German Civil Wars Nation-Building and Historical Memory, 1756-1914

Robert Beachy Professor of History, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

James Retallack Professor of History and German Studies, University of Toronto

“Prussia’s ascent had been due to the decline of Electoral Saxony; during the last century and a half, almost every great day for Germany had been a defeat for Saxon policy.”1

— Heinrich von Treitschke The Book

This book offers an alternative reading of Germany’s historical path to nationhood from the eighteenth century to modern times. By examining the federal state of Saxony during three Prussian military occupations, it historicizes the emergence of the nationalist narrative itself.

The conflicts that precipitated these occupations were the Seven Years' War (1756-63), the Napole- onic Wars, and the Austro-German War of 1866. In the second half of the nineteenth century, pro- Prussian nationalist historians described these conflicts as constitutive episodes in the triumphal narrative of Brandenburg-Prussia’s inexorable rise. As Heinrich von Treitschke glibly explained, the Prusso-German nation was predicated in part on the steady decline of the Kingdom of Saxony. That this trope was still powerful in the early twentieth century was tellingly exposed by the public discourse that unfolded around the hundredth anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Nations (1813), which had been fought near Leipzig. Both the celebration and the massive monument dedicated in 1913 became sites of memory, or lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora): together they enshrined the triumph of “Germany” while simultaneously atoning—curiously—for Saxony’s loss.

But the Borussian paradigm that structures German historical writing has come increasingly under attack in recent years. Local and regional studies have begun to highlight Germany’s rich and contentious pasts (in the plural). This book seeks to tilt the balance of historical understanding further. The view from Leipzig and Dresden, Saxony’s two largest cities, offers a potent alternative to Prussian triumphalism for understanding the shift in German identities as they were wrenched from the Old Regime context of the Holy Roman Empire and uneasily submerged in the modern nation state. Thus a consideration of regional and national memory further reveals the significance of Treitschke’s teleological presuppositions. Incorporating both “place” and “a sense of place” into its analysis, this book helps to redress the theoretical disjunction between a national past, which was “violently diverse,” and its telling, which has until recently has been “utterly homogenous.”2

Readers will be confronted with the corrosive character of civil war and the urban experiences of defeat and occupation—for example, by considering the German casualties suffered by both sides at

1 Heinrich von Treitschke, History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gordon Craig (Chicago, 1975), 150. 2 Michael Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch, “Great Men and Postmodern Ruptures: Overcoming the ‘Belatedness’ of German Historiography,” German Studies Review 18 (1995): 267.

1 the Battle of Nations or the massive outbreak of cholera induced by Prussian troops during the summer of 1866. Thus it focuses on public attitudes, memories, and mentalités rather than on the nuts and bolts of diplomatic and military history. The work is based on a variety and depth of primary sources that permit multiple perspectives on war, on peace, and on the historical spaces in which they intersect. As such, this book offers in practice what so many historians call for but rarely deliver: a study that brings into close proximity the worlds of everyday experience and high politics. This account is about both “politics from above” and “politics from below.” But it is also about the relevance of politics itself in times of personal, communal, and national crisis.

The economic consequences of military-civilian points of contact are exposed by examining the tributes paid to victors by municipal and state-level administrators. We also examine the requisitioning and quartering measures that Prussians imposed on Saxon civilians, and the challenges to estab- lished political authority as a consequence of battles won or lost. It matters little whether these points of contact are conceived as economic, political, or a mixture of both. Rarely were they equal or bi- lateral. Indeed, in times of crisis they involved structured disparities not unlike imperialism and racism. Such disparities generated local resistances and compromises that come into focus with uncommon sharpness in the crucible of war.

Another aim of this project is to demonstrate how the exercise of power through history has always had a local face. Thinking about the interconnectedness of places and identities obliges the reader also to think about the interconnectedness of time—in this case, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth. As the Canadian historian Timothy Brook has observed: “Simultaneity and simul- locality are potentially just as salient to the production of meaning as chronology. The past is not a straight line from what was to what is, but a maze of acts and accidents, flows and cross-currents, in which people find themselves at points they never expected to reach.” Saxony in 1756, 1813, 1866, and 1913 provides four such points. But these moments represent the beginning, not the end, of this book’s inquiry into the role of memory in history. The past, after all, is preserved only to the extent that we remember it. This book asks why certain people, in certain circumstances, remember some events and forget others. While illuminating both continuity and change, this study paves narrative avenues that link such “moments” together: it does so by tracking the fate of a single family, an institution of higher learning, a major firm, a printers' guild, or a trade union (this list is illustrative, not exhaustive).

