quick to condemn German intervention in Morocco as mischief-making, even though it was based on an international treaty. For Paul W. Schroeder this is a typical case of double standards from the age of imperialism, when some were allowed to ‘[steal] horses to great applause while others were hanged for looking over the fence’.71

68 Canis, Bismarcks Außenpolitik; idem, Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik; idem, Weg in den Abgrund. 69 Lansdowne to Lascelles, February 1903, The National Archives, FO 800/129. 70 Canis, Weg in den Abgrund, pp. 147–68. 71 Paul W. Schroeder, ‘Stealing Horses to Great Applause: Austria-Hungary’s Decision in 1914 in Systemic Perspective’, in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds),An Improbable War: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture Before 1914 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 17–42.

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At first it seemed as if Bülow might succeed when his request for an international conference was granted, but when the conference took place in January 1906 at Algeciras, Germany was utterly isolated: only Austria-Hungary supported the German position. Instead of weakening the Entente, Germany had managed to make it even more cordiale, especially when the new Liberal government in Britain sanctioned military staff talks in the event of war between France and Germany. Bülow’s policy of a ‘free hand’ had led to a complete mess. Consequently, Germany became increasingly dependent upon Austria- Hungary. Although Bismarck’s successors had tried to abstain from the eastern question, Germany’s growing isolation left Berlin with little choice but to back up Austrian diplomacy in the Balkans. The German response included increasing its armaments and tightening its alliance with Vienna. After the Anglo-Russian Entrevue at Reval in June 1908, it became quite clear to Bülow that the root causes of the political dangers facing Germany could not be eliminated without giving up on Germany’s imperial ambitions. It had to be conveyed to the other powers that, while Germany ‘does not intent to have her fingers in every pie’, it did seek to acquire an equal role as a great power and would not flinch from fighting for its aims and existence as a great power.72 By intensifying the naval race with Britain he hoped to renew conversations with London and to achieve a neutrality agreement at the very least, but Whitehall refused. This unyielding attitude has long been interpreted as classic proof of British ‘balance of power’ politics. In fact, however, the ‘German peril’ and the invasion panic of 1909 was a classic example of public outrage and press warfare, which had more to do with structures within British political, military and public life.73 Among naval experts the alleged German danger was taken much less seriously. When Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in autumn 1908, Berlin not only saw an opportunity to strengthen its alliance with Vienna, but also the duty to help. After all, the Austrian Foreign Secretary, Count Aehrenthal, had sought and found Russian approval at Ischl, and the right to annex the provinces derived from the Berlin Treaty in 1878. In the end, however, though the central powers succeeded with their fait accompli, it remained a pyrrhic victory. Again, Berlin and Vienna had failed to divide the Entente powers. And, to make matters worse, Russia now began a dramatic reinforcement ofits defences along its western borders.74 Additionally, the annexation crisis revealed a serious change within the state system: when Britain and Russia had agreed on their different spheres of interest in Persia, neither Germany nor continental relations were mentioned at all. Now it seemed clear that the realignments were directed against Germany and would have systemic repercussions. Indeed, the Anglo-Russian Entente finally meant the end of the advantageous ‘Crimean War Constellation’. While Anglo-Russian tensions on the periphery had made the foundation of the Kaiserreich possible, they had also served as a safety valve for great power relations in general. When London tried to ease Russian pressure on Persia and India by encouraging Russian interests in south-eastern Europe, British imperial interests benefited to the detriment of the European state system. As a consequence of the 1907 Entente, Russia’s expansionist energies now stood in direct confrontation with the central powers. If this was not enough, the Bosnian annexation crisis created further international tensions. Although London officially tried to

72 Bülow to Schlözer, 25 June 1908, cited in Johannes Lepsius et al. (eds), Die große Politik der Europäischen Kabinette 1871–1914. Sammlung der diplomatischen Akten des Auswärtigen ,Amtes vol. 25/2 (Berlin 1927), No. 8820, pp. 474–9. 73 Rose, ‘The Writers, Not the Sailors’. 74 David Herman, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, 1996), pp. 113–46.

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calm Russian aggression, in private Sir Edward Grey promised his loyalty to the Russian Foreign Minister, Alexander Isvolsky, and offered his support for future Russian aspirations in the Straits.75 These international tensions in the decade before 1914 reveal that, for all its enormous potential, Germany had come too late to the scramble for empire. Moreover, it lacked a sufficiently secure position within the European state system and did not possessthe fundamental geopolitical prerequisites for Weltpolitik: the course of international history has shown that peripheral countries like the United States, Great Britain and Russia are better suited for hegemony and empire, whereas central states like Germany and Austria tend to be handicapped by rivalries at their own frontiers.76 German ambitions undoubtedly posed a striking challenge to great power relations, but this was not on account of recklessness or aggression, but rather because, in its attempt to compete with Britain, the United States and Russia, Germany was bound to fail. In view of its enormous economic, technological, scientific, demographic and military potential, it would have been surprising hadthe Kaiserreich not aspired to world power status. Yet in contrast to its rivals, Germany was not only handicapped geopolitically, but also financially and politically. It was quite evident that the Empire’s central position was anything but a suitable basis for projecting its power. When German diplomats began looking rather desperately for a ‘new course’ and new partners in the 1890s and early 1900s, it became obvious that the Reich was caught in a permanent dilemma between activity abroad and defence at home. Not only did Germany lack international trust, but more importantly it lacked bargaining power: Berlin simply had nothing to offer. The English journal The Spectator recognized this when it spoke of the ‘horror to be a German’, facing the constant threat of invasion by Russian and French armies.77 As early as December 1895, Sir Edward Grey had arrived at the conclusion that Germany would be too handicapped to help the United Kingdom against Russia or France.78 Furthermore, the federally structured German Empire was constrained financially: whereas all the other powers could raise income taxes to pay for further armaments, Germany was utterly dependent on the contribution of her federal states. For all its economic and demographic potential, and its allegedly militaristic outlook, the Kaiserreich could not raise the funds necessary to guarantee its own security, and constantly felt in danger of encirclement.79 Imperialism had initially served as a safety valve during the age of Bismarck because it represented less a struggle for territory and positions of power, and more a hunt for prizes to dissipate excess energy. By the early 1900s, however, it had become increasingly destructive for the whole state system. Combined with other late nineteenth-century trends in economics, science and technology, the media, and Social Darwinist beliefs virulent among all powers great or small, imperialism led to a militarization of diplomacy and had serious repercussions for continental relations.80 That alliance and ententes both no longer

75 Rose, Empire und Kontinent, pp. 522–31. 76 Herfried Münkler, Imperien. Die Logik der Weltherrschaft – vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten, 2nd edn (Berlin, 2005), pp. 41–50. 77 The Spectator, 18 May 1901. 78 Grey to Buxton, 31 December 1895, cited in H.C. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists: The Idea and Politics of a Post Gladstonian Elite (Oxford, 1973), p. 202. 79 Niall Ferguson, ‘Public Finance and National Security: The Domestic Origins of the First World War Revisited’, Past and Present, 142 (1994), pp. 141–68, at 146; Stig Förster, Der doppelte Militarismus. Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik zwischen Status-quo-Sicherung und Aggression 1890–1913 (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 164, 205. 80 David Stevenson, ‘Militarization and Diplomacy in Europe Before 1914’, International Security, 22 (1997), pp. 125–61.

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functioned ‘as tools for managing the system’ but ‘as weapons for power’81 can also be shown in the Second Moroccan Crisis, which was triggered not by Germany but by the French statesman, Théophile Delcassé, who made no secret of his ambition to use the Entente with England and the alliance with Russia to ‘great political effect’.82 Alfred von Kiderlen- Wächter, the Reich’s new Foreign Secretary, picked up the gauntlet. However, instead of demonstrating German strength, as its public fervently hoped, the Entente powers again prevailed.83 The Agadir crisis of 1911 was followed by a phase of international détente. The new chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, adopted the slogan Weltpolitik und kein Krieg84 for his international course, indicating that Germany hoped to place more emphasis on economic influence than on military and diplomatic pressure, on cooperation rather than confrontation.

‘Weltpolitik and No War’?

The Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908–1909, as well as the two Moroccan crises in 1905–1906 and 1911, showed the growing danger of a militarization of diplomacy and of a bipolar ‘bloc’ confrontation between the Triple Entente and the central powers. However, the sequence of pre-war crises, as recent research has shown, was repeatedly interrupted by efforts to relax tension at transnational, diplomatic and dynastic levels. In fact, quite a few contemporaries spoke at the end of 1911 of a new ‘era of détente’.85 The crisis over Agadir thus not only led to rearmament and a status of heightened alert, but also to an intensified search for ways to avoid war. Holger Afflerbach, for instance, has gone so far as to interpret the Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy as an ‘insurance company’ for peace. For Afflerbach, the outbreak of war in August 1914 seemed a ‘rather unlikely result’.86 Recent research has indeed qualified older orthodoxies of a direct link between such episodes and the July Crisis. The majority of historians now view the outbreak of war in 1914 as neither ‘unlikely’ nor ‘inevitable’, but still a very possible result of pre-war rivalries. With these qualifications, the role of the Kaiserreich has been reassessed. It has been pointed out that Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had sought a rapprochement towards France and a new agreement on the Baghdad railway issue in 1909. Moreover, when new conflicts arose in the Balkans in 1912, the Wilhelmstrasse worked successfully with Whitehall to restrain their partners, Austria-Hungary and Russia. For a short period of time it seemed as if German foreign policy – and international relations in general – could make a fresh start. Although all efforts at détente ultimately failed, their study has undoubtedly contributed to our understanding of pre-war international relations. The policy of détente failed for

81 Paul W. Schroeder, ‘Alliances 1815–1945: Weapons of Power and Tools of Management’, in idem, Systems, Stability and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe (New York, 2004), pp. 195–222. 82 Cited in Konrad Canis, ‘Internationale Stellung und Aussenpolitik Deutschlands vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Heidenreich and Neitzel (eds), Kaiserreich, pp. 178–87, at 183. 83 Canis, Weg in den Abgrund, pp. 430–56. 84 The slogan ‘world policy without war’ was borrowed from the title of a book by Hans Plehn, Deutsche Weltpolitik und kein Krieg (Berlin, 1913). 85 Kießling, Gegen den ‘großen Krieg’? 86 Holger Afflerbach, ‘The Topos of Improbable War in Europe Before 1914’, in Afflerbach and Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War, pp. 162–83.

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many different reasons. Among them was the tension between the emerging age ofthe mass media and the tradition of secret diplomacy. While political efforts to relax tension went mainly through the means of secret diplomatic channels, their possible results were discussed in public, and frequently conflicted with popular expectations. The public did not have sufficient patience for a slow and gradual process of confidence-building measures. Against the background of Social Darwinism and a bellicose press, signs of rapprochement were all too quickly interpreted as concessions, compromise, defeat or humiliation. Power politics and the media followed different rules of engagement and different systems of interpretation.87 Efforts at détente also failed on account of the realities of international relations and great power politics: they could change neither Germany’s geopolitical constraints, nor the dominant values of the age of imperialism. While tension and relaxation may be viewed as two sides of the same coin when it comes to international relations, the constant interplay between the two should not be used to obscure the overall trend. Before 1914 this points more to conflict than cooperation. The constellations hardened, albeit also modified. The Austro-German Dual Alliance and the Franco-Russian Entente stabilized,88 as increasing doubts surrounded the respective third partners, Italy and Great Britain. While Italy did not return to the Triple Alliance, London ultimately remained faithful to the Entente. Though London and Berlin cooperated during the Balkan Wars for the benefit of international peace and stability, this did not lead to a general realignment. This was already evident in the next crisis, the so called ‘Liman-von Sanders-Affair’, when Britain again sided with France and Russia to protest successfully against an Ottoman request for German help to reform the Turkish army. The British saw nothing hypocritical in their own mission to help the Turkish navy, or that a French general was dispatched from Paris to rebuild the Turkish police.89 When London thought it necessary to begin negotiating a maritime convention with Russia in early 1914, which would have closed an encircling ring around Germany, the Wilhelmstrasse reacted with shock and then resignation.90 Ultimately the three-year period between 1911 and 1914 was too short to improve the already damaged trust between the European powers, let alone to reform the traditional mechanisms of international relations. The brief interlude of détente could not prevent the general impression that great power politics were increasingly becoming militarized, and that the two armed camps would rather prepare for a coming struggle than seek ways of keeping the peace. With regard to Germany, recent studies have revealed that the Kaiserreich was anything but prepared for a bid for world power. Germany had failed in every diplomatic crisis of the later Wilhelmine era, and European hegemony seemed out of reach. The Empire already had 1.3 million soldiers fewer than France and Russia combined;91 by February 1914 it had stopped all her armament programmes in order to focus on developing an air force; and when it entered the war in August 1914, the stocks of munitions were only sufficient

87 Geppert, Pressekriege, pp. 387–420, especially 419. 88 Jürgen Angelow, Kalkül und Prestige. Der Zweibund am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Cologne, 2000). 89 Martin Kröger, ‘Letzter Konflikt vor der Katastrophe. Die Liman-von-Sanders-Krise 1913/14’, in Jost Dülffer (ed.), Vermiedene Kriege. Deeskalation von Konflikten der Größmächte zwischen Krimkrieg udn Erstem Weltkrieg (1856–1914) (Munich, 1997), pp. 657–72. 90 Stephen Schroeder, Die englisch-russische Marinekonvention. Das Deutsche Reich und die Flottenverhandlungen der Tripelentente am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs (Göttingen, 2006). 91 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, vol. 1: Die militärischen Operationen zu Lande (Berlin, 1925), p. 22; Förster, Der doppelte Militarismus, pp. 164, 205.

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to last a few months.92 Does this look like a long-planned bid for world power? In fact, Berlin’s behaviour in the July Crisis appears to have been driven by the perception of being increasingly penned in; by not being accepted as an equal in the great power game; and by the expectation that this was only going to become worse, as Russian military reforms took hold and Austria-Hungary weakened further. Of course, Berlin’s clumsy tactics and methods were often counterproductive. Together with the Kaiserreich’s geographic and political handicaps, these account for many of Germany’s failures in the pre-war period. However, recent studies suggest that, in view of the actions of the other great powers, Germany’s failings may have been exaggerated. The major difference between Germany and France, Russia or Great Britain was that it was neither capable nor permitted to join in the game of world power. In fact, it seems that no improvement in tactics or methods would have produced acceptance as an equal partner within the imperial game, and that only the old Prussian role as a junior partner of Russia, France or Great Britain remained open. Naturally this was anathema to the Kaiserreich and its people. Recent studies have also qualified Germany’s role during the July Crisis. After Berlin became aware of the Anglo-Russian naval talks in the spring of 1914, the government was more determined than ever to break what it saw as an encircling ring. When, after the assassination in Sarajevo, the Austrian diplomat Count Hoyos arrived in Berlin to ask for assistance, it seemed vital not only to support Germany’s only remaining ally, but also to use the opportunity for a localized war in the Balkans. The Wilhelmstrasse feared that in another two years Russia would be invincible. Of course, the ‘enigmatic’ Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was aware that a war against Serbia could lead ‘to a world war’.93 At the same time, however, it also seemed possible that a ‘fast fait accompli’ against Belgrade – regarded by everyone except Russia as a hotbed of terrorism – might work without escalating into a greater conflict.94 Recent studies again have tried to bring this famous strategy of ‘calculated risk’ in line with the policy of the other actors. And indeed it can be seen that similar strategies were followed by Vienna, Paris and St Petersburg.95 Meanwhile in London, Sir Edward Grey was half-hearted in his efforts to prevent any escalation: it was not without reason that some cabinet ministers thought they were being manipulated into war by their Foreign Secretary.96 In the final analysis, July 1914 was, for Germany, more about regaining the old Bismarckian position of limited hegemony amongst the continental powers than an aggressive and well-planned bid for world power status.97

Suggestions for Further Reading

Afflerbach, Holger and Stevenson, David (eds).An Improbable War: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture Before 1914 (Oxford, 2007).

92 I would like to thank Siegfried Selzer for this information. He is currently working on a major study of German air armament before and during the First World War. 93 Konrad Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven and London, 1973). 94 Karl Dietrich Erdmann (ed.), Kurt Riezler. Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente(Göttingen, 1972), pp. 185, 183. 95 See Clark, Sleepwalkers. 96 John Viscount Morley, Memorandum on Resignation, August 1914 (London, 1928). 97 Canis, Weg in den Abgrund, p. 686.

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Angelow, Jürgen. Kalkül und Prestige. Der Zweibund am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Cologne, 2000). Bösch, Frank. Öffentliche Geheimnisse. Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880–1914 (Munich, 2009). Brechtken, Magnus. Scharnierzeit 1895–1907. Persönlichkeitsnetze und internationale Politik in den deutsch-britisch-amerikanischen Beziehungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Mainz, 2006). Canis, Konrad. Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik. Deutsche Außenpolitik 1890–1902 (Berlin, 1997). —. Bismarcks Außenpolitik, 1870–1890 (Paderborn, 2004). —. Der Weg in den Abgrund. Deutsche Außenpolitik 1902–1914 (Paderborn, 2011). —. ‘Internationale Stellung und Aussenpolitik Deutschlands vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Bernd Heidenreich and Sönke Neitzel (eds), Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1890–1914 (Paderborn, 2011), pp. 178–87. Clark, Christopher. Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power (London, 2009). —. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012). Dehio, Ludwig. ‘Deutschland und die Epoche der Weltkriege’, Historische Zeitschrift, 173 (1952), pp. 77–94. Dülffer, Jost (ed.) Vermiedene Kriege. Deeskalation von Konflikten der Größmächte zwischen Krimkrieg und Erstem Weltkrieg (1856–1914) (Munich, 1997). — et al. (eds). Deutschland in Europa: Kontinuität und Bruch. Gedenkschrift für Andreas Hillgruber (Berlin, 1990). Ferguson, Niall. ‘Public Finance and National Security: The Domestic Origins of the First World War Revisited’, Past and Present, 142 (1994), pp. 141–68. —. The Pity of War (New York, 1998). Fischer, Fritz. War of Illusions (London, 1973). Förster, Stig. Der doppelte Militarismus. Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik zwischen Status-quo- Sicherung und Aggression 1890–1913 (Stuttgart, 1985). — et al. (eds). Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition (Oxford, 1988). Geppert, Dominik. Pressekriege. Öffentlichkeit und Diplomatie in den deutsch-britischen Beziehungen 1896–1912 (Munich, 2007). Herman, David. The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, 1996). Hildebrand, Klaus. Das vergangene Reich. Deutsche Außenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler, 1871– 1945 (Stuttgart, 1995). Hillgruber, Andreas. Bismarcks Außenpolitik (Freiburg, 1972). —. Otto von Bismarck. Gründer der europäischen Großmacht Deutsches Reich (Göttingen, 1978). Hobson, Rolf. Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power, and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875–1914 (Boston, 2002). Janorschke, Johannes. Bismarck, Europa und die ‘Krieg-in-Sicht’-Krise von 1875 (Paderborn, 2010). Jarausch, Konrad. The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven and London, 1973). Kennedy, Paul. The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980). Kießling, Friedrich. Gegen den ‘großen Krieg’? Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen 1911–1914 (Munich, 2002). Lahme, Rainer. Von der Gleichgewichtspolitik des ehrlichen Maklers zur Allianzstrategie des Neuen Kurses (Münster, 1988). Loth, Wilfried and Osterhammel, Jürgen (eds). Internationale Geschichte. Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten (Munich, 2000).

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Müller, Frank L. Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA and London, 2011). Mulligan, William. The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2010). Neitzel, Sönke. Weltmacht oder Untergang. Die Weltreichslehre im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Paderborn, 2000). Riehl, Axel T.G. Der ‘Tanz um den Äquator’. Bismarcks antienglische Kolonialpolitik und die Erwartung des Thronwechsels in Deutschland 1883 bis 1885 (Berlin, 1993). Rose, Andreas. Zwischen Empire und Kontinent. Britische Außenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2008). —. Deutsche Außenpolitik in der Ära Bismarck (1862–1890) (Darmstadt, 2013). —. Die Außenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs (1890–1918) (Darmstadt, 2013). Rüger, Jan. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, 2006). Schmid, Michael. Der ‘Eiserne Kanzler’ und die Generäle. Deutsche Rüstungspolitik in der Ära Bismarck (1871–1890) (Paderborn, 2003). Schmidt, Rainer. Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). Realpolitik und Revolution. Eine Biographie (Stuttgart, 2004). Schöllgen, Gregor (ed.) Flucht in den Krieg. Die Außenpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland (Darmstadt, 1991). Schroeder, Paul W. ‘International Politics, Peace and Stability, 1815–1914’, in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: Europe 1789–1914 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 158–209. —. ‘Alliances 1815–1945: Weapons of Power and Tools of Management’, in idem, Systems, Stability and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe (New York, 2004), pp. 195–222. Schroeder, Stephen. Die englisch-russische Marinekonvention. Das Deutsche Reich und die Flottenverhandlungen der Tripelentente am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs (Göttingen, 2006). Stone, James. The War Scare of 1875: Bismarck and Europe in the Mid-1870s (Stuttgart, 2010). Urbach, Karina. Bismarck’s Favourite Englishman: Lord Odo Russell’s Mission to Berlin (London and New York, 1999). Wetzel, David. A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871 (Madison, 2003).

366 21 militarism

Benjamin Ziemann

in December 1918, a few weeks after the revolutionary mass movements of sailors, soldiers and workers had brought down the political edifice of the Kaiserreich, the book-length version of Der Untertan was published. its author, heinrich mann, understood his novel as a critical dissection of how the cult of the emperor and the matrix of authoritarian institutions such as family, school, university and the military in wilhelmine germany had damaged the liberal principles of the middle class. The storyline revolves around Diederich Hessling, a young factory owner in the fictitious provincial town of Netzig, situated somewhere in the prussian provinces east of the River elbe. hessling is the proverbial Untertan, a term that is probably best rendered in english as ‘deferential subject’. subordination, the ability not only to accept but even to anticipate orders coming from above, from the superior powers of the government and the military, is the decisive quality of this character type.1 in mann’s novel, hessling’s rise to being a key member of the state-supporting circles in Netzig is inseparably linked to the local Kriegerverein, a term that literally translates as ‘warriors’ association’. These associations gathered veterans of the wars of unification from 1864 to 1871, as well as former conscripts who had served under the system of general conscription. Early on, Hessling identifies the veterans’ association as the key lever to rally all those who ‘have no other programme than the name of his majesty’, the Kaiser.2 his own admission to the association is, however, delayed, as it transpires that he has only served in the army for three months, having been released from duty on the basis of a false medical certificate. (Bribing the medical doctor in charge of the physical inspection during the draft procedure was widely practised by middle-class families.)3 yet after hessling has proven his anti-democratic credentials in a dramatic court case against a leading local liberal, hessling is finally admitted among the veterans on the request of the Provincial Governor, a staunch conservative.4 His plan to field Major Kunze as a ‘national candidate’ for the upcoming Reichstag elections is first disclosed to his associates from the veterans’ association. The association should, as hessling suggests, also serve as the ‘basis of operations’ for

1 heinrich mann, Man of Straw (London, 1988). An annotated and accessible German edition is idem, Der Untertan. Roman (Frankfurt, 1991). On the contemporary reception of the novel, see Wolfgang emmerich, Heinrich Mann: ‘Der Untertan’ (Munich, 1980). I have to acknowledge a very similar use of the novel by Dieter Düding, ‘Die Kriegervereine im wilhelminischen Reich und ihr Beitrag zur Militarisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft’, in Jost Dülffer and Karl Holl (eds), Bereit zum Krieg. Kriegsmentalität im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Göttingen, 1986), pp. 99–121. My conclusions, however, are different. 2 mann, Man of Straw, p. 91. 3 Ute Frevert, ‘Das jakobinische Modell. Allgemeine Wehrpflicht und Nationsbildung in Preußen-Deutschland’, in idem (ed.), Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 17–47, at 41. 4 mann, Man of Straw, pp. 105, 125, 172. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

the campaign. On election day, the members of the veterans’ association march in close formation to the polling booth.5 It would be wrong to pigeon-hole Heinrich Mann’s novel as a mere satire, not least because his younger brother Thomas – at this point still much more conservative-leaning than in his later public statements against the Nazis – used the term in 1920 to do precisely that.6 But the use of satirical plot devices is certainly a crucial element of the text, which was designed by Heinrich Mann, a self-declared left-liberal critic of Wilhelmine politics and society, to render critical elements more visible through exaggeration. Yet some contemporary historians accept the novel as a seemingly realistic description of how it ‘really’ was. Wolfram Wette, for instance, in a textbook on the continuities of German militarism from 1871 to 1945, praises Mann for offering a ‘classical’ account of how the ‘spirit of militarism’ had penetrated ‘large parts of German society’ and had produced a mentality of ‘subordination’ under the military and ‘general acceptance of war’ as an inevitable necessity.7 The novel by Heinrich Mann is thus a crucial example for a more general point about militarism in Imperial Germany. As ‘rational critics’ of the German military had a virtual ‘monopoly’ over the term before 1914, their writings have, as historian Nicholas Stargardt has argued, ‘conditioned the meaning of militarism down to the present’. Their partisan perspective also introduced ‘a certain false naivety into their tracts’, as the critics ‘purported to describe or explain what they wished to condemn wholsesale’.8 But, as Stargardt hastened to add, just because the concept of ‘militarism’ was ‘constructed out of a medley of intellectual traditions and preoccupations’, this ‘does not mean that it did not describe realities’, such as the widespread abuse of conscripts by their superiors or the specific social prestige of reserve officers in civil society.9 The ambiguity and relevance of contemporary terminology that comes to the fore in these remarks is, to be sure, not restricted to the notion of militarism. It is just one of many examples of the ways in which the semantics of historical terminology tend to delineate the boundaries of social and political discourses and to shape debates within these fields. As with any other historical inquiry, research into militarism in Imperial Germany has to take the contemporary semantics into account, while such an interest in the shifting meaning of key signifiers does not mean that the historical phenomenon itself, the signified, had no reality of its own. Methodologically speaking, this tension between conceptual history and social history was at the heart of attempts by historian Reinhart Koselleck to investigate the semantics of key political concepts and their power to articulate political programmes such as liberalism, socialism or (anti-)militarism.10 As the tension between signifier and signified, between semantics and social structure, is a crucial element of any meaningful historical account of German militarism, a brief introduction to the emergence and shifting connotations of the term ‘militarism’ will stand at the beginning of our investigation. In a second step, we will then discuss some of the structural elements that form the core of German militarism in the period up to 1914, such as the veterans’ associations or the institution of the reserve officers. A certain strand of

5 Ibid., pp. 237 (quote), 261 f. 6 Mann, Der Untertan, pp. 497, 610 (afterword by Peter-Paul Schneider). 7 Wolfram Wette, Militarismus in Deutschland. Geschichte einer kriegerischen Kultur (Darmstadt, 2008), pp. 63 f.; see Düding, ‘Kriegervereine’, p. 115. 8 Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 152. 9 Ibid., p. 156. 10 See, for instance, Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Social History and Conceptual History’, in idem, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, 2002), pp. 20–37.

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historiography has interpreted these different phenomena as manifestations of one single militarism that has to be seen in alignment with the Sonderweg interpretation of a special path of German history leading right up to 1933. In this interpretation, it is part and parcel of that continuity. However, in the past two decades historians have aimed to deconstruct such a compact and homogenous interpretation of ‘the’ German militarism. Instead, they have pointed out that different social groups tried to appropriate the prestige of the military for different reasons and with different agendas. Also, it is increasingly clear that the bottom-up dynamics of such appropriations were not necessarily in line with the top- down aims of the military leaders. Ultimately, this strand of historiography has led to a proliferation of different ‘militarisms’ that no longer tie in with the peculiarities suggested by the Sonderweg approach. The third section of this chapter will consider the details and merits of such a pluralistic approach, and will suggest potentially fruitful avenues for further inquiry into the topic.

The Semantics of Militarism

‘Militarism’ is a neologism that first appeared in French and German parlance during the latter half of the 1860s. This was no coincidence, as both the Second Empire under Louis Napoleon III and Prussia under Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck were well known for their pursuit of power politics based on a strong military, and for sustained efforts to increase the size and strength of the army.11 To some extent, the first German usages of the term tapped into liberal ideas about a rejection of standing armies in favour of a military that was organized as a citizen’s militia. The Swiss militia system served as a role model for these arguments, as it seemed to combine a military that was under control of the people themselves – rather than being under the command of a ruler or monarch – with an emphasis on the training and education of self-confident citizens. Even though this was more a projection than an accurate description of the Swiss militia system, many German liberals from the 1830s were captivated by the advantages of militias.12 Yet there were also novel elements about the ‘militarism’ that authors mostly from the southern German states described in a string of pamphlets in the late 1860s. They responded to the military agreements that Baden, Bavaria, the Grand Duchy of Hesse and Württemberg, all allies of Austria in the war of 1866, had to conclude with Prussia after the Austrian defeat. One crucial stipulation of these agreements was that the right to buy-out of military service or to buy a proxy who would serve instead was terminated. Prior to 1866–67, these options had made conscription more palatable, especially for members of the middle class who could afford to avoid the draft through these means.13 Now, as the southern German states started to reorganize their military along the lines of the Prussian model, with a three-year

11 Werner Conze, Michael Geyer and Reinhard Stumpf, ‘Militarismus’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 1–47, at 22ff; for some brief remarks on the semantics of the term in English, see Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861– 1979 (Leamington Spa, 1981), pp. 7–11. 12 Rudolf Jaun, ‘“Das einzig wahre und ächte Volksheer”. Die schweizerische Miliz und die helvetische Projektion deutscher Radikal-Liberaler und Demokraten 1830–1870’, in Christian Jansen (ed.), Der Bürger als Soldat. Die Militarisierung europäischer Gesellschaften im langen 19. Jahrhundert (Essen, 2003), pp. 68–82. 13 Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society, trans. Andrew Boreham with Daniel Brückenhaus (Oxford and New York, 2004), pp. 101–48.

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military service in the context of a standing army, radical democrats and Bavarian Catholic particularists were up in arms. Josef Edmund Jörg, for instance, journalist and one of the leading figures of the Catholic-Conservative Bavarian Patriotenpartei that fought against a ‘lesser’ German nation-state under Prussian hegemony, described the military agreement between Prussia and Bavaria as the ‘source from which the evil of militarism spilled over the in former times so blissful southern German states’.14 Such rhetoric and the term itself quickly gained currency in Bavarian provincial newspapers in 1869, underpinning a critique of the rising costs of standing armies.15 That the neologism carried a new set of connotations was also made explicit by the Austrian Jesuit Georg Michael Pachtler, who published a more systematic analysis in 1876. He noted that in the old feudal system of absolutist states, what one could call ‘patrimonial militarism’ had mainly implied the waste of state funds for standing armies by rulers who displayed a personal penchant for the military. Yet after the Prussian campaign against Austria in 1866, the term had acquired a new, ‘special meaning’. Now, it implied the mobilization of all ‘forces of the people for the sole purpose of war’. And the full introduction of general conscription, withdrawing any exemptions and closing loopholes, was the key lever to achieve this aim. As such, the notion of a ‘nation in arms’ was not any longer a temporary wartime phenomenon, but also persistent in times of peace. And an immediate side-effect of a militarism based on universal conscription was the ‘undue esteem’ that was awarded to the ‘craft of the soldier’ at the expense of other, civilian occupations.16 With his two main points – militarism as a result of the Prussian military system based on general conscription in the standing army, which led to a preponderance of military values and prestige in civil society – Pachtler had set the tone for most subsequent contributions to the debate. The most prominent left-liberal critique of militarism in Wilhelmine Germany was a pamphlet by the historian and pacifist Ludwig Quidde on ‘Militarism in the Contemporary German Empire’, anonymously published in 1893.17 Even though the subtitle already clearly marked it as an ‘indictment’ that was meant to use the notion of ‘militarism’ for an all-out critique of the Wilhelmine state, historians have praised – and thus misunderstood – the book as a ‘systematic analysis’ of contemporary militarism.18 To be sure, Quidde included reflections on most of the phenomena that feature in current textbook accounts as examples of social militarism, from the transmission of military values into civil society to the higher social prestige of reserve officers and those former non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who found privileged employment in the lower ranks of the civil service. Yet his pamphlet was not an analysis. Rather, it was a partisan text that emanated from Quidde’s activism in the left-liberal Deutsche Volkspartei, a party that mainly operated in the Kingdom of Württemberg. Its publication coincided with campaigning for the Reichstag elections of 1893, which were dominated by controversy

14 Cited in Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Sozialmilitarismus und militärische Sozialisation im deutschen Kaiserreich 1870–1914. Ergebnisse und Desiderate in der Revision eines Geschichtsbildes’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 53 (2002), pp. 148–64, at 150. 15 Ingrid Mayershofer, Bevölkerung und Militär in Bamberg 1860–1923. Eine bayerische Stadt und der preussisch-deutsche Militarismus (Paderborn, 2010), pp. 143 f. 16 Annuarius Osseg [Georg Michael Pachtler SJ], Der europäische Militarismus (Amberg, 1876), pp. 9–12, printed in Bernd Ulrich, Jakob Vogel and Benjamin Ziemann (eds), Untertan in Uniform. Militär und Militarismus im Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Frankfurt, 2001), pp. 170 f. 17 Ludwig Quidde, ‘Der Militarismus im heutigen deutschen Reich. Eine Anklageschrift von einem Historiker’ [1893], in idem, Caligula. Schriften über Militarismus und Pazifismus, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Frankfurt, 1977), pp. 81–130. 18 Wette, Militarismus in Deutschland, p. 87.

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over the military bill. Seen in that perspective, the book was, more than anything else, a quasi-official commentary of the Deutsche Volkspartei on the army bill.19 German Social Democracy was quick to highlight similar core elements of Prussian ‘militarism’ that featured in the radical democrat and left-liberal critque. For Social Democrats, militarism was a key element of attempts by the ruling classes to crack down on the socialist movement, and in that sense a corollary of capitalist society.20 To drive home their point, Social Democrat newspapers used every opportunity to scandalize the many acts of verbal abuse and physical maltreatment that were meted out to the conscripts by NCOs. It was these NCOs rather than members of the active officer corps who were in daily contact with the conscript soldiers, and it was they who resorted to often brutal abuse as a matter of course to instil discipline. Vorwärts and other SPD newspapers repeatedly published secret documents that had been leaked to them and that indicated how the military authorities – unsuccessfully – tried to get a grip on the problem. In every Reichstag debate on the military budget since 1890, August Bebel and other leading Social Democrats had used these incidents to highlight the persistence of German militarism.21 From the turn of the century, Karl Liebknecht, a leading member of the left wing of the party, tried to broaden the terms of the Social Democrat debate on militarism. He analysed the (ab)use of military power in the wider context of the state apparatus, and ultimately concluded that militarism was as much based on the consent of those who were subjected to the military machine as on coercion.22 This brief and necessarily incomplete consideration of the semantics of ‘militarism’ demonstrates the extent to which the term itself is the result of repeated intervention by the fiercest critics of the phenomenon it was meant to describe. More than any otherof the key concepts in late nineteenth-century political discourse – bar perhaps the much loathed ‘imperialism’ – ‘militarism’ was created in the eye of the beholder, that is, those contemporaries who took part in the debate over its meaning. And whatever the reality was to which the signifier related: at the semantic level, militarism in Imperial Germany was in fact a highly contested issue.

Militarism as a Key Ingredient of the Sonderweg Argument

Ever since the publication of Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s short textbook account of Imperial Germany in 1973, Prussian militarism has been one of the core ingredients of the Sonderweg argument about the peculiarities of German history that led to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and to the radicalization of the German war effort since 1939. At this point, Wehler understood the line of continuity dating as far back as the old Prussian military system of the late eighteenth century. In subsequent versions, notably his comprehensive coverage of Imperial Germany in the third volume of his societal history of Germany, published in 1995, the accent has shifted. Here, Wehler suggests that the ‘glory’ of three successful wars of unification in 1864, 1866 and 1871 propelled the ‘social prestige’ of the military toan ‘unprecedented level’. Only in the wake of these three wars did the military in Imperial Germany gain an impact on, and prevalence in, civil society that was without parallel in

19 See with further references, Ziemann, ‘Sozialmilitarismus’, p. 151. 20 Stargardt, The German Idea, pp. 32–71. 21 Ibid., especially pp. 40 ff.; in more detail, see Hartmut Wiedner, ‘Soldatenmißhandlungen im Wilhelminischen Kaiserreich (1890–1914)’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 22 (1982), pp. 159–99. 22 Stargardt, The German Idea, pp. 91–107.

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France, England or the USA.23 Two historiographical elements of this interpretation of German militarism should be noted. First, it is well known that since the 1980s the Sonderweg argument has come under sustained attack in a number of other fields, for instance, with regard to the alleged feudalization of the bourgeoisie. Yet those historians who defend the notion of the Sonderweg invariably point to the specific status of the army in the politics and society of Imperial Germany.24 In that sense, Prussian militarism is in fact one of the last remaining bulwarks of the Sonderweg argument. Second, this interpretation emphasizes the direct line of continuity that ranges directly from 1871 over 1914–18 to 1933 and beyond. Even though a broad range of causal factors have to be taken into account when we consider the rise of the Nazis and the building of the Third Reich, Wehler argues, the continuities of militarism must count among the most important ones.25 From the vantage point of the Sonderweg argument, militarism is conceptualized as a collective mentality that accepted the primacy of the military and its values without any questioning, and that penetrated German society across the social strata and different social milieux.26 In this interpretation, the fact that military values pervaded society was partly the result of concerted efforts to indoctrinate male adolescents during their time in primary school. Not only in history lessons, but also during classes in geography or civic education, the glory of the German military during the wars of unification was a pivotal part of the curriculum. Every opportunity was used to hammer down the key fact that the victory over France in 1871 marked the apogee of German national history, and that the had to be thanked for this achievement.27 There is no doubt that this nationalistic agenda captivated the minds of young boys, not least through the thrill of the battlefield descriptions which were part and parcel of this type of tuition. One vivid testimony for the fascination of militaristic education is presented in the autobiography of Franz Rehbein (1867–1909), first posthumously published in 1911. Here, Rehbein recalls his childhood in a remote village in eastern Pomerania, a region dominated by the manors of aristocratic estate owners, and points out how listening to pub talk among veterans conjured up images of the many battles fought by the Prussian army: ‘I imagined a hail of bullets, the fray of battle, cavalry charges – an enthusiastic mutual slaughter “with God for king and fatherland.” After all, that was roughly how it was taught to us in school.’28 Whether such a militaristic primary school curriculum actually managed to substantially shape the political beliefs of the pupils who were exposed to it, however, remains doubtful. Rehbein himself is a case in point. After a work accident in 1895 forced him to stop working as a rural labourer, he moved to town and became a paid-up member and functionary of the Social Democratic Party.

