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The Home Front: 1914-1918

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The Home Front: 1914-1918 A Prussian Family’s Passage Through Leipzig VIII: THE HOME FRONT: 1914-1918 While the Germans dug in on foreign soils, soldiers’ families did much the same at home. It didn’t take long for the merrymaking to subside, once tales of woe and dismembered men began arriving home in large numbers. By Christmas it was clear the war would not be over, and from here on until its end, there was a battle to be fought on the ‘home front’ – keeping up the spirit of the nation, in turn to bolster that of the soldiers. In August 1914, my grandmother, Little Nannÿ, turned seven years old, her brother Theo was coming up six, while little sister Margot was just three. Among her cousins, Frits Lothar (hereafter Frits) was now eight, Martin was almost seven and Heinz was four and a half. When the war broke out, her aunt Hedwig was still carrying the last of her brood. She was four months pregnant with Hans, the youngest of the Hinsch grandchildren born in January 1915. The youngsters formed two basic cohorts; Nannÿ, Theo, Frits and Martin were elementary schoolchildren while Heinz, Margot and Hans spent most of the 1914- 1918 period, pre-schoolers. Although all seven middle-class children were part of the ‘war youth generation,’1 this chapter particularly brings Nannÿ, Theo, Frits and Martin’s worlds to life. We will see how their families’ lives changed in response to the evolving landscape around them, particularly as the social and political distance between Prussia and Saxony widened against a backdrop of growing class conflict. The Tÿrallas’ world in 1914 was northern Leipzig’s Roon Straße,2 where their home remained until spring 1916. Urban society was then awash with uncertainty, as arguments about education, poor relief and healthcare constantly laid bare its class- based nature. The social democrats, in their nascency in the Kingdom of Saxony, pitched their appeal at all the ‘little people’ who suffered from high rents, rigged food prices and unfair taxes.3 Despite an economic recession from 1913 that lasted until spring 1915, the unemployment rate rarely rose above six percent in Leipzig.4 However, it wasn’t long before cracks appeared in the Burgfrieden, the domestic truce which had been agreed among political parties at the outset of the war.5 The first days of the war had started brightly enough for Germany. Victory in Liege, Belgium on August 16th and then at Tannenberg in East Prussia on August 30th had ensured the war would not be fought on German soil and led to mass parades and 1 Children born between 1900 and 1914, too young to fight in the Great War. 2 Albrecht von Roon was a Prussian soldier and statesman who lived between 1803 and 1879. He was a dominating figure in Prussia's government during the key decade of the 1860s, when a series of successful wars against Denmark, Austria and France led to German unification under Prussia's leadership. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_Graf_von_Roon 3 Breuilly, pg. 215 4 Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910-1920. Dobson, pg. 115 5 Christophe Nonn. Saxon Politics during the First World War: Modernisation, National Liberal Style in Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830-1933. Edited by J. N. Retallack. Pg. 310. © All text on this page copyrighted. No reproduction allowed without permission of the author. 171 WANDERVÖGEL celebrations on Sedan Day, the national holiday on September 2nd.6 August’s ‘feel good’ factor came to be known as the ‘Spirit of 1914’ and all but the most cautious of military experts believed that victory over Russia was imminent, freeing the army in the east to conquer France. Preserving this spirit and the populace’s willingness to make fantastic sacrifices in turn became the military government’s conscious strategy to win the war.7 Pupils too rejoiced at the unity fostered by the war, while expressing grief and fear for the safety of loved ones.8 Its outbreak made for a predominantly matriarchal household dominated by thoughts of “the men at the front” recalled Alexander Walker in his biography of Marlene Dietrich.9 Dietrich was 13 at the time and spent hours knitting warm garments for the German troops or accompanying the school choir to the railroad station to sing the boys off to battle with patriotic anthem. Yet as another author recalls the story of one boy whose father departed to the front, although at first his family was sad, the lad adds: “We got used to the absence.”10 After the bloody battle of the Marne between September 5th and 12th and the stalemate on the Western Front, the public was no longer celebratory. Although most Germans wanted the benefits of victory, few were enthusiastic about fighting a war in which loved ones were going to die.11 There was also anxiety about day to day concerns with many queuing to withdraw their savings from the bank, buying up and hoarding food and other goods likely to be in short supply over the coming months. Shop owners raised the prices of those products suddenly in great demand, and refused to accept paper money. Civil administration was rapidly taken over by the military, which meant Deputy Commanding Generals were made responsible for army recruitment and labour distribution. They intervened in food-supply, social policy and domestic order. 