Synopsis

1756-1763 When Prussian forces invaded neutral Saxony in 1756 at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, contemporaries quickly condemned this as a violation of international law. Frederick the Great took these charges so seriously that he published government documents seized in Dresden, which purported to prove Saxon misdeeds and to justify his invasion. As Theodor Schieder has pointed out, the occupation was later compared to the German violation of Belgian neutrality in 1914. Frederick’s nominal victory by 1763 established Prussia’s great-power status, while exposing the vacuousness of Saxon great-power pretence. The Wettin and Hohenzollern strategies for establishing preeminence in German Central Europe—characterized as Saxony’s Glanz and Prussia’s gloire—included the acqui- sition of the Polish and Prussian crowns, respectively. But while Prussia established military superior- ity, the baroque opulence of the Dresden court nearly bankrupted the Saxon Electorate.

Saxony’s self-indulgent rulers also left the Electorate undefended and thus exposed to Prussian predations. Once Frederick had occupied Saxony, his officials systematically looted public and private coffers. According to the best estimates, Saxony contributed nearly 50 million Taler or approximately one-third of the total Prussian war expense. Leipzig’s portion of the Saxon tribute came to more than 12 million Taler. During six years of occupation, Prussian officials cajoled and extorted Leipzig resi- dents through the repeated incarceration of leading citizens. One victim of these tactics, Georg Friedrich Treitschke, a Leipzig councilor and great-grandfather of the German nationalist historian,

2 was jailed on three separate occasions for a total of eight months. The wealthy merchant paid a sizable fortune, more than 24,000 Taler, in cash contributions for the Prussian war effort. Leipzig escaped physical damage—unlike much of Saxony, including Dresden. But the humiliation inflicted by the Prussian occupiers and the city’s lingering war debt remained elements of a municipal narrative and civic identity that were embodied by individuals like Treitschke.

1813-1815 Napoleon’s victories over Saxon and Prussian armies at the Battles of Jena and Auerstädt in 1806 ensured French hegemony in German Central Europe. Yet French victory triggered very different responses. Exiled Prussian officials plotted resistance to the French, whereas the Saxon ruler— promoted to king by the French emperor and ruling over 2 million subjects—became Napoleon’s steadfast ally (regaining part of Poland in 1807 as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw). Saxon merchants profited handsomely from the geo-politics of the Continental System. In Leipzig and Dresden, official and unofficial voices commended Saxony’s foreign policy and close cooperation with the French.

Only the Battle of Nations in the autumn of 1813 could turn opinion decisively against the French. Once again Saxony was defeated—this time because the weak Friedrich August III waited too long to abandon Napoleon (not all his foot-soldiers made the same mistake). At the Battle of Nations, Saxony was allied with the French and against the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian victors. In the immediate aftermath of this epic battle, Leipzig residents were outnumbered by the wounded and dying, whom they nursed and tended in makeshift hospitals. Among soldiers and civilians in Saxony, the total number of war-related deaths caused by battle, epidemics, and hunger amounted to about 200,000— that is, about ten percent of the entire population. Over 150 villages in the neighborhood of Leipzig were either partially or totally destroyed. For the next fifteen months, first Russian and then Prussian commanders occupied and ruled the defeated state.

Treated as a French-allied belligerent at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Saxony lost over one-half (58%) of its territory, which was awarded to Prussia, and almost one half (42%) of its pre-war population. Yet this settlement proved less onerous than the one envisioned by the Prussians, who were only prevented by Russian and British objections from swallowing the state in its entirety. When released from his captivity in February 1815, the Saxon King was greeted by cheering crowds in Leipzig and Dresden. The adoption of green and white as the colors of the Saxon flag endowed the state with one of its most visible symbols. Defeated and truncated, Saxony largely withdrew from the national arena. Saxony’s cultural Glanz was diminished less abruptly: Bach and Handel were followed by the Schumanns and Wagner, and book publishing and university life thrived in Leipzig. Still suspicious of the Prussian threat lurking behind “Germany,” Saxons’ strongest point of identification remained the Wettin dynasty. Yet even the Saxon crown did not always rest lightly. In 1845, Prince Johann’s bigoted Catholicism so enraged Protestant Saxons that the army had to fire on a Leipzig crowd, with fatal consequences. And in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848/49, Saxon authorities were pushed to the brink of their legitimacy. When the Dresden Uprising of May 1849 had to be put down with the help of Prussian arms, German nation-building was given another galling fillip.