23 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3: 1848/49–1914 (Munich, 1995), pp. 880–85, 1125–9, quote at 881. 24 Hartwin Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders? Politisches System und Strukturen Preußens als Kern des “deutschen Sonderwegs”’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29 (2003), pp. 262–93, at 283–90. 25 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 885; see Wette, Militarismus in Deutschland, pp. 27–9. 26 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 882. 27 See Heinz Lemmermann, Kriegserziehung im Kaiserreich. Studien zur politischen Funktion von Schule und Schulmusik 1890–1918, 2 vols (Bremen, 1984). On the military indoctrination and militarization of working-class youth in the interlude between leaving elementary school at the age of 14 and joining the army at 18, see Derek S. Linton, ‘Preparing German Youth for War’, in Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871– 1914 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 167–87. 28 Excerpt from Franz Rehbein, Das Leben eines Landarbeiters [1911], ed. Urs J. Diederichs and Holger Rüdel (Hamburg, 1985); English translation online at http://germanhistorydocs.ghidc.org/pdf/ eng/611_Vets%20Discussion%20Evenings_191_JNR.pdf.

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Yet the prevalence of militaristic values in Imperial Germany rested not only on indoctrination in school and during the military service. In the Sonderweg historiography, much more significance is awarded to those social institutions that effectively worked as transmission belts of military values into civilian life, and which motivated and sustained individuals to uphold military values through the additional prestige they offered. In all historiographical accounts of German militarism, two institutions in particular are relevant.29 The first is the privilege of one-year voluntary military service andthe subsequent adoption into the reserve officer corps. This privilege had existed since the 1820s, and was based on a combination of educational qualifications and affluence. Students of a Gymnasium (grammar school) or equivalent secondary school who had passed the ‘Sekunda’ qualification in year ten and who thus belonged to the so-called ‘educated estates’ could opt to serve as a one-year volunteer. This implied that their military service was reduced to twelve months, compared to the three years of service (reduced to two since 1893 in most of the branches of the army) for regular conscripts. In addition, they could live in private accommodation, and were thus removed from the infighting and daily quarrels that were an important part of military socialization in the barracks. Upon completion of the service, they were released to the reserve and could, with some additional exercises, qualify as a reserve officer in the rank of a lieutenant. The privilege, however, came at a price, as the Einjährig-Freiwilligen themselves had to cover the costs for uniform, maintenance and equipment, including the horse in cavalry regiments. This could amount to up to three times the annual wage of a skilled factory worker or small artisan. Hence, from 1906 to 1910, slightly less than a third of those who qualified for the privilege actually took it up, as the number of those who had the necessary funds was limited.30 The key vehicle of militarization was the rank of reserve officer that was bestowed upon one-year volunteers. This institution was part and parcel of the Sonderweg argument even before this strand of historiography existed as such. In 1928, historian Eckart Kehr published a seminal article on the reserve officers, in which he argued that they were carrying ‘military subordination’ into civilian life.31 Kehr (1902–33) has often been credited with being one of the first historians to describe the peculiarities of power structures in Imperial Germany as an anomaly that was bound to have the outcome that emerged in the year of his premature death.32 In his 1928 article, Kehr had described a process of amalgamation, in which the reserve officers with their middle-class background were accustomed to the aristocratic conventions of the active officer corps. The result was, Kehr argued, a shared set of attitudes that could be described as typically ‘wilhelminian’ and which were effectively hollow expressions of an inner weakness. Reserve officers shared with their Kaiser, he summed up, the idea that ‘snap’ was an expression of ‘fortitude’, that ‘self-conceit and vanity’ were a form of ‘dignity’, and that ‘boastfulness’ was a legitimate ‘pathos’.33 Whether all reserve

29 See Wette, Militarismus in Deutschland, pp. 60–64, 72–5. 30 Lothar Mertens, ‘Das Privileg des Einjährig-Freiwilligen Militärdienstes im Kaiserreich und seine gesellschaftliche Bedeutung’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 39 (1986), pp. 59–66, figure at 62; in more detail, see Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, pp. 52–5, 157–70. 31 Eckart Kehr, ‘Zur Genesis des Königlich Preußischen Reserveoffiziers’ [1928], in idem,Der Primat der Innenpolitik. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur preußisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna, 1976), pp. 53–63, quote at 54. 32 A properly delineated school of ‘Kehrites’, however, never existed. See Hans-Jürgen Puhle, ‘Zur Legende von der Kehrschen Schule’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 4 (1978), pp. 108–19. See also Chapter 23 in this volume. 33 Kehr, ‘Zur Genesis’, p. 63.

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officers really shared this set of values is still a matter of debate.34 But there is no doubt that middle-class families appreciated the social prestige that the rank of reserve officer offered. Johann Georg Mönckeberg (1836–1908), the mayor of Hamburg from 1892 and a member of the city’s leading bourgeois circles, strongly advised his son Carl in 1896 that he had to take up the rank of reserve lieutenant for the sake of the added networking ‘advantage’ it offered in a world of increasingly tough business ‘competition’.35 The second key institution was the veterans’ associations, already highlighted by Heinrich Mann as an important site of militarization.36 Associations of former conscripts had existed since the 1830s. But only in Imperial Germany had they emerged as a mass movement, in the first instance comprising veterans of the three wars of unification, soon followed by former conscripts. Since about 1890 at the latest, the latter provided the majority of all members, and strong generational tensions between the two groups came to the fore. Originally, the associations were based on local initiatives, and the notion of comradeship in a local context, mutual support and the provision of a proper burial stood at the heart of their endeavours. But up and down the country, the Kriegervereine were quick to form umbrella organizations to increase their political leverage. This happened first at state level, for instance, with the Deutscher Kriegerbund, founded in 1873, which operated mostly in Prussia. In 1899 the initiative to build a monument for Kaiser Wilhelm I on the Kyffhäuser hill in Thuringia led to the founding of a united umbrella organization at the national level in the form of the Kyffhäuserbund (Kyffhäuser League). In 1913, it comprised more than 31,000 local associations with a total of 2.84 million members, thus making it the biggest mass organization in Imperial Germany, even ahead of the Free Trade Unions.37 Joining a veterans’ association basically provided a platform for the exchange and symbolic expression – through festivities, public speeches or alcohol-fuelled social events – of gold-plated recollections of service in the army. Apart from the provision of mutual financial assistance – an aspect that is often neglected in the relevant literature – the Kriegervereine extended the prestige of wartime service or the draft into civilian society.38 It is fair to assume that most of the rank-and-file members by and large accepted and supported the existing political framework of the Wilhelmine state and the monarchical system. Whether this support was to a large extent a result of their membership is another issue and a matter of debate. Yet the leadership of the state bodies and the Kyffhäuser League – mostly former army officers and mid- or high-ranking civil servants, in particular county officials (Landräte) – had more ambitious plans. Through their speeches and articles in the membership journals, they tried to inculcate a staunch nationalist worldview among the members that legitimized imperialist power politics based on military might and glorified the military as the bulwark of the existing order. Since the 1890s, the Kyffhäuserbund propagated with increasing aggressiveness a ‘new militarism’ based on Social Darwinism that interpreted an upcoming

34 See the detailed discussion by Hartmut John, Das Reserveoffizierkorps im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890– 1914. Ein sozialgeschichtlicher Beitrag zur Untersuchung der gesellschaftlichen Militariserung im Wilhelminischen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt and New York, 1981), pp. 305–40. 35 Printed in Ulrich, Vogel and Ziemann (eds), Untertan in Uniform, pp. 136 f. 36 For the following, see Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus der ‘kleinen Leute’. Die Kriegervereine im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Munich, 1990); for a short English version of this argument, see idem, ‘Heroes and Would-Be Heroes: Veterans’ and Reservists’ Associations in Imperial Germany’, in Boemeke, Chickering and Förster (eds), Anticipating Total War, pp. 189–215. 37 Figures in Klaus Saul, ‘Der “Deutsche Kriegerbund”. Zur innenpolitischen Funktion eines “nationalen” Verbandes im kaiserlichen Deutschland’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 6 (1969), pp. 95–159, at 95. 38 Rohkrämer, Militarismus, pp. 55–77, 147–75.

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war as a necessary means to shield the nation against moral and physical decline.39 Since the late 1880s, another aim had climbed to the top of the agenda of the umbrella organizations in Prussia and elsewhere. In close cooperation with state officials at all levels, including the army, the Deutscher Kriegerbund and the Kyffhäuserbund declared anti-socialism as their core aim. In practical terms, the measures ranged from the exclusion of active Social Democrats to electioneering on behalf of the state-supporting conservative parties.40 In this reading of the veterans’ associations, there is a direct line of continuity from their aggressive militarism to their enthusiastic support for the First World War.41

A Plurality of ‘Militarisms’? Recent Approaches and Their Merits

Whereas continuity is the keyword for interpreting German militarism in the Sonderweg tradition, historians have tried for about 15 years to move this field of investigation beyond the confines of that debate. While mostly focusing on a similar set of phenomena, they tend to stress the disparity, openness and ambiguity of different militarisms, a term that is now used in the plural. These new interpretations put particular emphasis on the ways in which different groups of stakeholders appropriated the prestige of the military for their own purposes and with their own meanings. Thus, these appropriations did not conform with the official façade of Wilhelmine militarism as, for instance, represented by the leaders of the Kyffhäuser League, without necessarily being in open opposition to it. In one way or another, these new interpretations rest on intensive scrutiny of a new range of primary sources, while at the same time voicing concerns about the reading of primary sources in those accounts that favour the Sonderweg. One excellent example of this new trend is a detailed microstudy of the veterans’ associations in rural regions of the Prussian province of Hesse. The starting point for this approach is the critical inquiry into the validity of the sources that have been used to distil the political ideology of the rank-and-file members of the Kyffhäuser League. These are mainly the membership journals and published autobiographical accounts of wartime service in 1870–71, or of subsequent military service. Most of the authors were members of the educated middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum, or had at least grammar school education.42 Relying on these sources as evidence for the reasons why lower-class men joined the Kriegervereine is thus tantamount to mistaking the (elaborate nationalist) educational aims of the Prussian Gymnasium for the intellectual horizon of those who had only elementary school training, as one critic has wryly remarked.43 A microhistory that tries to contextualize the veterans’ associations in this specific rural setting offers an alternative approach. The first important issue here is chronology. In the rural villages of Hesse, the veterans’ associations did not turn into a mass movement before the late 1880s. And when they did, the joiners were not 20-year-old males who had just left the army, but adult household heads in their early forties.44 Gold-plated recollections of

39 Ibid., pp. 187–202, 236–62; see idem, ‘Heroes’, quote at p. 207. 40 The most comprehensive documentation is Saul, ‘Der “Deutsche Kriegerbund”’, pp. 95–129. 41 Rohkrämer, ‘Heroes’, pp. 210 f. 42 See Rohkrämer, Militarismus, pp. 25 f. 43 Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Klassen-, Geschlechter- oder Nationalidentität? Handwerker und Tagelöhner in den Kriegervereinen der neupreußischen Provinz Hessen-Nassau 1890–1914’, in Ute Frevert (ed.), Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 229–44, at 229 f. 44 Ibid., pp. 231 f.

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wartime or military service or any interest in militarist ideologies can thus be ruled out as the primary reason for joining. Rather, the upsurge of interest in the associations coincided with the emergence of the ‘political mass market’ in the 1880s, which triggered a wave of competitive politicization even in rural constituencies and thus also raised interest in the veterans’ associations.45 Countering this argument, defenders of the Sonderweg have insisted that the numerical growth of the associations was basically the result of concerted efforts by county officials (Landräte) and estate owners to rally support for the conservative parties.46 This is the ‘manipulation from above’ theory, a staple of Sonderweg historiography that has been thoroughly refuted since the 1980s.47 There is no doubt that former officers and civil servants encouraged lower-class men to join the associations. But joining they had to do themselves, as well as attending meetings and taking part in debates, based on their own intrinsic motives. The second crucial element of a microhistory of the Kriegervereine is social class. Record linkage, that is, combining membership lists with tax, census and electoral roll data, allows us to pinpoint the social status of the Kriegerverein members. The most crucial class divide existed between those peasant farmers who owned and cultivated a substantial property on the one hand, and day labourers who only farmed a small patch of land – thus forced to commute periodically into nearby towns for other manual labour – and small village artisans without land on the other. In a rural society in which ownership of land was the key marker of prestige, affluence and social exclusivity in terms of connubium, small peasant farmers exerted a relentless hegemony over village affairs, from ruling the political community to dominating the parochial church board. That is, with the exception of the Kriegervereine, where day labourers could claim to be on an equal footing as conscription had been the same for everyone. And so they embarked on a constant tussle with the peasant farmers – who usually provided the heads of local branches – over hegemony in the local associations. Claiming that they were ‘truly German men’, they did not invoke any militarist or nationalist ideology. Rather, the day labourers used their military service to make a claim for an inclusive citizenship that transcended the steep social hierarchies of property in the village community.48 The example of these day labourers has relevance beyond their parish-pump setting in the rural valleys of Hesse. First, it matters in terms of methodology. Only such a microstudy allows us to reconstruct the motives and context of how former conscripts appropriated the veterans’ associations with precision and in sufficient detail. Second, these findings can potentially be applied to many other rural regions in Imperial Germany. In 1911, no fewer than 28.8 per cent of all members of the Deutscher Kriegerbund were rural labourers or smallholders.49 It is fair to assume that many of them had similar motives for joining as their peers in Hesse, or at least much more likely than any ‘manipulation from above’. Still, these findings have been countered with the fact that the media outlets of the Kyffhäuser League and the other umbrella organizations, in particular their membership journals and annual calendars, publicized and mobilized bellicose views and a Social Darwinist militarism. Hence, it has been argued, the veterans’ associations ‘fostered militaristic dispositions in

45 On the notion of the ‘political mass market’, developed by historian Hans Rosenberg, see Benjamin Ziemann and Thomas Mergel, ‘Introduction’, in Ziemann and Mergel (eds), European Political History 1870–1913 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. xi–xxvi, at xiii–xvi. 46 Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders?’, p. 288. 47 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (London, 1984). 48 Friedeburg, ‘Klassen-, Geschlechter- oder Nationalidentität?’, pp. 236–44. 49 Saul, ‘Der “Deutsche Kriegerbund”’, p. 109.

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(petty-) bourgeois and national-liberal circles’.50 This statement is, alas, a truism. The real issue is whether the militaristic ideologies of the Kyffhäuser League were disseminated and found reception beyond those (petty-) bourgeois circles. In this respect, severe doubts remain, as the leagues consistently complained that only a small minority of the rank-and- file members actually read their membership journal, making it implausible to assume they took in the views that were presented on their pages.51 In Imperial Germany, the higher echelons of the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie of shopkeepers, artisans, small businessmen and white-collar employees taken together amounted to about 15 per cent of the overall population.52 No reasonable historian would refute that militaristic ideologies pervaded these circles. The question is whether the remaining 85 per cent of the German population followed suit and also tapped into these ideologies, or whether their interest in the military was based on other motivations. Any substantial answer to this conundrum has to pay considerable attention to the symbolic languages and performative representations that were part and parcel of the cult of the nation in arms. A stimulating and innovative attempt in this direction has been made by Jakob Vogel in his comparative study of military celebrations in Imperial Germany and the French Third Republic.53 Key avenues for the ritualistic celebration of the military were annual parades. In France, they took place on 14 July, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, which had been celebrated as a national holiday since 1880 and was marked by military parades both in Paris – here including the complete government and other members of the republican establishment – and in garrison cities up and down the country. In Imperial Germany the key ritual was the Kaiser parades, military festivities which were conducted in early September. In technical terms, they were an inspection of the military training in all contingents of the German military, which had been put under the command of the Kaiser in 1871 (even though Bavaria retained formal control over its army in peacetime, administered through its War Ministry, and the King of Württemberg retained the right to appoint the officers in his contingent). Thus, the inspection was a symbolic confirmation of the fact that military training was now standardized across the nation, based on terms defined by Prussia. Building on an earlier Prussian tradition which had commenced in the 1860s, Kaiserparaden outside Prussia were introduced in 1876. They usually took place on a large field outside one of the (initially 17) towns in which the respective Army Corps was situated. In Berlin the Prussian Guard lined up twice a year in front of the Kaiser, in the autumn on Tempelhof field, nowadays the site of the defunct airport.54 The parades had to respect the official constitutional protocol, according to which the Kaiser was formally only the primus inter pares, the first among equals of the allied rulers who were technically sovereign in Imperial Germany. The Bavarian monarchy was particularly picky in this respect. Inspection by the Kaiser only commenced here in 1891, and even then Luitpold, the of the reigning Wittelsbachers, continued to address the Kaiser as only one of his many ‘princely guests’ during the ceremony. Yet despite these irritations that reflected the federal structure of the Reich, the Kaiser parades were in fact the only major official festivity that celebrated the German nation as a whole, as a formal national holiday was never introduced. The official elements of the parades, however, were quickly

50 Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders?’, p. 288. 51 Ziemann, ‘Sozialmilitarismus’, p. 160; Saul, ‘Der “Deutsche Kriegerbund”’, pp. 113 f. 52 See the calculation in Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 713. 53 Jakob Vogel, Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der ‘Nation in Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 1997). A short English version is idem, ‘Military, Folklore, Eigensinn: Folkloric Militarism in Germany and France, 1871–1914’, Central European History, 33 (2000), pp. 487–504. 54 Vogel, Nationen, pp. 39 f., 45 f.

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accompanied by a popular appropriation of these military spectacles. Stalls sold alcoholic drinks, sandwiches and souvenirs, bands played military music, and large crowds milled around on the parade ground even hours after the official programme had come to a close. In that respect, the parades turned into popular festivities that fused an interest in the colourful spectacle of uniforms, horses and marching with popular leisure-time activities.55 Vogel describes this as a ‘folkloristic militarism’, as interest in the military was bound up with popular activities such as mingling, drinking or gazing. Three characteristics of this by and large apolitical type of militarism stand out. First, it did not transport any bellicose ideologies or glorification of war, and hence did not stand in any line of continuity to the period since 1914. Quite to the contrary, the practices of folkloristic militarism before 1914 can be identified as one major reason why widespread disillusionment with industrial warfare kicked in after the first battles of the Great War. Nothing had prepared those who had watched the parades for the sheer ferocity of attacks conducted with machine guns or poison gas.56 Second, folkloristic militarism was not simply a case of manipulation or indoctrination from above, as the official pageantry met with a genuine bottom-up interest in the folkloristic elements. And, third, this militarism differed from that of the Kyffhäuser League in that it was not centred around exclusively male forms of sociability: women and children were an integral part of the crowds that accompanied the parades.57 The notion of a ‘folkloristic militarism’ goes a long way to explaining popular interest in the spectacle of military representation that was not predominantly based on any ideological notions of the superiority of the army. The fact that comparable festivities accompanied the military parades in the French Third Republic underscores another key aspect of German military folklore: it was not a building block of an alleged Sonderweg, but part of a wider interest in the military that emerged across late nineteenth-century Western Europe in all those states in which the army relied on general conscription.58 Seen in this perspective, a promising line of further research could inquire about the perception of German militarism in other European countries. In that respect it is revealing that ‘British Prussianism’ became a buzzword of political debate in Great Britain during the First World War. As the British army introduced general conscription in 1916 to cope with the increased manpower demand at the Western Front, some Quakers and socialists pointed out that, by adopting this core element of German army organization, the United Kingdom itself might develop the traits of a militarized nation. Such a notion had been less obvious prior to 1914 due to the predominance of the navy in the running of the Empire.59 Comparative research that also explores such mutual observations between nation- states and national cultures is certainly one fruitful line of future inquiry. Perhaps more urgent, however, are further studies that investigate the perceptions and appropriations of

55 Ibid., pp. 47–92, quote at 56. 56 On disillusionment as a theme in the experience of the Great War, see the documents in Bernd Ulrich and Benjamin Ziemann (eds), German Soldiers in the Great War: Letters and Eyewitness Accounts, trans. Christine Brocks (Barnsley, 2010). 57 Vogel, Nationen, pp. 275–7. 58 For another, less convincing comparison between France and Germany, see Markus Ingenlath, Mentale Aufrüstung. Militarisierungstendenzen in Frankreich und Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt and New York, 1998). Spenkuch, ‘Vergleichsweise besonders?’, p. 289, offers some criticism of the comparative argument by Vogel. This, however, does not affect Vogel’s critique of the Sonderweg, nor does it refute the bottom-up nature of folkloristic militarism, which runs against the grain of the Sonderweg thesis with its emphasis on manipulation from above. 59 See Christoph Jahr, ‘British Prussianism. Überlegungen zu einem europäischen Militarismus im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert’, in Wolfram Wette (ed.), Militarismus in Deutschland 1871 bis 1945 (Münster, 1999), pp. 293–309.

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the military among those 85 per cent of the German population that did not belong to the liberal-conservative, Protestant (petty-) bourgeoisie. Any such inquiry is confronted with the problem of finding appropriate primary sources that shed light on the ways in which lower-class Catholics and Social Democrat workers – to name only the two most sizeable groups – experienced military service and endeavoured to use its prestige in civilian life. At least a few options, however, are available. One could start with a more thorough search for unpublished autobiographies and diaries by lower-class authors. Many gems are probably still hidden in private possession or in remote municipal archives. But autobiographical texts are also made available in increasing numbers by specialist archives such as the ‘Doku’, situated at the University of Vienna, or the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv in Emmendingen, which contains diaries mostly – but not exclusively – from the south-west of Germany. Historian Christa Hämmerle has edited a selection of pertinent autobiographies for the Austrian army, and the very rich material demonstrates the merits of such an approach.60 Another fruitful approach is to study the interactions between the military and civil society at the local level in those garrison towns that hosted one or sometimes even a couple of active infantry and cavalry regiments. So far, studies of this kind have focused on the organizational details of the regiments and on the architecture of the barracks.61 But a recent book by Ingrid Mayershofer on the intersections between the military and civilians in Bamberg goes much further than this. Through a detailed analysis of the local press and municipal records she demonstrates how the Catholic middle class in this town in Upper Franconia gradually adapted to the situation created by the introduction of Prussian-style conscription. Once the Kulturkampf against the Catholics had been settled in the late 1880s, the local Centre Party continued to use the charge of Prussian ‘militarism’ against individual abuses of power by the military. But this no longer implied a wholesale indictment against the military framework of the imperial state as in previous years.62 Such an approach that focuses on a local garrison could be extended to include lower-class Catholics through the use of court-martial records. These do not only cover the wartime army, but are also held in large numbers for the period up to 1914 in the Bavarian military archives in Munich.63 Prior to 1914, conscripts were mostly court-martialled for involvement in pub brawls and other minor incidents, and confrontations with civilians. Through a detailed reading of the extensive interrogation protocols, they offer a glimpse into the attitudes of lower-class people towards the military in everyday situations. Perhaps the biggest gap in our knowledge about militarism in Imperial Germany remains with regard to the attitudes of Social Democrat voters and party members. Itis a well-known fact that quite a few Social Democrats remained members of local veterans’ associations despite the increasing efforts of the Kyffhäuser League to ensure that all state branches took steps to expel them. Whether this implies that these Social Democrats tapped into the official ideologies of the leagues, however, remains rather doubtful. As with many other scholarly remarks on socialist attitudes towards the military, they are by and large based on the perusal of a limited number of autobiographies which were mostly written

60 See Christa Hämmerle (ed.), Des Kaisers Knechte. Erinnerungen an die Rekrutenzeit im k.(u.)k. Heer 1868 bis 1914 (Vienna, 2012). For some personal testimony by German conscripts, see Ulrich, Vogel and Ziemann (eds), Untertan in Uniform, pp. 80 f. 61 See, for instance, Christian Lankes, München als Garnison im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Haupt- und Residenzstadt als Standort der Bayerischen Armee von Kurfürst Max IV. Joseph bis zur Jahrhundertwende (Berlin, Bonn and Herford, 1993); Wolfgang Schmidt, ‘Die Garnisonsstadt Regensburg im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert’, PhD dissertation, Regensburg, 1988. 62 Mayershofer, Bevölkerung und Militär in Bamberg, pp. 236–327. 63 Gerhard Heyl, ‘Bayerische Militärgerichte 1806 bis 1919’, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 75 (1979), pp. 61–73.

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by labour movement functionaries.64 A much more promising way of charting the attitudes of Social Democrats – both voters and members of the party and Free Trade Unions – is to use the records of police surveillance. Between 1892 and 1914, the political police in the port city of Hamburg sent plain-clothes policemen to pubs in working-class neighbourhoods. Their reports on the discussions in these pubs, which often include more or less verbatim notes, provide detailed insights into the perceptions of working-class men in an SPD stronghold. Based on the tiny fraction of the existing documentation that Richard J. Evans has edited, it can be gleaned that most SPD supporters were confident that military service would continue to produce new recruits for the party. Workers based their optimism on the continuing scandal – in their view – of the maltreatment and abuse that was meted out to conscripts, which in their perception was an endemic problem with roots in the power structure of the German military.65 In a recent reflection, Helmut Walser Smith has considered the historiographical problems that have emerged in the wake of the widespread turn away from the Sonderweg argument. Even though the search for German peculiarities has often proved to be futile, Smith insists, it is necessary to consider continuities and ‘to posit deeper historical connections between the twentieth-century catastrophe and the nineteenth-century history that preceded it’. Only by pondering these continuities, Smith argues, can we get a ‘deeper chronological sense’ in explaining the German practices of mass violence since 1914.66 And a reconsideration of the ways in which Gentile Germans kept a distance from their Jewish neighbours can indeed offer important insights into the long pre-history of the Holocaust.67 It is, however, the core argument of this chapter that militarism is not a category that renders itself for such an inquiry into continuities. This is only partly a result of the semantics of the term itself, which had been in use as a polemical marker in political debates over conscription and armaments since 1866. If we accept an analytical core definition of militarism – the preponderance and uncritical acceptance of military values and prestige in civil society – it is increasingly clear that there was not one compact ‘militarism’ in Imperial Germany, but many different militarisms, that is, ways of appropriating the prestige of the military for economic, political or personal advantage. And none of these forms went uncontested. This assertion even goes for the most spectacular impostor in Imperial Germany, the Captain of Köpenick. In 1906, an unemployed journeyman shoemaker, Wilhelm Voigt, borrowed the second-hand uniform of a captain and commanded a platoon of soldiers to the town hall of the Berlin suburb of Köpenick, trying to extract money from the public purse. His case has often been cited as a blatant example of submission under the prestige of the uniform, and thus of social militarism. Yet a closer scrutiny of public reactions demonstrates that most observers interpreted the incident as a theatrical farce, a kind of hilarious spectacle that was in the first instance well suited to feed the appetite of the metropolitan public for entertainment and amusement.68

64 For a critique, see Ziemann, ‘Sozialmilitarismus’, pp. 156 f. 65 Richard J. Evans, Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich. Die Stimmungsberichte der Hamburger Politischen Polizei 1892–1914 (Reinbek, 1989), pp. 388, 392–4. 66 Helmut Walser Smith, ‘When the Sonderweg Debate Left Us’, in Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (eds), Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (New York, 2011), pp. 21–36, quotes at 32 f. 67 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008). 68 See Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Der “Hauptmann von Köpenick” – Symbol für den Sozialmilitarismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland?’, in Vilém Precan, Milena Janisová and Matthias Roeser (eds), Grenzüberschreitungen oder der Vermittler Bedrich Loewenstein. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag eines europäischen Historikers (Prague and Brno, 1999), pp. 252–64.

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More importantly, militarist attitudes of the type that we see before 1914 do not offer an explanation for the apparent ability of German society to mobilize for total war in the period from 1914 to 1918, and again, on a much bigger scale, from 1939 to 1945. Such a concerted effort to organize society for war required more than just a prevalence of military values among some quarters of the civilian population. It required the widespread dissemination of proactive belligerence and bellicosity, and a broad societal consensus over the maximization of armaments to prepare Germany for war. Historians currently discuss whether such a bellicose consensus emerged during the Weimar Republic.69 In this context it is remarkable that even the most bellicose militarist organization in Imperial Germany, the Deutscher Wehrverein (German Army League), founded in 1912, was somewhat ambivalent in its rhetoric. Founded by the former general, August Keim, to canvass support for the massive increase of the army in the Army Bill of 1912, it quickly gained a membership of 360,000, mostly through collective incorporation of other nationalist pressure groups.70 While Keim aggressively denounced pacifists as effeminate weaklings and made clear that the German nation had to be prepared for war, he also insisted, if only in a rhetorical disclaimer, that his efforts would ultimately serve the purpose of keeping the ‘horrors of war’ away from Germany through a pre-emptive offensive.71 Yet even in the years from 1912 to 1914, such bellicose rhetoric was more of a fringe position, rather than part of the mainstream of nationalist mobilization.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Becker, Frank. Bilder von Krieg und Nation. Die Einigungskriege in der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit Deutschlands 1864–1913 (Munich, 2001). —. ‘Strammstehen vor der Obrigkeit? Bürgerliche Wahrnehmung der Einigungskriege und Militarismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich’, Historische Zeitschrift, 277 (2003), pp. 87– 113. Berghahn, Volker R. Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861–1979 (Leamington Spa, 1981). Bönker, Dirk. ‘Military History, Militarization, and the “American Century”’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 2 (2005), no. 1, pp. 105–9; online: http:// www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/site/40208308/default.aspx. Chickering, Roger. The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007). —. ‘Militarism and Radical Nationalism’, in James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 196–218. Coetzee, Marilyn Shevin.The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York and Oxford, 1990). Conze, Werner, Geyer, Michael and Stumpf, Reinhard. ‘Militarismus’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 1–47.

69 See the important but partly inconclusive study by Rüdiger Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik: Wehrkonsens und ‘Wehrhaftmachung’ in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich, 2012). 70 Marilyn Shevin Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York and Oxford, 1990). 71 Quoted in Ulrich, Vogel and Ziemann (eds), Untertan in Uniform, pp. 187 f. On the broader context, see Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Oxford, 2004), pp. 85–105.

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Craig, Gordon A. The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford, 1964). Cramer, Kevin. ‘A World of Enemies: New Perspectives on German Military Culture and the Origins of the First World War’, Central European History, 39 (2006), pp. 270–98. Düding, Dieter. ‘Die Kriegervereine im wilhelminischen Reich und ihr Beitrag zur Militarisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft’, in Jost Dülffer and Karl Holl (eds), Bereit zum Krieg. Kriegsmentalität im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Göttingen, 1986), pp. 99–121. Eley, Geoff. ‘Army, State and Civil Society: Revisiting the Problem of German Militarism’, in idem, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), pp. 85–109. Förster, Stig. Der doppelte Militarismus. Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik zwischen Status-Quo- Sicherung und Aggression 1890–1913 (Wiesbaden, 1985). Frevert, Ute. A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society, trans. Andrew Boreham with Daniel Brückenhaus (Oxford and New York, 2004). Geyer, Michael, ‘The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945’, in John R. Gillis (ed.), The Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick and London, 1989), pp. 65–102. —. ‘The Past as Future: The German Officer Corps as Profession’, in Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch (eds), German Professions 1800–1950 (New York, 1990), pp. 183–212. Hewitson, Mark. Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Oxford, 2004). Jansen, Christian (ed.) Der Bürger als Soldat. Die Militarisierung europäischer Gesellschaften im langen 19. Jahrhundert (Essen, 2003). John, Hartmut. Das Reserveoffizierkorps im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914. Ein sozialgeschichtlicher Beitrag zur Untersuchung der gesellschaftlichen Militarisierung im Wilhelminischen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt and New York, 1981). Linton, Derek S. ‘Preparing German Youth for War’, in Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871– 1914 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 167–87. Ritter, Gerhard. The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, Vol. 2: The European Powers and the Wilhelminian Empire, 1890–1914 (Coral Gables, 1970). Rohkrämer, Thomas. ‘Heroes and Would-Be Heroes. Veterans’ and Reservists’ Associations in Imperial Germany’, in Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 189–215. Schoenbaum, David. Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London, 1982). Showalter, Dennis E. ‘Army and Society in Imperial Germany’, Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (1983), pp. 583–618. Stargardt, Nicholas. The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994). Ulrich, Bernd, Vogel, Jakob and Ziemann, Benjamin (eds). Untertan in Uniform. Militär und Militarismus im Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Frankfurt, 2001). Vogel, Jakob. ‘Military, Folklore, Eigensinn: Folkloric Militarism in Germany and France, 1871–1914’, Central European History, 33 (2000), pp. 487–504. Ziemann, Benjamin. ‘Sozialmilitarismus und militärische Sozialisation im deutschen Kaiserreich 1870–1914. Ergebnisse und Desiderate in der Revision eines Geschichtsbildes’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 53 (2002), pp. 148–64. — and Mergel, Thomas. ‘Introduction’, in Ziemann and Mergel (eds), European Political History 1870–1913 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. xi–xxvi.

382 22 The Army

william mulligan

In 1888 Helmuth von Moltke resigned as Chief of the General Staff. The leading general of his generation and the author of prussia’s victorious wars between 1864 and 1871, moltke was almost 88 years old. ‘Your Majesty’, he wrote to Wilhelm II in his resignation letter on 3 August 1888, ‘I am obliged to acknowledge that at my advanced age I can no longer mount a horse. Your Majesty needs younger energy and is no longer served by a Chief of the General Staff incapable of field service.’1 given his advanced age and the accession to the throne of Wilhelm II, for whom he had little respect, his resignation was not a surprise. It was striking that, of all possible attributes and skills, he highlighted the ability to ride a horse as a key criteria of effective generalship. After all it was Moltke’s mastery of the railway, rather than horsemanship, that had proved essential to victories against Denmark, Austria and France. The following year the leading military journal, Das Militärwochenblatt, ran an article entitled ‘The Officer: The Modern Knighthood’ (Der Offizier. Das moderne Rittertum). The author instructed young officers on the officer corps’ code of behaviour, including the courteous (and protective) treatment of women. ‘I have had the experience in more than twenty battles and engagements’, the author concluded, ‘that the smart dancers in the ballroom were also the best and most splendid leading dancers in the bloody dance of war.’2 The self-presentation of German officers encompassed characteristics, codes and ethics that appeared modern and feudal at the same time. This combination has provided the substance of major debates about the place of the army in German history between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War. Was the army a bastion of feudal values, defending outdated political institutions and social classes, such as the East Prussian Junker, from revolution? Or was the army, as more recent historical studies have argued, at the fore of modernization in the Kaiserreich, quick to adapt to new technologies and a guardian of strict professional standards? Since the 1980s the approach to studying the German army has changed in three significant ways. First, historians – most notably Michael Geyer – now view the army as a modern, professional institution, motivated by the mission of military preparedness for war and its demand for autonomy in the exercise of military violence.3 This perspective has replaced an older model, rooted in Marxist and other ideas of class conflict in modern German history, in which the aristocratic officer corps’ primary aim was the defence of social privilege and authoritarian political institutions. Approaching the officer corps as a professional

1 cited in michael schmid, Der ‘eiserne Kanzler’ und die Generäle. Deutsche Rüstungspolitik in der Ära Bismarck (1871–1890) (Paderborn, 2003), p. 25. 2 Cited in Marcus Funck, ‘Bereit zum Krieg? Entwurf und Praxis militärischer Männlichkeit im preußisch-deutschen Offizierkorps vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds), Heimat – Front. Militär – und Geschlechterverhätnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Frankfurt, 2002), p. 74. 3 michael geyer, Deutsche Rüstungspolitik 1860–1980 (Frankfurt, 1984). The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

institution enables historians to account for flexible political and social attitudes within the officer corps, which evolved according to the putative demands of military efficiency. Historians also take seriously the officers’ own claims and self-presentation rather than attributing motives and intentions ascribed by critics of the officer corps. As Geyer stresses, understanding the officer corps as a professional élite rather than a reactionary caste does not diminish the often baleful consequences of the army’s interventions in modern German history. Indeed the professional officer corps was a dangerous institution that dominated a fundamental aspect of the modern state and required political control. The central issue in civil–military relations, therefore, was defining the scope of the professional military expert to intervene in social relations and politics. More recent studies have suggested that the problem in the Kaiserreich’s model of civil–military relations was the disjunction between the military professional and wider political purposes. Second, the loss of military archives in the Second World War has proved a major obstacle to historical research, but since the end of the Cold War new archival material has been identified. Early research on the history of the army often exploited personal papers, many of which are available at the Military Archive in Freiburg. Historians were also able to reconstruct some of the decision-making processes and debates at the highest level of the army through the use of the reports of military representatives from Bavaria, Württemberg and – since the fall of the East German regime – Saxony in Berlin. These officers reported on the development of army bills and discussions about foreign policy, amongst other issues. In the 1990s scholars found some archival material in Moscow from the military history section of the Reichsarchiv. Much of this material was written in the 1920s as preliminary studies for the official military histories of the First World War and the pre-war era. These works made use of archival material which was later destroyed in the bombing raids on Berlin in 1945. This material has generated new work particularly on war planning before 1914, as well as the politics of armaments policy. New sources on the German army are not simply the result of fresh archival work, however. The third important change in understanding the history of the army derives from new historiographical approaches to military history which have occurred in recent decades. Social and cultural historians examine the army’s role in society, its recruitment patterns and its representation in public culture. These approaches have opened new questions about the army, concerning the construction of gender relationships, the formation of national identities and the role of barracks in local urban relations, to name but some of the themes. These works show that the army was a porous institution, shaped by social norms and contexts that were distant from the claims of military efficiency. This approach has qualified older studies that cast the army as a ‘school of the nation’ to show how it was also a product of the nation.

The Army and the Constitution

Before analysing the development of war plans and armaments policy, it is worth reviewing the institutional structure of the German army. Under the constitution the Kaiser was the Supreme Commander of the army, with the power to declare war, issue orders and appoint officers. The Chancellor counter-signed orders issued by the Kaiser, but as the Kaiser had the authority to appoint and dismiss the Chancellor, the latter’s role was circumscribed, at least in the theoretical workings of the constitution. In the actual operation of the constitution, much depended on the person of the Kaiser, his particular interest in any given area of military policy and the balance of court politics. Wilhelm II presented a highly personal connection to the army as an institution that embodied the wider relationship between the Kaiser and

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the German nation. Personally he enjoyed the ceremonial role, which was important to the public image of his imperial dignity. He intervened on all manner of issues, though without particular rhyme or reason. In line with modern military thinking he promoted infantry target practice and artillery training, but he also opposed the replacement of colourful uniforms with field grey tunics. The institutional structure of the German army was fragmented, due to functional divisions within the military and political interests. There were four war ministries and armies, reflecting the federal character of the Kaiserreich: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg retained their own war ministries. However, the Prussian Ministry ofWar and army were undoubtedly first amongst equals, though Bismarck stymied an attempt by the to transform itself into a Reich ministry. The Prussian Ministry of War implemented regulations, negotiated armaments contracts and represented the combined German army in the Reichstag. It was, therefore, at the administrative heart of the military. In political terms the Prussian Minister of War often found himself in a difficult position. Both Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II resented the minister’s responsibility to represent the army in the Reichstag, as it undermined the notion of the Kaiser’s sole authority over the army. The Ministry, as it negotiated with Reichstag, Treasury and other institutions for financial resources for the army, was inevitably compelled to compromise, demonstrating the political limitations on the Kaiser’s constitutional authority. The General Staff was a small body of officers dedicated to the development of war plans, the gathering of intelligence on foreign armies and the training and exercise of troops. In peace-time its powers were limited, but once war was declared the General Staff commanded the army. Its prestige derived from its mission in a putative future war, its role in planning for a war and its historical association with Prussian victories in the ‘wars of unification’. In the Kaiserreich its influence gradually expanded. In 1883 Bismarck exploited the difficulties of Georg von Kameke, the Prussian Minister of War, in the Reichstag, denouncing the notion of the ‘parliamentary general’. Kameke resigned and the General Staff received the right of a direct audience with the Kaiser. Previously the General Staff’s access to the Kaiser had been controlled by the Prussian Ministry of War. From 1889 the General Staff had a weekly meeting with the Kaiser. This enabled the Chief of the General Staff to play a more active role in shaping policy beyond the formal mission of military planning. Following Moltke’s resignation in 1888, the successive chiefs were Alfred von Waldersee, Alfred von Schlieffen and Helmuth von Moltke the Younger. While the division of labour between the Prussian Ministry of War and the General Staff reflected different functions, in practice their respective tasks of organizing the size of the army and its equipment and planning for war overlapped. The institutional divisions reinforced tensions between these different goals. While the Kaiser was theoretically supposed to reconcile these tensions, in practice it boosted the importance of the Chancellor. Bismarck had recognized this in 1883 as he pushed for more autonomy for the General Staff. The Kaiser also had a military cabinet, essentially his own personal military advisers. These were independent from the Ministry of War and the General Staff. Members of the military cabinet were in almost constant contact with the Kaiser, which enabled them to intervene on a whole range of policy issues. This contributed to the fragmentation of military policy-making in the Kaiserreich. While competing institutions and a range of different views can produce better policy outcomes, in this instance the military cabinet added confusion. Moreover, as Wilhelm II’s sometime close friend Philip von Eulenburg cruelly remarked, there were ‘more stupid [officers] than clever ones’ in the military cabinet.4

4 Oliver Stein, Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik 1890–1914. Das Militär und der Primat der Politik (Paderborn, 2007), p. 25.