12 As early as August 12th for instance, the recently introduced Leipziger KraftOmnibus was put into war service and used for ferrying about soldiers, while women were introduced as Strassenbahner.13 Hundreds of thousands more women, overwhelmingly upper-middle class, joined the Red Cross, besides the newly founded National Women’s Service (Nationaler Frauendienst) and various state, municipal and Leipzig’s women on tram duty, 1914/1915. 14 Source: Wikipedia charity welfare organizations. 6 A semi-official memorial holiday in the German Empire commemorating Prussia's victory in the Battle of Sedan after Napoleon III was taken prisoner on Sept. 1 1870, a major step to eventual victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedantag 7 Andrew Donson. Youth in the Fatherless Land. War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918. Harvard University Press, 2010. Pg.7 8 Ibid (Donson). Pg.81 9 Alexander Walker. Dietrich. Harper and Row. 1984. pg. 12. 10 Donson. Pg.81 11 Donson. Pg. 7 12 Richard Bessel: Germany after the First World War. 1995. Pg. 2, 4 and 5. 13 Martina Güldemann in 1999 in Das war das 20. Jahrhundert in LEIPZIG. 14 Donson. Pg. 108 172 © All text on this page copyrighted. No reproduction allowed without permission of the author. A Prussian Family’s Passage Through Leipzig The war confronted Germany with the unprecedented organization of the domestic economy too.15 Rather than switch in 1914 to high levels of direct taxation, the government opted to fund the war by appealing to a patriotic public to subscribe to semi-annual war bonds (Kriegsanleihe).16 In effect, it sought to borrow from its own subjects, gambling that it would win the war and could compel its enemies to pay for the war through reparations. This borrowing, however, only accelerated inflation in the short term which was “already galloping…resulting from the shortage of goods.”17 Six days after the outbreak of the war, Little Nannÿ Tÿralla celebrated her birthday. I wonder how? Before German propaganda poster: 1914, most of the toys sold in Germany were non- “Subscribe to war bonds!” military items, such as dolls, trains and chemistry Source: Wikipedia.. /War_bond#Germany sets. But in the months leading up to Christmas 1914, toy displays in department stores were set up with almost exclusively miniature infantry, submarines, zeppelins, planes, guns and other items. In contrast to convention before the war, they bore clear nationalist markers. Playing with toy soldiers was fabulously popular among middle-class male youths in Germany, but I wonder what caught Little Nannÿ’s interest?18 Military nurses maybe? The war’s assault on customary food habits began when supplies of wheat for bread ran low by December. Germany depended on imports for half of its wheat and one third of its fodder, but the military and municipal and state governments had not planned for the English food blockade and did not have a contingency plan for a protracted war. In addition, Germany’s federal food system was poorly equipped to coordinate a national food policy; civilian administrations did not readily cooperate with each other.19 As a highly industrialized state,20 Saxony was hit very early and severely.21 As one of Germany’s most densely populated regions, western Saxony had little arable land per resident. In the pre-war era most of Leipzig’s food came from Prussia’s Province of Saxony (where Little Nannÿ’s grandmother’s family, the Lieberoths lived) and Thuringia to the southwest. But when the war broke out, officials in each of Germany’s Länder strove for autarchy in order to feed their respective populations. Consequently, Leipzig’s officials obtained shipments from Prussia with difficulty. Leipzig then was probably worse off then than most other German cities.22 15 Pg. 233 Ogilvie and Overy. 16 War bonds typically offered a rate of return of 5 percent and were redeemable over a ten year period, in semi- annual payments. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_bond#Germany 17 Sean Dobson. Authority and Upheaval in Leipzig, 1910-1920. Pg. 136 18 Donson. Pg.173 19 Donson. Pg. 126-7 20 Although Saxony had been the earliest and most rigorously industrialized German state, it had a low level of protein production per capita, writes Jörg Baten in his contribution to Germany Since 1800: A New Social And Economic History edited by Ogilvie and Overy (pg.
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