1866-1867 During the 1866 conflict known variously as the Austro-Prussian War, the Seven Weeks’ War, or the German Civil War, Saxons experienced the cruelty of war only at arm’s length. Although their native sons fought alongside the Austrians (on the losing side), no fighting actually occurred on Saxon soil. After war was declared in mid-June 1866, Prussian soldiers marched quickly through the kingdom on their way to Bohemia, where the Battle of Königgrätz on July 3rd effectively determined Prussian hegemony over Germany. Dresdeners and Leipzigers nevertheless experienced first-hand the humili- ations of military occupation by the Prussians. That occupation stretched on for many months after the initial armistice. It included forced tributes extracted from Saxons at gunpoint (eventually commuted to a fixed sum of 10,000 Taler for each day of occupation). It subjected large segments of the population

3 to harsh garrisoning and requisition measures. And it coincided with a massive outbreak of cholera that killed many more Saxons than died in actual fighting. Not least because Prussian soldiers brought the disease from the north, Prussia was identified in the Saxons’ imagination with the “sickness” of the times—that is, with the horrors of war and the humiliations of peace. Again the Treitschke family was convulsed by the ordeal: as Heinrich von Treitschke became an embattled propagandist of Prussian hegemony in Germany, his father, a former commander in the Saxon army, suffered a double humilia- tion.

Yet suffering and discontent on the home front dovetailed with the rebirth of Saxon political life in 1866. From the moment that war clouds gathered, municipal and state parliaments became active participants in a rejuvenated public sphere, and the establishment of new political parties helped foster the emergence of a national party system that remained largely intact until 1933. This revitaliza- tion of political life in Saxony illustrates how Germans grudgingly came to understand the nature of modern politics in a national context. Saxons were not untypical in seeking ways to participate in the processes of German state- and nation-building while at the same time retaining their traditional iden- tities and prosperity. Such participation became simpler in some ways, and more complex in others, when the Saxons at last fought on the winning side during the Franco-German War of 1870-71. For Saxons, the invigorating “success” of defeating the new arch-enemy across the Rhine immediately overshadowed—but could not quite erase—the “failures” of 1813 and 1866.

1913-14 Every section of this book raises questions about war, peace, class, nation, memory, and a particular- ly German concept, Bürgerlichkeit (inelegantly translated as “middle-classness,” but also evoking the culture of urban residence and citizenship). In this final section, the reader’s attention is focused on the public subscription campaign that preceded building and dedication of the monument to the Battle of Nations, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal. Even as a new, distinctively “German” identity was monumen- talized in stone on the outskirts of Leipzig, its meaning became more abstract and contentious. This cultural symbol both reflected and reshaped the public discourse about what it meant to be German— a discourse that in turn was commemorated anew in national festivals, public spaces, museums, and other monuments. Hence this section looks back over the other three epochs to take stock of the ways that war-making, peace-making, and national reconciliation were represented in German memory over more than 150 years.

Reasons for Writing

We have three principal reasons for tackling this project. First, having each completed a monograph on Saxon history, we wanted to tackle a project written in a very different style and attuned to a wider audience. Moreover, it was only in the course of our earlier research that we found we could penetrate to the level of everyday life and tie this to the processes of memory and nation-building. Thus our sources allow us to come close to writing a “total history” of these occupations—albeit with a clear temporal and geographical focus.

Second, we wanted to explore a genre that so far has addressed mainly twentieth-century topics. In recent years a number of key works have illuminated the social and cultural dimensions of modern warfare by studying home fronts and what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has termed the “culture of defeat”—a culture that evokes “national trauma, mourning, and recovery.” First-rate work on these themes now exists on the American Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Like the authors of these works, we use short passages from primary documents to fire the imagination of readers. Where our book differs from others, however, is the degree to which we (re)integrate diplomatic and political history with social and cultural history. We do not believe that the study of high politics should exclude the strangeness and richness of individual histories. By looking at Saxony in four watershed epochs, we avoid the trap of presenting a single view of history

4 as homogenized totality. This approach also sets our book apart from other recent additions to the lit- erature on German nationalism (for example, Stefan Berger’s contribution to the Inventing the Nation series, of which only 110 pages deal with the pre-1914 era).3

Third and lastly, we wanted to reconsider the north-south and east-west paradigms that have con- strained the writing of German history for too long. These paradigms have given long life to a number of untenable polarities: Prussia, not Austria; Hohenzollern, not Habsburg; Protestant, not Catholic; “smaller Germany,” not “larger German” (Klein- not Grossdeutschland). Squeezed to conform to such dichotomous thinking, Saxony has been at best an attendant lord to two superpowers, at worst a “state that wasn’t there.” Interestingly, such interpretative models were encouraged both before and after 1945, and they were not only propagated in Prussia. The so-called “white-blue” (Weisblau) school of Bavarian historiography that grew up around Karl Bosl fell into the same pattern, as did the more federalist scholarship championed by Thomas Nipperdey and others.