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The only coordinating agency for the disparate military institutions, the National Defence Commission (Landesverteidigungskommission), was dissolved in 1897. Although the institutional framework of the military was fragmented, this was not unusual when compared with other great powers. The German model of the General Staff, including its autonomy, was widely admired in Europe and beyond, including by naval reformers in the United States. The streamlined military structures set out in the constitution, with the Kaiser at the apex, was an ideal type. Personal rivalries, different conceptions of military doctrine and changing domestic and international political constellations would have created divisions, even in a tightly organized army. What exacerbated these tensions was the failure of the Kaiser, especially Wilhelm II, to adopt the coordinating role that was expected of him. It also reduced the potential political influence of the army vis-à-vis the civilian political leadership. The disjunction between the professional and the political was the most serious flaw in this system. Civilian political leaders failed to question the military about its war plans and its assumptions about future war in any great depth, while the General Staff developed war plans that concentrated on the first engagements of the war, rather than asking more fundamental questions about the likely face of war and its political purpose. While the constitutional structures, which gave the military direct access to the Kaiser, offered opportunities for the officer corps to intervene in major political decisions, the civilian government remained in control of such decisions, particularly concerning war and peace. The role of the military during the culmination of the July Crisis is the most extreme example of military concerns intruding into political decision-making. However, the significance of the General Staff’s demands for rapid mobilization in late July1914 remains contentious; more pertinently, the unfolding of the July Crisis was not typical of the character of civil–military relations in the arena of foreign policy during the Kaiserreich. At various moments – during the ‘War in Sight’ Crisis in 1875, the multiple crises of 1887–88 and the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905–1906 – General Staff officers considered a preventive war against either France or Russia. In 1887 and 1888 Alfred von Waldersee made the most sustained efforts to embark on a preventive war as a means of destroying the future military threat of France and Russia before these two states became too strong for German forces to defeat. Yet in none of these crises was war declared. The civilian leadership, supported by the Kaiser, retained control of the final decision in foreign policy. In domestic politics the army was seen as a potential instrument in a Staatsstreich or coup against the constitutional order. Wilhelm II warned soldiers that they might have to shoot their brothers to suppress revolution, while the Junker aristocrat, Elard von Oldenbourg-Januschau, claimed that the Kaiser should be able to command a military unit at any time to break up the Reichstag.5 However, revolution was a remote possibility in the Kaiserreich and the government’s willingness to use the army to suppress revolts was shared by other governments across Europe, notably the Tsarist regime after 1905, while the British government faced a mutiny within its officer corps during the Home Rule Crisis in early 1914. The Zabern case in 1913 encapsulated the tensions in civil–military relations. In late 1913 Güntner von Forstner, a young lieutenant, abused local inhabitants in the town of Zabern in Alsace, triggering demonstrations and unrest. Civilians were imprisoned without trial, von Forstner assaulted a local civilian and Wilhelm II rejected criticism of the military. The incident quickly became a crisis as the Reichstag declared no confidence in the Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg. He refused to resign, pointing out that his position rested on the authority of the Kaiser, not parliament. The affair demonstrated the latent potential for military intervention

5 David Blackbourn, The Fontana History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (London, 1997), p. 407.

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in domestic politics, as well as concerns about the military’s place in German politics and society amongst the largest parties in the Reichstag, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Catholic Centre Party. Nonetheless, dramatic incidents like the Zabern affair were rare in the Kaiserreich. The most dangerous aspect of the military lay in the logic of military necessity, in areas which were often considered separate from political and public scrutiny.

War Planning

Following his retirement Schlieffen wrote a number of articles on the face of war. The author of a plan that intended to defeat French armies within a matter of weeks and then turn the bulk of German forces towards the eastern front to stave off Russian invasion outlined the consequences of a great power war in the modern world. War would bring economic production to a halt, create social tensions and even lead to political revolutions. Owing to the interdependent economies of Europe, any war would likely be over within a matter of months, whether there was a decisive victory or a negotiated settlement. What was striking about Schlieffen’s vision was not the belief in a short war, but rather in war’s potentially catastrophic consequences. Only during the First World War did people confuse the time span of war with the scale of destruction. Before 1914 the question was not whether a war would be short or long, but whether social and political collapse would ensue.6 Schlieffen’s concerns were widely shared within the German army leadership. The rapid victories in 1866 and 1870 did not disguise a change in the nature of modern warfare. The continued French resistance to German invasion and occupation after the defeat of Napoleon III’s armies at Sedan in September 1870 led Moltke to conclude that the age of cabinet war had now passed into the age of people’s war. This opened the appalling vista of unrestrained and uncontrollable violence. The professional officer, whose expertise lay in the precise application of violence for a particular political end, now faced a new challenge. It was no longer sufficient to destroy the opponent’s army; rather the aim was to destroy the political will of the opponent to fight. This was a much more difficult task, less amenable to the strict calculations of railway timetables and rates of artillery fire. In his final speech to the Reichstag in 1890, Moltke warned that the next great power war in Europe would be akin to the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48): two wars that had terrible consequences for the civilian populations of central Europe. The prospect of such a war, particularly following the Franco-Russian alliance formed in the early 1890s, raised questions about whether war was a viable instrument of politics. Yet this question was barely answered by General Staff officers, who were charged with developing the war plans. Their professional focus evaded these questions. Indeed to pursue these questions would have cast doubt on their professional status, which was predicated on their ability to win wars without triggering social and political upheaval.7 Civilian leaders also spoke of war in catastrophic language. The loss of human life was a central concern. Words such as ‘misery’, ‘suffering’ and ‘pain’ were regularly associated with war. As Schlieffen pointed out, Europeans had little hesitation in inflicting this misery on African and Asian societies, but when their own life and limb were at stake in a more equal conflict, it provided reason to pause. There were also good political reasons to avoid

6 See the articles ‘War Today’ (1909) and ‘Million Man Armies’ (1911) in Robert Foley (ed.), Alfred von Schlieffen’s Military Writings (London, 2002). 7 Stig Förster, ‘Der deutsche Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges 1871–1914. Metakritik eines Mythos’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 54 (1995), pp. 61–95.

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a war, if at all possible. The Foreign Secretary between 1910 and 1912, Alfred von Kiderlen- Wächter, believed that the victor in a European war would emerge almost as damaged as the vanquished, while Bethmann Hollweg warned that war would likely benefit the SPD. Yet despite this awareness of the likely catastrophic consequences of a future European war, civilian leaders failed to question the military professionals about their plans. It is difficult to explain the absence of something, but the civilian politicians’ respect for the expertise of the General Staff and the demarcation of military operational plans from the purview of civilian leaders underlined the remarkable disjunction between the professional and the political in military policy. The General Staff, in their plans, tended to concentrate on operations rather than strategy. When General Staff officers assessed the wars fought during this period, from Manchuria to the Balkans, the focus of their interest was on battlefield performance, the impact of new technologies and the quality of troops and officers in the belligerent armies. Moreover, the wars in Manchuria and the Balkans in the decade before the First World War confirmed the utility of military force in achieving political goals. War planning is a misleading term when assessing the activities of the General Staff. Their plans amounted to a scheme for the concentration of forces and the initial operations. The officers could control these operations, which suited their professional temperament. The education of young aspiring General Staff officers was broad, but the military dimension was extremely narrow, concentrating on the tactical and operational level of military thinking. The most important section of the General Staff was the Railroad Section, which devoted its working day to poring over timetables and making the process of mobilization as smooth as possible. Only in 1891 did the Reichstag introduce standard time across Germany, which was necessary to coordinate the departures and arrivals of trains in the mobilization schedule. The self-contained rationality of the mobilization schedule brooked no political intrusion even as it created inherent political issues concerning the timing of the declaration of war. According to the officers in the General Staff, rapid mobilization before the enemy had concentrated its forces was essential to success in the initial operations. This created an incentive for a pre-emptive strike against an enemy, but undertaking a pre-emptive strike also entailed declaring war and placing Germany in the position of being the aggressor. As the French and Russian armies improved their mobilization techniques, the pressure on time was exacerbated. The competing political and military imperatives – appearing as the defender rather than the aggressor to domestic and international opinion and, on the other hand, delivering a first strike – only came to the fore at the end of the July Crisis. The geopolitical context of war planning was the likelihood of a two-front war against France and Russia, a prospect that Moltke feared as early as April 1871. The proposed solution was to concentrate German forces against one enemy, destroy its military forces and then turn against the other enemy. The calculation of where to strike first depended on the comparative rapidity of French and Russian mobilization and the space to be covered by German forces. The experience of drawn-out people’s war in 1870–71 and the construction of forts in eastern France convinced Moltke the Elder to propose a limited offensive against Russian forces, while leaving part of the German army on the defensive in the west. After 1891 German military planners identified French forces as the first target, given their superior rail network and the relatively confined spaces in Western Europe. German planners correctly assumed that French forces, inspired by the cult of the offensive and the political aim of conquering Alsace and Lorraine, would concentrate close to the border, rather than retreat into the interior. This would render French forces more vulnerable to a rapid German offensive. As Russian forces would mobilize more slowly than their French allies, the German army would have time to attack France and then return to the eastern front.

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The most famous and controversial war plan in the early twentieth century is the Schlieffen Plan. Completed in his final days in office in December 1905, the plan proposed the concentration of approximately 7/8ths of German forces, which would undertake an offensive through Belgium and the Netherlands, wheel through northern France, and position itself between the bulk of the French army and Paris. The other 1/8th of German forces would offer defensive cover in Alsace and Lorraine. The plan required immense speed, culminating with the destruction of French forces and the capture of Paris within six weeks. The plan was a product of its specific context, as well as the fruits of Schlieffen’s 15- year stint as chief of the General Staff. In late 1905 defeat in war in East Asia and revolution at home rendered Russia impotent in any European war in the immediate future. Yet even with France’s ally prostrate, Schlieffen was concerned at the relative military strength of France and Germany. The plan included divisions that did not yet exist, a feature that has led some historians to claim that Schlieffen’s real purpose was to show the need for increases in the size of the army. Recent studies by Terence Zuber have cast doubt on whether the Schlieffen plan – as people came to know it in the aftermath of the First World War – ever existed. Although Zuber’s claims have been effectively countered by other historians, notably Annika Mombauer, his arguments have shown that war plans were contingent and that it is necessary to look beyond the dry certainties declared in the text to the actual production of the text itself. The German invasion of Belgium and northern France in August 1914 reflected the general thrust of Schlieffen’s plan, though Moltke the Younger had modified it in several important ways. First he decided not to invade the Netherlands. In a drawn-out war the German economy could import materials through a neutral Netherlands, undermining the utility of the Royal Navy’s blockade. This meant that the bulk of the German army had to sweep through Belgium, a much narrower strip of territory. To speed up the advance, Moltke wanted to capture Liège, a central node of the Belgian rail network, in the first days of the war. The second significant alteration was Moltke’s decision to reduce the number of divisions on the German right wing. After the war critics claimed that Moltke had diluted Schlieffen’s recipe for victory by violating the principle of concentrating forces at a single point. Moltke wanted to strengthen the German defence of Alsace and Lorraine, and putting too many divisions on the right wing, forcing them through a confined space, risked blockages and chaos. The final change was the deployment of the 8th Army to the defence of East Prussia against Russian invasion. Moltke increased the number of troops to provide defensive cover on the eastern front. The recovery of Russian military power after 1905 alarmed German military planners, though they remained wedded to concentrating on defeating France in the first instance. In 1913 the General Staff abandoned their one alternative, a plan to attack first against Russia, on the grounds that it was unlikely that the French government would remain neutral in the case of a war between Germany and Russia. The political implication of the invasion of Belgium, guaranteed by a great power treaty since 1839, barely troubled the General Staff. From their perspective the mobilization and offensive were purely military affairs. The invasion of Belgium was discussed as an operational, not a political, problem. Much of their education and training concentrated on operational and tactical issues, rather than strategic ones. The main concern was whether an offensive through Belgium offered a greater prospect of military success than a frontal assault against fortifications in eastern France. The plan was highly risky, a gamble disguised in the precise language of railway timetables and miles covered per day. The responsibility lies not only with the officers, but also with the civilian political leaders, who failed to ask the right questions and who acquiesced in the artificial division between professional expertise and politics. Similar divisions afflicted the strategic planning of other great powers.

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Arming the German Nation

In the aftermath of the ‘wars of unification’ German liberals ascribed military success to the army’s role in embodying the German nation. Conscription, without exceptions based on status or wealth, represented both a fair and effective means of defending the nation. Other states followed the Prussian example, with Russia introducing the Miliutin reforms in 1874 and the Third Republic introducing general conscription as it restored French military power. Indeed by the eve of the First World War, the proportion of males of military age who were conscripted into the army was higher in France than in Germany. Given German fears of encirclement by Russia and France, the failure to conscript almost half of eligible men into military service represents something of an historical puzzle. Historians have offered a range of explanations for the limits on conscription inthe Kaiserreich. A recent study by Oliver Stein has questioned the argument that the army, especially the Prussian Ministry of War, as a conservative and monarchical institution deliberately excluded working-class men from the army on the grounds that they would undermine discipline with their socialist tendencies. Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, the plans to arrest socialist leaders at the outbreak of war and the role of the army as the shield of the political and social order bolstered the argument that the army manipulated recruitment patterns. Undoubtedly there were concerns about the SPD’s perceived revolutionary challenge to the Kaiserreich. Recruits who were in contact with the SPD had to report this to their commanding officers, while there were bans on the dissemination of socialist pamphlets within the army. However, Stein’s analysis shows that the primary concern of recruiting offices was the fitness of the conscript. Living in cramped quarters and inhaling poor-quality air on a daily basis meant that workers were generally in worse health than the rural population. They had higher rates of chronic disease and lower life expectancy. Social groups such as civil servants and engineers, generally considered to be reliable middle- class patriots, were also under-represented due to lower than average rates of fitness. This division between urban and rural also reflected contemporary notions about the virtues of rural life and the fear of national degeneration as German society became increasingly urbanized and industrialized – a preoccupation shared by the military in other European powers, including Britain after the Boer War. Gradually urban public health improved and the decreasing proportion of working-class recruits had levelled off before 1914. The path to the wartime cooperation of the SPD and socialist trade unions with the Kaiserreich had already begun before the war. Officers who favoured arming the nation often made clear their confidence in the loyalty of the German worker. ‘They are German soldiers’, Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian Minister of War, told the Reichstag on 5 May 1914, ‘and they will uphold German manliness, German strength, and German fidelity [Treue].’8 From the army’s perspective, the limitations on recruitment centred on the relative merits of quantity as opposed to quality. German officers did not give an absolute answer to this question, though they tended to start from the premise that quantity was essential to deliver victory. However, professional officers believed that poorly trained soldiers were ineffective and even counterproductive. The restraints on increasing the size of the army lay in the ability to train more recruits adequately. The real limitation was not the health of potential recruits, but the numbers of officers and NCOs. The latter in particular were considered to be the backbone of the German army, but it was difficult to attract them in sufficient numbers. As part of the increases in the size of the army in the early 1890s, Leo Caprivi, a general and now Chancellor, demanded improvements to pay and conditions.

8 Stein, Heeresrüstungspolitik, pp. 56–70, quote at 59.

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In other words, the German army had to compete in the labour market. The recruitment of officers also placed limits on the growth of the army, though the numbers of officers in the Prussian army increased from 15,038 in 1888 to 22,112 in 1914. Wilhelm II widened the social circles from which officers came, so that the proportion of nobles in the officer corps fell from 65 per cent to 30 per cent between 1860 and 1913. Nonetheless, the aristocracy dominated the higher ranks with 56 per cent of officers holding the rank of colonel or higher in 1913. Considerations of social rank and political loyalty were important in tailoring the increase in the number of NCOs and officers, and therefore in limiting the increase in the overall size of the German army. While issues about recruitment and training were primarily about military efficiency, there were also political limitations on the size of the army. Fiscal politics were essential to the debates about army bills. The Prussian Ministry of War had to negotiate with the Treasury (Schatzamt) and the Chancellor in advance of submitting an army bill to the Reichstag. As the Reich enjoyed only limited sources of taxation, the fiscal structure of German politics was an important restraint. Moreover, Reichstag deputies were often cautious about voting for tax increases required to pay for the army. Finally, from the late 1890s the army had to compete with the navy for budgetary resources, though this only became a source of tension after 1911. Nonetheless, the predominant political consideration in shaping armaments policy was German security. The major increases in the size of the army came in two waves: between 1887 and 1894, and in 1912 and 1913. German army bills contributed to and reflected the militarization of international politics in these years. Following the constitutional crises of the 1860s that had pitted the Prussian Diet against the government over the military budget, Bismarck and Kameke, the Minister of War, sought to introduce greater stability into military planning. The size of the army was fixed at 1 per cent of the population in the constitution, but the government still required the approval of the Reichstag to fund the military budget. While Kameke proposed an Äternat (an eternal budget), Bismarck recognized that the Reichstag would not give up its fiscal powers in perpetuity. He also opposed placing such a rigid framework on military policy, which reduced flexibility in international politics. The Septennat, or seven-year budgetary period, was Bismarck’s alternative and the Reichstag passed the law in 1874. While the seven-year period was not strictly followed, the principle of long-term military budgets remained in practice until the late 1880s. The series of increases in the size of the army between 1887 and 1894 were notable for two reasons. First, army bills became a central issue in domestic politics. This undermined the government’s practice adopted after 1871, in which the purpose was to shield military policy from public debate. By early 1887 Bismarck realized that the Reichstag might reject a new army bill, so he decided to dissolve it and hold elections. In the election campaign the proposal to increase the size of the army was a central issue. Generating popular and parliamentary support for army bills became a more pressing issue from the late 1880s. This coincided with the establishment and growth of popular nationalist associations, most notably the Pan- German League. The Prussian Ministry of War sought to retain full control of military policy, but the government gestured towards the new contours of popular politics by employing August Keim, an officer and talented writer on military affairs, to produce propaganda for the army. Wilhelm II was delighted with Keim’s 1892 brochure, entitled Why Germany Must Strengthen Its Armed Forces, condemning anyone who disputed its logic as ‘mad or traitors’.9 From the perspective of parliamentary arithmetic the government’s readiness to place the army at the centre of domestic political debate paid dividends. The 1887 election saw

9 Ibid., p. 204.

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Bismarck’s Kartell triumph, while the Reichstag passed the army bill in 1893, following elections. The 1893 bill reduced the length of military service from three to two years, but it also increased the size of the army, giving Germany a much greater reserve force for a future war – and also a further indication that German officers believed the next war would not be decided by an early decisive battle à la Sedan. The successful appeal to public opinion owed much to the genuine sense of military threat that existed in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Bismarck countered charges in 1887 that there was no need to increase the size of the army by pointing to the Boulanger movement in France, which was depicted in the German press as a turn to revanchist politics. There was also a revolution in the alliance system, as Russia dropped its alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary and concluded an alliance with France by 1894. As pan-Slavism appeared to become a more significant force in Russian politics, international relations were increasingly framed in terms of rival nationalist passions rather than the calculations of cabinet politics. The response to this uncertainty was to bolster military forces, the ultima ratio of national defence. The second period of intense armaments increases occurred in 1912 and 1913, following the Second Moroccan Crisis and in the midst of the Balkan Wars. Armaments policy was at the centre of a complex set of foreign, domestic and financial politics. The Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, sought to re-orientate German policy following the Moroccan Crisis, away from Weltpolitik to continental Europe. The construction of the fleet had succeeded in alienating Britain and undermining Germany security; Bethmann wanted to concentrate on bolstering German security on land. By pressing for increased resources for the army, Bethmann intended to scupper Tirpitz’s plans for naval construction and to lay the basis for détente between Germany and Britain. The army bills also intersected with a fiscal crisis. Bethmann and Adolf von Wermuth, the Treasury Minister, wanted to increase the imperial government’s source of income. They proposed an inheritance tax, which was opposed by conservatives and the Centre Party. By linking the army bills to fiscal policy, Bethmann intended to appeal to the instinctive support of these parties for the army. Finally, the government was coming under popular pressure to strengthen the German army. The Pan- German League devoted increasing attention to the alleged relative weakness of Germany vis-à-vis France and Russia. At their conference in Karlsruhe in late 1910, the Pan-German League agreed to promote military issues in public debate. In 1912 a new organization, the German Army League, was founded. By 1914 it had 100,000 members. In each of these areas – foreign policy, financial reform and popular propaganda – the Prussian Ministry of War reacted to pressures. Within the Prussian Ministry of War, officers were divided over the military necessity to increase the size of the army. Political interest, rather than professional military expertise, drove policy. The army bills of 1912 and 1913 increased the number of soldiers by 117,000 men, 15,000 NCOs and 4,000 officers respectively. This was by far the largest increase in the size of the German army and brought the number of recruits back to the ratio set in 1871 of 1 per cent of the population (the proportion had been reduced as a result of rapid population growth, rather than declining numbers of recruits). However, these army bills arguably exacerbated the political crises that they were designed to resolve. First, the French and Russian governments responded to the army bills by increasing their own military power. Hence the arms race weakened German security. The militarization of international relations and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 also highlighted the relative military weakness of Austria-Hungary. Second, fiscal reform failed in 1912 as conservatives rejected the linkage between army and tax increases. The reforms carried through in 1913 failed to resolve the underlying fiscal weakness of the state. Finally, the Pan-German League and the German Army League criticized the army bills as inadequate to meet the French and Russian threats. Only by arming the nation could Germany ensure its security.

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Once the 1913 bill was passed Heeringen resigned as Minister of War. His successor, Erich von Falkenhayn, was favourably disposed to further expansions in the size of the army, lamenting that up to 38,000 fit young men escaped military service every year. On the eve of the First World War German military policy remained in flux, having generated new tensions rather than resolving existing problems.

The German Army and Society

The public debates about the army bills on the eve of the First World War demonstrated the limits of professional autonomy. During the Franco-Prussian War, liberals claimed that the army represented a particularly German version of the nation-in-arms. In this iteration, patriotism, equality of sacrifice, subordination of the individual to the national good and military training were the foundation of victory over France. In recent years historians such as Ute Frevert, Frank Becker and Jakob Vogel have turned their attention towards the popular perception and public representation of the army in German society.10 The relationship between military and civilian-bourgeois (bürgerlich) institutions and values was complex, involving exchange, assimilation and confrontation. Older liberal criticisms of the army became marginal, as the business and professional middle classes praised the ethos of the officer corps. Some cast the victory over France as atriumph over narrowly conceived economic metrics that viewed war as a destroyer of wealth. Hermann Baumgarten, an historian and supporter of the National Liberals, told Heinrich von Treitschke that nothing undermined a nation more than ‘pathetic Manchesterism’, a reference to the free-trade doctrines championed by British liberals and adopted by their European counterparts in the 1860s.11 Military service transformed the soldier into a citizen, equipping him with the values and discipline to make a contribution to society. The army embodied a set of professional values shared by the professional and commercial middle classes. Training, planning and meritocracy were considered common professional military and civilian attributes. The officer corps, as noted above, also opened up its ranks to entrants from the middle classes. Yet the residual distinction between the aristocratic officer corps and the middle classes persisted. Rudolf Binding, the son of an academic and renowned wartime writer, bitterly resented his rejection from a regiment on the grounds that he was not an aristocrat, which was compounded when the same regiment chose a ‘small, weak count’.12 This resentment and sense of injured dignity was the flipside of the middle classes’ relationships with aristocratic officers. Leading middle-class families, such as the Siemens andthe Bleichröders, cultivated officers from the local élite regiments. The social prestige ofa regiment depended on the number of aristocrats within it. Marie von Bunsen, the daughter of the National Liberal deputy Georg von Bunsen, recalled how junior officers from the prestigious Garde regiments were considered the preferable dancing partners during the winter ball season.13 Wealthy families could afford to marry their daughter to an officer

10 Frank Becker, Bilder von Krieg und Nation. Die Einigungskriege in der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit Deutschlands 1864–1913 (Munich, 2001); Jakob Vogel, Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der ‘Nation im Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 1997). 11 Becker, Bilder, p. 276. 12 Stein, Heeresrüstungspolitik, p. 78. 13 Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation. Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 2001), pp. 208–9.

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from an élite regiment, who often needed the additional source of income to maintain a suitable lifestyle. The exchange of social prestige and financial security benefited both parties, but it also created tensions, born out of the resentments of mutual dependency. The image of the reckless officer, squandering his father-in-law’s hard-earned money, was the antithesis of careful middle-class values. The points of daily interaction between the officer corps and the middle classes highlighted social distinctions and tensions. Equally, within the officer corps there was vehement denunciations of materialism, associated with the economic creed of the middle classes. While officers were reluctant to have specific military issues, such as military justice, debated in public, the army embraced its representational role. At annual celebrations or in one-off events such as the commemorations of the German ‘wars of liberation’ in 1913, army parades provided a constant public spectacle. These displays embodied heroic and modern dimensions. Generals became public celebrities, victories were commemorated and the most modern weapons such as artillery were pulled through the streets. These military displays served a variety of different purposes, including political ones. The Kaiser was often prominent in the review stand, as the salute from the passing soldiers symbolized the connection between the Kaiser and the nation through the army. Representational politics also brought tensions to the fore. Hence Sedan Day was not celebrated in Alsace and Lorraine for fear of alienating the local population. Wilhelm II’s efforts to promote a cult of his grandfather through military commemorations conflicted with the interpretation of the wars of unification as a national, rather than monarchical, project. Military parades and festivals were supposed to habituate the civilian population to military values and institutions. Veterans remembered their service, families saw relatives marching in uniform and children admired the spectacle. The impact of these military displays on the civilian population was ambiguous. At the parade of the élite Gardekorps in September 1909, spectators were surprised that the soldiers were wearing the field grey uniforms. Although these uniforms had been introduced years before, the public came to the parade to be entertained as well as educated.14 While the intention of the organizers was to promote military values, the crowds often came to the parade for other purposes. In some cities the Kaiser’s Parade was a day free from work, an obvious recommendation for its popularity. Most festivals and displays also had a commercial element as drink and food vendors looked forward to bumper sales. Families viewed the parade as an opportunity for a day out. On the eve of the war observers commented that interest in military parades was waning, while the military writer Hermann Vogt suggested that the ubiquity of these events had dulled their impact on the popular imagination. The difficulty of assessing popular responses to the military raises the wider issue of the prevalence of a ‘war mentality’ in German society in the early twentieth century. Groups such as the Pan-German League and the German Army League attracted 17,000 and 90,000 members respectively on the eve of the war. Approximately three million people were members of the Kyffhäuserbund, the largest veterans’ association in the Kaiserreich. Its members included small merchants, lower ranking civil servants, peasants and workers. Yet even within these militarist associations there were distinctive attitudes towards war and peace. Thomas Rohkrämer has shown that veterans of the wars of unification favoured a powerful army as a means of deterring attack and preserving peace, whereas those who served after 1871 desired war as a means of fulfilling their self-identification as warriors. There were also members, often from the working classes, who concurred with socialist

14 Vogel, Nationen, p. 11.

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ideas about international relations, but remained in the veterans’ association because of its social benefits. Moreover, proclaiming the abstract glories of war was very different from confronting the specific prospect of war.15 A study of newspaper reports during the Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911 demonstrates that, while 60 per cent of articles claimed that war was a likely outcome, many people were resigned to war rather than longed for war.16 Between 1912 and 1914, during war crises, the SPD mobilized its supporters to protest against war. By this point the traditional antipathy between the SPD and the army had abated, so the protests were motivated by opposition to war, rather than opposition to the army. Anti-war protesters in German cities in late July 1914 outnumbered pro-war crowds. The popular reaction to the outbreak of war in 1914 was stoic and earnest, shaped by a sense of defensive patriotism. The bulk of the German population was prepared to fight a defensive war. By casting the war as a defence against Tsarist Russia’s aggression, the German government was able to generate popular consent for the war. From this perspective the significance of popular attitudes to war before 1914 was that it provided a minimum basis for popular mobilization, rather than popular opinion pushing the Chancellor and other leaders towards war.

Conclusion

In August 1914 the German army mobilized efficiently, advanced through Belgium into northern France and fended off Russian invasion into East Prussia. However, defeat at the Battle of the Marne in early September ended any slim hopes of a short, decisive war. Tactical and operational successes and strategic errors and defeats continued to characterize German military (and naval) action throughout the rest of the war. The military failures in the First World War were, in part, the result of reckless gambles prepared in the pre- war years. They also derived from the failure of military and political leaders to ask fundamental questions of each other and about the utility of war. Explaining the absence of expected relationships – in this case between civilian and military leaders – is difficult, but the failure to exchange information systematically and to tease out the military requirement for foreign policy was rooted in a rigid division of tasks between the civilian and the military sides of government, as well as the narrow professional understanding of the officer corps’ mission. Despite the isolationist tendencies inherent in professionalism, the army was very much part of German society. By the eve of the First World War the German army had woven itself into the fabric of society, including into the social relations of groups, notably the working class, which had once been viewed with suspicion. This social dimension of civil–military relations accounts, in part, for the cohesion of German society and military in the four years following the Battle of the Marne.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Afflerbach, Holger.Falkenhayn. Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (Munich, 1994).

15 Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus der ‘kleinen Leute’: Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Munich, 1990). 16 Bernhard Rosenberger, Zeitungen als Kriegstreiber? Die Rolle der Presse im Vorfeld des Ersten Weltkrieges (Cologne, 1998), pp. 188–205.

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—. ‘The Topos of Improbable War in Europe Before 1914’, in idem and David Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture Before 1914 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 161–82. Becker, Frank. Bilder von Krieg und Nation. Die Einigungskriege in der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit Deutschlands 1864–1913 (Munich, 2001). Boemeke, Manfred, Chickering, Roger and Förster, Stig (eds). Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1999). Buehrer, Tanja. ‘Chartergesellschaft, privatrechtliche Wissmann-Truppe, Kaiserliche Schutztruppe: Deutsch Ostafrika, 1885–1918’, in Stig Förster (ed.),Rückkehr der Condottieri? Krieg und Militär zwischen staatlichem Monopol und Privatisierung. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn, 2010), pp. 237–50. Chickering, Roger. ‘Der Deutsche Wehrverein und die Reform der deutschen Armee 1912– 1914’, Militärgeschichtlichen Mitteilungen, 1 (1979), pp. 7–33. —. We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984). Dülffer, Jost and Holl, Karl (eds). Bereit zum Krieg. Kriegsmentalität im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Beiträge zur historischen Friedensforschung (Göttingen, 1986). Ehlert, Hans, Epkenhans, Michael and Gross, Gerhard (eds). Der Schlieffenplan. Analyse und Dokumente (Paderborn, 2007). Eley, Geoff.Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (New Haven, 1980). Ferguson, Niall. ‘Public Finance and National Security: The Domestic Origins of the First World War Revisited’, Past & Present, 142 (1994), pp. 141–68. Foley, Robert (ed.) Alfred von Schlieffen’s Military Writings (London, 2002). —. German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916 (Cambridge, 2004). Förster, Stig. Der doppelte Militarismus. Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik zwischen Status-quo- Sicherung und Aggression, 1870–1913 (Stuttgart, 1985). —. ‘Der deutsche Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges 1871–1914. Metakritik eines Mythos’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 54 (1995), pp. 61–95. — (ed.) Helmuth von Moltke. Vom Kabinettskrieg zum Volkskrieg. Eine Werkauswahl (Bonn, 1992). Frevert, Ute. Die kasernierte Nation. Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 2001). Gerwarth, Robert and Malinowski, Stephan. ‘Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42 (2009), pp. 279–300. Geyer, Michael. Deutsche Rüstungspolitik 1860–1980 (Frankfurt, 1984). Hadley, Tim. ‘Military Diplomacy in the Dual Alliance: German Military Attaché Reporting from Vienna, 1906–1914’, War in History, 17 (2010), pp. 294–312. Hagemann, Karen and Schüler-Springorum, Stefanie (eds). Heimat – Front. Militär – und Geschlechterverhätnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Frankfurt, 2002). Herrmann, David. The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, 1996). Holmes, Terence. ‘The Reluctant March on Paris: A Reply to Terence Zuber’s “The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered”’, War in History, 8 (2001), pp. 208–32. —. ‘The Verifiable Army of the Schlieffen Plan’, War in History, 16 (2009), pp. 98–115. Hull, Isabel. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005).

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Johansen, Anja. ‘Violent Repression or Modern Strategies of Crowd Control: Soldiers as Riot Police in France and Germany, 1870–1914’, French History, 15 (2000), pp. 400–420. Kennedy, Paul (ed.) The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914 (London, 1979). — and Nicholls, Anthony (eds). Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany Before 1914 (London, 1981). Klein, Thoralf and Schumacher, Frank (eds). Kolonialkriege. Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg, 2006). Krumeich, Gerd (ed.) ‘Gott mit uns’. Nation, Religion, und Gewalt im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2000). Kühne, Thomas and Ziemann, Benjamin (eds). Was ist Militärgeschichte? (Paderborn, 2000). Leutner, Mechthild and Mühlhahn, Klaus (eds). Kolonialkrieg in China: Die Niederschlagung der Boxerbewegung 1900–1901 (Berlin, 2007). Meteling, Wencke. Ehre, Einheit, Ordnung. Preußische und französische Städte und ihre Regimenter im Krieg 1870/1 und 1914–1919 (Baden-Baden, 2010). Mombauer, Annika. Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001). —. ‘Wilhelm, Waldersee, and the Boxer Rebellion’, in idem (ed.), The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 91–118. —. ‘German War Planning’, in Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig (eds), War Planning, 1914 (Cambridge, 2010). Rohkrämer, Thomas. Der Militarismus der ‘kleinen Leute’: Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Munich, 1990). Rosenberger, Bernhard. Zeitungen als Kriegstreiber? Die Rolle der Presse im Vorfeld des Ersten Weltkrieges (Cologne, 1998). Schaller, Dominik J. ‘From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and ’, in Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008), pp. 296–324. Schmid, Michael. Der ‘eiserne Kanzler’ und die Generäle. Deutsche Rüstungspolitik in der Ära Bismarck (1871–1890) (Paderborn, 2003). Schoenbaum, David. Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1982). Stargardt, Nicholas. The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1860–1914 (Cambridge, 1994). Stein, Oliver. Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik 1890–1914. Das Militär und der Primat der Politik (Paderborn, 2007). Stevenson, David. Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914 (Oxford, 1996). —. ‘War by Timetable? The Railway Race Before 1914’, Past & Present, 162 (1999), pp. 163–94. Vogel, Jakob. Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der ‘Nation im Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 1997). Zimmerer, Jürgen. Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster, 2001). Zuber, Terence. Inventing the SchlieffenP lan: German War Planning, 1871–1914 (Oxford, 2002). — (ed.) German War Planning, 1891–1914: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2004).

397 This page has been left blank intentionally 23 The navy and the sea

Jan Rüger

germany’s relationship with the sea has been a crucial aspect of the political, social and cultural history of the Kaiserreich. imperialism, colonialism, globalization and great-power rivalry were but a few of the late nineteenth-century developments that were decidedly maritime in character. The Kaiser’s navy itself was seen as ‘a microcosm of society’ from early on.1 it played a key role in the debates that have shaped the historiography of imperial germany, be they about the interpretation of militarism and imperialism, the relationship between domestic and foreign policy, the origins of the first world war or the Sonderweg. most of these debates have taken a number of turns since the 1970s, but the Kaiser’s fleet continues to be a contentious subject. Moreover, the field has been broadened out methodologically, involving new approaches that go beyond the traditional focus on the navy. As a result, the history of germany’s relationship with the sea has turned into a vibrant field in which different historiographies intersect. This includes not only naval, diplomatic, social and cultural history, but also transnational and global approaches as well as scholarship concerned with gender, technology and the environment. The following survey examines the key debates that have framed the field and illustrates the historiographical diversity that is now associated with it.

German Navalism ever since eckart Kehr’s path-breaking study on the relationship between domestic politics and naval expansion, three related questions have been at the heart of the debate about the Wilhelmine fleet.2 First, was the German navy an expression of domestic conflict, a tool through which the ruling elite, faced with significant socio-political challenges, aimed to cement their grip on power? second, should the imperial navy be seen as a prime example of a peculiar form of german militarism? And third, did the rapid building of the Kaiser’s fleet permanently alienate Britain and hence contribute to the underlying causes of the first world war? For Kehr there was little doubt that these questions offered the key to an understanding of Germany’s naval and imperial ambitions before 1914. In his view, it was domestic conflict rather than international rivalry that explained why the Kaiserreich’s leaders had embarked on the costly project of building up a battle fleet that was to be second only to the Royal

1 Keith W. Bird, German Naval History: A Guide to the Literature (new york, 1985), p. 3. 2 eckart Kehr, Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik 1894–1901. Versuch eines Querschnitts durch die innenpolitischen, sozialen und ideologischen Voraussetzungen des deutschen Imperialismus (Berlin, 1930); idem, Der Primat der Innenpolitik. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur preußisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1970). The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Navy. The rallying of otherwise divergent political forces against the perceived threat of Social Democracy and thus the preservation of the social and political status quo: these, Kehr argued, were the key aims of the ruling elite. In the navy they found a project that could unite and integrate an increasingly divergent society, if at the cost of creating external conflict. The Kaiser’s fleet was, in this interpretation, first and foremost a project in the stabilization of the Wilhelmine system of rule. When Kehr put forward this interpretation in Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik (1930), most in the historiographical establishment rejected it, dismayed at the radicalism and Marxist leanings that his analysis betrayed.3 However, Kehr’s work had considerable influence in the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of West German historians rediscovered it (see also Chapter 21). Volker Berghahn’s study of the Tirpitz Plan (1971), though addressing a broader historiographical context, built on Kehr in that he interpreted the navy as an instrument of domestic politics. The fleet, Berghahn argued, had been directed as much against the Reichstag as against Britain. The naval programme devised by Tirpitz was, as the book’s title suggested, a strategy designed to defuse the Kaiserreich’s ‘domestic crisis’.4 Hans-Ulrich Wehler continued this line of argument in his seminal Das deutsche Kaiserreich (1973). Wehler interpreted the navy as a tool of ‘social imperialism’, a project designed to unite economic and political interests as well as integrate the voting masses in order to counter the rising influence of parliament and Social Democracy: the naval programme had been devised in order to rally the voting masses and the aspiring middle classes behind the Hohenzollern monarchy at a moment of acute crisis. This crisis was, first and foremost, provoked by the ruling elite’s stubborn resistance against all attempts at political modernization. Wehler thus agreed with Berghahn that Germany’s expansionism had to be understood as a function of domestic politics, rather than as a reaction to the changing international constellation that characterized the age of empire: Weltpolitik was Innenpolitik in this sense.5 Numerous diplomatic historians objected to this ‘Kehrite’ interpretation.6 They found it difficult to accept that a strategic gamble of the magnitude of the Tirpitz Plan had been undertaken primarily for domestic reasons. Surely the primacy of foreign politics, established in the nineteenth century as a widely accepted dogma, still held fundamentally true. The Kaiserreich’s leaders had embarked on naval expansion and Weltpolitik not in order to create a red-herring for ‘the masses’, but to achieve the international status and prestige that they saw as befitting Germany in this period: sea power was a translation of economic clout and great-power ambition. Domestic factors may have complicated foreign policy, but they did not explain, at least not sufficiently, why Germany decided to extend its claim to the sea so dramatically in the imperial age. They certainly did not account for the kind of navy that the

3 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Eckart Kehr’, in Deutsche Historiker, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 100–113. 4 Volker Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan: Genesis und Verfall einer innenpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II. (Düsseldorf, 1971). 5 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich (Stuttgart, 1973), pp. 165–70, 176–9, 184–92. Similarly, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy Before 1914’, Central European History, 6 (1973), pp. 3–43; idem, Großmachtstellung und Weltpolitik 1870–1914. Die Außenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches (Frankfurt, 1993), pp. 140–41; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995), pp. 1129–37. 6 On the label ‘Kehrite’, first coined by Wolfgang Mommsen in 1973 and rejected by some of the participants in the debate, see Mommsen, ‘Domestic Factors’; Geoff Eley, ‘Die “Kehrites” und das Kaiserreich: Bemerkungen zu einer aktuellen Kontroverse’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 4 (1978), pp. 91–107; Richard J. Evans, ‘The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution’, New Left Review, 149 (1985), pp. 76–7.

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leaders of the Kaiserreich decided to build: a fleet that was primarily directed against Britain rather than focused on overseas colonial service.7 The debate about the causes of German naval expansionism reached its climax in the 1980s as part of the Sonderweg controversy. While it has not entirely died down since then, the dichotomy between domestic and foreign policy seems decidedly outdated now. Few historians would argue these days that the Tirpitz Plan, and German imperialism more generally, were primarily expressions of a domestic crisis in which the ruling elite sought to defend the status quo against the spectre of parliamentary democracy. Most recent interpretations seek instead to explain Wilhelmine navalism in a combination of domestic and foreign contexts. It is surely a sign of an emerging new consensus that scholars who reject the idea of the navy as embodying a German Sonderweg now overtly use ‘Kehrite’ concepts such as ‘social imperialism’, leaving little doubt that integral to the navy’s quest for world-power status was a domestic agenda of state- and nation-building.8 This applies in particular to the key figure who continues to loom large in this field: Admiral von Tirpitz. The recent historiography, including the first comprehensive scholarly biography to be written about the admiral,9 portrays the architect of the imperial navy as a masterful technocrat and tactician who manipulated the press and managed the Reichstag like few others did in his period. He skilfully exploited the impact that the rapidly expanding navy had as a magnet for middle-class aspirations, but he did so primarily in pursuit of a strategy that was international in character: to build up an instrument of power that would secure Germany’s great-power status by engaging the British in a tightly run arms race, aimed at coercing them into accommodating the Kaiserreich as an equal partner.10 A second challenge to the ‘Kehrite’ interpretation of German navalism came from historians concerned not with international relations, but with the distribution of power in Imperial Germany. Geoff Eley in particular argued forcefully against the notion that the navy simply expressed the government’s will to manipulate the electorate ‘from above’. He agreed that Tirpitz and his admirals had been keen to stir enthusiasm for the navy, but navalism was more than the result of propaganda: for Eley it was just as much created ‘from below’, especially through popular organizations such as the Navy League (Flottenverein). This new radical right, which rose in the last decade of the nineteenth century to become an important factor in Wilhelmine politics, could challenge the government as well as support it. Naval expansionism was thus not so much a product of government manipulation, but rather an expression of the ‘self-mobilization’ of a significant part of the middle classes.11

7 Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich. Deutsche Aussenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler, 1871–1945 (Stuttgart, 1995), pp. 258–60; Gregor Schöllgen, Imperialismus und Gleichgewicht. Deutschland, England und die orientalische Frage 1871–1914, 3rd edn (Munich, 2000); Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich, 1992), pp. 242–7. For a more detailed survey of the debate about the primacy of foreign politics, see Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1871–1918 (Munich, 1994), pp. 93–106. 8 Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War I (Ithaca, 2012), pp. 234–9. 9 Patrick J. Kelly, Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy (Bloomington, 2011). Michael Salewski’s brief account, Tirpitz: Aufstieg, Macht, Scheitern (Göttingen, 1979), remains useful. 10 Apart from Patrick Kelly’s book, the most important recent studies are Rolf Hobson, Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875–1914 (Boston, 2002), and Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age. 11 Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (New Haven and London, 1980); idem, ‘Some Thoughts on the Nationalist Pressure Groups’, in Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (eds), Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany Before 1914 (London, 1981), pp. 40–67; Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), pp. 85–153.

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This argument was part of the larger challenge that Eley mounted, together with David Blackbourn, against the ‘Kehrite’ interpretation of Imperial Germany.12 In the course of the debate the argument became increasingly focused on the opposition between ‘manipulation from above’ and ‘mobilization from below’. Arguably this ‘rather prevented new questions from being fruitfully generated and pursued’, as Eley put it 16 years after his landmark study Reshaping the German Right (1980) had come out.13 Since then scholars have begun to focus on other actors and sources of power. The press and popular culture, consumption and advertising played roles that were less clearly defined, but just as influential as government protagonists and the radical right.14 Projecting the Reich beyond its boundaries and claiming the sea as a sphere of German influence was an immensely popular activity precisely because it was not the prerogative of one agency: a range of actors (official and private, commercial and governmental, local and national) drove this process without having to agree on an aim.15 This reassessment of the power relations at the heart of the navy’s public role has gone hand-in-hand with the reinterpretation of the second key question that has dominated research in this field: was the imperial navy a prime example of German militarism and hence symbolic of the Sonderweg, the ‘special path’? Contemporaries of the Kaiserreich who were critical of the government often described the fleet as a symbol of the undue power that the military seemed to exert over German society.16 The ‘Kehrite’ historians pushed this interpretation further, portraying the navy as the ‘epitome of German militarism’.17 Wehler and others argued that this was a form of militarism that was peculiar to Germany, at least when compared to France, Britain and the US. This was the case not only constitutionally, but also socially and culturally.18 From the 1980s onwards a number of scholars tested this thesis in detailed studies of the German army and its role in society, but it took much longer for similar work on the navy to come out.19

12 For recent surveys of the Sonderweg debate, see Matthew Jefferies,C ontesting the German Empire 1871–1918 (London, 2008), chapter 1; H. Glenn Penny, ‘The Fate of the Nineteenth Century in German Historiography’, Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008), pp. 81–108; Helmut Walser Smith, ‘When the Sonderweg Debate Left Us’, German Studies Review, 31 (2008), pp. 225–40; James J. Sheehan, ‘Paradigm Lost? The Sonderweg Revisited’, in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz (eds), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 150–60; Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005), pp. 65–81. 13 Geoff Eley, ‘Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?’, in idem (ed.),Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), p. 13. 14 While Wilhelm Deist, Flottenpolitik und Flottenpropaganda. Das Nachrichtenbureau des Reichsmarineamtes 1897–1914 (Stuttgart, 1976) had concentrated on the manipulation of public opinion as directed ‘from above’, recent work stresses the independence of the press. See Gunda Stöber, Pressepolitik als Notwendigkeit. Zum Verhältnis von Staat und Öffentlichkeit im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914 (Stuttgart, 2000); Martin Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal. Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin, 2005); Dominik Geppert, Pressekriege. Öffentlichkeit und Diplomatie in den deutsch-britischen Beziehungen 1896–1912 (Munich, 2007); Frank Bösch, Öffentliche Geheimnisse. Skandale, Politik und Medien in Deutschland und Großbritannien 1880–1914 (Munich, 2009). 15 Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 50–139. 16 For examples, see Rüger, Great Naval Game, pp. 125–6. 17 Emilio Willems, A Way of Life and Death: Three Centuries of Prussian-German Militarism (Nashville, 1986), p. 89. 18 For a reiteration of this position, see Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, pp. 880– 85. For a detailed survey of the historiography on ‘German militarism’, see the chapter by Benjamin Ziemann in this volume. 19 Stig Förster, Der doppelte Militarismus. Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik zwischen Status-quo- Sicherung und Aggression 1890–1913 (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 75–207; Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus

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Despite a number of recent comparative studies that address this gap, the debate about militarism seems far from resolved.20 It hinges ultimately on the question of definition.21 If ‘militarism’ is meant to encapsulate a general prominence of the military forces in society, a popular liking for pomp and pageantry, then the German navy seems not much different from other cases. A similar ‘militarist culture’ in which the nation’s claim to the sea was celebrated existed in most countries who had a tradition of or aspiration to become a sea power with global influence in the late nineteenth century.22 In the same vein, if ‘militarism’ is meant to describe the ambitions and activities of a technocratic elite bent on naval expansion, there is little that distinguished the Kaiserreich from other nations.23 However, the picture is less clear-cut when ‘militarism’ is taken to refer to the structures of government within which those leading the armed forces had to operate. Here scholars continue to acknowledge fundamental differences: based on the constitutional set-up and Tirpitz’s relationship with the Kaiser, the German navy was able to escape what it saw as undue civilian interference in a way that was unknown in London, Washington or Paris. In as far as the relationship between civilian and military spheres of society and government is concerned, a good case can be made for Imperial Germany to be more militarist than Britain, France or the USA.24

Anglo-German Antagonism

Did the German naval build-up alienate Britain permanently, thereby contributing to the long-term causes of the First World War? This, the third key question that has dominated the historiography on the Kaiser’s fleet, continues to be the subject of considerable controversy. After the First World War a number of historians and most in the naval establishment had defended Tirpitz: the admiral had not intended the navy as a weapon against Britain; he was not to be blamed for the deterioration in Anglo-German relations, even less so for Britain siding with France and Russia in 1914. Aspects of this apologetic tradition, which Tirpitz himself had begun with the publication of his memoirs in 1919,25 were revived after der ‘kleinen Leute’. Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871–1914 (Munich, 1990); Jakob Vogel, Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der ‘Nation in Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 1997); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2004). 20 Hobson, Imperialism at Sea follows a loosely comparative framework, but concentrates on Imperial Germany. More stringently comparative, though limited to bi-national case studies, are: Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age; Rüger, Great Naval Game; and Nicolas Wolz, Das lange Warten: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher und britischer Seeoffiziere, 1914 bis 1918 (Paderborn, 2008). 21 On definitions, see Nicholas Stargardt,The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866–1914 (Cambridge, 1994); Werner Conze and Michael Geyer, ‘Militarismus’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.H istorisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1978), pp. 1–47; Volker R. Berghahn,M ilitarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861–1979 (Leamington Spa, 1981). 22 Charles Schencking, Making Waves: Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868–1922 (Stanford, 2005); James A. Reckner, Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet: The World Cruise of the American Battlefleet, 1907–1909 (Annapolis, 1988); Rüger, Great Naval Game; Anne Summers, ‘Militarism in Britain Before the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, 2 (1976), pp. 104–23. 23 Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age; Hobson, Imperialism at Sea. 24 Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age, pp. 305–7; Rüger, Great Naval Game, p. 137. 25 Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (Leipzig, 1919); idem, Politische Dokumente. Der Aufbau der deutschen Weltmacht (Stuttgart, 1924); Ulrich von Hassell,Tirpitz: SeinL eben und Wirken mit Berücksichtigung

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1945 when Walther Hubatsch and others argued that the impact of the Wilhelmine naval programme on Britain could not have been foreseen.26 This older historiography was radically revised by Jonathan Steinberg and Volker Berghahn, who demonstrated that the navy had been directed against Britain from early on.27 Tirpitz had explicitly planned a battle fleet which would have its operational focus in the North Sea. When presenting the blueprint of the new navy to Wilhelm II in June 1897, the admiral had been clear that Britain was ‘the enemy against which we most urgently require a certain measure of naval force as a political power factor’.28 The Kaiser’s fleet was to be that factor. Once it had reached its full strength, it would be too risky for the Royal Navy to attack it. It was the intended aim of this ‘risk strategy’ that Britain would have to make wide-ranging concessions regarding Germany’s global role. Until then the Germans would have to build the fleet as rapidly as possible, while not alarming Britain, lest it pre-emptively attack the imperial navy in a modern-day ‘Kopenhagen’.29 During that period of danger, the Gefahrenzone, the Germans had to ‘keep quiet and build ships’.30 A number of scholars subsequently added important aspects to this explanation, notably Wilhelm Deist, Paul Kennedy, Ivo Lambi, Michael Epkenhans and Rolf Hobson, establishing a broad consensus about the Tirpitz Plan as directed against Britain.31 While this consensus has remained essentially unchallenged, the effect which the Tirpitz Plan had on Anglo-German relations and the European balance of power continues to be a contentious issue. For Steinberg, Berghahn and Kennedy the impact of the German naval build-up was a transformative one: not only did the Kaiser’s battle fleet force Britain into a costly arms race with Germany, but it also motivated a broader foreign policy realignment. Faced with a rival who seemed resolved to build a force that the British might not be able to defeat in the future, London turned to France and Russia. Settling colonial conflicts with its imperial rivals allowed Britain to concentrate more forces in home waters and signalled the beginning of the entente which eventually stood against Germany in the First World War. Tirpitz’s grand strategy had thus resulted in the opposite of what it had been aimed at: rather than create opportunities for German Weltpolitik, it closed down the Reich’s options dramatically. When the failure of the Tirpitz Plan became evident in the years before the war, Germany was seiner Beziehungen zu (Stuttgart, 1920); , Grossadmiral von Tirpitz. Flottenbau und Reichsgedanke (Breslau, 1932); Hans Hallmann, Der Weg zum deutschen Schlachtflottenbau (Stuttgart, 1933). 26 Walther Hubatsch, Die Ära Tirpitz. Studien zur deutschen Marinepolitik, 1890–1918 (Göttingen, 1955). See also Michael Epkenhans, ‘Walter Görlitz und Walther Hubatsch: Zu den Anfängen und Problemen der Militärgeschichtsschreibung in der frühen Bundesrepublik’, in Hans Ehlert (ed.), Deutsche Militärhistoriker von Hans Delbrück bis Andreas Hillgruber (, 2010), pp. 53–68. 27 Jonathan Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (London, 1965); Berghahn, Tirpitz-Plan. 28 Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent, appendix, p. 209: ‘Allgemeine Gesichtspunkte bei der Feststellung unserer Flotte nach Schiffsklassen und Schiffstypen’, June 1897, dubbed ‘Tirpitz-Memorandum’ by Steinberg. 29 Jonathan Steinberg, ‘The Copenhagen Complex’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1 (1966), pp. 23–46. 30 Tirpitz, Politische Dokumente, p. 16, n. 1. 31 Deist, Flottenpolitik und Flottenpropaganda; Salewski, Tirpitz; Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (London, 1980); idem, ‘Strategic Aspects of the Anglo-German Naval Race’, in idem, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945 (London, 1983), pp. 127–60; Ivo Nikolai Lambi, The Navy and German Power Politics, 1862–1914 (Boston, 1984); Michael Epkenhans, Die wilhelminische Flottenrüstung 1908–1914. Weltmachtstreben, industrieller Fortschritt, soziale Integration (Munich, 1991); Gary Weir, Building the Kaiser’s Navy: The Imperial Naval Office and German Industry in the von Tirpitz Era, 1890–1919 (Annapolis, 1992); François-Emmanuel Brézet, Le plan Tirpitz, 1897–1914: une flotte de combat allemande contre l’Angleterre (Paris, 1998); Hobson, Imperialism at Sea; Kelly, Tirpitz.

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internationally isolated and weakened – Bismarck’s nightmare, the cauchemar des coalitions, had become true.32 This reading, canonized in the 1980s as a key element in the ‘rise of the Anglo-German antagonism’, has since been challenged by the revisionist interpretation of British foreign policy.33 Niall Ferguson, Keith Wilson and others have argued that concerns about the Russian threat to the empire mattered far more for British policy-making than the Kaiserreich. If officials in London had talked with alarm about Germany publicly, especially during the naval scare of 1909, this should not be taken at face value: behind this façade, Whitehall was more focused on safeguarding the future of the empire. A bogey German menace made it easier for the Admiralty to secure its budget and the Foreign Office to explain its rapprochement with Russia and France. The ‘German enemy’ had been based on invention, rather than a realistic assessment of threat. Historians such as Kennedy and Hildebrand had thus vastly overestimated the impact of the German naval challenge on British foreign policy.34 This position was supported by Jon Sumida’s and Nicholas Lambert’s work on British naval policy before 1914.35 They argued that the changes effected under Admiral Fisher, often seen as Tirpitz’s key adversary, had only indirectly to do with Germany. The Admiralty had to reckon with a number of potential enemies, of which the Germans were rarely the most prominent. Its focus was on the empire rather than the North Sea, which the Royal Navy never doubted it would be able to dominate. This was the case with the ‘Dreadnought revolution’, which was insufficiently explained as a direct response to Tirpitz’s programme;36 and it was the case with the redistribution of the fleet announced by Fisher in November 1904, which had more to do with imperial factors than the German threat. Both moments – the introduction of the Dreadnought and the redistribution of the fleet – could thus no longer be explained as milestones in the rise of the Anglo-German antagonism in the way in which Arthur Marder and Paul Kennedy had done in their seminal work.37 This revisionist interpretation has in turn been challenged by historians who continue to emphasize the importance of the German naval threat for British naval thinking. Michael Epkenhans has argued that both Lambert and Sumida seem to underestimate the impact

32 Despite all differences regarding the underlying motivation behind the Tirpitz Plan, a consensus has existed amongst German historians about this point. See Hildebrand, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1871–1918, p. 34; Epkenhans, Flottenrüstung, p. 400; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, p. 1137; Michael Stürmer, German Empire (London, 2002), p. 73; Gregor Schöllgen, Jenseits von Hitler. Die Deutschen in der Weltpolitik von Bismarck bis heute (Berlin, 2005), p. 84. 33 For a broader survey, see Jan Rüger, ‘Revisiting the Anglo-German Antagonism’, Journal of Modern History, 83 (2011), pp. 579–617. 34 Keith Wilson, The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904– 1914 (Cambridge, 1985); idem, ‘Great Britain’, in idem (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914, 2nd edn (London, 2003), pp. 175–208; Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998); Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford, 1995). See also Andreas Rose, Zwischen Empire und Kontinent. Britische Außenpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2011); and Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2013), pp. 159–66. 35 Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (Boston, 1989); idem, ‘British Naval Administration and Policy in the Age of Fisher’, Journal of Modern History, 54 (1990), pp. 1–26; idem, ‘Sir John Fisher and the Dreadnought: The Sources of Naval Mythology’, Journal of Military History, 59 (1995), pp. 619–37; Nicholas A. Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia, SC, 1999). 36 See also Charles H. Fairbanks Jr, ‘The Origins of the Dreadnought Revolution: A Historiographical Essay’, International History Review, 13 (1991), pp. 246–72. 37 A.J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. 1: The Road to War, 1900–1914 (Oxford, 1961); Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism.

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of the development of the High Seas Fleet upon British policy-makers. In spite of their fear of Russia, Germany – at least after 1905 – seemed a greater danger to British interests than the Tsarist empire.38 Matthew Seligmann and Christopher Bell have also defended the older interpretation associated with Kennedy and Marder. At the height of the naval race the Admiralty was focused on the German threat not only in rhetoric, but also in substance: it had largely accurate information about the German threat;39 Fisher’s redistribution of the fleet was at least in part a reaction to Tirpitz’s build-up;40 British concerns that Germany threatened its naval supremacy and aimed at European hegemony may have been amplified by the Admiralty,41 but they were not invented.42 The Kaiser’s fleet was, in this reading, not the only factor that mattered for the Admiralty, but nor was it subsidiary to considerations concerning Russia and France.43 It is easy to see why this debate, which has occasionally been heated,44 has a wider significance. Key questions about the reorientation of the UK’s foreign policy before 1914 hinge on the way in which historians interpret the British response to Germany’s naval expansion. If the Royal Navy never expected the Germans to be able to seriously tip the balance of power in the North Sea; if the Foreign Office was much more worried about Russia than it was about Germany, even after the Japanese had defeated the Russian navy at Tsushima in 1905; if the ‘German enemy’ was talked up by Whitehall not out of concern for what Tirpitz intended, but in order to make the rapprochement with France and Russia palatable to the British public, then the Tirpitz Plan might be seen as much less significant than the established interpretation associated with ‘the rise of the Anglo-German antagonism’ suggests. Had the Germans vastly overestimated the effect their navy would have on the British? And did a generation of historians represented by Kennedy, Steinberg and Berghahn get it similarly wrong? The jury is still out on these questions, but it is fair to say that a broader reconsideration of the Anglo-German relationship before 1914 has set in. As part of it, diplomatic historians have examined the years immediately before the outbreak of the war. Their work makes clear that the naval race seriously damaged Anglo-German relations, but only temporarily so: between 1909 and 1912 it became evident that Tirpitz would not manage to challenge

38 Michael Epkenhans, ‘The Naval Race Before 1914: Was a Peaceful Outcome Thinkable?’, in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture Before 1914 (Oxford and New York, 2007), p. 129, note 17. 39 Matthew S. Seligmann, ‘Intelligence Information and the 1909 Naval Scare: The Secret Foundations of a Public Panic’, War in History, 17 (2010), pp. 37–59. 40 Matthew S. Seligmann, ‘A Prelude to the Reforms of Admiral Sir John Fisher: The Creation of the Home Fleet, 1902–3’, Historical Research, 83 (2010), pp. 506–19. 41 Rüger, Great Naval Game, pp. 220–21; T.G. Otte, ‘Grey Ambassador: The Dreadnought and British Foreign Policy’, in Robert Blyth, Andrew Lambert and Jan Rüger (eds), The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age (Farnham, 2011), p. 59. 42 Mathew S. Seligmann, Spies in Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the First World War (Oxford, 2006); idem, ‘Switching Horses: The Admiralty’s Recognition of the Threat from Germany, 1900–1905’, and idem, ‘New Weapons for New Targets: Sir John Fisher, the Threat from Germany, and the Building of HMS Dreadnought and HMS Invincible, 1902–1907’, both in International History Review, 30 (2008), pp. 239–58, 303–31. See also Shawn T. Grimes, Strategy and War Planning in the British Navy, 1887–1918 (Woodbridge, 2012). 43 Christopher M. Bell, ‘Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution Reconsidered: Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–14’, War in History, 18 (2011), pp. 333–56; Matthew S. Seligmann,The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901–1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War Against Germany (Oxford, 2012). 44 Nicholas A. Lambert, ‘On Standards: A Reply to Christopher Bell’, War in History, 19 (2012), pp. 217–40; Christopher M. Bell, ‘On Standards and Scholarship: A Response to Nicholas Lambert’, War in History, 20 (2013), pp. 381–409.

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the Royal Navy’s lead. The source of European tension shifted from naval rivalry to the arms race on the Continent.45 Berlin and London therefore had a shared interest in finding new forms of co-operation and détente, which led them to defuse a number of international crises.46 On the basis of this research, the direct causal link between Anglo-German naval confrontation and the First World War appears decidedly less compelling than it had to historians working in the 1970s and 1980s.

Expanding the Field

While the debate about the Kaiser’s navy and its impact on Britain reflects a traditional historiographical preoccupation with the Tirpitz Plan and Anglo-German relations, a number of other initiatives have transcended the field in recent years chronologically, geographically and methodologically. The phase between Tirpitz’s appointment (1897) and the end of the First World War used to be the focus of most studies of German navalism. Only slowly did historians extend this periodization backwards to include the early decades of the Kaiserreich, and indeed the 1840s to 1860s. The revolution of 1848 provided an intriguing conjuncture, when the attempt at parliamentarization and democratization intersected with a vigorous discussion of Germany’s role abroad and the need for a strong navy. Many of the delegates in the revolutionary who discussed the shape of a democratic and unified Germany envisaged this future nation-state to have strong interests in overseas expansion: there was no a priori contradiction between liberalism and imperialism.47 Investigating these continuities allows us to understand better why the navy became such a successful symbol of national unity and an expression of middle-class aspirations towards the end of the century. It also makes it possible for us to question how much of a watershed the accession of Wilhelm II and the appointment of Tirpitz constituted.48 In the light of recent research, the Tirpitz era looks less unique and more in line with a tradition in which thinking about German national unity and overseas expansion went hand-in-hand. Far from constituting a break with the earlier nineteenth century, the Kaiser’s navy could build on (and was carefully advertised as building on) earlier attempts at establishing Germany on the ‘parade ground of the nations’, as Friedrich List had called the sea in 1843.49 In exploring these continuities historians working on Germany’s relationship with the sea have begun to cast their net more widely, not only chronologically, but also geographically. The traditional focus, from Eckart Kehr to Paul Kennedy and beyond, has been on the North Sea and the naval arms race. But the recent historiography on German colonialism demonstrates that there is a need to examine the imperial navy not only as an expression

45 David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe (Princeton, 1996); David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914 (Oxford, 1996). 46 Holger Afflerbach, Der Dreibund. Europäische Großmacht- und Allianzpolitik vor dem ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna, 2002); Friedrich Kießling, Gegen den ‘großen Krieg’? Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen 1911–1914 (Munich, 2002); William Mulligan, ‘We Can’t Be More Russian than the Russians: British Policy in the Liman von Sanders Crisis, 1913–14’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 17 (2006). 47 Matthew Fitzpatrick, ‘A Fall from Grace? National Unity and the Search for Naval Power and Colonial Possessions 1848–1884’, German History, 25 (2007), pp. 135–61; idem, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (Oxford and New York, 2008). 48 See also David H. Olivier, German Naval Strategy 1856–1888: Forerunners of Tirpitz (London, 2004); Lawrence Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik: German Sea Power Before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis, 1997); Jörg Duppler, Der Juniorpartner. England und die Entwicklung der Deutschen Marine (Herford, 1985). 49 Georg Friedrich List, ‘Die deutsche Flagge’, Das Zollvereinsblatt, 2 (8 January 1843), pp. 17–20.

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of Anglo-German rivalry, but also as a global vehicle of imperialism.50 How, then, do we relate the emphasis on the North Sea as the focus of the navy’s ‘greatest military potential’, as Tirpitz put it famously in his memorandum of June 1897,51 to the diverging scales of investigation suggested by the new colonial and global histories? This question seems all the more pertinent since Germany’s historical relationship with the sea has ceased to be a field in which one approach or methodology dominates. When Keith Bird wrote his comprehensive guide to the literature in the 1980s, it went without saying for him that the navy would be the focus of anyone working on the Kaiserreich’s claim to the sea. The emphasis was unapologetically on the leading cast of statesmen and admirals, on politics and diplomacy as well as strategy and technology.52 This focus seems outdated now. Naval historians have begun to integrate their traditional interests with the new directions taken in other parts of historiography. Social, cultural, gender and world historians, in turn, have discovered the navy and the sea as important arenas in which to examine the developments that they are concerned with. This methodological opening of the field can be seen particularly well when considering the effect which the ‘cultural turn’ has had on studies of the navy and the sea.53 Tirpitz himself saw the sea as a Kulturgebiet, a ‘cultural space’.54 Warships were not only military instruments, but also rhetorical or symbolical vehicles, through which to impress audiences abroad and at home with the nation’s global mission. Only recently have historians followed this insight more extensively. Their argument – namely that sea power ought to be understood not only in the context of strategy, technology and policy, but also in cultural terms – is based on two insights. First, culture had an eminently political dimension in the ‘age of the masses’. The new popular press, advertising and the rising cinema catered to an audience that had a new political function since the advent of universal manhood suffrage. Tirpitz and his public relations department were acutely aware of this: popularizing the navy in a broader social and cultural arena became a key political necessity.55 Second, the Kaiser’s fleet played a symbolic role not only for domestic, but also for foreign audiences in this period, often described as the first modern ‘cold war’.56 The imperial navy was constructed to deter potential enemies from

50 Stefan Manz, ‘Nationalism Gone Global: The “Hauptverein Deutscher Flottenvereine im Auslande” 1898–1918’, German History, 30 (2012), pp. 199–221; Bradley Naranch, ‘Made in China: Austro-Prussian Overseas Rivalry and the Global Unification of the German Nation’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 56 (2010), pp. 367–81; idem, ‘Between Cosmopolitanism and German Colonialism: Nineteenth-Century Hanseatic Networks in Emerging Tropical Markets’, in Margrit Schulte-Beerbühl and Andreas Gestrich (eds), Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914 (London, 2011), pp. 99–132. On the new colonial history of nineteenth-century Germany, see Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, 1997); Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox and Susanne Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998); Alexander Honold and Klaus R. Scherpe (eds), ‘Mit Deutschland um die Welt’. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit (Stuttgart, 2004). 51 Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent, appendix, p. 209. 52 Bird, German Naval History. A similar presupposition characterized Stig Förster’s succinct survey a decade later: Stig Förster, ‘The Armed Forces and Military Planning’, in Roger Chickering (ed.), Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion (Westport, 1996). 53 On the rise of cultural history, see Peter Burke, What is Cultural History?, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008). 54 Tirpitz, Erinnerungen, p. 16. 55 Deist, Flottenpolitik und Flottenpropaganda; Juerg Meyer, Die Propaganda der deutschen Flottenbewegung 1897–1900 (Bern, 1967). 56 Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent; Volker R. Berghahn, Rüstung und Machtpolitik. Zur Anatomie des ‘kalten Krieges’ vor 1914 (Düsseldorf, 1973).

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attack through its mere existence. But for this instrument of deterrence to work in the age of mass media, it had to be seen. The public staging of the navy catered to this need: sea power was as much about performance and display as it was about technology and operational capabilities.57 Another key impulse for the broadening of the field has been the rise of transnational and world history. If the sea was ‘the vital gateway to a more interconnected world’,58 it is easy to see why maritime history matters for scholars working on the global past. Particular oceans are now routinely used as the geographical spaces within which to study migration, trade and empire-building: maritime history has become world history.59 The navy is only one amongst a number of actors that play a role in this flourishing ‘new maritime history’. Commercial and passenger shipping, maritime communication, ports, islands and the environmental history of the sea have become increasingly important subjects, mostly studied as decidedly transnational in character.60 Yet there remains a tension between the function that the sea has acquired in world history on the one hand and the older tradition of maritime history associated with Fernand Braudel on the other.61 How does the aim to analyse oceans as spaces of world history square with the Braudellian idea of the sea as conditioning a regionally specific historical context? Are the seascapes of the past to be appreciated in their peculiar characteristics or should maritime history be understood primarily as a function of world history, giving a convenient spatial definition to investigations which would otherwise have little geographical focus at all? One answer may be found in the historicization of ‘the ocean’ which has gathered steam in the past decade or so and can be seen as a central tenet of the ‘new maritime history’.62 Deconstructing the ways in which the sea was conceptualized in specific contexts in the past might allow us to bring together some of the historiographies sketched above.63 This approach could also become instrumental in shifting the focus away from the national narrative that

57 Rüger, Great Naval Game, pp. 203–10. 58 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History (London, 2007), p. 28. 59 Daniel Finamore (ed.), Maritime History as Global History (Gainesville, 2004). For recent examples, see Sunil S. Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2006); H.P. Ray and E.A. Alpers (eds), Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World (Oxford, 2007); Kenneth McPherson (ed.), Maritime India (Oxford, 2004); Philip de Souza, Seafaring and Civilization: Maritime Perspectives on World History (London, 2001). 60 Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2012); John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York, 2004); Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Kären Wigen (eds), Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, 2008); Helen M. Rozwadowski and David K. van Keuren (eds), The Machine in Neptune’s Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment (Sagamore Beach, MA, 2004). 61 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II, 3 vols (Paris, 1949), abridged and translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sîan Reynolds, 2 vols (Berkeley, 1995). See also Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz and Geoffrey Symcox (eds), Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800 (Toronto, 2010); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and “the New Thalassology”’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 722–40. 62 Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun (eds), Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York, 2004); Kären Wigen, ‘Oceans of History’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 717–21. 63 For influential examples, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987); Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001); Gillis, Islands of the Mind; Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840 (Berkeley, 1994).

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has dominated accounts of Germany’s relationship with the sea. While it seems unlikely that the North Sea will become the subject of a discrete historiography in the way in which the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean have,64 there is no reason why it could not provide a similarly useful starting point for an approach that aims to integrate transnational and national perspectives. More than before, therefore, historians working on Germany’s relationship with the sea need to be attuned to a range of methodologies. It is arguably the combination of different approaches, bringing together the traditional focus on the navy with the recent scholarship on Imperial Germany’s global and colonial pasts, which is best suited to explain why the sea played such a crucial role in the Kaiserreich.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bell, Christopher M. ‘Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution Reconsidered: Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–14’, War in History, 18 (2011), pp. 333–56. Berghahn, Volker. Der Tirpitz-Plan: Genesis und Verfall einer innenpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II. (Düsseldorf, 1971). —. Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, 2nd edn (New York, 1993), chapter 2. Blyth, Robert, Lambert, Andrew and Rüger, Jan (eds). The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age (Farnham, 2011). Bönker, Dirk. ‘A German Way of War? Narratives of German Militarism and Maritime Warfare in World War I’, in Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (eds), Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (Oxford and New York, 2011), pp. 227–37. —. Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War I (Ithaca, 2012). Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sîan Reynolds, 2 vols (Berkeley, 1995). Deist, Wilhelm. Flottenpolitik und Flottenpropaganda. Das Nachrichtenbureau des Reichsmarineamtes 1897–1914 (Stuttgart, 1976). Eley, Geoff. ‘Sammlungspolitik, Social Imperialism and the Navy Law of 1898’, Militargeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 15 (1974), pp. 29–63. —. Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (New Haven and London, 1980). Epkenhans, Michael. Die wilhelminische Flottenrüstung 1908–1914. Weltmachtstreben, industrieller Fortschritt, soziale Integration (Munich, 1991). —. ‘The Naval Race Before 1914: Was a Peaceful Outcome Thinkable?’, in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture Before 1914 (Oxford and New York, 2007). Fairbanks, Charles H., Jr. ‘The Origins of the Dreadnought Revolution: A Historiographical Essay’, International History Review, 13 (1991), pp. 246–72. Finamore, Daniel (ed.) Maritime History as Global History (Gainesville, 2004). Fitzpatrick, Matthew. ‘A Fall from Grace? National Unity and the Search for Naval Power and Colonial Possessions 1848–1884’, German History, 25 (2007), pp. 135–61.

64 David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London, 2011); Horden and Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean’; Bose, A Hundred Horizons; McPherson, Maritime India; Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, and Matt K. Matsuda, ‘The Pacific’, both in American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 741–57, 758–80.

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Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, Lennox, Sara and Zantop, Susanne (eds). The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998). Geppert, Dominik and Rose, Andreas. ‘Machtpolitik und Flottenbau vor 1914. Zur Neuinterpretation britischer Außenpolitik im Zeitalter des Hochimperialismus’, Historische Zeitschrift, 293 (2011), pp. 401–37. Herwig, Holger. The German Naval Officer Corps: A Social and Political History, 1890–1918 (Oxford, 1973). —. ‘Luxury Fleet’: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918 (London, 1980). Hobson, Rolf. Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875–1914 (Boston, 2002). Honold, Alexander and Scherpe, Klaus R. (eds). ‘Mit Deutschland um die Welt’. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit (Stuttgart, 2004). Kehr, Eckart. Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik 1894–1901. Versuch eines Querschnitts durch die innenpolitischen, sozialen und ideologischen Voraussetzungen des deutschen Imperialismus (Berlin, 1930). —. Der Primat der Innenpolitik. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur preußisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1970). Kelly, Patrick J. Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy (Bloomington, 2011). Kennedy, Paul M. The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (London, 1980). —. ‘Strategic Aspects of the Anglo-German Naval Race’, in idem, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945 (London, 1983), pp. 127–60. Klein, Bernhard and Mackenthun, Gesa (eds). Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York, 2004). Lambert, Nicholas A. Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia, SC, 1999). —. Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA, 2012). Lambi, Ivo Nikolai. The Navy and German Power Politics, 1862–1914 (Boston, 1984). Manz, Stefan. ‘Nationalism Gone Global: The “Hauptverein Deutscher Flottenvereine im Auslande” 1898–1918’, German History, 30 (2012), pp. 199–221. Marder, Arthur J. From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. 1: The Road to War, 1904–1914 (Oxford, 1961). Miller, Michael B. Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2012). Mommsen, Wolfgang J. ‘Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy Before 1914’, Central European History, 6 (1973), pp. 3–43. Naranch, Bradley. ‘Made in China: Austro-Prussian Overseas Rivalry and the Global Unification of the German Nation’,Australian Journal of Politics and History, 56 (2010), pp. 367–81. Olivier, David H. German Naval Strategy 1856–1888: Forerunners of Tirpitz (London, 2004). Plagemann, Volker (ed.) Übersee. Seefahrt und Seemacht im deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 1988). Rüger, Jan. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, 2007). —. ‘Revisiting the Anglo-German Antagonism’, Journal of Modern History, 83 (2011), pp. 579–617. Salewski, Michael. Tirpitz: Aufstieg, Macht, Scheitern (Göttingen, 1979). Seligmann, Matthew S.Spies in Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the First World War (Oxford, 2006). —. The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901–1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War Against Germany (Oxford, 2012).

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Sondhaus, Lawrence. Preparing for Weltpolitik: German Sea Power Before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis, 1997). Steinberg, Jonathan. Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (London, 1965). —. ‘The Copenhagen Complex’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1 (1966), pp. 23–46. Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001). Sumida, Jon Tetsuro. In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (Boston, 1989). Wigen, Kären. ‘Oceans of History’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), pp. 717–21. Wolz, Nicolas. Das lange Warten: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher und britischer Seeoffiziere, 1914 bis 1918 (Paderborn, 2008).