By contrast, we portray Saxony as both a frontier zone and a heartland—potentially and in fact. In our story, Saxony was at the center of German national discourses. It was an autonomous participant, an impact player, never destined to be absorbed by one or the other colossi. Thus the German civil wars we describe were constitutive of a much more richly textured process of nation-building and nation- defining than can fit within either Treitschke’s Borussian model or the undifferentiated interpretations that appeared during the 1980s. Although we use four historical moments to focus attention on events that helped constitute an identifiable national “way of remembering,” we take great care not to miss the continuities upon which German memory—Germany itself—was built.

Readership

One appeal of this book is that it breaks new ground methodologically. By this we mean that it does three things at the same time: 1) it takes up a question of larger relevance to historians: the inter- actions between wartime upheaval on the home front and diplomatic peacemaking; 2) it appeals to non-specialist audiences by establishing a strong narrative hold on readers through the use of anecdotes and vignettes; and 3) it addresses issues central to mainstream political history while bring- ing to the story the richness that social, economic, and cultural history provide.

We believe that the kinds of general questions raised by our perspective will prove attractive to readers in the fields of Comparative Politics, International Relations, War and Society, European Integration, and German Studies. This book will also be read by non-specialists who are curious about the ways in which the lives of ordinary Germans in the early-modern and modern periods were conditioned by violent military conflicts, the commodification of politics and nationalism, and questions of local and regional identity. Such readers will be able simultaneously to view a nation from the inside and a region from the outside, thereby discovering how local “ways of life” were imprinted with national “ways of seeing” over the longue durée. This dual perspective, we believe, offers an impor- tant step forward in developing an intellectually complete understanding of the processes by which the German nation was formed and understood—constructed and commemorated.

Structure

We plan to write a manuscript of approximately 100,000 words. Line drawings taken from the pages of Leipzig’s Illustrirte Zeitung and other hitherto unused sources will be incorporated into the book. We foresee the following chapter headings:

3 Stefan Berger, Germany (London, 2004).

5 Table of Contents

I Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities

1 The Smell of War 2 The Politics of Peace

II Tribulations and Tributes: Saxony in the Seven Years’ War

3 The Holy Roman Empire 4 Prussian Invasion: A War Crime? 5 Occupation, Extortion, and the Wages of War 6 Saxon Submission

III Napoleon’s Europe: An Unseemly End?

7 Brothers in Arms 8 Commerce and Accommodation 9 Nationalist Revival or Civil War? 10 The Dissection of Saxony

IV Civil War, Uncivil Occupation?

11 Political Awakenings 12 Invasion, Defeat, Armistice 13 The Politics of Excoriation 14 Peace-Making and Nation-Building

V Remembering and Forgetting

15 Saxony in Imperial Germany 16 Contested Memories, 1813-1913 17 Commemorating the Nation

The Authors

Robert Beachy, PhD. Chicago, is Professor of History at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Previously he taught for many years at Goucher College in Baltimore. He is the author of The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property and Politics in Leipzig, 1750-1840 (2005) and co-editor of Women in Business and Finance in Nineteenth Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres, with Alastair Owens and Beatrice Craig (2006); Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World, with Michele Gillespie (2007); and Who Ran the Cities? Elite and Urban Power Structures, 1750–1950, with Ralf Roth (2007). His book Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, will appear with Alfred A. Knopf in November 2014. Among other awards he has won the Higby Best Article Prize of the American Historical Association and has been a John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.

James Retallack, D.Phil. Oxford, is Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Toronto. He is author of The German Right, 1860-1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (2006). He will publish a second collection of essays, Germany’s Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways, with the University of Toronto Press in 2015. As well as editing Imperial Germany 1871-1918: The Short Oxford History of Germany (2008) and volume 4 of German History in Documents and Images (on the website of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.), he has coedited books with Larry Eugene Jones, Simone Lässig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, Geoff Eley, and David Blackbourn, and Ute Planert. His monograph, Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016. He won the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Bessel Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

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