412 24 germany and the origins of the first world war

Annika mombauer

After a century of controversy about the origins of the first world war, historians remain divided about its causes, and germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war is once again the topic of much debate. samuel williamson has summarized this development as the ‘erosion of the german paradigm’, and a number of recent publications on the topic suggest the end of the orthodox interpretation that we can legitimately speak of a substantial amount of german ‘war guilt’.1 As a result of the Allies’ certainty at Versailles in 1919 that germany caused the war, the debate has – in essence – always centred on germany’s responsibility. Starting with the war-guilt premise, there have been attempts to try to prove that germany was to blame (either exclusively, or at least more than anyone else), while those who have taken the opposite view have variously been labelled revisionists or apologists. The demarcations have not always been quite this simplistic and clear-cut, but nevertheless at the heart of this long debate has been the question of germany’s share of responsibility for the outbreak of war.2 This chapter examines the historiographical debate as it pertains to germany’s role, charting the controversy from the immediate post-war years to the most recent views which downplay german culpability. The debate has moved from a focus on german war guilt3 in the immediate aftermath of the war to a more conciliatory interpretation in the 1930s. The war was then seen as an accident, rather than design, and germany appeared no more responsible than any other great power. This comforting consensus was exploded in the

1 samuel R. williamson Jr, ‘July 1914 Revisited and Revised: The erosion of the german paradigm’, in Jack s. levy and John A. Vasquez (eds), The Causes of the First World War: Analytic Perspectives and Historical Debates (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 30–62. Williamson offers a detailed discussion of the development of this paradigm in the literature on the origins of the war. his essay is particularly useful in pointing forward to a future research agenda, and in discussing the arguments of political scientists on the outbreak of war, an aspect of the debate which is beyond the scope of this chapter. he also analyses the perspectives of political scientists in a magisterial review article: samuel R. williamson Jr and ernest R. may, ‘An identity of opinions: historians and July 1914’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), pp. 335–87. Among the most recent publications which question this paradigm are christopher clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (london, 2012); sean mcmeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (cambridge, mA, 2011); stefan schmidt, Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ausbruchs des Ersten Weltkrieges (munich, 2009); herfried münkler, Der Grosse Krieg. Die Welt 1914–1918 (Berlin, 2013). 2 for details of the debate, see John w. langdon, July 1914: The Long Debate, 1918–1990 (new york and oxford, 1991); Annika mombauer, The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (london, 2002), pp. 21–98; williamson and may, ‘An identity of opinions’, pp. 335–87. 3 Kriegsschuld was the commonly used term in the post-war years, whereas today we are more cautious about such language and many prefer to talk about responsibility or culpability rather than guilt. The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

1960s in the so-called Fischer Controversy, with its renewed focus on Germany’s alleged culpability. The resulting consensus (of sorts) that Germany’s role was more decisive and significant than that of other nations has in turn slowly been revised, first by a detailed focus on Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary, and more recently with studies of the roles of France, Russia and Serbia. Over the last years the focus of historians seeking to explain the outbreak of the war has become increasingly international, as it became recognized that no country was acting in a vacuum, and that explaining the breakdown of the international alliance system of 1914 would require an international approach. As a result, Germany, once considered the main culprit, today appears in many interpretations as no more culpable than other major powers; one of a group of nations whose leaders caused the war by making mistakes.4 The idea of ‘war guilt’, so confidently asserted at Versailles in 1919, has also fallen out of fashion today; most historians use terms such as culpability or responsibility rather than guilt. Christopher Clark has moved the debate to new ground by rejecting the usefulness of a ‘blame-centred account’ and highlighting the ‘drawback of prosecutorial narratives’ of the outbreak of the war. He has claimed that there are no smoking guns to be found in this who-done-it drama. Or if there are, they are ‘in the hands of every major character’.5 In 1914, and even more so in 1919, a blame game was not considered futile: in the light of the astonishing slaughter that had ensued during the war, it seemed essential to point the finger at a culprit and make those responsible pay for the damage that had been done. The decision to blame Germany and its allies was as contested then as it still is today. This means that, 100 years on, there has actually been very little agreement reached on the question of the causes of the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century. Even though countless studies have been undertaken, and thousands of documents unearthed, historians still disagree about why the war broke out. And yet, a hundred years of scholarship have left their mark. We have an overwhelming amount of scholarly literature on the topic, and we are fortunate to be able to draw on extensive amounts of primary sources, in archives and in edited volumes. We can make assertions about Germany’s role in the outbreak of war (as well as that of the other Great Powers) based on solid documentary footing. While it is true that an international perspective is essential, this should not detract from the evidence which points to the actions of one or two nations above others. Arguably, not all of the Great Powers are equally as responsible for the escalation of the July Crisis into war, but deciding which of the ‘smoking guns’ was fired first remains a formidable challenge.

Germany at the Centre of the Long Debate

As soon as war had broken out, Germany’s stubborn attitude during the July Crisis and particularly its attack on neutral Luxembourg and Belgium convinced its enemies that its leaders had been responsible for the escalation of the crisis and the start of the European war. This attitude did not change among the Entente powers, and was further confirmed by other acts of international violence, such as the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 and the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917. Meanwhile, Germans were persuaded by their government’s propaganda that they were embroiled in a defensive war.

4 See, for example, Clark, Sleepwalkers; Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture (New York, 2007). 5 Clark, Sleepwalkers, pp. 560–61.

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In May 1919, the victorious Allies, as convinced as ever of German war guilt, forced the defeated and now defenceless Germany to sign the . No part of the perceived victors’ Diktat caused more upset and united more Germans against the peace treaty than the so-called ‘war-guilt’ clause. In it, Germany was blamed for the outbreak of the war which, in four years of bloody fighting, had led to the death of some ten million soldiers and countless more civilians. Count Brockdorff von Rantzau, the German foreign minister, was forced to sign the peace treaty on behalf of the German government, which contained the infamous article 231:

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.

Even before the war had ended – in fact, as early as July 1914 – Germany’s government had started to work on trying to prove the war guilt of its enemies, and to refute the allegations that Germany had started the war. ‘In the midst of peace the enemy attacks us’, Kaiser Wilhelm II had indignantly proclaimed at the beginning of August 1914, a statement immediately immortalized in countless propaganda postcards and thus imprinted on the German mind. Germany had been attacked by envious neighbours and had fought a defensive war in 1914. As Arnold Wahnschaffe explained in June 1915: ‘One can hear again and again: “if the Kaiser could have avoided the war, he would have done it and thus this war could not be an unjust war of conquest”.’6 After Versailles, the effort to prove Germany’s innocence became all the more urgent: successive German governments attempted to prove that the Allies had been wrong in their war-guilt allegation and that the Treaty of Versailles needed to be revised. For Germany, the stakes were high: not only was the Versailles war-guilt ruling perceived as an attack on national pride, but it was also the justification for the huge reparation demands made by the Allies. If it could be shown that the victors had been wrong to blame Germany, then both war guilt and reparations could be refuted. The efforts of countless historians working for this cause, many on behalf ofthe government, led to an outpouring of revisionist literature; most, but by no means all of it, stemming from Germany.7 It also led to the publication of secret diplomatic documents which might otherwise have remained hidden from public view. The power of documents to indict or exonerate governments was clear to all European leaders, and as a result the first document collections on the origins of the war were published in the early weeks and months of the war. Germany’s White Book was presented to the Reichstag on 4 August 1914. Within a few months, all of the Great Powers had published their own coloured books.8

6 Wahnschaffe was Chef der Reichskanzlei from 1909–17. Cited in John C.G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Der Weg in den Abgrund 1900–1941 (Munich, 2008), p. 1179. 7 For details, see, for example, Langdon, July 1914; Mombauer, Controversies and Consensus; Williamson and May, ‘An Identity of Opinions’. 8 Britain’s Blue Book, Russia’s Orange Book, France’s Yellow Book, Serbia’s Blue Book and Austria- Hungary’s Red Book were all designed to blame the enemy for the outbreak of war by publishing carefully selected official documents. For details of the history of coloured books and those relating specifically to the First World War, see Sacha Zala,Geschichte unter der Schere politischer Zensur. Amtliche Aktensammlungen im internationalen Vergleich (Munich, 2011), pp. 23–37; Mario Toscano, The History of Treaties and International Politics: The Documentary and Memoir Sources (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 88–103; Langdon, July 1914, p. 17.

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They were not primarily edited by historians but by diplomats eager to advance a particular version of events.9 But if such highly subjective collections published during the war had no effect on the decision of the Allies to blame defeated Germany and its allies for the outbreak of the war, the post-war German governments had other tricks up their sleeves. After 1918, governments found themselves embroiled in ‘a world war of documents’,10 and as a result, an enormous number of previously secret documents was made available for public scrutiny. The first attempts to publish official documents was made in Russia, where the new Soviet government was eager to highlight the shortcomings of the previous Tsarist regime and of imperialism in general, which it saw as the cause of the war.11 It took a little longer for a substantial collection of Russian documents tobe published. The first five volumes of Russian documents, covering the first seven months of 1914, were published between 1931 and 1934 by M.N. Pokrovsky, and a simultaneous German edition appeared in Berlin translated by the historian Otto Hoetsch, who had collaborated with his Russian counterpart.12 The collection of more than 2,000 documents was regarded as disappointing by some in Germany ‘because it contains … not one really new or weighty document which could convince our enemies and the neutrals of the error of their opinions’.13 In other words, it did not reveal that Germany had been falsely accused of starting the war, nor did it help the revisionists’ quest to blame Russia for the outbreak of the war. In Germany, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Kurt Eisner’s revolutionary government decided to publish pre-war Bavarian documents, motivated by a similar wish to influence world opinion against the old regime. The decision to publish preceded the Treaty of Versailles.14 ‘This is the only means by which to achieve the conduct of the peace negotiations in a spirit of mutual trust’, Eisner wrote on 21 November 1918.15 Soon, the socialist government in Berlin decided that, in order to influence the peace negotiations at Versailles, the complete rupture of the new German state with the Kaiserreich should be emphasized, and that by exposing some of the decisions that had led to the outbreak

9 For a detailed discussion of the limitations of government document collections, see Winfried Baumgart, Quellenkunde zur deutschen Geschichte der Neuzeit von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 5: Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus und des ersten Weltkrieges (1871–1918), part 1: Akten und Urkunden, 2nd edn 1991 (Darmstadt, 1977), particularly p. 69. 10 Bernhard Schwertfeger, Der Weltkrieg der Dokumente. Zehn Jahre Kriegsschuldforschung und ihr Ergebnis (Berlin, 1929). 11 Lenin announced two days after the beginning of the October Revolution that the new government would immediately proceed to publish all secret treaties, and as a result the world learned for the first time, for example, about the secret London Treaty of 26 April 1915. Zala,Geschichte unter der Schere, p. 48. For details of the history of publication of Russian documents, see Derek Spring, ‘Russian Documents on the Origins of the First World War’, in Keith M. Wilson (ed.), Forging the Collective Memory: Governments and International Historians Through Two World Wars (Providence and Oxford, 1996), pp. 63–86. 12 Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya v Epokhu Imparializma. Dokumenty iz arkhivov tsarskogo i vremennogo pravitel’stv, also published in German: Die Internationalen Beziehungen im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (International Relations in the Age of Imperialism: Documents from the Archives of the Tsarist and Provisional Governments). For more details on the background to this publication, see Spring, ‘Russian Documents’, pp. 74ff. 13 This was the complaint by the publisher. Cited in Spring, ‘Russian Documents’, p. 77. 14 For details, see, for example, Bernhard Grau, Kurt Eisner 1867–1919. Eine Biographie (Munich, 2001), pp. 377–91. 15 P. Dirr (ed.), Bayerische Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch und zum Versailler Schuldspruch, 3rd edn (Munich and Berlin, 1925), Doc. No. 22.

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of war they might perhaps bring about a more lenient peace agreement. Their call for an international committee of experts to assess the origins of the war had been rejected and instead they undertook editing their own documents. The socialist Karl Kautsky (at that time under-state secretary in the foreign office) was initially charged with this task. He was convinced of the imperial government’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war and this influenced his selection criteria.16 However, his work was rejected by historians and politicians keen to show German pre-war policies in a more favourable light, and his edition was only published after two editors of more patriotic persuasion, Graf Max Montgelas and Walter Schücking, had taken over from Kautsky. Four volumes of German documents (Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch), sometimes referred to as the ‘Kautsky Documents’, were published in December 1919.17 Proving Germany’s innocence became even more urgent following the Versailles war- guilt clause which burdened a defiant Germany with sole responsibility for starting a war that most Germans felt they had not caused.18 In the summer of 1919 it was decided to publish an edition of documents spanning the years 1871–1914, and the first volumes of Die Grosse Politik (eventually a 40-volume collection) were published in 1922.19 As the Chancellor wrote to the British Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald in 1924, the German government fully intended to use the documents contained in these volumes to force the victors of 1918 to convene an international court of arbitration to re-examine the war-guilt question.20 Germany’s interwar governments regarded the publication of these documents as an ‘act of self-defence’21 and as part of the large-scale ‘innocence propaganda’ which dominated the publications of this period.22 This was an early attempt to internationalize the search for a culprit. By publishing documents relating to international relations in the pre-war period, the editors sought to highlight the foreign policy pursuits of other governments in the years before the war to show that Germany had not been responsible for its outbreak.

16 Zala, Geschichte unter der Schere, p. 50. 17 Die deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch. Vollständige Sammlung der von Karl Kautsky zusammengestellten amtlichen Aktenstücke mit einigen Ergänzungen, ed. Graf Max Montgelas and Walter Schücking, 4 vols (, 1919). 18 As Holger Herwig shows, the attempts to ‘deceive Clio’ with official document collections and accounts of the outbreak of war began in August 1914, when the German government authorized publications aimed at showing that ‘the ring of entente politics encircled us ever more tightly’. Holger H. Herwig, ‘Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany After the Great War’, in Wilson (ed.), Forging, pp. 87–127. 19 The last volume was published in 1927. Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871– 1914. Sammlung der Diplomatischen Aktenstücke des Auswärtigen Amtes, ed. Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Friedrich Thimme (on behalf of the Auswärtiges Amt), 40 vols (Berlin, 1922–27). 20 Wilson (ed.), Forging, p. 11. 21 Ibid., p. 12. For a critique of the selectivity employed by the editors, see, for example, Fritz Klein, ‘Über die Verfälschung der Historischen Wahrheit in der Aktenpublikation “Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette 1871–1914”’, inZeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 7 (1959), pp. 318–30; an excellent summary of the genesis of the edition, and of the criticism levelled at it, is in Zala, Geschichte unter der Schere, pp. 62ff. 22 As Konrad Repgen points out, Weimar historians ‘did not engage in controversies with each other … the debates over the causes of the war of 1914 were waged as a fight, although not internally, but rather directed to the outside’. Konrad Repgen, ‘Methoden – oder Richtungskämpfe in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945?’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 30 (1979), pp. 591–610, at 600, cited in Zala, Geschichte unter der Schere, p. 68.

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Other governments also published their secret documents, these ‘sharpest of weapons’,23 although this was largely in response to the document collections published in the , Austria (whose first official three-volume edition of documents was published in 1919)24 and particularly Germany. Die Grosse Politik forced Britain and France to consider adopting similar measures, as contemporaries had predicted,25 and Britain was the first to respond with an official document publication. ‘Rather late’, as Max Montgelas criticized, the British Documents on the Origins of the War were published between 1926 and 1938.26 The effect of Germany’s propaganda effort was readily apparent to many observers. In France, Pierre de Margerie, who had been Political Director in the French Foreign Office in July 1914, noted in 1926: ‘There can be no doubt that under the influence of the enormous quantity of documents that the Wilhelmstrasse has thrown on to the historical market, world opinion has begun to change to our disadvantage.’27 The decision to publish French documents was announced in 1927, partly motivated by the fact that revisionist historians were basing their accounts of Germany’s role in the outbreak of the war on Germany’s official document collection.28 The first volume of Les Documents diplomatiques français 1871–1914 was published in 1929.29 Bernhard Schwertfeger considered it ‘perhaps the most important success of the German document edition [Die Grosse Politik] that France has also decided to publish her pre-war documents … France has been the last … to follow the German example’.30 This flurry of document editions is one reason why historians have been able to draw on such a wealth of primary materials in their investigations of the war’s causes.31 In addition to these official collections, myriad autobiographical accounts, memoirs, diaries and letters have been published, as almost everyone involved in the decision-making of the pre-war years sought to commit their experiences to paper. Based on such contemporary evidence, historians have been able to reconstruct, often in minute detail, the immediate events that led to the outbreak of the war, and some of the foreign policy decisions taken in the previous years. Few historiographical debates have been as heated and as passionately fought as the controversy over the origins of the First World War. In the debates between revisionists

23 M.N. Pokrovsky, 28 November 1927, in an article in Pravda, cited in Spring, ‘Russian Documents’, p. 72. Klaus Hildebrand also refers to ‘files as weapons’ in Deutsche Außenpolitik 1871–1914 (Munich, 1989), p. 52. 24 Die österreichisch-ungarischen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch. Diplomatische Aktenstücke zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges 1914. Ergänzungen und Nachträge zum österreichisch-ungarischen Rotbuch, ed. Republik Österreich, Staatsamt für Äusseres, 3 vols (Vienna, 1919). For details of Austria’s document editions, see Ulfried Burz, ‘Austria and the Great War: Official Publications in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Wilson (ed.), Forging, pp. 178–91; Rudolf Jerábek, ‘Die österreichische Weltkriegsforschung’, in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg. Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse (Munich, 1994), pp. 953–71. 25 For example, Thimme and Schwertfeger had predicted a compulsion to publish among the former enemies. Cited in Zala, Geschichte unter der Schere, p. 77. 26 Montgelas, cited in ibid., p. 78. 27 Cited in Keith Hamilton, ‘The Historical Diplomacy of the Third Republic’, in Wilson (ed.), Forging, pp. 29–62, at 44. 28 Zala, Geschichte unter der Schere, p. 85. 29 For details, see Hamilton, ‘The Historical Diplomacy’, p. 44; Mombauer, Controversies and Consensus, pp. 65 ff. 30 Cited in Zala, Geschichte unter der Schere, p. 84. The last of the 42 volumes was not published until 1959, with the third series, focusing on the July Crisis, having been completed in 1936. 31 For more details on these editions, and others not mentioned here, see Annika Mombauer (ed.), The Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents (Manchester, 2013), pp. 5–15, cited hereafter as Mombauer (ed.), Documents.

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and anti-revisionists, Germany’s role in the events before the outbreak of war was more or less prominently in the foreground. By the 1930s the revisionists had largely succeeded in creating a new consensus. Now it became common to argue that no single country had been responsible for the outbreak of war. As put it in his war memoirs in 1934, all nations had ‘slithered into war’, and alliance policy was to blame. The war had been an accident. This was a more radical assertion of his statement, in December 1920, that ‘no one at the head of affairs quite meant war’ in July 1914.32 For Germany, whose successive governments had been keen to prove the victors and their Diktat of 1919 wrong, this was a welcome turn. The new orthodoxy resulted in part from the propaganda efforts of revisionists, many of whom had been working in Germany.33 But the softening of attitude towards Germany among its former enemies was also due to the fact that the newly perceived threat to European peace, emanating from the Soviet Union, weighed more heavily than any residual enmity towards Germany. It seemed more advantageous to secure Germany as a potential ally than to continue to regard her as a former enemy. And so the new, conciliatory orthodoxy stuck, and once Europe was embroiled in a new war, the origins of the First World War seemed to be relegated to history. There was not much appetite for revisiting the events of 1914 when explaining the war of 1939 – and later dealing with its aftermath – was so much more pressing. As a result, the conciliatory ‘accident’ interpretation of the war only came under scrutiny in the 1950s and 1960s. The Italian Luigi Albertini published a detailed, document-based analysis of the events that led to war which was a devastating indictment of the accident theory, but the ground-breaking three-volume study failed to make much of an impact at the time (to this day there is no German translation). A major revision of the orthodox view only occurred when, in the 1960s, the German historian Fritz Fischer published his controversial findings. Fischer argued that there had been in Germany a willingness to unleash a war, in pursuit of aggressive foreign policy aims, and that Germany’s foreign policy had deliberately aimed at provoking a European war. The German Empire, Fischer asserted, had a significant share in the responsibility for the outbreak of war. While his views did not precisely hark back to Versailles, as he never claimed Germany’s sole war- guilt, his well-documented claims undid the best part of 50 years of German revisionist propaganda.34 Fischer’s extensive use of primary sources in his two contentious books, Griff nach der Weltmacht and Krieg der Illusionen, and other publications resulted in a quest on his part and on that of his critics to locate further primary evidence and publish it in scholarly editions. Fischer found much of his more incendiary evidence in unpublished and previously inaccessible archival sources (including those held in the archives of the GDR), and their publication would further serve to highlight the omissions in the official German collection and point towards a deliberate obfuscation of the events leading to the outbreak of war.35 The focus on documents of the Fischer Controversy resulted in a large number of edited

32 Cited in Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (eds), Decisions for War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 19. 33 For details of revisionist and anti-revisionist efforts in the interwar years, see Langdon, July 1914; Mombauer, Controversies and Consensus. 34 For a recent re-assessment of the nature of the Fischer Controversy and its reception throughout Europe, see the special issue: ‘The Fischer Controversy 50 Years On’, The Journal of Contemporary History, 48 (2013). 35 On the importance of evidence in the Fischer Controversy, see Annika Mombauer, ‘The Fischer Controversy, Documents, and the “Truth” About the Origins of the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 48 (2013), pp. 290–314.

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document collections.36 However, in the heated debate that followed the publication of Fischer’s theses, arguments even ensued over the authenticity of some of these primary sources, and the reliability of published editions of documents. Prominent examples include the diaries of Alfred von Waldersee, Georg Alexander von Müller and Kurt Riezler, whose authenticity and accuracy have been questioned.37 Indeed, it has been a characteristic of the debate that historians have been unable to agree on the interpretation of certain key documents, such as Admiral von Müller’s diary entry detailing the events of the so-called ‘War Council’ meeting of December 1912: did his account of the meeting suggest that something momentous had been decided (a definite decision to unleash war, postponed for 18 months until July 1914), as Fischer and John Röhl, for example, contended? Or was Müller’s own conclusion that this meeting had really amounted to ‘almost 0’ correct, as Walter Görlitz’s truncated rendering of the text suggested?38 Similarly, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s attitude in the weeks before the outbreak of war, as revealed in the diary of his personal assistant, Kurt Riezler, could be interpreted either as evidence of the Chancellor’s pessimism and fear in 1914, or of his policy of ‘bluff’ – of a calculated risk that went wrong – during the July Crisis. In other words, documents could not provide an objective answer. Some documents were so contested that they were the cause of their own controversy, and the Riezler diary, published by Karl-Dietrich Erdmann, is a case in point.39 Prior to

36 Among them (and this is no exhaustive list) are Imanuel Geiss’ two-volume document collection, Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch 1914 (of which abridged German and English editions were published in 1965 and 1967 respectively); John Röhl’s publication of memoranda by Prince Karl Max von Lichnowsky and Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, and his three-volume edition of the Eulenburg papers; the diaries of Kurt Riezler, edited by Karl Dietrich Erdmann; and the diaries of the journalist Theodor Wolff, edited by Bernd Sösemann, to name only a few. Imanuel Geiss (ed), Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch 1914. Eine Dokumentensammlung, 2 vols (Hanover, 1963/64); idem (ed.), Juli 1914 (English trans: July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War: Selected Documents (London, 1967)); John Röhl (ed.), Zwei deutsche Fürsten zur Kriegsschuldfrage (English trans: 1914: Delusion or Design?); idem (ed.), Philipp Eulenburgs Politische Korrespondenz, 3 vols (Boppard, 1976–83); Karl Dietrich Erdmann (ed.), Kurt Riezler. Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente (Göttingen, 1972), republished with an introduction by Holger Afflerbach (Göttingen, 2008); Bernd Sösemann (ed.), Theodor Wolff. Tagebücher 1914–1918 (Boppard, 1984); Michael Epkenhans, Albert Hopman. Das ereignisreiche Leben eines ‘Wilhelminers’. Tagebücher, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen 1901 bis 1920 (Munich, 2004); Holger Afflerbach (ed.), Kaiser Wilhelm II. als oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg: Quellen aus der Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1918 (Munich, 2005). 37 For example, the debate about the so-called ‘War Council’ meeting of December 1912 called into question the accuracy of Görlitz’s edition of the Müller diaries. While some of the diary entries accurately reflect the original text, others were altered by the editor to present a more favourable version of events. Walter Görlitz (ed),Regierte der Kaiser? Kriegstagebücher, Aufzeichnungen und Briefe des Chefs des Marinekabinetts Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller 1914–1918 (Göttingen, Berlin and Frankfurt, 1959); idem, Der Kaiser … Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Marinekabinetts Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller über die Ära Wilhelms II (Göttingen, 1965). For a critique of the edition, see John Röhl, ‘Admiral von Müller and the Approach of War, 1911–1914’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969), pp. 651–73; and for a discussion of the event, see idem, Wilhelm II, vol. 3, pp. 963–6. 38 The relevant passages, as well as further references to the controversy about the Müller diary, can be found in Mombauer (ed.), Documents, No. 44, 46, 47. 39 The history of the publication, and of the controversy over the diaries, is detailed in Agnes Blänsdorf, ‘Der Weg der Riezler-Tagebücher. Zur Kontroverse über die Echtheit der Tagebücher Kurt Riezlers’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 35 (1984), pp. 651–84. For an account in English, see Langdon, July 1914, pp. 109 ff. The diaries were published as Erdmann (ed.), Kurt Riezler. Tagebücher, Briefe, Dokumente. For a bibliography of the relevant newspaper articles and publications around the Riezler controversy, and a strong attack on Erdmann, see Bernd Felix Schulte, Die Verfälschung der Riezler Tagebücher. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der 50er und 60er Jahre (Frankfurt, Bern and New York, 1985). For the debate in the German press, see, for example, Karl-Heinz Janssen, ‘August ’14: Wahrheit auf Raten. Zwei Historiker streiten um Tagebücher: Wurde die deutsche Kriegsschuld

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publication, Erdmann had claimed that the diaries proved Fischer wrong, particularly regarding Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg’s role. Both sides therefore awaited the publication of the diaries with great anticipation. Riezler had been a close confidant of the Chancellor and was in almost daily contact with him during July 1914: his observations would surely provide an insight into Bethmann Hollweg’s intentions? When the long- awaited edition appeared, doubts were soon raised about the authenticity of parts of the edited diary and about the fact that they did not contain the explosive evidence that had been promised.40 However, a real controversy did not begin until the early 1980s, when the principal attack against Erdmann’s edition was launched by Bernd Sösemann.41 The suspicion was raised that some incriminating material had been removed, either by Riezler himself, or by someone else after his death, and some have even questioned the reliability of the entire diary.42 The importance attached to contemporary evidence as a way of laying bare the decision-making of July 1914 made the Riezler diary controversy particularly heated.43 In the end, the diary failed to confirm the views of either side, while the controversy surrounding its authenticity only added to the mistrust between the different factions.44 The acrimonious nature of the Fischer Controversy is only explicable within the context of 1960s Germany. It was as much about Germany’s delicate position at the forefront of the Cold War as it was about the First World War, and as much about Hitler’s war aims as Bethmann Hollweg’s.45 Yet, despite the bitter debate which raged throughout the 1960s, a new orthodoxy eventually emerged and few historians engaged in the debate in the 1980s and 1990s would have denied that Germany bore a significant (or even the most significant) share of responsibility for the outbreak of war. The idea of an accidental or inevitable slide into war no longer found much favour. In the process of revisiting this topic during and after the Fischer Controversy, historians instead tried to find reasons for Germany’s errant

am Ersten Weltkrieg im nationalen Interesse verschleiert?’, , No. 24, 10 June 1983; Karl Dietrich Erdmann, ‘Die Tagebücher sind echt. Streit um ein historisches Dokument, das ins Zwielicht geraten ist. Eine Antwort’, Die Zeit, No. 28, 8 July 1983; and letters to the editor,Die Zeit, No. 33, 12 August 1983. The ‘duel’ between Erdmann and Bernd Sösemann, the historian who first doubted the authenticity of Erdmann’s edited text, was largely conducted in the pages of the Historische Zeitschrift. 40 Fritz Fellner concluded: ‘The Riezler diaries do not reveal anything and do not prove anything.’ ‘Review of Kurt Riezler. Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente’, in Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Instituts für Geschichte (1973), pp. 490–95. 41 For example, Erdmann had not alerted his readers to the fact that for the most important times, July and August 1914, the diary was not kept in its usual format in small exercise books, but was available only on loose pages, which differed in style from the rest of the diaries, suggesting that Riezler perhaps edited crucial sections of his writings, or that they had even been tampered with at a later date, perhaps even in the light of the Fischer Controversy. See Schulte, Verfälschung, who suspected foul play on behalf of Fischer’s critics. 42 Some have even concluded that it is ‘unsuitable material for history-writing’. Lüder Meyer- Arndt, Die Julikrise 1914. Wie Deutschland in den Ersten Weltkrieg stolperte (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2006), pp. 3–67. 43 On the importance of documents as a means to discover the truth about the events of 1914, see Mombauer, ‘The Fischer Controversy, Documents, and “the Truth”’. 44 In the most recent instalment of this controversy, Bernd Sösemann has revisited the diary and published an article in the Historische Zeitschrift which points, inter alia, to some transcription problems between the edited version and the original: ‘Die “Juli-Krise” im Riezler-Tagebuch. Eine kritische Edition (7. Juli–15. August 1914)’, Historische Zeitschrift, 298, 3 (June 2014), pp. 593–888. This, in turn, has been picked up by critics, for example, Herfried Münkler, ‘Der Reichskanzler war kein verantwortungsloser Hasardeur’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (9 July 2014). 45 See also Annika Mombauer, ‘Introduction: The Fischer Controversy 50 Years On’, in Journal of Contemporary History, 48 (2013), pp. 231–40; and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘The Political and Historical Significance of the Fischer Controversy’, in ibid., pp. 251–70.

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behaviour, focusing, inter alia, on domestic motivations for wanting a war in 1914, on the role of Bethmann Hollweg and whether or not he took a calculated risk in the summer of 1914, on the role of the Kaiser, and on that of his military entourage.46 The Fischer Controversy and its focus on the war-guilt question also led to a resurgence of interest in the roles played by the other Great Powers. From the 1980s onwards Austria- Hungary’s pre-war policies became the focus of a number of historians, and it soon became clear that Vienna had not been the innocent victim of Berlin’s bellicose designs. Rather, a large party of ‘hawks’ in Vienna had advocated a war against Serbia for some time (Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf demanded war against Serbia on at least 25 occasions in 1913 alone).47 What was needed was the right occasion and, crucially, the support of the German ally. The occasion was provided by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo, and the support was granted – willingly – by what has been called a ‘blank cheque’ for Austria-Hungary. Research into Austria-Hungary’s decision-making, for example, revealed the extent to which war was wanted and seen as a last chance to stop the perceived decline of the Dual Monarchy.48 But it also showed that, while there was a desire for war in both capitals, the two allies wanted a very different war. In 1914, Austria- Hungary’s – arguably justified49 – demand for a war against Serbia to address the shifting balance of power in the Balkans was trumped by Germany’s perceived need to implement the so-called Schlieffen Plan in order to defeat the encircling Entente powers before Russia became too powerful ever to be challenged by Germany. And so Wilhelm II informed Kaiser Franz Joseph on 31 July 1914: ‘In this difficult struggle it is of utmost importance that Austria deploy her main troops against Russia and does not split them up by a simultaneous offensive against Serbia.’50 Serbia was now of secondary importance in the European war

46 For accounts of Germany’s belligerence in the run-up to 1914, see Dieter Hoffmann,Der Sprung ins Dunkle: Oder wie der 1.Weltkrieg entfesselt wurde (Leipzig, 2010); Röhl, Wilhelm II; Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Oxford, 2004); Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001); Stig Förster, ‘Der deutsche Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges, 1871–1914. Metakritik eines Mythos’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 54 (1995), pp. 61–95; Fritz Fischer,Griff nach der Weltmacht(Düsseldorf, 1961), translated as Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967); idem, Krieg der Illusionen: Die deutsche Politik von 1911 bis 1914 (Düsseldorf, 1969), translated as War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York, 1975). 47 Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1: To Arms (Oxford, 2001), p. 69. 48 For research on Austria-Hungary, see Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg (Graz, 1993); Günther Kronenbitter, ‘Krieg im Frieden’: Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Grossmachtpolitik Österreichs-Ungarns 1906–1914 (Munich, 2003); Samuel R. Williamson Jr, Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York, 1991); Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: Architect of the Apocalypse (Boston, 2000); Fritz Fellner, ‘Die “Mission Hoyos”’, and idem, ‘Zwischen Kriegsbegeisterung und Resignation – ein Memorandum des Sektionschefs Forgách von Jänner 1915’, both in Heidrun Maschl and Brigitte Mazohl-Wallnig (eds), Vom Dreibund zum Völkerbund: Studien zur Geschichte der internationalen Beziehungen, 1882–1919 (Vienna, 1994), pp. 112–41 and 142–54 respectively; John Leslie, ‘The Antecedents of Austria-Hungary’s War Aims: Policies and Policy-Makers in Vienna and Budapest Before and During 1914’, in Elisabeth Springer and Leopold Kammerhold (eds), Archiv und Forschung: Das Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in seiner Bedeutung für die Geschichte Österreichs und Europas (Vienna, 1993), pp. 307–94; John Leslie, ‘Österreich-Ungarn vor dem Kriegsausbruch: Der Ballhausplatz in Wien im Juli 1914 aus der Sicht eines Österreichisch- Ungarischen Diplomaten’, in Ralph Melville, Claus Scharf, Martin Vogt and Ulrich Wengenroth (eds), Deutschland und Europa in der Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 661–84. 49 This point is forcefully made by Christopher Clark, who bemoans the fact that Russia and France would not grant Austria-Hungary the redress it justifiably deserved following the provocations emanating from Serbia. He argues that Vienna’s right to make demands was not accepted in St Petersburg and Paris. Sleepwalkers, p. x. 50 Wilhelm II to Franz Joseph, in Mombauer (ed.), Documents, No. 353. Fritz Fellner considers this telegram ‘a shocking documentation of disregard for the interests of an ally who had been promised

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that was about to begin. Berlin and Vienna were partners in crime, but crimes of different magnitude, and certainly of different consequences.

The Debate in the Twenty-First Century

In recent years the post-Fischer consensus has been effectively undermined and with the renewed interest in the topic on the eve of the anniversary year and in extensive public debates in 2014, there remains little of the post-Fischer orthodoxy. The states which generally escaped the strictures of historians in the late twentieth century have now come to the attention of those who once again question the ‘German paradigm’ established by Versailles and Fischer. France and Russia in particular have been studied closely in this regard, and the often overlooked role of Serbia has also been given more prominence.51 Arguably, however, the tendency to seek those responsible among the actors of 1914 still features in many accounts; few historians manage to avoid pointing the finger in one direction or another. As Christopher Clark remarks, the ‘drawback of prosecutorial narratives is that they narrow the field of vision by focusing on the political temperament and initiatives of one particular state rather than on multilateral processes of interaction’.52 This has undoubtedly been the case for much of this hundred-year debate. In contrast, a comparative, international approach might result in a less judgemental view of the past. It can highlight, for example, the extent to which military decision-makers in all European capitals wanted to press for military solutions to the July Crisis much earlier than their civilian counterparts. Managing and restraining these military demands until a peaceful solution had been ruled out was in fact a common problem among Entente and Alliance powers alike.53 That does not mean, however, that every government went into this war equally as willingly and that all decisions taken were equally as momentous and of equally disastrous consequences. The way in which we study Germany’s role in the outbreak of the war, and that of every other power, is today determined by the fact that – unlike in 1919 and 1961 – the topic is no longer of the same contemporary relevance. Today, we are as far removed from the First World War as the Wilhelminer were from the Battle of Waterloo. This temporal distance must surely affect how we relate to the topic, yet the debate surrounding the centenary has shown that there is still contemporary political mileage to be had from arguing for or against German war guilt.54 Even now we still seek answers: why did ‘conflict avoidance’ not work in 1914 as it had in previous crises?55 What was the role played by certain key decision- makers? Is David Lloyd George’s celebrated interpretation that Europe had ‘slithered’ into loyal friendship and protection’. Wilhelm II’s telegram was ‘monstrous in its wording, in its total disregard for the interests of the alliance partner, and in its complete misrepresentation of the situation’. Fritz Fellner, ‘Austria-Hungary’, in Keith Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914 (London, 1995), pp. 9–25, at 21–2. 51 For France, see particularly Schmidt, Frankreichs Außenpolitik; for Russia, see McMeekin, Russian Origins; and for Serbia (and the central position of the Balkans in the decisions made in July 1914), see Clark, Sleepwalkers. 52 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 560. 53 See, for example, Mombauer (ed.), Documents, p. 25. 54 For a detailed discussion, see Annika Mombauer, ‘Der hundertjährige Krieg um die Kriegsschuld’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 3–4 (2014), pp. 303–37. 55 On the argument of avoided conflicts, see William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2010); Afflerbach and Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War?

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war really as valid as one which considers all the available evidence and concludes that some individuals actually wanted the war more than others? In 2003, Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig contended: ‘Lloyd George’s notion of the innocent or unintended “slide” stands sharply opposed to the evidence now available.’56 In the most recent major investigation of the July Crisis, ‘the most complex event of modern times’ (Clark), an impressive amount of international evidence is mustered without a case being made against a single state. This is still quite an unusual approach, as most accounts of the origins of the war continue to seek to advance arguments which foreground the culpability of one or other state.57 Crucially, however, that state is no longer almost by definition Germany. Rather, Clark argues that the war was caused by ‘sleepwalkers’ who were not aware of the consequences of their actions. Clark’s sleepwalkers are not terribly far removed from Lloyd George’s contention that ‘no one at the head of affairs quite meant war’. And such a notion was as revisionist in 1920 as it is again today, for it turns on its head decades of near-consensus about Germany’s role in the origins of the war. There is, then, still no clear agreement why war broke out. It is as easy to find recent accounts which stress the war guilt of Entente powers as it is those which focus on Germany or Austria. But there is nonetheless some broad agreement. Most historians would agree that war was not inevitable. As part of the most recent historiographical developments, historians have pointed to the fact that conflicts had been successfully avoided in the years before 1914 and that the alliance system had worked well in defusing crises. It is the failure of this system of conflict avoidance in July 1914 that needs to be explained: assuming an inevitability of the events, as was suggested by Lloyd George’s conciliatory interpretation, for example, does not take proper account of the agency of decision-makers in the history of the pre-war years. With such a focus on the years before 1914, it is also possible to argue, as Holger Afflerbach has done, that war was considered improbable by contemporaries in 1914. This is quite a departure from the commonly held view that contemporaries felt war to be inevitable, and were only in doubt about when it would break out, not that it would occur. In Afflerbach’s interpretation, the war was the result of mistakes, and of overconfidence that it would be possible to avert an escalation at the last minute, as the events of the previous years had suggested. Such mistakes are made by Clark’s ‘sleepwalkers’ too. Overconfidence is also diagnosed by Mark Hewitson’s interpretation that Germany was acting not out of fear and despair over the declining status of the Dual Alliance powers, but out of a position of confidence (unwarranted, as it turned out).58 The true extent of the horror they were about to unleash clearly could not have been anticipated by those who decided to risk a war in 1914, and so they ‘stumbled’, according to Lüder Meyer-Arndt, blindly into the First World War.59 This is not so very different from Lloyd George’s view that Europe had slithered into war. It certainly holds true that the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war should not be regarded as inevitably leading to war. While with hindsight such an interpretation seems almost inescapable – given that the period was characterized by increasing international tension, mutual suspicion and a widespread arms race – historians have

56 Afflerbach and Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War?, p. 39. 57 See, for example, McMeekin’s recent account of Russia’s culpability, Russian Origins; Daniel Allen Butler, The Burden of Guilt: How Germany Shattered the Last Days of Peace (Havertown, PA, 2010); Hoffmann, Der Sprung ins Dunkle; Jack Beatty, The Lost History of 1914: Why the Great War Was Not Inevitable (London, 2012). 58 Hewitson, Germany. 59 Meyer-Arndt, Die Julikrise 1914.

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stressed that in fact these last years of peace saw a number of successful attempts by the Great Powers to avert a large-scale war. Peace conferences and mediation, not war, were the way to settle international crises, at least those involving the so-called Great Powers. While smaller states engaged in armed conflicts, the governments in London, St Petersburg, Paris, Berlin and Vienna did not, and war was avoided at several important junctures. This history of ‘avoided wars’60 is crucial background for understanding the decision-making of European statesmen and military leaders during the final crisis in July 1914 when the Great War, so frequently anticipated and so often avoided, finally broke out. Before the war, alliance systems both sustained peace and acted as deterrents, and some would argue that they ‘generally functioned as a restraint on war’, rather than being a cause of it.61 During the July Crisis, most governments continued, as they had done before, to try and find a diplomatic solution to the international crisis that resulted from the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne. In Vienna and Berlin, however, there was no desire for yet another conference or for mediation in the summer of 1914. Austria-Hungary’s ‘hawks’ considered a diplomatic victory over Serbia to be ‘odious’,62 and in Germany, the military leaders had asked for war on many occasions and considered the present opportunity too good to miss. War was demanded ‘now or never’ and ‘the sooner the better’ among the leaders of the two allied countries before the other powers were even aware that the assassination would result in a major international crisis.63 We know today, crucially, that similar promises of support were exchanged between French president Poincaré and Russian foreign minister Sazonov; that similar demands for war were made in Paris and St Petersburg; and that similar statements of joy about the outbreak of war can be found in French and Russian sources, as well as German and Austrian documents. On 30 July, to give but one example, the Russian military attaché in Paris reported the ‘unconcealed joy’ among the French General Staff thatone could take advantage of the situation which was strategically advantageous for France.64 Historians arguing in Fischer’s tradition have used such evidence (‘beaming faces’ in the ministry of war, congratulations that one had ‘cleared the ditch’) to great effect to show Germany’s responsibility for the war. However, it is clear from research based on French sources that the sentiments of German officers and military planners were echoed in Paris.65 In fact, they can be found in the capitals of all the Great Powers. This suggests, at the very least, that decision-makers everywhere underestimated the consequences of their decisions. When Erich von Falkenhayn exclaimed, at the end of July, ‘even if we perish over this, at

60 Jost Dülffer, Martin Kröger and Rolf-Harald Wippich (eds), Vermiedene Kriege. Deeskalation und Konflikte der Großmächte zwischen Krimkrieg und Erstem Weltkrieg (1856–1914) (Munich, 1997). More recently, the idea of war actually being improbable was explored by Afflerbach and Stevenson (eds),An Improbable War? 61 Mulligan, Origins, p. 229. Similar arguments have been made by Holger Afflerbach, Der Dreibund. Europäische Großmacht- und Allianzpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2003); and Friedrich Kiessling, Gegen den ‘großen Krieg’? Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen, 1911–1914 (Munich, 2002). 62 See Mombauer (ed.), Documents, No. 333, 31 July 1914: ‘The Imp. and Roy. Prime Minister [Stürgkh] explains that the idea of a conference is so odious to him that he would want to avoid even seeming to accept it.’ 63 For details, see, for example, Annika Mombauer, Die Julikrise. Europas Weg in den Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2014). 64 Cited in Schmidt, Frankreichs Außenpolitik, p. 209. 65 See ibid., passim. See also Marc Trachtenberg, ‘French Foreign Policy in the July Crisis: A Review Article’, H-Diplo, 1 December 2010, pp. 8–9, on the many parallels between French and German military policy in this regard.

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least it was beautiful’,66 he could not have foreseen what horrors would soon engulf Europe. But he was not the only high-ranking military figure to dream of battlefield glory. However, while there have been attempts to arrive at a more conciliatory interpretation in the recent literature on the origins of the war, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Germany and Austria-Hungary were still the main culprits. Demands for a war were voiced with increasing frequency as it seemed to contemporaries that time was running out for the Dual Alliance partners’ ability to wage war, and as future enemies were gaining in strength. In May 1914 Quartermaster Georg von Waldersee explained that Germany had ‘not only no reason to avoid a conflict whatever the situation but rather, the prospects for coming through a great European war quickly and victoriously are today still very favourable for Germany and also for the Triple Alliance. Soon this will no longer be the case.’67 Dieter Hoffmann has provided evidence of at least 76 occasions when a preventive war was demanded in Germany in the years 1906–14.68 Whether they were made from a perceived position of strength or weakness remains debatable. But elsewhere, as those focusing on the actions of other countries would argue, demands for war were also raised. This is true and important to note, but the crucial difference is that these did not precipitate action until the unacceptable demands that Austria-Hungary made of Serbia on 23 July set the tone for what remained of the July Crisis. In Berlin and Vienna, the evidence suggests, they did result in decisions which made the outbreak of war unavoidable. The recent focus on the roles of the Entente powers is, as we have seen, by no means entirely new. Some interpretations echo the revisionist arguments of the interwar years by shifting part of the blame for the pre-war tensions onto the Entente, for not allowing Germany to reach its full potential: ‘France, Russia and particularly England’ were not willing to give Germany its ‘place in the sun’, it is argued. ‘Desperately fixated on their own advantage and security they did not grant Berlin the necessary room to expand’, and from this resulted what they surely had not wanted: that the Dual Alliance dragged ‘the world into a terrible war’.69 This is certainly an argument that contemporaries would have recognized. Those who remain convinced of Germany’s responsibility for the war might posit in reply why it was necessary for Germany to expand at all. Was it not doing very well anyway and had become the continent’s leading industrial power without expanding, as industrialists and other successful businessmen frequently asserted? They might also ask where this expansion would have ended, had the other powers allowed it to go ahead? How much scope should the other countries have given Germany? How much leeway could Austria-Hungary give Serbia, following an assassination which undermined its international prestige, as well as robbing it of its heir to the throne? In 2014 the consensus in Germany – among many historians, the media and the public at large – is that the Kaiserreich was not to blame for the outbreak of war. Germany is once again portrayed as a victim of the Entente. It is now even possible to find arguments for Britain’s responsibility for the escalation of the crisis. After Clark’s path-breaking new take on the origins of the war, a new consensus has emerged in Germany.70 In Holger Afflerbach’s

66 ‘Wenn wir auch darüber zu grunde gehen, schön war’s doch’, cited in Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn. Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (Munich, 1994), p. 148. 67 Waldersee, cited in Mombauer, Moltke, p. 182 (original emphasis). 68 Hoffmann, Der Sprung ins Dunkle, pp. 325ff. 69 Sönke Neitzel, Kriegsausbruch. Deutschlands Weg in die Katastrophe (Munich, 2002), pp. 194–5. 70 An example of the way in which Clark’s thesis has been vulgarized and brought to a broader audience is Bruno Bandulet, Als Deutschland Großmacht war (Rottenburg, 2014). Unlike Clark, this author advances an apologist argument. He does not shy away from talking about Belgian ‘atrocity fairy tales’ (Gräuelmärchen) and from denouncing the ‘atrocity propaganda’ of the British (Gräuelpropaganda), while

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words, ‘the Germans are responsible for the First World War, but no more than others’.71 The journalist Cora Stephan concluded that Clark’s book ‘had buried the thesis of Germany’s main responsibility six-foot under’.72 A critic of the new consensus, Volker Ullrich, bemoaned the fact that the new debate reminded him of the anti-Fischer campaign of the 1960s, when Fischer was accused of ‘political masochism’. Now, those who continue to hold Fischerite views are accused of ‘guilt-pride’ (Schuldstolz), and it is alleged that they are somehow:

always compelled to have to admit to German guilt, they even get satisfaction from this. Such attacks make clear what the sometimes ear-piercing jubilation of Clark’s Sleepwalkers is aiming at: it’s about a historical-political sea change. What conservatives did not manage during the Historikerstreit of the 1980s – to regain the right to interpret German history – is now to be achieved. It is noticeable how meek the objections have been so far. Historians seem to have tired of the argument.73

Certainly the topic has not lost any of its explosive qualities. The fact that Germany is now seen by some to have been innocent in the events that led to war in 1914 has even enabled historians to revisit the origins of the Second World War. Ullrich’s concern that the conservative intentions of the Historikerstreit are finally being realized is not without foundation. Nearly 30 years after the Historikerstreit, its main proponent, Ernst Nolte, made the following observation about the origins of the 1939–45 conflict:

Increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that we must rate more highly the part played by the Poles and the English than is usually the case. Hitler did not want war for war’s sake, as is so often claimed … His demands vis-à-vis Poland were not ‘national socialist’ but went back to the time of the Weimar Republic.

If the Polish government had sent a negotiator, as Hitler had wished, and had agreed to those ‘Weimar’ demands of the return of Danzig to the German Reich and the establishment of extra-territorial street and railway connections through the ‘corridor’, then Poland would not have been attacked by Hitler.74

The belief that the First World War was not caused by Germany must inevitably lead to the conclusion that the Versailles Treaty was unjust, and with that, those ‘Weimar demands’ become justified. As a result, Germany’s role in the origins of both wars could now be up for revision.

not mentioning the actual atrocities which were committed by German troops. The reader searches in vain for any reference to the standard works in this account, which is as biased as anyone can find published in the interwar years. 71 Der Spiegel, 24 September 2012, at http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-88754330.html. 72 Cora Stephan, ‘Die Urkatastrophe’, Die Welt, 14 November 2013, at http://www.welt.de/print/ die_welt/debatte/article121873002/Die-Urkatastrophe.html. 73 Die Zeit, 24 January 2014, at http://www.zeit.de/2014/04/erster-weltkrieg-clark-fischer/seite-2. 74 Ernst Nolte, cited in Dirk Kurbjuweit, ‘Der Wandel der Vergangenheit’, Der Spiegel, 7, 10 February 2014, pp. 112–17, at 116. For a detailed discussion of the German debate on the eve of the centenary, see Mombauer, ‘Der hundertjährige Krieg’.

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Conclusion

Despite both crude and subtle propaganda efforts on the part of the Central Powers during the war, in 1919 the victorious allies were largely in agreement that Germany and its allies were to blame for its outbreak. However, their harsh war-guilt allegations were soon softened by a more conciliatory interpretation in the light of new potential threats to the interwar order, and an apologetic interpretation which allocated responsibility for the outbreak of war to the alliance system and international rivalries became firmly established in the 1920s and 1930s, continuing unchallenged into the post-war years.75 In Germany, the re-opening of the debate during the Fischer Controversy of the 1960s caused consternation among historians and the general public of a nature that is today difficult to comprehend. It has taken many years for passions to run less high, enabling historians to discuss their still divergent opinions without resorting to insult and defamation. Throughout the long debate on the origins of the First World War, historians’ views have been shaped by the current political context and climate in which they were formulated, and in the second decade of the twenty-first century, this still holds true.76 A younger generation of Germans is keen for Germany once again to play a more decisive role in international politics. However, this would require that it should finally put to rest some of its uncomfortable past. No longer being considered responsible for the outbreak of the First World War is a welcome move in that direction. Of course, it is not just Germany’s role that is being re-evaluated. Where previously historians were perhaps quick to judge Austria-Hungary’s reaction to the assassination as exaggerated and belligerent, they are today more willing to concede that a sovereign nation that found itself exposed to terrorist attacks may have felt obliged to defend itself against the threat that emanated from Serbian terrorists who sought to undermine the Dual Monarchy.77 As Sam Williamson concludes: ‘Sarajevo was the most successful terrorist act of all time. The effects of July 1914 continue to reverberate across our contemporary world and nowhere more than in the Middle East.’78 And in that sense, the assassination of 28 June 1914 and its terrible consequences continue to be of contemporary relevance even a hundred years after the war’s outbreak. It does not seem too daring a prediction that historians will continue to debate this topic far beyond the centenary. The latest debate is perhaps less acrimonious than it has been in the past, but historians remain divided. It has, on the whole, become easier to agree to disagree, as historians are less concerned with attributing war guilt than with explaining how war had come about; a crucial difference if we are to move away from the passionately fought debate of the interwar years and the 1960s.79 They largely accept that we may never be able to agree about why the war started, but that it is possible to explain how it did. As such, Clark’s recent dismissal of the ‘blame game’ is useful in moving the debate on from its personalized and fractious roots. If any agreement has been reached after a hundred years of debate, it is that the First World War, which has rightly been regarded as the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth

75 For more details on the historiographical debate, see Langdon, July 1914; Mombauer, Controversies and Consensus. 76 For details, see Mombauer, Controversies and Consensus. 77 Clark has put Serbia centre-stage and points out that it has been ‘one of the blind spots in the historiography of the July Crisis’: Sleepwalkers, p. xxiv. 78 Williamson, ‘July 1914 Revisited and Revised’, p. 62. 79 A notable recent exception is the sometimes heated debate on the nature of the Schlieffen Plan which seemed to hark back to previous acrimonious encounters. For details, see Annika Mombauer, ‘Of War Plans and War Guilt: The Debate Surrounding the Schlieffen Plan’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 28 (2006), pp. 857–85; Terence Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning 1871–1914(Oxford, 2002); as well as numerous articles on this controversy in War in History since 1999.

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century, was not an act of fate, need not have happened, and could – even in July 1914 – have been avoided if all the decision-makers in the European capitals had wanted to do so. Crises had previously been defused and wars avoided, a major war among the Great Powers may even have been considered ‘improbable’, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand need not have resulted in a localized war, never mind a world war. An explanation can only be found in human agency – not by trying to focus on impersonal forces or accidents. But tragically, some thought they had more to lose from not fighting a war than from fighting it. This was, for many military leaders in Berlin and Vienna, a last chance to change the status quo before their enemies became invincible in the near future. So they preferred to have a war ‘now or never’, in Wilhelm II’s words, and considered mediation ‘odious’.80 The Allies at Versailles had not been so far off the mark in their assessment of the war-guilt question. The war had been no accident, and it had not resulted from the alliance system, the arms race, imperialism or international rivalries; or at least it had not resulted from them alone. In a summary of the most recent debates, Volker Berghahn concludes that ‘there is no need for scholars to go on a roundtrip through the capitals of Europe with the aim of finding out that other decision-makers were more responsible for the First World War than the two emperors and their advisers. Berlin and Vienna continue to be the best places for historians to look closely for clues as to why war broke out in 1914.’81 Recent attempts to highlight French, Russian or Serbian complicity notwithstanding, it would indeed be ill-advised to let Germany entirely off the hook: its decision-makers, along with those of its ally Austria- Hungary, took fateful decisions which precipitated the outbreak of war.82 If there really was a gun in the hand of every major protagonist, it does not follow that everyone pulled the trigger simultaneously. It is true that Germany’s decision-makers did not act within a vacuum, and they were not the only ones to take fateful decisions. But there is plenty of documentary evidence to suggest that it was the decisions taken foremost in Berlin and Vienna which led to the escalation of the July Crisis, and to the outbreak of war. By deliberately obscuring their intentions and playing an underhand game, they made possible a disagreement of opinions that has continued to vex historians for a century. And by deliberately provoking a war with Serbia in July 1914, Vienna’s and Berlin’s decision-makers took a risk of incalculable consequences in which ultimately they got more than they had bargained for.83

Suggestions for Further Reading

Afflerbach, Holger (ed.) Kaiser Wilhelm II. als oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg: Quellen aus der Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1918 (Munich, 2005). — and David Stevenson (eds). An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture (New York, 2007). Albertini, Luigi. The Origins of the War of 1914, trans. and ed. Isabella M. Massey, 3 vols (Oxford, 1952–57). Beatty, Jack. The Lost History of 1914: Why the Great War Was Not Inevitable (London, 2012).

80 See above, notes 62 and 63. On 30 June, Wilhelm II urged the then still cautious German ambassador in Vienna to encourage the ally to have ‘a reckoning’ with Serbia ‘now or never’: Mombauer (ed.), Documents, No. 108. 81 Volker Berghahn, ‘Origins’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2014), vol. 1, pp. 16–38, at 37. 82 For references, see above, note 46. For references on Austria-Hungary, see note 48. 83 This argument is developed in more detail in Mombauer, Julikrise.

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Bosworth, R.J.B. Italy, the Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy Before the First World War (Cambridge, 1979). Clark, Christopher. Kaiser Wilhelm II: Profiles in Power (London, 2000). —. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012). Epkenhans, Michael (ed.) Albert Hopman. Das ereignisreiche Leben eines ‘Wilhelminers’: Tagebücher, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen 1901 bis 1920 (Munich, 2004). Erdmann, Karl Dietrich (ed.) Kurt Riezler. Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente, republished with an introduction by Holger Afflerbach (Göttingen, 2008). Fay, Sidney B. The Origins of the World War, 2nd edn (New York, 1930). Fischer, Fritz.Griff nach der Weltmacht(Düsseldorf, 1961), translated as Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967). —. Krieg der Illusionen: Die deutsche Politik von 1911 bis 1914 (Düsseldorf, 1969), translated as War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York, 1975). Förster, Stig. ‘Der deutsche Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges, 1871–1914. Metakritik eines Mythos’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 54 (1995), pp. 61–95. —.‘Im Reich des Absurden: Die Ursachen des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in Bernd Wegner, Ernst Willi Hansen, Kerstin Rehwinkel and Matthias Reiss (eds), Wie Kriege entstehen: Zum historischen Hintergrund von Staatenpolitik (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 211–52. Fromkin, David. Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War? (New York, 2004). Geiss, Imanuel (ed.) Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch 1914. Eine Dokumentensammlung, 2 vols (Hanover, 1963/64). — (ed.) July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War: Selected Documents (London, 1967). Hamilton, Richard F. and Herwig, Holger H. (eds). The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2003). —. Decisions for War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, 2004). —. War Planning 1914 (Cambridge, 2010). Hayne, M.B. The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War, 1898–1914 (Oxford, 1993). Herrmann, David G. The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, 1996). Hewitson, Mark. Germany and the Causes of the First World War (Oxford, 2004). Hoffmann, Dieter. Der Sprung ins Dunkle: Oder wie der 1.Weltkrieg entfesselt wurde (Leipzig, 2010). Joll, James and Martel, Gordon. The Origins of the First World War, 3rd edn (London, 2007). Keiger, John F.V. France and the Origins of the First World War (New York, 1983). —. Raymond Poincaré (Cambridge, 1997). Kiessling, Friedrich. Gegen den ‘grossen Krieg’? Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen 1911–1914 (Munich, 2002). Kronenbitter, Günther. ‘Krieg im Frieden’: Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Grossmachtpolitik Österreichs-Ungarns 1906–1914 (Munich, 2003). Krumeich, Gerd. Juli 1914. Eine Bilanz (Paderborn, 2014). Lambert, Nicholas A. Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA, 2012). Langdon, John W. July 1914: The Long Debate, 1918–1990 (New York and Oxford, 1991). Leslie, John. ‘The Antecedents of Austria-Hungary’s War Aims: Policies and Policy-Makers in Vienna and Budapest Before and During 1914’, in Elisabeth Springer and Leopold Kammerhold (eds), Archiv und Forschung: Das Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in seiner Bedeutung für die Geschichte Österreichs und Europas (Vienna, 1993), pp. 307–94. Levy, Jack S. and Vasquez, John A. The Causes of the First World War: Analytic Perspectives and Historical Debates (Cambridge, 2014).

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Lieven, D.C.B. Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York, 1983). Maurer, John. The Outbreak of the First World War: Strategic Planning, Crisis Decision-Making and Deterrence Failure (Westport, 1995). McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Menning, Bruce W. ‘War Plans and Initial Operations in the Russian Context’, in Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (eds), War Planning 1914 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 80–142. Meyer-Arndt, Lüder. Die Julikrise 1914: Wie Deutschland in den Ersten Weltkrieg stolperte (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2006). Mombauer, Annika. Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001). —. The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (London, 2002). —. ‘The First World War: Avoidable, Improbable or Desirable? Recent Interpretations on War Guilt and the War’s Origins’, Germany History, 25 (2007), pp. 78–95. —. ‘The Fischer Controversy, Documents, and the “Truth” About the Origins of the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 48 (2013), pp. 290–314. —. Die Julikrise. Europas Weg in den Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2014). — (ed.) The Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents (Manchester, 2013). Mulligan, William. The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2010). Röhl, John C.G. The Kaiser and His Court (Cambridge, 1994). —. Wilhelm II: Der Weg in den Abgrund 1900–1941 (Munich, 2008). Schmidt, Stefan. Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ausbruchs des Ersten Weltkrieges (Munich, 2009). Seligmann, Matthew S. The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901–1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War Against Germany (Oxford, 2012). Snyder, Jack. The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, 1984). Soroka, Marina. Britain, Russia and the Road to the First World War: The Fateful Embassy of Count Aleksandr Benckendorff (1903–16) (Farnham, 2011). Sösemann, Bernd (ed.) Theodor Wolff. Tagebücher 1914–1918 (Boppard, 1984). Steiner, Zara S. and Neilson, Keith. Britain and the Origins of the First World War, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2003). Stevenson, David. Armaments and the Coming of the War: Europe, 1900–1914 (Oxford, 1996). Strachan, Hew. The Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford, 2004). Turner, L.C.F. ‘The Russian Mobilization in 1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, 3 (1968), pp. 65–88. Van Evera, Stephen. ‘The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War’, International Security, 9 (1984), pp. 59–107. Williamson, Samuel R., Jr. The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1969). —. Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York, 1991). —. ‘July 1914 Revisited and Revised: The Erosion of the German Paradigm’, in Jack S. Levy and John A. Vasquez (eds), The Causes of the First World War: Analytic Perspectives and Historical Debates (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 30–62. — and May, Ernest R. ‘An Identity of Opinions: Historians and July 1914’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), pp. 335–87. — and Van Wyk, Russel (eds). July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Coming of the Great War: A Brief Documentary History (Boston, 2003). Wilson, Keith (ed.) Decisions for War, 1914 (London, 1995).

431 This page has been left blank intentionally 25 colonialism and genocide

Jürgen Zimmerer

Twice within 40 years Germans attempted to create a racial state; twice they intended to order society on the basis of (perceived) racial categories; twice this involved ethnic cleansing and genocide; and twice this took place in the context of empire-building. This recurrence of ethnic politics within almost the lifespan of a single generation cannot be explained by contingency alone. It suggests a deeper relationship between the ideas of race and the concept of space in German history which needs to be explored in more detail. This would contribute not only to a better understanding of German history in the twentieth century, but also to the global history of colonialism and the transnational study of mass violence. If the new paradigm of transnational and global history is to be taken seriously, we have to move beyond a merely comparative exercise in entangled history. We have to simultaneously situate any given historical phenomenon in a synchronic and diachronic perspective. We have to globalise national histories. For that we need concepts that span the globe and stretch over centuries. Colonialism is one such paradigm.1 There is, however, still a reluctance to apply a concept, which in its popular understanding is limited to non-European societies and regions, to European history. This reluctance is in itself a consequence of European colonialism, here understood as a mental disposition based on the binary construction of the world in which Europe and its post-colonial dependencies are discursively separated from the ‘rest’ of the world. This reluctance to accept post-colonial approaches is even stronger in German historiography than in other national historiographies. There are two reasons for this: first, the importance to German post-war identity of the Nazi crimes and their long-term causes, and linked to that a rather narrow, provincial interpretation of the Third Reich; and second, the marginal position of non-European history in German historiography, and the longevity of a nostalgic perception of colonialism as an essentially developing and modernising project.2

1 For the new trend in transnational and global history, see the book series by Akira Iriya and Jürgen Osterhammel (general editors), A History of the World (Cambridge, MA and Munich, 2012 ff.) See also new research into German transnationalism such as Jürgen Osterhammel and Sebastian Conrad (eds), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010); George Steinmetz,The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007). 2 I have offered an explanation of the reluctance to apply post-colonial insights to the study of the Third Reich and its crimes elsewhere. See Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster, 2011). For an English edition, see Jürgen Zimmerer, From Windhoek to Auschwitz? On the Relationship Between Colonialism and the Holocaust (New York, 2015; in press). The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Colonial Amnesia or Tunnel Perspective?

Why is it that the German colonial experience – despite the fact that it saw the first genocide of the twentieth century and the first German attempt at building a racial state – has been marginalised in Germany? Why is it that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, the myth still prevails that colonialism has had little or no effect on German history; that Germany was never a proper part of the colonial endeavour and that its colonial empire was rather short-lived and only marginal in its repercussions?3 This perspective can only be sustained by ignoring anything less than formal colonialism and by acknowledging only those consequences felt by ethnic Germans at the time of formal rule.4 The victims of the wars against the Wahehe, the ‘Boxer’, the Herero, the Nama or in the Maji-Maji War, to name but a few, are thus discounted, as they are mainly from the local population; their numbers (in absolute terms) are rather small (especially compared to both World Wars); and relatively few Germans were directly involved. And where they acknowledge it at all, many observers have difficulty in recognising the modes of dominance in Germany’s former African colonies for what they are: extreme forms of racial subjugation and violence. This originates in part in a Hegelian notion of Africa as a continent without history and the related belief that history is a continuing process towards (European) modernity.5 In his Philosophy of History Hegel stated:

At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it – that is in its northern part – belong to the Asiatic or European World … What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.6

What Africa and the Africans were lacking in Hegel’s view was a modern state. They remained in their ‘natural state’, because they had allegedly never developed any state-building potential. Although this was historically wrong, and obviously Eurocentric in its conception of what a state was supposed to look like, Hegel’s dictum nevertheless remains influential to this day. For his followers, establishing the modern (that is, European) state, albeit in the form of a colonial administration, was a modernising project and part of the civilising mission. The colonial state, however, meant violence: very often unlimited violence.7 For

3 For German colonial sites of memory, see Jürgen Zimmerer (ed.), Kein Platz an der Sonne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Frankfurt, 2013). 4 A number of collections have tried to broaden this perspective: Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt, 2003); Volker Langbehn (ed.), German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (New York, 2010); idem and Mohammad Salama (eds), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York, 2011); Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (eds), German Colonialism and National Identity (New York, 2010). 5 For a discussion of alternative modernities, see Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds), Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s (New York, 2007). 6 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, ‘Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte’ [Werke, vol. 12, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel], 5th edn (Frankfurt, 1999), p. 129. An English translation can be found at http://www.umass.edu/afroam/aa254_hegel.html (accessed 19 February 2014). 7 The German term ‘entgrenzte Gewalt’ captures it better, as it has built in the notion ofEntgrenzung or radicalisation. The boundaries of acceptable violence are pushed back further and further in the colonial context.

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many contemporary European observers, violence was the price to pay for progress. And it seems that this ideology of progress and modernisation, in which colonialism was seen as a necessary and sometimes violent agent of the latter, is still prevalent today. It lies at the core of the argument, for example, that colonial ideology was primarily a developmental ideology, whereas Nazism was only destructive.8

A German Colonial Empire in the East?

What then is colonialism? The question is not easily answered. Exercising or being subjected to colonial rule meant different things to different people.9 It was a relationship of power; of dominance and subjugation; however, it was never uncontested. For too long formal rule over a clearly defined territory has been seen as defining colonialism with the territory geographically located outside Europe. However, most contemporary historians of colonialism agree that saltwater colonialism was not the only form of colonialism; nor was any form of exoticism, which often accompanied colonial rule, a necessary precondition. Sebastian Conrad has defined interactions as colonial if (1) ‘imperial (metropolitan) and colonised societies possess different social-political structures’; (2) if they have ‘distinguished histories’; and (3) if they are separated – from the perspective of the coloniser – by the idea of different developmental levels.10 With his focus on interactions instead of formal rule, Conrad’s definition frees colonialism from its sole application to formal empires. In a post-colonial perspective, which does not reduce colonisation simply to ‘exotic’ places, the concept can be applied to Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe.11 For centuries Germany’s eastern borderlands were regarded as its ‘natural’ frontier,12 populated by ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ Slavs. This extrapolated the medieval slogan of a Germanic eastern colonisation, the mythical settlement of Eastern Europe, which was one ofthe founding myths of German national identity.13 In his bestselling novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), for example, the nineteenth-century novelist Gustav Freytag described the travel of his protagonist Anton Wohlfart into Poland. As they ride towards their destination,

8 See, for example, Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Der Holocaust als kolonialer Genozid? Europäische Kolonialgewalt und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 33 (2007), pp. 439–66. A slightly modified version has been published in English: ‘Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42 (2009), pp. 279–300. 9 Jürgen Osterhammel has called colonialism ‘a phenomenon of colossal vagueness’. See Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus. Geschichte – Formen – Folgen (Munich, 2005), p. 8. For an example of the complexities of the imperial experience, see John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London, 2012). 10 Sebastian Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Munich, 2008), p. 15. 11 See, for example, Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Colonial Genocide and the Holocaust: Towards an Archaeology of Genocide’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and SettlerS ociety: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York, 2004), pp. 49–76; and Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the “Ostland” Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Pattern of Prejudice, 39 (2005), pp. 197–219. 12 By Germany I mean the various territories which together were to form Imperial Germany in 1871. I am aware that this terminology is anachronistic for the time before 1871. 13 See Gregor Thum (ed.), Traumland Osten. Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006); Robert L. Nelson (ed.), Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East (New York, 2009). Also see Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (eds),S hatterzone ofE mpires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington, 2013).

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Wohlfart’s employer, who accompanies Anton, assesses the nature of the Poles and their ability to form their own state:

There is no race more lacking in the prerequisites of social progress and no race more unable to use their capital to achieve civilized development than the Slavic race … There, the privileged class claims to represent the people. As if the nobility and their indentured servants could establish a state! They don’t have any more right to do so than this flock of sparrows in the trees … ‘They don’t have a middle class’, concurred Anton eagerly.14

What is striking here is that the stereotypes about the Poles, in particular about their deficiencies, are very much in line with Hegel’s stereotypes about Africa quoted above. State-building capacity is regarded as synonymous with civilisation and development; the lack thereof is seen as a proof of backwardness and primitiveness. Of course, Poles were state-builders: it is the German state which they did not build, and which was held against them. Hegel’s attitude was not that different. Interestingly we find an almost direct echo of this stereotype in the report of ’s secretary, Hanns Johst, who travelled with the Reichsführer SS through Poland during the winter of 1939–40:

The Poles are not a state-building nation. They lack even the most elementary preconditions for it. I drove alongside the Reichsführer-SS up and down that country. A country which has so little feeling for systematic settlement, that is not even up to dealing with the style of a village, has no claim to any sort of independent political status within the European area. It is a colonial country!15

Colonisers such as Johst had to face the problem that all settlers had to face: there were already people living in the land that they hoped to cultivate. By 1937 at the latest, Himmler had developed a ‘solution’ for that problem. In a meeting of SS leaders (Gruppenführerbesprechung), he stated that in Nazi circles some would dream that they would one day conquer the world:

I am for it, even if we don’t talk about it at the moment. But I am also aware that we have to do it in stages. Today we would not even have the people to resettle one single further province, a zone or only a country half the size of Germany today. It should be obvious that we could not take over any [indigenous] population. That those, should we take over a province, would have to be swept [out] down to the last grandmother and down to the last child – and without mercy – about that [there] should be no doubt; nor should there be any that we would need a [new] population, and a racially good one, which we can settle there, so that we can begin to settle one hundred million Germanic peasants … and to breed them and then to take up the road to world dominance, which we had in the past, and to make the world a better place according to Aryan principles than it is now.16

14 Quoted in Kristin Kopp and Gray Zones, ‘On the Inclusion of “Poland” in the Study of German Colonialism’, in Perraudin and Zimmerer (eds), German Colonialism, pp. 33–42, at 36. 15 Hanns Johst, cited in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London, 2000), p. 447. 16 Himmler (Gruppenführerbesprechung, Bad Tölz, 18 February 1939), quoted in Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler. Biographie (Munich, 2008), p. 399.

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A hundred million people, he estimated, would be needed to settle the newly created Germanic empire. The local population would have to make space for them. In his opinion coexistence was not possible, since any survivors of the traditional inhabitants would be a threat to the new ones. This form of colonial resettlement was more than just the fantasy of a lunatic, as discussions about the Generalplan Ost – which foresaw up to 70 million Russians being deported to Siberia and left to perish – show. It was intended to ‘solve’ the problem through ethnic cleansing and outright genocide.17 Hitler was thinking along broadly similar lines:

The struggle for hegemony in the world is decided for Europe by the possession of Russian territory; it makes Europe the place in the world most secure from blockade … The Slavic peoples on the other hand are not destined for their own life … The Russian territory is our India and, just as the English rule India with a handful of people, so we will govern this, our colonial territory. We will supply the Ukrainians with headscarves, glass chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like … My goals are not immoderate; basically these are all areas where Germans [Germanen] were previously settled. The German Volk is to grow into this territory.18

Next to the areas directly settled by Germans, a string of colonial possessions would supply them with resources. In December 1941 Hitler announced that ‘the European-Russian space – as far as it is not intended for the settlement of German or Nordic-Germanic people – is colonial land in which on the one side industrial products can be gained for Germany and Europe – oil, ore, coal etc. – and on the other side agricultural products’.19 All these quotations clearly indicate that their authors used a colonial rhetoric and were thinking within a colonial framework. This is not surprising since the notion of Lebensraum, one of the pillars of Nazi ideology, was deeply colonial in its outlook. Belief in a ‘biologically healthy’ nation, whose ultimate triumph in the ‘survival of the fittest’ would depend on the number of ‘biologically healthy’ citizens who could be resettled in newly acquired territory, was already one of the main driving forces behind the German colonial movement of the imperial era. Its advocates pushed for formal colonial expansion to prevent the loss of ‘good blood’ to the Americas, where millions of Germans settled in the nineteenth century: ‘For a people which suffers from overproduction and which loses year after year 200,000 of its children to foreign lands (in die Fremde), colonisation becomes a matter of existence (Daseinsfrage)’, the famous historian Treitschke stated.20 It has been argued that Hitler (and implicitly the others too) possessed an incorrect understanding of British colonialism.21 This may well be the case, but it misses the point. The quotation is not supposed to prove that he merely copied British colonial principles; nor that he had an accurate understanding of British rule in India. What it does show, however, is that he thought and operated within a colonial mental framework, as did Himmler and Johst. In order to accept a post-colonial reading of Nazi policies, it is largely irrelevant

17 For a discussion of Generalplan Ost, see Mechthild Rössler and Sabine Schleiermacher (eds), Der ‘Generalplan Ost’ (Berlin, 1993); Czeslaw Madajczyk (ed.), Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan (Munich, 1994). 18 Adolf Hitler, 17 September 1941, in Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, ed. and annotated by Werner Jochmann (Hamburg, 1980), pp. 60–64. 19 Adolf Hitler, 12 December 1941, quoted in Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg, 1999), pp. 111 f. 20 Quotes in Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte, p. 25. 21 See, for example, Gerwarth and Malinowski, ‘Der Holocaust als kolonialer Genozid?’, pp. 457 f.

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whether or not the protagonists understood the historical reality of colonialism – of which there is more than one, anyway – but that they thought they did. This was sufficient to help legitimise their actions. And as post-colonial theory has emphasised, colonialism is as much about imagination as it is about social practice. It is not only a system of rule, but also a general relation of power, a mental framework that capitalises on the construction of social groups (coloniser and colonised) as binary or even absolute opposites: that is, groups whose existence excludes each other. This othering is asymmetric – that is, the coloniser is deemed superior, more civilised, more modern than his counterpart – and lies at the core of colonialism, since it creates the legitimisation for exploitation, forced assimilation and even destruction. Obviously the alleged lack of state-building capacity is one such marker of difference, symbolising the inferiority of the Polish population. As is the stereotype of the dirt and the filth, which supposedly could be found everywhere: ‘the successes were fantastic, our advances victorious … but Russia is on the whole a great disappointment. No culture, no paradise … a low filth and a people that will prove a serious colonial assignment for us.’22 This observation of a rank-and-file member of the army shows that not only members of the Nazi élite perceived the situation in Eastern Europe as colonial. It also indicates how deeply ingrained this thinking about the Slavic Untermensch was. There can hardly be any doubt that the German occupation and exploitation of Eastern Europe was played out within a colonial mental framework since it rested on Aryan superiority over Slavs and Jews. The fact that some of the stereotypes used in this process of othering went back hundreds of years does not devalue this hypothesis either, since it only goes to show the long trajectory of colonial thinking within German thought. However, the colonial dimension of the Second World War is not only apparent in the rhetoric of conquest and resettlement, and in the discourse of the superior self and the inferior other, but also in the occupation policy and the way in which the war itself was conducted. The most basic observation is that warfare, just like occupation, was deeply racialised. As has been stated time and again, Germany’s war in the east was not a fight between equals, but a racial war. It was a struggle for Lebensraum, for space, fought against an enemy regime and people which was seen as vastly inferior. It was fought not only to gain a military victory, but also to expel, subjugate or annihilate large proportions of the Slavic and Jewish population.23 After a meeting with Hitler in April 1941, the Chief of General Staff, Halder, noted: ‘Our task against Russia: Annihilate the army, dissolve the state.’ On the margins he scribbled ‘Colonial Tasks’. It is hard to imagine a more accurate description of a colonial project than ‘dissolve the state’. In terms of the way in which the war was to be conducted, he continued: ‘We have to distance ourselves from the principle of comradeship between soldiers. The communist is no comrade, before or after. This is a fight for annihilation. If we don’t accept it as such, then we may gain victory over the enemy, but in thirty years’ time we will have to face a communist enemy again.’24 On the surface this is a struggle between ideologies, and has no racial background, though given the prevailing Nazi ideology – that Bolshevism was linked to Jews and that the commissars were Slavs – the racial-hierarchical set-up is clearly detectable. However, binary oppositions such as this, in which the enemy is turned into an ‘absolute other’, are also colonial.

22 A soldier of the 12th Air Force Regiment, 20 July 1941, cited in Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 102. 23 See, for an overview, Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York, 2000). 24 Quoted in Gerd Ueberschär, ‘Dokumente zum “Unternehmen Barbarossa” als Vernichtungskrieg im Osten’, in idem and Wolfram Wette (eds), Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion (Frankfurt, 1991), pp. 248 f.

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Two German ordinances, in particular, transformed the manner of warfare: the Commissar Order and the Decree on Military Jurisdiction. The former stated: ‘troops must realize … that the originators of the asiatic-barbaric methods of fighting are the political commissars. They must be dealt with promptly and with the utmost severity. Therefore, if taken while fighting or offering resistance they must, on principle, be shot immediately.’25 In an almost classical colonial argument, the blame for one’s own cruelty was shifted onto the alleged cruelty and barbarism of the opponent. That this was ‘asiatic-barbaric’ disqualifies the opponent as racially inferior; as a colonial other. They had no right to resist, were not protected by the laws of war. They were not legitimate fighters and should be shot on the spot. The Decree on Military Jurisdiction empowered German troops to shoot hostages arbitrarily, and to carry out summary executions against guerrilla fighters. ‘Any civilian impeding or inciting to impede the Wehrmacht is to be considered a “guerrilla”, and executed’ without fear of reprisal from the army. Suspicion was enough to warrant execution. In the case of partisan attacks, should the culprits not be identified, then collective measures of force against villages and populations were allowed.26 Although not limited to colonialism, the denial of any right to resist, on-the-spot shootings and summary executions are quintessential features of colonial warfare. During the course of Operation Barbarossa, Soviet soldiers were killed in their millions. Many of those who surrendered were murdered through neglect in captivity (at least three million); leaders (commissars) were shot directly, as were thousands of civilians under the pretext of being suspected partisans. This confirms the racial character of the war. It was colonial as the opponent was seen as either Jewish or Asiatic, and therefore as the absolute other. This distinguished the war in the east fundamentally from that in the west. It was a war of annihilation, which targeted all fighting men, and many women and children, as well as the elderly. However, not all the population was to be eradicated. Some should survive, as the Germans needed servants, as Hitler wrote:

The Slavs should work for us. When we no longer need them they may die … The Slavonic fertility is undesirable. They may use contraception or abort pregnancies, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is sufficient that they can count up to 100. An education which produces good handmaids is the most that is acceptable … In terms of food, they should receive only the minimum [das Notwendigste]. We are the masters, we come first.27

Being superior, being the master, forcing everybody else to work for the benefit of a distanced economic, political and social centre is colonialism par excellence. In occupied Poland, Polish citizens were prohibited from attending cinemas, concerts, exhibitions, libraries, museums and theatres, and from owning bicycles, cameras and radios.28 This was both symbolic subordination and a deliberate attempt to de-culture the Polish population, to transform them into an ‘uncivilised’ ‘native’ mass. The Third Reich attempted in this respect a form of regressive colonialism: social and economic developments in Eastern Europe were to be turned back. The developmental difference – one condition of colonialism – was to be created, and in so doing the colonial situation was to be affirmed. We have already seen that a resettlement of vast quantities of territory

25 http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=2252 (accessed 18 May 2009). 26 Jürgen Förster, The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union, http://www1. yadvashem.org/untoldstories/documents/studies/Jurgen_Forster.pdf (accessed 20 February 2014). 27 Quoted in Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich, 2005), p. 529. 28 Burleigh, The Third Reich, pp. 450 f.

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with ethnic Germans was planned, and in some places even started. This planned economic and ethnic restructuring, which changed century-old patterns of trade and production in a matter of months, contributed to the horrific scale of destruction which German occupation caused in Eastern Europe.29 It was the mania of planning which gives the impression that what happened in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation was unprecedented. This seems to have hindered our understanding of it as essentially colonial in nature; especially since colonialism in popular understanding is still linked to exoticism, backwardness and the European ‘civilising mission’. It is hard to accept, but – in the logic of the Nazi perpetrators – creating an ideal German settler society, purifying the ‘degenerate’ Slavonic societies of ‘undesirable elements’ and restructuring a large scale economy (Großraumwirtschaft) – which placed an increase in economic efficiency over the lives and well-being of millions of human beings –also constituted some form of ‘developmental mission’. Of course, it was a most barbaric one, but in the logic of the perpetrators it appeared to be a necessary task, which had to be carried out for the benefit of the German race, which they equated with the human race at large.

Order, Planning, Genocide: The German Colonial Empire Before 1914

If one accepts that Nazi war aims and occupation policy were colonial, how does the German colonial enterprise during the Second World War relate to that before the First World War? Is it justifiable to speak of Germany’s ‘imperial century’, or were the empires simply too different to see them in conjunction? First of all, it is important to note that in theKaiserreich a single ‘German colonialism’ did not exist. It makes little sense to generalise when Qingdao and Samoa, Togo and German East Africa were each so different. Not only did they vary in terms of purpose, but also in the way they tried to organise the relationship between the German masters and the indigenous populations.30 It seems to me, however, that German Southwest Africa offers an interesting and valuable point of comparison, since it was the only German settler colony and also witnessed the first German genocide. Research in this area is still in its infancy, however, and some of the more blatant statements to have emerged in recent years may have hindered post-colonial readings of German history more than they have helped.31 To avoid any misunderstanding: the aim here is not to construct a causal nexus between events in Southern Africa and Eastern Europe; nor is it to create any one-way street which inevitably led to Auschwitz. It is rather to offer a tool by which we can examine certain structural developments in German history. It refutes any attempts to dissociate the crimes of the Third Reich from wider German history, and emphasises the need for a closer look at a variety of causes of individual behaviour – some ideological, some not. In the following section I will analyse German colonial rule in what is today known as Namibia, with a particular emphasis on genocide, warfare, administration and planning. This broad conceptualisation should help to overcome the overly narrow focus on the German-

29 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 11. 30 Modern introductions to German colonialism include Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte; Dirk van Laak, Über alles in der Welt. Deutscher Imperialismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2005); Winfried Speitkamp, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Stuttgart, 2005). 31 See, for example, Ben Madley, ‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German Southwest Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe’, European History Quarterly, 35 (2005), pp. 429–64.

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Herero War and possible lines of continuity to the war of extermination in Eastern Europe, which have so far characterised the debate.32 Whilst I certainly do not want to reject any link between the two, I will argue that the concentration on military culture ignores larger similarities between German Southwest Africa and the occupation of Eastern Europe.33 I will also argue that the destruction of African life, society and economy brought about by the German colonisers cannot be reduced to the wars of 1904–1908 alone, but that the genocide started before and continued afterwards as a form of cultural genocide.34 Founded in 1884, German rule in Southwest Africa lasted barely one generation until the end of the First World War, when the colony became a League of Nations mandate administered by South Africa. Those three decades, however, saw a fundamental change in the social and economic structures of the colony.35 The German administration may have started with only three officers, but by 1915 almost all indigenous ‘tribes’ had been dissolved, their property (especially land and stock) confiscated and their traditional cultures destroyed.36 Probably more than 50 per cent of the population had lost their lives and the rest had become captives in their own land. This process of transformation was more rapid and more violent than in almost any other European colony, and it is something which requires explanation. I argue that this was due to an attempt to create a model colony. This was a desire fuelled by the fact that the German nation-state was a latecomer amongst the European nations. One consequence of the deeply felt insecurity vis-à-vis the established nations was an inferiority complex, especially of its élite. As a consequence the latter craved to catch up, to do better than their competitors, and in particular to show the world what the Germans were capable of. The colonial arena was a perfect stage for this, especially as Germany’s main points of reference, Great Britain and France, were both major colonial powers. They were both widely accepted as world powers, and their colonies were seen as a symbol of that. Germany set off to compete for recognition as a global player on a par with the latter, as the (in)famous remarks by Chancellor von Bülow about Germany’s ‘place in the sun’ illustrate.37 However, this competition was not only played out in the diplomatic field, but also in the field of colonial policy; not only in the acquisition of colonies, but also in their effective administration. Whereas the former is widely recognised in studies of international relations, the latter is not. It was at the Berlin Conference in 1884–85 that the representatives of the

32 This narrow perspective can be found on both sides of the argument regarding links between the two genocides. See, for example, Jeremy Sarkin, Germany’s Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers (Cape Town, 2011); David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London, 2010); Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005); Susanne Kuß, Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen. Eskalation von Gewalt zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2010). 33 See Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? 34 I have explored this argument in greater detail in Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Lager und Genozid. Die Konzentrationslager in Südwestafrika zwischen Windhuk und Auschwitz’, in Christoph Jahr and Jens Thiel (eds), Lager vor Auschwitz. Gewalt und Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2013), pp. 54–67. 35 For an introduction to Namibian history, see Marion Wallace, A History of Namibia: From the Beginning to 1990 (London, 2011). 36 Only the northern part of the colony was exempt from administration and remained relatively untouched. For an overview of German colonial policy in Southwest Africa, see Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner. Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkei im kolonialen Namibia (Münster, 2002). 37 Bülow, 6 December 1897, Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags, IX. Legislaturperiode. V. Session. 1897–98, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1898), p. 60; online at http://www. reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt_k9_bsb00002771_00112.html (accessed 24 February 2014).

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European powers decided that it was no longer sufficient to raise a flag andclaim ownership of territories on foreign shores, but that only effective administration of those territories would assert claims to ownership.38 Henceforth the colonial powers intensified their administrative efforts by opening military stations in the coastal hinterland, by improving the infrastructure, and so on. For many this was not much more than a half-hearted attempt to comply with the letter of agreements. The Germans, however, intended to rise to this challenge in earnest. And they did so from a clean slate, as they were ‘unburdened’ by colonial experience. What was seen by some contemporaries as a disadvantage, not to possess centuries-long experience and well-established routines, offered the German colonisers the opportunity to shape their new possessions according to their own plans. This is particularly true of German Southwest Africa, which took a special place in both the German colonial empire and the German colonial imagination as it was the only territory under German rule deemed suitable for large-scale white settlement. Those plans, which I would term cultural genocide, started in 1893 with the arrival of Theodor Leutwein, the first governor of German Southwest Africa. Leutwein was assisted by a group of ambitious young administrators, who were to shape the history of the German colony for decades to come. It is this top-down approach to native policy that distinguished the German experience in Southwest Africa from that of other colonial powers.39 Those administrators had been trained in Germany not specifically for colonial service, but mostly as civil servants within the various federal states. When they arrived in Africa they tried to implement their European notions of order and development, and to create an ideal society on a racial basis. In many ways this can be viewed as a conservative response to modernity and to the problems of industrialisation they had witnessed in the Kaiserreich. Back home they had been concerned by the growth of an industrial proletariat and the accompanying demands for increased political representation from the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Their response in Africa was to create a black homogenous workforce, which would fulfil the role of the proletariat in Germany without ever being able to demand meaningful political participation. It is this export of an administrative fantasy40 which caused many of the catastrophic outcomes of German colonialism in Southern Africa. By administrative fantasy I mean the ideas and images of state rule which provided the administrators with their models and benchmarks. It describes what German colonial dominance would have looked like, had the colonisers had their way without meeting resistance from the colonised, and other groups such as settlers and missionaries. By looking at it we are not diminishing African agency, because African resistance can only be valued against the backdrop of colonial planning. It does shed light, however, on the colonisers and their mindset.41

38 For an overview, see Andreas Eckert, ‘Die Berliner Afrikakonferenz 1884/85’, in Zimmerer (ed.), Kein Platz an der Sonne, pp. 137–49. 39 See Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner, for details. 40 This concept was originally developed by the sociologist Trutz von Trotha in his analysis of German colonial rule in Togo. See Trutz von Trotha, Koloniale Herrschaft. Zur soziologischen Theorie der Staatsentstehung am Beispiel des ‘Schutzgebietes Togo’ (Tübingen, 1994). 41 There is now a long tradition of research which shows that the Herero, Nama, Ovambo, Damara and other African communities were by no means passive victims. See, for example, Horst Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft. Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus 1884–1915, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1984); Jan-Bart Gewald, Towards Redemption: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia Between 1890 and 1923 (Leiden, 1996); Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewusstsein. Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkrieges in Namibia 1904–1907 (Göttingen, 1999).

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Soon after Leutwein’s arrival in the colony, the German administration was systematically intensified. In 1894, for example, the colony (Schutzgebiet) was divided into three districts: Keetmanshoop, Windhoek and Otjimbingwe. In 1903 the number of districts doubled, and by 1914 there were 16 districts, each of which consisted of several police posts. They were to form the institutional backbone for a planned piece of large- scale social engineering: the transformation of African ‘tribespeople’ into a homogenous black working class. Leutwein knew about the explosive nature of this endeavour, since it attacked African identity at its very core – their traditions – and it had to be carried out from a position of relative weakness, that is, in the face of overwhelming African strength. Leutwein and his group therefore counted on a strategy of small steps, which would camouflage the fundamental changes the Germans were intending to bring about. Leutwein hoped that his Häuptlingspolitik (‘chieftains’ policy’), a strategy of divide and rule, would buy him the time he needed. Superficially, he left the chiefs of the Herero and Nama – the two most prominent being Samuel Maharero and Hendrik Witbooi – in office. However, he limited their powers – such us the right to wage war or to administer justice in the territory under their rule – by exempting Europeans from African justice. With that, the traditional African leaders lost the power and the means to defend their subjects against fraud, rape and murder, which were committed by settlers in increasing numbers as more of the latter moved to the colony. Slowly this eroded the authority of the chiefs. Together with the increased violence of the settlers, this became one of the driving forces behind African resistance and ultimately led to the war of 1904–1908. The war simultaneously disrupted and accelerated a process which led to the almost total disenfranchisement of all African people under German control. Since the story of the war and unfolding genocide has been told many times before, a brief summary will suffice.42 The war began on 12 January 1904. It is still unclear who actually started it, but the Herero initially had the advantage. They killed 123 men – they largely spared women and children, in marked contrast to the claims of German propaganda at the time – but they did not use their early successes to force a quick victory over the barricaded Germans. This allowed the latter to send for reinforcements and to avert total defeat. A series of small skirmishes followed without a decisive victory on either side. Newly arrived reserve troops from the Reich and incensed settlers engaged in acts of retaliation and committed massacres. This was accompanied by a rhetoric of ‘cleaning up, hanging, battering down to the last man, of showing no mercy’.43 Leutwein tried to stop any further escalation and warned against those ‘rash voices … who wanted the Herero’s complete destruction’, because he thought that a nation of 60,000 to 70,000 people ‘would not let itself be so easily exterminated’. Equally important for him, the Germans would still need Herero as ‘small cattle breeders and especially as labourers’. He agreed, however, that they were to be ‘politically silenced’, their social structures destroyed and their people forced into ‘barely adequate’ reservations.44 This had, after all, been his plan in principle since the very beginning. Yet Leutwein was no longer in control. Embarrassed by the impending military defeat, the army high command in Berlin decided to send a huge expeditionary force under the

42 Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (eds), Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath (London, 2008). For a short summary, see Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Colonial Genocide: The Herero and Nama War (1904–1908) in German and Its Significance’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (London, 2007), pp. 323–43. 43 Missionary Elger to the Rhenish Mission, 10 February 1904, quoted in Drechsler, Südwestafrika, pp. 146 ff. 44 Quoted in Drechsler, Südwestafrika, pp. 149 ff.

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command of Lothar von Trotha, an experienced colonial warrior. His orders were clear: to crush the ‘revolt’ by any means possible. This did not order him to commit genocide, but this carte blanche, combined with von Trotha’s highly ideological worldview, had the effect of turning a war into genocide. It has recently been argued that genocide was never the intention; that von Trotha had been caught up in a certain Prusso-German military culture – which neglected logistics for operational troops and relied on decisive battles – and it was this strategy which escalated into genocide when the German troops ran into difficulties themselves.45 Certainly a radicalisation can be observed, in particular after von Trotha had failed to achieve victory at the Waterberg in the summer of 1904. However, the road to a war of annihilation had been entered much earlier, and not under the influence of military defeat or problems on the battlefield. Even before von Trotha had entered German Southwest Africa, he had declared martial law and empowered his officers to shoot all armed ‘rebels’. He decreed:

a) Every commanding officer is authorized to have the following coloured inhabitants shot without prior trial and in accordance with the existing German manual for war: Those who are caught committing a treasonous act against German troops, for example, all armed rebels with war-like intentions.

b) All other coloured inhabitants arrested by German military personal and who are suspected of having committed criminal acts will be tried by a special field court.46

This clearly resonates with the same ideas as the Decree on Military Jurisdiction (1941) discussed above. Von Trotha knew neither the land nor its people, but he nevertheless had very firm ideas about a future ‘racial war’. Africans, he believed, would ‘submit onlyto force’. He was willing to apply this force ‘with blatant terrorism and even with cruelty’. ‘The rebellious tribes’, he wrote, should be ‘annihilated with streams of blood.’47 This was clearly a decisive step beyond what Leutwein had envisioned for the colony. When von Trotha arrived in Windhoek, Leutwein tried to dissuade him from his policy of destruction by pointing to the need for African labourers. Von Trotha, however, replied that he had thought that Southwest Africa was ‘white man’s land’ and therefore the ‘whites’ should do the work themselves. In this discussion, as in the strategies carried out by both men, the military fantasy of fast and decisive victory clashed with the colonial fantasy to preserve the economic foundation of the settler colony. Von Trotha prevailed, and the military genocide took its course.48

45 See Hull, Absolute Destruction. For a summary of our divergent views, see Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Annihilation in Africa: The “Race War” in German Southwest Africa (1904–1908) and Its Significance for a Global History of Genocide’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, 37 (2005), pp. 51–7. 46 Proclamation made by von Trotha on board the steamship Eleonore Woermann, June 1904: Namibian National Archives, Windhoek (NNAW), Zentralbureau des Gouvernements (ZBU): Geheimakten (IX.A.Bd.1, BI. 1b). 47 Quoted in Drechsler, Südwestafrika, p. 156. 48 It is revealing that this discussion took place even before the Battle of Waterberg, as it shows that at that point genocide was already a realistic aim for von Trotha. Military developments were not the cause of his genocidal visions but merely enabled him to make them a reality. See Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century: The German War of Destruction in Southwest Africa (1904–1908) and the Global History of Genocide’, in Doris L. Bergen (ed.), The Holocaust: Lessons and Legacies (Chicago, 2008), pp. 34–64.

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The opportunity arose after the Herero fled from the Waterberg plateau, where they had gathered with families and stock, towards the east. With that, the war had been decided militarily and the purely genocidal phase commenced, because German troops now began chasing the Herero towards the Omaheke semi-desert. German troops stopped at the border of the desert and cordoned it off, so that the Herero would not be able to return, but would die in the waterless area. At the beginning of October von Trotha made his infamous proclamation that all returning Herero should be shot:

The Herero are no longer German subjects. They have murdered and stolen, they have cut noses and ears and other body parts from wounded soldiers. And now they no longer want to fight out of cowardice. I say to the people: whoever brings one of their captains as a prisoner to one of my stations will receive 1,000 Marks. Whoever turns in Samuel Maharero receives 5,000 Marks. The nation of the Herero, however, must leave the country. If they will not go, I will force them with the Groot Rohr [cannon]. Within the German border every Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer grant sanctuary to women and children. Chase them back to their people or let them be shot.49

He further clarified that, in order to preserve the good reputation of German soldiers, the order ‘to shoot women and children’ should be understood as to shoot ‘above their heads to force them to run’. He ‘was certain that this decree would lead to no more male prisoners and would also not degenerate into cruelty toward women and children’. The latter would certainly ‘run if shot twice above their heads’.50 But their only place of retreat was the Omaheke where, as a consequence of this decree, thousands died of thirst. This clearly indicates that his war aim was the destruction of the entire people, not just the destruction of their military capacity. Eventually von Trotha had to abandon his strategy because, in the southern part of the country, the Nama now joined the war against Germany, and his troops were needed there. Concentration camps were now established next to all larger settlements, where the surviving Herero were incarcerated along with Nama civilians. Von Trotha and his successors also conducted a war of annihilation against the Nama, targeting warriors and civilians alike, by blocking access to waterholes, burning villages and destroying their livestock in an attempt to prevent support for the guerrilla fighters. Most ofthe concentration camps served the purpose of providing the army, private companies and farms with forced labour. However, a further purpose can be identified: besides murder through intentional neglect, which can be identified as a purpose in Swakopmund and Lüderitzbucht, the camps were also meant to discipline the inmates and transform the Africans into an obedient workforce, in preparation for their future role after the camps were abolished in 1908. By then the German civilian colonial administration had prepared itself to take over responsibilities from the military. Under the first post-war civilian governor, , one of Leutwein’s young assistants, three ‘native ordinances’ were passed, which attempted to create a system of almost total control over the African population.51

49 Proclamation by von Trotha, Osombo-Windhoek, 2 October 1904. Bundesarchiv Berlin- Lichterfelde Reichskolonialamt (R 1001)/2089, BL. 7af. 50 Ibid. 51 For a detailed discussion of the ordinances and the German control system, see Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner.

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The Herero and Nama had already been dispossessed and their political organisations dissolved, but ‘Lindequist’s Native Ordinances’, as they were called, subjected individual Africans directly to German laws and to a bureaucratic, centralised administration. The intention was to control all aspects of African life, and to allow the administrators an overview of which Africans were present at any particular time in a given district or section: where they lived; whether they were employed; and if so where. To achieve this, all ‘natives’ had to be entered into ‘native registers’. A pass-badge had to be worn visibly in order to guarantee the clear identification of any African. A travel pass was required for anyone leaving his or her place of residence. Without a pass it was not legal to get work or accommodation. Since, in order to be economically independent the Africans needed to own cattle and horses, and as this was forbidden without the express authorization of the governor, they had no option but to seek to work for Europeans, or run the risk of being punished as vagrants. The regulation that, without special authorisation, no more than ten families or individuals could live in a private ‘werft’ allowed for better surveillance of the Africans, as well as the most efficient supply of labour to the whole colony. It is important to note that this was the German aspiration, which does not mean that they could implement it rigorously. I have shown at length elsewhere how and why this administrative utopia failed in day-to-day life, not least because of the resistance of Africans who succeeded in creating pockets of autonomy.52 Fear of renewed resistance obviously played an important role in German policy. Equally, if not more importantly, the three ordinances allowed for an effective central planning of labour distribution, which had become a tool of state economic management and was the fulfilment of German plans from the outset: to destroy African political institutions and identity; and to re-educate the individual African to become a willing member of a homogenous black workforce at the disposal of the colonial state, which saw itself as a strong and proactive agent of development. In order to get a better trained workforce, African education – which was by and large carried out by missionaries – was brought under state control and limited to some basic knowledge, which would make the Africans better servants without enabling them to challenge German rule. The official curriculum included ‘the proper understanding and clear speaking of a simple German’, ‘making notes in simple sentences’ and ‘mathematical calculation between 1 and 100’.53 A settler society like the one envisioned and established in German Southwest Africa rested on a rigid colour line. Developments from the pre-1904 era to prohibit marriages between Europeans and Africans were intensified after the Herero War, and eventually all sexual contacts were stigmatised as a violation of racial purity. Miscegenation had been a ‘problem’ for the German administration from the very beginning, since mainly young men emigrated into the colony and many of them married African women. The status of these marriages – whether they should be sanctioned by the government and therefore become legal in the sense of German civil law, with implications for German citizenship laws – was the object of great dispute. Leutwein and others were strictly opposed, as they feared that the children of those relationships would become German citizens, as some indeed did. The colonial office in Berlin initially supported the validity of such marriages, and before the Herero War this view carried the day. The war, however, served as a pretext for a clampdown and in 1905 all such weddings were forbidden. Later, the local court followed suit and all marriages from the pre-war era were declared void. It was not only the legal consequences of having ‘coloured’ German citizens which worried the administration.

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., pp. 243–50, at 249.

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They increasingly fought against any form of sexual contact, which they came to regard as a violation of racial purity. Underlying this was a change in the definition of a ‘native’. Whereas in the early days of the colony a cultural definition prevailed, after the war a biological one became dominant:

Natives are all those members by blood of an aboriginal people, including the offspring fathered on native women by men of the white race, even when mixing with white men may have taken place through several generations. As long as a child’s origins may be shown to relate to a member of an aboriginal people, that child is a native by virtue of its blood.54

This ‘one-drop rule’ no longer allowed for education or cultural assimilation. Biological concepts of race had taken over. Ultimately the German administrative fantasy encompassed genocide just as von Trotha’s military fantasy had done, albeit of a cultural kind.55 Moreover, rather than being a new attempt at ordering native policy after the war, this policy was in fact a return to old principles. This is significant because it changes the general perception of German colonial policy. Conventional historiography has it that, after a decade of benevolent paternalism under Leutwein, a period of mass murder and ruthless exploitation followed, typified by the genocide under Lothar von Trotha and the ‘native ordinances’ of 1907; then the enlightened colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg stepped in to halt the worst forms of exploitation, calling the ‘natives’ the colonies’ most important asset. This narrative makes the war and subsequent exploitation an historical accident, remedied by the imperial colonial administration itself. However, not only is it impossible to discern any impact of Dernburg’s ‘reforms’ in the social practice of colonialism in German Southwest Africa, but in fact Dernburg was himself involved in formulating the ‘native ordinances’ of 1907. A close analysis shows that he not only approved of all regulations, but toughened them in several regards. In fact ‘native policy’ after the Herero War was no aberration, but in line with the long- standing policy to create a ‘black’ working class by means of expropriation, forced labour and re-education. In a radical form of developmental frenzy, German Southwest Africa was to be transformed into a model colony. In order to achieve this, the planning and central organisation of economic development and labour supply were to play a key role. German colonial administrators wanted to create the ideal colony, and this was to be based on racial hierarchy. It is the combination of these two factors which drove the radical restructuring of the colony’s socio-economic structures: the transformation of free African pastoralists into unfree labourers; the dispossession of all African communal land; and its distribution among German settlers. Pre-1914 German colonial policy intended to destroy indigenous societies and modes of production in order to rebuild them from scratch. As we have seen, this was also the case with German occupation policy in Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

54 Judgement of the district court of Windhoek, 26 September 1907, NNAW ZBU F.IV.R.1., Bl. II- 37a-40b. See also Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner, pp. 94–109. 55 See Zimmerer, ‘Lager und Genozid’. For a comparative perspective, see Schaller’s attempt to apply this also to German East Africa: Dominik J. Schaller, ‘From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa’, in Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008), pp. 296–324.

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Towards a Post-Colonial Reading of Germany’s Imperial Century

For too long, research into the (post-)colonial origins of Nazi crimes has concentrated on war and genocide alone. Important as that is, however, a more inclusive approach is necessary. War and genocide, cultural genocide, and economic and social reorganisation, as well as the attempts to reorder space on the principles of race, all need to be looked at simultaneously in order to gain a clearer picture. Even a cursory scan of world history would show that European settler colonialism encompassed all these elements, and it would point to German Southwest Africa as an area of unique densification. That alone should make the historian curious and warrant a more detailed look; all the more so if one takes into account that essentially the same administrative and military tradition was at work in both Southwest Africa and Eastern Europe. The exact nature of the relationship between the two is yet to be determined. The cases are too different to be considered identical, and too similar to be considered separate. Obviously there is no causal nexus, no necessary and unavoidable path from Southwest Africa to the German occupation policy in Eastern Europe. However, the similarities do allow us to see lines of continuity: continuity in this sense means the existence of similar central defining features in two situations, and allows for adaptation, transfer, change or progress.56 Even if we already have sufficient evidence to understand the period between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century as Germany’s ‘imperial century’, this continuity requires further exploration. Germany’s imperial project was part of a transnational communicative network. It was tied into a tight web of exchange which drew on both contemporary and past experiences of other imperial projects. The imperial trajectories are multi-directional. They point towards the German colonial experience and beyond to the European colonial project. For the former I have identified personal experiences, institutional memory and collective imagination as significant.57 However, it is not simply a case of looking for the odd administrator or officer who served in both the imperial colonial service and during the Second World War, even though they can be found. More important are indirect or deduced experiences, as can be seen, for example, in the transmission through personal networks and teacher–student relationships, of which the racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer might serve as an example. He gained his professorship with a study of Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardisierungsproblem beim Menschen (that is, about an ethnic group in the former German Southwest Africa); served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics between 1927 and 1942; and became Chancellor of Berlin University in 1933. Institutional memory and collective imagination play an even more important role, because the administration and the military, which perpetrated the racial war and the genocide in Africa, were also at the forefront of the Nazi eastern empire. The common principle of both, the reordering of space on the basis of race, allowed people and ideas to float from one realm into the other. Richard Walther Darré, for example, was a student at the Colonial School in Witzenhausen before being appointed chief of the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS during the Third Reich, and was responsible for racial screening of

56 For a critical assessment of continuity, see Birthe Kundrus, ‘Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeptionen. Überlegungen zur Kolonialisierung des Nationalsozialismus’, WerkstattGeschichte, 43 (2006), pp. 45–62. 57 See Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the “Ostland”’. For an early discussion of these issues, see Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (Oxford, 1986).

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children in order to be ‘re-Germanised’.58 The colonial teaching in institutions like the one in Witzenhausen, at the Hamburg Tropical Institute, or the Colonial Women’s Schoolin Rendsburg, offered practical knowledge that was useful for a future (reconquered) African empire and one in the east. The school in Rendsburg, for example, offered Russian as an elective subject, opened another campus in Potok Zloty and sent some of its students to the east.59 Former settlers from the Kaiserreich’s African colonies were preferred settlers in the east, where their ‘pioneer qualities’ were found to be useful, as Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp, director of the Colonial Office and himself a veteran of the Herero War, wrote in 1941:

As the Director of the Colonial OfficeI urge all colonial farmers and experts from the German colonies or other tropical regions, who volunteered for duty in our colonies, to now assist with their expertise in the southern part of the occupied east … Those who prove themselves are assured of preferential treatment in the colonies in the future.60

It was not only government institutions which refocused their attention to the east. German African companies became more and more engaged, as their traditional overseas economic relations were severed. They were also made particularly welcome, as they had experience in commerce with ‘primitive’ societies. Undoubtedly, colonial enthusiasm and the quest for a return of the German colonies, supported by monuments, films, exhibitions and lecture tours by colonial veterans, as well as the wide genre of colonial literature, helped keep a colonial mentality alive, which could easily be redirected to the east. A ‘Volk ohne Raum’ needed space, and just as the slogan ‘travelled’ from Africa to Eastern Europe, so did the fantasies of empire. But the German colonial empire in Africa was not the only source of ‘inspiration’: just as popular were images of America, India and the Middle East. One only has to think of Karl May and the fantasy of the ‘Wild West’.61 They all contributed to the image of the (German) colonisers/ conquerors as messengers of civilisation, where Poles and Russians were constructed as the ‘savages’ who had to be educated to become servants or ‘resettled’ to make the country more efficient, just like ‘natives’ in Africa or America. The importance of colonial fantasies relating to the Americas as well as to Africa and Asia also shows that the aim should not be to create a causal link, or a renewed German Sonderweg, but rather to show that the imperial mentality was formed within a global and transnational communicative space, in which various potential trajectories are identifiable. The German eastern empire had many roots, only some of which lay in the Kaiserreich’s colonial empire. Moreover, the latter did not exist in a vacuum either, but was situated in a web of intense communication between the formal and informal colonial powers. Any mono-causal explanation, any construction of a German Sonderweg, therefore ignores the historical reality of both German and European colonialism.

58 On Darré, see Gustavo Corni, ‘Richard Walther Darré – Der “Blut-und-Boden” Ideologe’, in Ronald Smelser, Enrico Syring and Rainer Zitelmann (eds), Die braune Elite 2. 21 weitere biographische Skizzen (Darmstadt, 1999), pp. 15–27. 59 Karsten Linne, Weiße ‘Arbeitsführer’ im ‘Kolonialen Ergänzungsraum’. Afrika als Ziel sozial- und wirtschaftspolitischer Planungen in der NS-Zeit (Münster, 2002), p. 180. 60 Ritter von Epp, 20 November 1941, cited in Karsten Linne, ‘Deutsche Afrikafirmen im “Osteinsatz”’, in 1999. Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, 16 (2001), pp. 49–90, at 88. 61 On the importance of Karl May for the German popular imagination, see Rolf-Bernhard Essig and Gudrun Schury, ‘Karl May’, in Etienne François and Hagen Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. III (Munich, 2002), pp. 107–21.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Drechsler, Horst. Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft. Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus 1884–1915, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1984). Gerwarth, Robert and Malinowski, Stephan. ‘Hannah Arend’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42 (2009), pp. 279–300. Hull, Isabel. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005). Krüger, Gesine. Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewusstsein. Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkrieges in Namibia 1904–1907 (Göttingen, 1999). Kundrus, Birthe (ed.) Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt, 2003). —. ‘Kontinuitäten, Parallelen, Rezeptionen. Überlegungen zur Kolonialisierung des Nationalsozialismus’, WerkstattGeschichte, 43 (2006), pp. 45–62. Kuß, Susanne. Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen. Eskalation von Gewalt zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2010). Laak, Dirk van. Über alles in der Welt. Deutscher Imperialismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2005). Langbehn, Volker (ed.) German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (New York, 2010). — and Salama, Mohammad (eds). German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Post-War Germany (New York, 2011). Madley, Ben. ‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German Southwest Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe’, European History Quarterly, 35 (2005), pp. 429–64. Olusoga, David and Erichsen, Casper W. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s ForgottenG enocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London, 2010). Osterhammel, Jürgen. Kolonialismus. Geschichte – Formen – Folgen (Munich, 2005). — and Conrad, Sebastian (eds). Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871– 1914 (Göttingen, 2004). Perraudin, Michael and Zimmerer, Jürgen (eds). German Colonialism and National Identity (New York, 2010). Sarkin, Jeremy. Germany’s Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers (Cape Town, 2011). Schaller, Dominik J. ‘From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa’, in Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008), pp. 296–324. Speitkamp, Winfried. Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Stuttgart, 2005). Steinmetz, George. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007). Zimmerer, Jürgen. Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner. Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster, 2002). —. ‘The Birth of the “Ostland” Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Pattern of Prejudice, 39 (2005), pp. 197–219. —. ‘Colonial Genocide: The Herero and Nama War (1904–1908) in and its Significance’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (London, 2007), pp. 323–43.

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—. ‘The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century: The German War of Destruction in Southwest Africa (1904–1908) and the Global History of Genocide’, in Doris L. Bergen (ed.), The Holocaust: Lessons and Legacies (Chicago, 2008), pp. 34–64. —. Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster, 2011). —. ‘Lager und Genozid. Die Konzentrationslager in Südwestafrika zwischen Windhuk und Auschwitz’, in Christoph Jahr and Jens Thiel (eds), Lager vor Auschwitz. Gewalt und Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2013), pp. 54–67. — (ed.) Kein Platz an derS onne. Erinnerungsorte der deutschen Kolonialgeschichte (Frankfurt, 2013). — and Zeller, Joachim (eds). Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath (London, 2008). Zimmerman, Andrew. Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010).

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Achinger, christine 145–6, 154–6 Augusta, Kaiserin 27 Adorno, Theodor w. 148 Auguste Viktoria, Kaiserin 27, 231 Aehrenthal, count Alois lexa von 360 Australia 132 Afflerbach, holger 362, 424, 426 Austria–hungary 13, 95, 100, 126, 128–9, 132, Africa 92, 102, 104–5, 107, 134, 221, 274, 351, 354, 153, 239, 300, 308, 339, 348–55, 360–62, 356–7, 359, 387, 434, 436, 440, 449 364, 369–70, 383, 392, 414, 418, 422, german southwest Africa 8, 105, 202, 280, 424–6, 428–9 440–49 Austrian army 379 Agadir 362 Agrarian league 84–5, 281, 293 Bachem, carl 129, 160 agriculture 47, 84, 87, 161, 227, 293–4, 298–9, Bachem-Rehm, michaela 170 303–15, 317–20, 327, 333, 335, 341–2 Bade, Klaus 335 Albertini, luigi 419 Baden 36, 48–9, 84, 99, 111, 118, 165, 184, 197, Albisetti, James c. 229 199, 309, 369 Albrecht, henning 156–7 grand Duke of 17, 56 Alexander, matthias 118 Baden, prince max von 17, 21, 29, 190 Algericas 360 Baden-württemberg 9 Allen, Ann Taylor 6, 225, 235 Baghdad Railway 354–5, 359, 362 Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life) 165, Balfour, Arthur 359 184, 209–10, 216, 264–5 Balkans 350–51, 353, 360, 362–4, 388, 392, 422 Alsace-lorraine 17–18, 22, 26, 130, 179, 186, 250, Bamberg 55, 379 350, 386, 388–9, 394 Bamberger, ludwig 91 Altenloh, emilie 211 Barkin, Kenneth 38 Altgeld, wolfgang 165, 170 Barres, maurice 354 Anderson, margaret l. 38, 47, 77, 85, 95, 161–2, Bartels, Adolf 202 164–5, 247–8, 257 Barth, Theodor 91, 96 Anhalt 197, 311 Basel 272 anti-Jesuit law 17, 100, 167–9 Bassermann, ernst von 48 anti-socialist laws 18, 42, 58, 83, 85, 180–81, 190, Baumann, Ulrich 99 390 Bäumer, gertrud 98–9, 233 antisemitism 5, 15, 38, 47, 77, 85, 99–100, 104, Baumgarten, hermann 393 108, 123, 143–57, 172, 187, 202, 204, 250, Bavaria 16–17, 21–2, 27, 35–6, 49, 55–6, 58–9, 61, 253, 281 64, 66, 68, 70, 84, 111, 119, 127, 169, 173, Applegate, celia 124, 203–5 184, 197, 247, 249, 254, 276, 303, 309, 369, Arendt, hannah 105 370, 384–5, 416 Argentina 132 army of 377, 379 army 7, 14, 17, 19, 22, 29–30, 35, 48, 124, 131, 134, constitution of 1818 59 189, 238, 266, 280, 363, 369–70, 372–5, Beauvoir, simone de 236 377–8, 383–395 Bebel, August 129, 179–80, 182, 184, 186–8, 371 Army Bills 28, 371, 381, 391–2 Becker, carl heinrich 35 377, 379 Becker, frank 393 Asia 92, 102, 104, 107, 135, 274, 387, 389, 434, Belgium 59, 134, 355, 389, 395, 414 439, 449 Bell, christopher 406 Auer, ignaz 184 Below-schlatau, paul von 26 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Benjamin, Walter 9 Blackbourn, David 77, 93, 100, 162–5, 167, 198, Bennette, Rebecca Ayato 171–2 200, 237, 241, 252, 268–9, 291, 304, 309, Bennigsen, Rudolf von 37, 91 313, 402 Berger, Stefan 9, 177 Blaschke, Olaf 166, 172 Berghahn, Volker 124, 238, 241, 400, 404, 406, Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang 59, 71 429 Boentert, Annika 304–5 Berghoff, Hartmut 276 Boldt, Hans 57 Berlepsch, Hans Hermann von 41 Bösch, Frank 119 Berlin 99, 202–3, 231, 247, 254, 265–6, 274, 312, Bosnia-Herzegovina 360, 362 326, 337–9, 377, 380, 384, 416 Bosnian Serbs 422 as capital city 14, 16–17, 22–7, 30, 46, 49, 83, Botzenhart, Christof 68 133, 136, 348–50, 352–3, 355–7, 359–64, Bourdieu, Pierre 269–70, 279 407, 416, 423, 425–6, 429, 443, 446 Boxer, Marilyn 235 as major industrial city 46, 91, 101, 195, 322, Brand, Adolf 26 334 Brandenburg 44, 118, 205–6, 277 ‘Antisemitism Dispute’ 154 Braudel, Fernand 289, 409 archives 48, 108, 384 Braun, Lily 240 Congo Conference (1884–85) 351, 441 Braun, Stefan 5, 177 Congress (1878) 350–51 Bré, Ruth 232 museums 43 Bremen 4, 197, 337 royal court 66 Breslau 98, 272, 337–8 royal palace 1 Breuilly, John 103, 125 strikes 189 Brockdorff von Rantzau, Count Ulrich 415 theatres and amusements 214–16 Brophy, James 200 Trade and Industry Fair (1896) 221 Brubaker, Rogers 103 University 79, 164, 177, 291, 448 Bucher, Lothar 350 Wall 9 Brunswick 197, 270, 275 Berman, Russell 104 Budde, Gunilla 228, 270 Bernstein, Eduard 129, 181, 183–4, 188 Bulgaria 352–3 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von 15, 19, 21, 25, Bülow, Alfred von 26 28–9, 37–8, 44–5, 125, 136, 362, 364, 386, Bülow, Bernhard von 15, 19–21, 23–9, 37, 44, 55, 388, 392, 420–22 70–71, 124, 356–7, 359–60, 441 Bieber, Helmut 275 ‘Bülow Bloc’ 44 Biefang, Andreas 50 ‘Bülow Tariff’ (1902) 201, 204, 295, 297–300 ‘Bielefeld School’ 93, 97, 104, 118, 124–5, 161, Bülow, Karl von 26 166, 178, 201, 269 Bülow, Marie von 27 Binding, Rudolf 393 Bundesrat 13, 16–17, 19, 25, 29, 35, 47, 57–8, 168, Bird, Keith 408 197 Bismarck, Otto von, 15–16, 18–26, 28–30, 34, 46, Bunsen, Marie von 393 58, 60, 62, 71, 79, 82–3, 87, 96–7, 100, 118, Bürgertum 64, 97, 123, 228, 249, 261–3, 268–75, 128–9, 154, 180, 261, 308, 369, 385, 390–92 278, 280–82, 375 Realpolitik 1 Bürgerlichkeit 200–1, 236, 271–4 turn to the right 28, 36–8, 42, 44, 83, 102, 104 Burke, Edmund 112–13, 115 dismissal 19, 20, 24, 30 Busch, Moritz 350 foreign policy 20, 348–53, 355, 359–61, 364, Buse, Dieter 189 405 as founder of the Empire 16, 21, 34, 56–7, 78, Callahan, Kevin 190 126, 197, 199 Canis, Konrad 359 and the Kulturkampf 159, 169, 247–8 Canning, Kathleen 227, 264, 266–7 relationship with Wilhelm I 60 Caprivi, General Leo von 19, 21–2, 28, 37, 47, 84, tariff policy 84, 91, 292, 296 291, 294, 296, 298–300, 355–9, 390 women 27 Castell-Rüdenhausen, Alexander von 276 Bismarck, Herbert von 26, 353 Catholics 5, 17, 27–8, 38–42, 44, 46–7, 49, 82–4, Bjork, James 6, 245 86–7, 93–6, 98, 100, 107, 119, 128–30, 136, Björkö 359

454 Index

159–73, 237, 245–58, 261, 267, 309, 334, Darré, Richard Walther 448 370, 387 Darwin, Charles 252 Catholic areas 44, 47 David, Eduard 184, 188 Catholic church 82 Davis, Belinda 240, 266 Catholic workers 49, 170 Dawson, William H. 40 Catholicism 46, 100, 159–73, 200, 237, 247, Dehio, Georg 327 249, 251–5, 256, 309 Deist, Wilhelm 404 Catholic Women’s League 237 Delbrück, Clemens 36, 41, 48 Cecil, Lamar 68 Delbrück, Hans 130, 354 Centre Party 5, 24, 28, 37, 41–2, 44–7, 49, 55, Delbrück, Rudolph 18, 20 80, 82–3, 86–8, 129–30, 159–73, 186, 200, Delcassé, Théophile 361 248–50, 261, 379, 387, 392 Denmark 42, 130, 136, 300, 383 Chamberlain, Joseph 356–7 Dernburg, Bernhard 105, 447 Chickering, Roger 3, 117 Déroulède, Paul 354 Chile 132 Disraeli, Benjamin 348–9 China 2, 133–4, 356 Dresden 66, 71, 184–5, 203 Christian Peasant League 170 Döllinger, Ignaz 249 Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, 1900) 42, Droysen, Johan von 167 229, 446 Duisburg 170, 337 Clark, Christopher 3, 33, 69, 165, 414, 423–4, Düsseldorf 334, 336–8, 340, 342 426–8 Claβ, Heinrich 130 East Prussia 44, 50, 84, 313, 383, 389, 395 Clemens, Bärbel 235 Ebert, Friedrich 71 Cody, William F. 220 Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation 9, 190 Cold War 178, 347, 384, 421 Echternkamp, Jörn 170 Cologne 44, 170 Eddie, Scott 311 colonialism 8–9, 35, 39, 92, 95, 102–8, 274, 279– Edinburgh 272 80, 283, 399, 407, 433–49 Egypt 221, 355 Confino, Alon 57, 124, 203–4 Eisenach 179 Connelly, John 172–73 Eisner, Kurt 70, 416 Conrad, Joseph 137 Elbe, Lily von 27 Conrad, Sebastian 8, 102, 123–4, 132, 435 Elberfeld 323 Constantine, Simon 6, 303 Eley, Geoff 77, 85, 102, 106, 117, 200, 241, 262, constitution (of Imperial Germany) 13–19, 24, 268–9, 283, 291, 401–2 29–30, 35, 55–62, 69–70, 77–8, 80, 87–8, Emscher River 323, 325 96–7, 103, 129, 131, 273, 377, 384–6, 391, Endres, Fritz 63 403 Engehausen, Frank 189 Conwentz, Hugo 327–8 Engels, Friedrich 150, 177 Conze, Eckart 279 Epkenhans, Michael 404–5 Conze, Werner 178 Erdmann, Karl-Dietrich 420–21 ‘Crimean War Constellation’ 349, 360 Erfurt 181, 268 Crispien, Arthur 71 Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Altenburg 70 cultural pessimism 92, 97, 202 Erzberger, Matthias 41 ‘cultural turn’, the 5, 15, 160, 262–4, 266, 269, Étienne, Eugene 354 275, 282 eugenics 98–9, 231, 448 Eulenburg-Hertefeld, Philipp zu 15, 24–6, 37, D’Azeglio, Massimo 198 43, 68, 385 Dahrendorf, Ralf 8 European Union 2, 16 Daily Telegraph Affair 16, 19, 25–6, 43, 96 Evans, Sir Richard J. 2, 234, 237, 291, 380 Dallwitz, Johann von 45 Daly, Mary 236 Fairbairn, Brett 85, 267 Damaschke, Alfred 98 Falkenhayn, Erich von 390, 393, 425 Daniel, Ute 240, 265–6 Fashoda 354, 356–7 Dann, Otto 125 Faulenbach, Bernd 178 Darmstadt 66–7, 71

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Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) Friedrich III, King of Prussia and Kaiser 17–18, 1, 178, 195–6, 269, 273, 334, 400 27, 65, 67 Ferguson, Niall 405 Friedrich August III, King of Saxony 61, 65, 71 Ferry, Jules 352, 354 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia 60 Finance reform bill (Reichsfinanzreform) 41, 47 Funck, Marcus 279 First World War 1–9, 14, 17, 29, 92, 99, 101–2, 105, 118–19, 124, 133–7, 159, 172, 180–81, Gall, Lothar 94–5, 104, 199, 269, 271 185, 189, 254, 265, 273, 375, 378, 384, Ganghofer, Ludwig 328 387–90, 393, 395, 405 Gawatz, Andreas 77 civil truce (Burgfrieden) 70, 79, 136, 185, 188 Gdansk (Danzig) 83, 427 centenary of 1–2, 8 Gebhardt, Miriam 151 origins and causes of 7, 15, 30, 226, 238, 348, Geller, Jay 151 358, 399, 403, 407, 413–29, 440–41 Gellner, Ernest 125 outbreak of 24, 30, 70 General Staff 23, 36, 351–2, 356, 383, 385–9, 438 POW labour 307–8 George, Stefan 117 and revolution 62, 67, 70–71, 91, 190, 261, German Army League (Deutscher Wehrverein) 275, 281 127, 130, 381, 392, 394 war aims 70 German Colonial Society 127, 274 Fischer Controversy 15, 414, 419, 421–2, 428 German Confederation 127, 198, 349 Fischer Eugen 448 German Conservative Party 28, 37–8, 44–8, Fischer, Fritz 15, 77, 106, 124, 419–21, 423, 425, 79–88, 91, 94–5, 111–19, 130, 133, 155–7, 427 186, 261, 279, 304, 375, 392 Fischer, Lars 5, 143 German Democratic Republic () 9, Fisher, Admiral ‘Jacky’ 405 94, 178, 195, 311, 384, 419 Fitzpatrick, Matthew 105 German Diary Archive (Deutsches Tagebucharchiv) Fontane, Theodor 205–6 379 foreign policy 13, 19–20, 24–5, 28, 34, 57, 92, 104, German Language Association 127 107, 125–31, 134–5, 197, 232, 296–7, 348, German Military Archive 384 350, 347–64, 384, 386, 392, 395, 399–406, German Nobles’ Cooperative 281 417–19 German Protestant Women’s League 237 Foucault, Michel 230, 232 German Racial Hygiene Society 231 Fout, John C. 233 German Southwest Africa (Namibia) 105, 202, France 1, 8, 63, 107, 119, 126–7, 129, 131, 134–7, 280, 440–49 186, 250, 257, 299–300, 348–64, 372, 377, German Veterans’ League (Deutscher 383, 386, 388–95, 402–6, 414–15, 418, 423, Kriegerbund) 374–6 425–6, 441 Gerschenkron, Alexander 291 French Revolution 59, 112–13, 115, 238, 348 Geyer, Michael 383–4 Franco-Prussian War 349, 383, 393 Giloi, Eva 49 Franconia 63–4, 119, 277, 379 globalization 2, 6, 107, 123–4, 132–3, 137, 213, Frank, Ludwig 185 220, 289–300 Frankfurt am Main 40, 91, 95, 99, 101, 108, 200, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 171, 249 236, 247 Görlitz, Walter 420 National Assembly (‘Frankfurt Parliament’) Göttingen 184, 275 79, 407 Gollwitzer, Heinz 60, 62 Peace of 349 Gossler, Alfred von 48 University 97, 201, 269 Gotha 180, 197, 275, 313 Frankfurter Zeitung 91 Gothein, Georg 105 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 1, 422, 429 Gove, Michael 2 Franzoi, Barbara 227 Great Britain (United Kingdom) 2, 3, 5, 8, 27–8, Franz Joseph, 64, 422 40, 81–3, 103, 107, 119, 126–7, 129, 131–2, Free Conservative Party (Reichspartei) 38, 47, 79, 134–7, 150, 210, 231, 234, 236, 257, 290, 81, 118, 261 292, 298–9, 300, 322, 348–9, 351–64, 372, Frenssen, Gustav 202 378, 390, 392, 399–407, 418, 426, 441 Frevert, Ute 239, 393 Grebing, Helga 178 Freytag, Gustav 146, 155–7, 435 Green, Abigail 197–8

456 Index

Green Party 196 Hesse, Hermann 328 Greve, Barbara 311 Hettling, Manfred 270, 272–3 Greven-Aschoff, Barbara 234 Heuss, Theodor 100 Grey, Sir Edward 361, 364 Hewitson, Mark 5, 35, 96, 98, 103, 107, 123, 424 Grieβmer, Axel 118 Heydebrand, Ernst von 47–8 Grimm, Dieter 16 Heymann, Lida Gustava 240 Groener, Wilhelm 278 Himmler, Heinrich 436–7 Groh, Dieter 178 Hindenburg, General Paul von 22, 29, 70 Gross, Michael 100, 168–9, 171, 248 Hintze, Otto 35, 59, 131 Groβbölting, Thomas 270 Hirschfeld, Magnus 233 Grünthal, Günther 49 Hitler, Adolf 8, 15, 117–18, 199, 421, 427, 437–9 Gummersbach (Archive of German Liberalism) Hobsbawm, Eric 123 108 Hobson, Rolf 404 Günther, Prince of Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen Hochstadt, Steve 7, 333 70 Hoelz, Max 312–13 Hoetsch, Otto 416 Habermas, Jürgen 124 Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig 96, 270 Hackett, Amy 234 Hohenlohe, Alexander von 26 Hacohen, Malachai 100 Hohenlohe, Princess Marie zu 27 Haenisch, Konrad 188 Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Prince Chlodwig zu Häfner, Heinz 68 17–19, 21–3, 25–6, 29, 37, 48 Halsdorf 340 Holocaust (Shoah), the 8, 15, 151–2, 380 Hamburg 4, 95, 101, 108, 124–5, 131, 133, 137, Hölscher, Lucian 165, 252 197, 199–200, 204–5, 303, 325, 374, 380 Holstein, Friedrich von 15, 23, 25, 68–9, 350, Tropical Institute 449 353, 355 Hamerow, Theodore 116 Holy Roman Empire 63, 127, 198, 245, 247 Hämmerle, Christa 379 Honoratioren 78, 93, 95, 204 Hanover 46, 50, 119, 130, 198, 275 Hötzendorf, Franz Conrad von 421 Hard Labour Bill (Zuchthausvorlage) 42 Hoverbeck, Leopold von 79 Harden, Maximilian 25–6 Hoyos, Count Alexander von 364 Hardie, Keir 187 Hubatsch, Walther 404 Hartung, Fritz 48 Huber, Ernst Rudolf 59 Hastings, Derek 172–3, 249 Hübinger, Gangolf 165 Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard 170 Hunt, James C. 291 Hauptmann, Gerhart 218, 328 Hunt, Tristram 2 Healy, Róisín 167–8 Hecht, Moritz 309 Imhof, Arthur 334 Hedemann, Alexandra von 27 Imperial League to Combat Social Democracy Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 171, 434, 436 127 Heidegger, Martin 323 Independent Social Democratic Party of Heilbronner, Oded 5, 111 Germany (USPD) 71, 188–90, 266 Heimat 5–6, 62–3, 119, 145, 160, 195–6, 201–6, 329 India 360, 437, 449 Heimatschutz 325–8 Indian Ocean 410 Heine, Heinrich 29 industry 38–9, 47, 84, 87, 94, 221, 227, 264, 271, Heligoland 354 276–7, 291–5, 300, 303, 305, 317, 320–29, Herder, Johann Gottfried 326 335, 340–43 Henning, Friedrich-Wilhelm 341 industrialization 40, 92, 98, 100, 103, 107, 124, Hertling, Georg von 17, 21, 26, 29 136, 254, 261, 319–24, 327–8, 333, 339–42 Herzog, Dagmar 165 Iran 165 Hess, Jürgen 102 Ireland 165 Hesse 36, 46, 49–50, 60, 184, 197, 199, 311, 369, Isvolsky, Alexander 361 375–6 Italy 46, 126, 129, 257, 325, 352–5, 362–3 Hesse-Darmstadt 66 Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of 67, 71 Jackson, James H. 337 Upper Hesse 340 Jagow, Gottfried von 15

457 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

James, Harold 103, 124–5 Konitz 253 Janβen, Karl-Heinz 70 Köpenick 380 Japan 136, 297, 356, 359, 406 Koshar, Rudy 275 Jaurès, Jean 187 Koselleck, Reinhard 320, 368 Jefferies, Matthew 1, 202–5 Krieger, Leonard 93 Jelavich, Peter 213–14 Krieger, Martin 307 Jena 48 Kruger, Paul 356 Jenkins, Jennifer 6, 95–6, 101, 204–5 Kubrova, Monika 280 Jews 6, 39, 42, 96, 99–100, 104, 107, 130, 144–57, Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael 166 160, 165, 169, 250–58, 315, 334, 438 Kühne, Thomas 4, 43–4, 77 Judaism 143–4, 147, 247, 251 Kulturkampf 6, 28, 38, 42, 82–3, 85, 87, 100, 128–9, Central Association of German Citizens of 159–72, 237, 247–8, 252–3, 257, 309, 379 Jewish Faith 250 Kurlander, Eric 4, 91 Johnson, Boris 2 Kyffhäuser Association (Kyffhäuserbund) 127, Johst, Hanns 436–7 374–5, 377–9, 394 Jones, Elizabeth 227, 304, 306 Jones, Larry Eugene 94 Lambert, Nicholas 405 Jörg, Josef Edmund 368 Lambsdorff, Count 359 Judson, Pieter 95, 100 Lambi, Ivo 404 ‘July Crisis’ 7, 15, 17, 28, 362, 364, 386, 388, 414, Lamprecht, Karl 132–3 420, 423–9 Landräte 39, 45, 48, 85, 278–9, 374, 376 Jünger, Ernst 117 Langbehn, Julius 202 Junker 23, 38, 45, 48, 84, 117, 124, 261, 268, 277–8, Lange, Helene 233 291, 383, 386 Langewiesche, Dieter 86, 95, 124, 170, 200, 337 Lansdowne, Lord 359 Kaelble, Hartmut 118 Lasker, Eduard 91 Kaiser (emperor), role of 13–14, 18–20, 57, 83, 96, Lassalle, Ferdinand 177, 179 278, 377, 384–6, 394 Latin America 220, 290 Kameke, Georg von 385, 391 Lauenstein 326 Kandinsky, Wassily 67 Laufenburg 327 Kaplan, Marion 237 League of German Women’s Associations (BDF) Karl I, King of Württemberg 61 233–7 Karlsruhe 392 Leipzig 70, 132, 179, 272–3 Kartell 28, 37, 44–5, 261, 392 left liberals 41, 44, 47, 78–9, 84, 86, 91, 94, 98–9, Kästner, Erich 8 101, 127, 129–30, 134, 136, 167, 181, 183, Kautsky, Karl 181–8, 417 186, 251, 261, 368, 370–71 Kehr, Eckart 38, 93, 166, 291, 294, 373, 399–402, Lehmann, Sibylle 95 407 Leipzig 70, 132, 179, 272–3 Keim, August 130, 381, 391 Lenbach, Franz von 67 Kennedy, Paul 404–7 Lenz, Max 354 Kerr, Alfred 214 Lenz, Siegfried 196 Keyserlingk, Count Robert 48 Lepsius, M. Rainer 82, 86, 118, 166, 248, 268 Kiderlen-Wächter, Alfred 15, 24, 28, 362, 388 Lerchenfeld, Count Hugo Phillip von 35 Kiel 108 Lerman, Katharine 4, 13 Kirchhoff, Alfred 128 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 249 Kirsch, Martin 34 Leuschen-Seppel, Rosemarie 150 Kladderadatsch 169 Leutwein, Theodor 442–7 Klages, Ludwig 320 Levenstein, Adolf 182 Klausmann, Christina 236 Levy, Richard 153 Knodel, John 333–4 liberals 16, 34, 40–48, 78–9, 81, 84–8, 91–107, 116, Kocka, Jürgen 199, 229, 263, 271 118, 135, 154–7, 167–8, 186, 240, 272, 369, Kohfink, Marc-Wilhelm 102 390, 393 Kohn, Hans 124 life reform movement (Lebensreformbewegung) Kohut, Thomas 69 203, 205, 272–4, 324 Königsberg 99 ‘Liebenberg Circle’ 25–7

458 Index

Liebermann, Max 328 Maynes, Mary Jo 228 Liebknecht, Karl 184, 188, 371 Mazón, Patricia 236 Liebknecht, Wilhelm 56, 179–80 McDonald, Ramsay 417 ‘Liman-von-Sanders-Affair’ 363 Mecklenburg 59, 197, 277, 303, 305–6, 312 Lindenberger, Thomas 265 Mehring, Franz 177 Lindequist, Friedrich von 445–6 Meinecke, Friedrich 93, 124, 128–30, 354 Lienhard, Friedrich 202 Meiwes, Relinde 237 List, Friedrich 407 memory studies 8–9, 173, 190, 205, 279, 327–8, Lloyd George, David 419, 423–4 448 Lohmann, Theodor 20–21, 41 Mergel, Thomas 162, 249 Loth, Wilfried 49, 162–5, 172 Meyer, Eduard 137 Lower Saxony 84, 86, 326, 328 Meyer, Sybille 228 Lower Silesia 44 Michaelis, Georg 16, 19, 21–2, 29 Lübeck 4, 49, 197 Miquel, Johannes von 20, 37, 41, 91, 294 Ludendorff, General Erich 22, 29 Miller, Susanne 179, 189 Lüdtke, Alf 265 Mitteleuropa 102, 106 Ludwig I, King of Bavaria 64 Mittelstand 94, 97, 99, 261, 266–7 Ludwig II, King of Bavaria 22, 56–8, 60–61, 63–4, Mittnacht, Hermann von 61 68–9 Möckl, Karl 61, 66 Ludwig III, King of Bavaria 58, 65, 70 modernity 33, 64, 69, 77, 92, 97–101, 107, 117, Ludwig, Emil 68 119, 125, 143–6, 156, 165, 167, 195, 198–9, Ludwigshafen 303 218, 241, 246, 269, 272–3, 276–8, 327, 348, Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria 55, 61, 63, 434, 442 66, 68 Modernization theory 92, 101, 143–4, 155–6, Lüneburg Heath 326, 328 161–2, 166, 199, 204, 227, 261, 269, 272, Luther, Martin 171 275, 309, 383 Lutheran 164, 247, 250–51 Moltke, Friedrich von 37 Lutz, Johann von 61 Moltke, Helmuth von (the elder) 383, 385, 387–8 Luxembourg 414 Moltke, Helmuth von (the younger) 385, 389 Luxemburg, Rosa 184 Moltke, Kuno von 25, 27 Mombauer, Annika 1, 7, 389, 413 Maase, Kaspar 6, 209 Mommsen, Theodor 99, 137, 167 MacGregor, Neil 3 Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 93–5, 104 Machtan, Lothar 17 Mönckeberg, Johann Georg 374 Macmillan, Margaret 2 Montgelas, Count Max 417–18 Magdeburg 337, 340 Morocco 359 Mahan, Alfred T. 358 Moroccan Crises 136, 362, 386, 392, 395 Malet, Edward 356 Morsey, Rudolf 172 Malinowski, Stephan 279, 281 Mosse, George L. 98, 124, 231, 233 Mann, Heinrich 367–8, 374 Moy, Count Ernst von 55 Mann, Thomas 62, 101, 328 Mozambique 356 Mannheim 185, 322 Müller, Adam 115 Mannheim, Karl 77, 111 Müller, Felix von 26 Marder, Arthur 405–6 Müller, Frank Lorenz 4, 55 Margerie, Pierre de 418 Müller, Admiral Georg Alexander von 136, Marpingen 163, 198, 237, 252, 304, 309 420 Marschall von Bieberstein, Adolf von 23 Müller, Karl Alexander von 66 Marx, Karl 50, 151, 190 Mulligan, William 7, 383 Marxism 87, 94, 161–2, 177–91 Munich 58, 63–7, 108, 172, 249, 379 Marx, Wilhelm 417 Matthiesen, Helge 275 Napoleon Bonaparte 198 Matysik, Tracie 233 Napoleonic Wars 239, 245, 350 May, Karl 449 Napoleon III 369, 387 Mayer, Gustav 150–51, 177 National Association 128 Mayershofer, Ingrid 379

459 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

National Liberal Party 28, 35, 37–8, 42–9, 57, Potthoff, Heinrich 179 78–81, 84, 86–8, 91–100, 118, 130, 136, Press Law (1874) 43 186, 199, 247, 261, 377, 393 Prinz, Michael 267 National Socialism (Nazism) 1, 5, 9, 38, 92, 119, Proctor, Robert 230–31 145, 172, 177, 195, 199, 201–2, 204, 225, Progressives (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei) 37, 241, 261, 268, 275, 281, 329, 368, 372, 427, 39–40, 44, 47, 49, 84, 86–8, 92, 95, 100 435 Protestants 83–5, 160, 168, 170–71, 247–8, 250– National Social Association (Nationalsoziale 51, 254–5, 257–8, 334 Verein) 91, 250 Protestant League 249–50 Naumann, Friedrich 91, 95–6, 98, 101–2, 105–6, Prussia 13, 20, 28–9, 33–50, 56, 111–19, 126, 129, 250, 327 132–3, 169–72, 196, 206, 215, 247, 253–4, navy (imperial German) 7, 19, 23–4, 27, 104, 357, 278–9, 281, 298, 306, 308, 311, 322, 328, 378, 391, 399–410 338, 341, 348–9, 385 Navy League 24, 86, 106, 118–19, 127, 250, 401 constitution (1850) 34–7, 45, 47, 59, 278 ‘negative integration’ 161, 178 position and role in German Empire 4, 13, Netherlands, The 129, 136, 257, 300, 389 16–17, 19–20, 22, 33–6, 43, 48, 57, 80, 127, Nield, Keith 283 129, 196–8, 200, 245, 294, 370 Nietzsche, Friedrich 117 Herrenhaus 34, 45–6, 48, 80, 278 Nipperdey, Thomas 4, 36, 57, 61, 165, 199 Landtag 14, 24, 34, 40, 42–8, 78, 80, 86 North German Confederation 15, 19, 56, 78, 179, Landtag elections 45, 81, 87 212 militarism 172, 367–79, 385, 390–95 North Sea 326, 404–10 ministries 16, 23, 35–7, 39 Noske, Gustav 129 three-class franchise 61, 80–82, 91, 185–6, Nuremberg 270 265 Prussian People’s Association 116 Offen, Karen 226, 234 Puhle, Hans-Jürgen 85, 118 Oktoberfest 64 Pulzer, Peter 99, 153–4 Oldenbourg-Januschau, Elard von 386 Oldenburg 9, 197 Quataert, Jean 227, 235, 239, 304 Grand Duke Friedrich August of 67, 70 Quidde, Ludwig 105, 370 Oskar, Prince of Prussia 70 Osterhammel, Jürgen 8, 132 Radbruch, Gustav 39 Ottoman Empire 353, 359, 363 Radowitz, Josef Maria von 350 Rahden, Till van 98, 250 Pachtler, Georg Michael 370 Raβloff, Steffen 275 Palmowski, Jan 95–6, 99 Rathenau, Walther 130 Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband) 106, Reagin, Nancy 228 118–19, 126–7, 130, 250, 274, 281, 391–2, Reformation, the 164, 168, 246–7, 251–2, 257 394 Rehbein, Franz 312, 372 Paris 22, 136, 179–80, 215, 221, 350–52, 355–6, Reichstag 13, 16–17, 22–5, 28–30, 35–6, 40, 42, 359, 363–4, 377, 389, 403, 425 46–8, 69, 106, 168, 180, 267, 295, 299, 371, Particularism 5, 17, 23, 128, 195–201 385–7, 390–92, 399, 400–1, 415 Patriotic Book League 127 elections 24, 28, 47, 77–88, 91–2, 100, 108, People’s Association for Catholic Germany 170, 159, 162, 180, 183, 187, 282, 294, 367, 370, 249 391–2 Persia 360 franchise 13, 36, 40, 61, 78–80, 85 Ping, Larry 96, 100 powers of 13, 16–17, 28–30, 35, 385 Planert, Ute 99, 231 speeches in 23, 25, 55, 129, 387, 390 Plumpe, Werner 273 Reif, Heinz 275, 281 Poland 108, 199, 308, 427, 435–6, 439 Reinhard, Wolfgang 164 Poles 42, 44–45, 82–83, 130, 146, 169, 339, 348, Reinsurance Treaty 352–3, 355 427, 436, 449 Reitmayer, Morten 270 Pomerania 44, 50, 305, 312, 338, 372 Rendsburg (Colonial Women’s School) 449 Posadowsky-Wehner, Arthur von 24, 41 Repp, Kevin 97–8, 100 Posen 42, 44 Retallack, James 3, 33, 47–8, 77, 117

460 Index

Reuss, Prince Heinrich XXII of 58 Schäfer, Michael 270, 272–3 Reuss-Gera 197 Schaser, Angelika 98 Reval 360 Schaumburg-Lippe 56, 197, 342 Rheinbaben, Georg von 37 Scheefer, Max 26 Rhineland 46, 118–19, 199–200, 203–4, 247, 249, Schiller, Friedrich von 249 254, 264, 266, 277, 338 Schiller, René 277 River Rhine 319, 322–3, 326–7, 336 Schilling, Heinz 164 Richter, Eugen 91, 95, 97 Schlee, Ludwig 312 Rieger, Gabriele 310 Schleswig-Holstein 44, 46, 50, 84, 101, 108, 312, Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich 195, 202, 326 338 Riesser, Gabriel 104 Schlieffen, Alfred von 356, 385, 387, 389 Riezler, Kurt 420–21 ‘Schlieffen Plan’ 36, 389, 422 Ritter, Gerhard 48 Schmidt, Jürgen 268–70 Ritter, Gerhard A. 263 Schmitt, Carl 59 Ritter von Epp, Franz Xaver 449 Schmoller, Gustav 35 Roethe, Gustav 35 Schmuhl, Hans-Walter 269–70 Rohe, Karl 44, 86–7, 118 Schöllgen, Gregor 133 Rohkrämer, Thomas 7, 317, 394 Scholtis, August 312 Röhl, John 18, 21, 49, 66, 68–9, 420 Schorske, Carl E. 95, 100, 178, 189 Rohrbach, Paul 126 Schrader, Paul 312 Romania 355 Schröder, Iris 236 Rome 26, 83, 137, 167, 248–9, 318 Schroeder, Paul W. 358–9 Rose, Andreas 7, 347 Schücking, Walter 417 Rosenberg, Hans 77, 79, 85, 276, 291 Schüler-Springorum, Stefanie 99 Rostock 303 Schulte, Regina 309, 313 Rudorff, Ernst 326–8 Schulz, Andreas 273 Rüger, Jan 7, 399 Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt 56 Ruhr district 87, 169–70, 215, 254, 268, 321, 323, Schweizer, Johann Baptist von 177 325, 334, 336 Schwertfeger, Bernhard 418 Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria 70 Scott, Joan W. 226 Ruprecht-Ransern, Alfred 84 secularization 119, 143–4, 165, 236–7, 245, 252, Rürup, Reinhard 98 254–7, 309 Russell, Bertrand 177 Second World War 107, 177, 289, 384, 427, 438, Russell, Lady Emily 36 440, 447–8 Russia 2, 23, 29, 134–7, 172, 186, 188, 250, 255, Sedan 349, 387, 392 257, 297, 300, 308, 313, 339, 348–64, 386– Sedan Day 394 92, 395, 403–6, 414, 416, 422–3, 425–6, Sedition Bill (Umsturzvorlage, 1894) 42 429, 437–8, 449 Seligmann, Matthew 406 Russo-Japanese War 135 Sell, Friedrich 93 Revolution (1905) 184 Serbia 355, 364, 414, 422–9 Seven Years War 349, 387 Saarbrücken 169 Sheehan, James J. 94–5, 199 Saarland 9, 163, 252, 267, 304 Siegmund-Schulze, Friedrich 274 Saldern, Adelheid von 184 Silesia 101, 118, 247, 278 Salisbury, Lord 354–5, 357 Lower 44 Salomon, Alice 235 Upper 50, 169, 249, 254, 276–7, 312 Samoa 135, 440 Simmel, Georg 123, 218 Sammlungspolitik 6, 261, 275, 282, 294, 297 Simplicissimus 22, 131, 134 Sarajevo 364, 422, 428 Slavs 134, 188, 435, 438–9 Saxe-Coburg 66, 197 Slevogt, Max 67 Saxony 17, 44, 49, 60–61, 66, 70, 81, 101, 111, Smith, Helmut Walser 164–5, 169–70, 248, 253, 118–19, 127, 132, 186, 197–8, 254, 276, 257, 380 304, 312, 321, 334, 384–5 Social Darwinism 104, 133, 295, 354, 361–2, 374, constitution (1831) 59 376 Schaedler, Franz Xaver 55

461 The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 5, 9, Switzerland 126, 257, 300, 355, 369 24, 28–9, 34, 39–42, 44–7, 49, 64, 78–84, Sybel, Heinrich von 167 87–8, 93, 127–30, 177–90, 261–2, 265–6, Sykora, Katharina 68 268, 273, 282, 294, 371, 380, 387–8, 390, 395, 442 Tenfelde, Klaus 263–64, 267 ‘social imperialism’ 104, 125, 127, 400–1 Theilemann, Wolfram 277–8, 280 ‘Social Question’ 105, 156 Thierry, Jacob 276 Society for Germandom Abroad 127 Third Reich 8–9, 14, 105, 177, 226, 241, 256, 329, Society for the Eastern Marches 106, 127, 250 372, 433, 439, 440, 448 Sohnrey, Heinrich 202 Thirty Years War 249, 258, 387 Solf, Wilhelm 105 Thoma, Ludwig 61 Sombart, Werner 97–8, 101, 327 Thompson, Alastair 49, 95, 167 Sonderweg 8, 14, 77, 92, 96, 98, 101, 104, 107–8, Thompson, E.P. 226, 265, 282 118–19, 159, 163, 199–200, 203, 241, 256, Thuringia 46, 49–50, 58, 111, 374 261, 268, 271, 275, 278, 281, 348, 354, 369, Tilse, Mark 49 371–80, 399, 401–2, 449 Tirpitz, Admiral Alfred von 7, 23–5, 27–8, 357–8, Sösemann, Bernd 421 392, 400–8 South Africa 441 Tönnies, Ferdinand 145 South African (Boer) War 354, 357, 390 Tornau, Joachim F. 274 Soviet Union 416, 418–19, 439 Torp, Cornelius 6, 289 Spain 46, 257, 355 Trade Unions (Free) 47, 179–81, 185, 189, 229, Spengler, Oswald 137 262–4, 266–8, 343, 374, 380, 390 Spenkuch, Hartwin 4, 33, 278 Christian 249 Sperber, Jonathan 87, 95, 118, 165, 169, 183, 200, Transvaal 356 248 Treitschke, Heinrich von 79–80, 126, 154–7, 167, Spitzemberg, Baroness 27 238, 354, 393, 437 Stahl, Friedrich Julius 59 Trotha, Lothar von 280, 444–7 Stalmann, Volker 22, 118 Tsar Alexander III 356 Stambolis, Barbara 171 Tsar Nicholas II 58 Stampfer, Friedrich 13 Stargardt, Nicholas 368 Uekötter, Frank 320 Stegmann, Dirk 118 Umbach, Maiken 101 Stein, Oliver 390 United States of America 2–3, 27, 29, 40, 80, 83, Steinberg, Hans-Josef 182 107, 112, 124, 131–7, 165, 200, 234, 241, Steinberg, Jonathan 404, 406 295, 297, 313, 328, 339, 349, 354, 361, 386, Steinhoff, Anthony 255 402–3, 449 Steinmetz, George 279 urbanization 98, 212, 254, 333, 338 Steinmetz, Willibald 171 Stern, Fritz 98, 124 Venezuela 354, 359 Stöcker, Helene 98, 232–3 Vereine 201, 247, 270 Stoecker, Adolf 117, 250 Verne, Jules 137 Stoehr, Irene 235 Versailles 56, 196–7 Stoetzler, Marcel 144–5, 154–6 Treaty (1919) 106, 413–19, 423, 427, 429 Stoneman, Mark 277 Vico, Giambattista 111–13 Stratigakos, Despina 236 Victoria (Vicky), Kaiserin 27 Stresemann, Gustav 99, 105 Vienna 25, 95, 156, 215, 350–53, 360, 364, 422–3, Stürmer, Michael 1 425–6, 429 Stuttgart 65–6, 108, 129 Congress (1814–15) 198, 349 Sumida, Jon 405 University 379 Sun, Raymond C. 49 Vogel, Jakob 377–8, 393 Suttner, Bertha von 239 Vogt, Hermann 394 Suval, Stanley 83 Volkov, Shulamit 150 Swabia 64 Vollmar, Georg von 129 Sweden 129, 300 Vorwärts 70, 371 Sweeney, Dennis 6, 261

462 Index

Wagner, Patrick 45–6, 278–9 Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and Kaiser 3, 15, Wagner, Richard 117 17–30, 36–7, 42–4, 49, 55, 58, 61, 67–70, Wahnschaffe, Arnold 415 104, 180, 354, 356, 359, 383–6, 391, 394, Waldeck and Pyrmont 16 404, 407, 415, 422, 429 Waldersee, Alfred von 385–6, 420, 426 Staatsstreich plans of 17, 80, 386 Wallerstein, Immanuel 289 abdication of 70–71 Wallot, Paul 328 Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute 448 Walser, Karin 314 Wilhelm II, King of Württemberg 61, 65, 71 ‘War-in-Sight’ Crisis 350, 386 Williams, Raymond 209 Wartenburg, Count Heinrich Yorck von 47 Williamson, Samuel R. 413, 428 Weber, Max 29, 93, 97, 101, 135, 236–7, 245, 263, Wilson, Keith 405 268–70, 327, 341 Windthorst, Ludwig 161 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 6, 15, 20, 48, 77, 118, 124, Winzen, Peter 25 161–2, 178, 199, 225, 241, 261–2, 271–3, Witzenhausen (Colonial School) 448–9 291, 371–2, 400, 402 women 50, 98–9, 105, 107, 114, 134, 173, 204, Wehner, Silke 313 214, 221, 225–42, 246, 255–6, 264–74, 280, Weichlein, Siegfried 171 304–6, 309, 313–14, 317, 334–5, 342, 378, Weigand, Katharina 64 383, 439, 443, 445–9 Weimar Republic 9, 13–14, 40, 82, 91, 106, 118, women’s education 229, 236, 241 150, 172, 177, 199, 226, 230, 241, 329, 381, women’s employment 40, 180, 189, 227, 229, 427 235–6, 239, 264–8, 305–6, 342 Weindling, Paul 230–31 in public life 27, 98–9, 113 Welskopp, Thomas 267 suffrage 81, 96, 99, 168, 236, 239, 241 Weltpolitik 107, 133, 185, 348, 355, 361–2, 392, Worms 322 400, 404 Wupper River 322 Werkbund 101, 222 Württemberg 9, 17, 36, 49, 56, 61, 66, 70–71, 84, Wermuth, Adolf von 24, 28, 392 118, 197–8, 203, 277, 369–70, 377, 384–5 Werner, Anton von 56, 197 Werner, Karl Ferdinand 62 Zabern Affair 28, 43, 96, 386–7 Wernigerode 311 Zalar, Jeffrey 5, 159, 249 West Prussia 253, 278 Zantop, Susanne 104 Westarp, Count Kuno von 48 Zanzibar 355 Westphalia 46, 50, 264, 266, 277, 338 Zeender, John 161 Wette, Wolfram 368 Zeppelin, Ferdinand 328 White, Dan 199 Zetkin, Clara 181, 235 Wienfort, Monika 279–80 Ziemann, Benjamin 7, 367 Wietschorke, Jens 274 Zimmerer, Jürgen 8, 433 Wildenthal, Lora 98, 105 Zimmerman, Andrew 169 Wilhelm I, King of Prussia and Kaiser 16–18, Zuber, Terence 389 23, 27, 36, 49, 56, 58, 60, 65, 68, 197, 351, Zweig, Stefan 64, 321 374, 385 Zwicker, Lisa Fetheringill 97, 172

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