Military Conscription and Civil Society: Historical Trajectories 1

A Nation in Barracks Conscription, Military Service and Civil Society in Modern Germany Ute Frevert Translated by Andrew Boreham with Daniel Brückenhaus Oxford • New York First published in 2004 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Ute Frevert 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85973 881 8 (Cloth) ISBN 1 85973 886 9 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn. www.bergpublishers.com Contents Introduction: Military Conscription and Civil Society: Historical Trajectories 1 1 War, Nation, Gender Images: Core Concepts in Conscription in the Early Nineteenth Century 9 1. Criticism of Existing Prussian Army Structures 10 2. Conscription: Setbacks on the Road to a ‘National Army’ 14 3. The Battle for the Middle Classes 18 4. Military Service, Wartime Service, and Manliness 22 5. ‘Female Patriotism’ 30 2 ‘Both Citizen and Soldier’? Prussia in the Vormärz Period (1815-48) 47 1. The Law on Wartime Service: Rules and Practices 47 2. The Landwehr as a Citizens’ Militia? 56 3. Citizenship and Masculinity: The Jewish Population Demands Participation 65 4. The Army as the ‘Training School’ for War and Peace 70 5. Soldiers and Civilians – Soldiers as Citizens? 82 3 Military Systems in the ‘Third Germany’ 101 1. The Move from Exemption to Substitution 102 2. Army Service: The View from Inside 109 3. Civilian Counterparts: An Armed Citizenry and a Man’s Right to Bear Arms 113 4. Civilian Militias during the Vormärz Period and in 1848–1849 122 5. The ‘Martial Spirit’ in Military Associations or Dreams of a Democratic Army 132 4 War and Peace: Imperial Germany in the Prussian Barracks 149 1. Constitutional or Military State: Paving the Way in the Pre-Empire Years 150 2. Middle-class Arrangements: One-yearers and Reserve Officers 157 3. Soldiers at the ‘School of Manliness’ 170 – v – Contents 4. The Regiment as a Family: The Potential and Limits of Military Comradeship 182 5. Liaisons Dangereuses: The Military and Civil Society 200 5 The Twentieth Century: The (Ex-)Soldier as Citizen 237 1. The Post-First World War Years: Militarisation without Military Service 238 2. Soldiers and Volksgenossen: The Escalation of Violence under the Nazis 247 3. Post-war Germany: From Disarmed to Rearmed State 259 4. Civic Spirit and Gender Politics: The End of Conscription? 272 Bibliography 289 Index 319 – vi– Introduction: Military Conscription and Civil Society: Historical Trajectories Aux armes, citoyens! The echo of that famous call to arms in revolutionary France has long since faded, though wars continue to be fought, even in Europe, as the history of the 1990s shows only too well. But such conflicts no longer demand vast conscripted citizens’ armies clashing on the battlefields, as in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Instead, modern warfare focuses on deploying small, highly specialised and professional military combat units – a change opening a debate on universal conscription, whereby, in principle, every male citizen is summoned to arms. Now, after two hundred years, France, home of the modern conscript army, has abolished the draft, shortly after other continental countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, instituting a purely professional army instead. It is a path Germany, too, will most likely follow in the foreseeable future. The American and British military model has triumphed, with a professional army comprising a stable group of long-term volunteers. Helped by geopolitical factors, neither country saw a need to establish a conscription system, merely introducing a short-term draft in times of war to cover recruiting and mobilisation needs.1 In contrast, on mainland Europe, citizens were mustered and enlisted even in peacetime, and trained in military skills2 – a policy dictated by military and strategic considerations, but in which differing political cultures, social and gender arguments also played a role. Even today, supporters of conscription emphasise the institution’s symbolic value and the benefit it brings in the political sphere, repeatedly claiming that the draft prevents social decay, acting as a reminder of civic virtues and the solidarity lying at the very heart of a democratic state. Advocates of conscription draw on a long tradition, going right back to the start of conscript armies in France and Prussia, appealing to the notion of the soldat citoyen, or citizen-soldier, as a figure bridging the structural gap between the armed forces and civil society and transforming the military into a societal institution. In fact, military service is one of the very oldest institutions in the history of modern continental Europe, and generally older than the male franchise, a tradition tracing its roots to the late eighteenth century in France and the early nineteenth century in Prussia. Conscription has survived changing political systems and various constellations in security policy where the characteristics of democracy, fraternity and equality were not always immediately discernible, if at – 1 – Introduction all. In Germany especially, the nation, donning uniforms and gathering under army banners, only rarely had institutionalised democratic structures. Certainly, Marx and Engels’ comment in 1870 that Germany found ‘unity in the Prussian barracks’ still seems true today, but army quarters were hardly the place to practise models of civic order and values. On the contrary, as this book argues, the paradigm of a ‘nation in barracks’ is fundamentally opposed to the basic tenets and beliefs of civil society, and this itself is one main reason why support for conscription is dwindling at present.3 The terms themselves, whether soldat citoyen, citizen-soldier or the post-war ‘citizen in uniform’, all indicate how deeply conscription affected, and affects, civil life, and hence how much it needed, from the very start, convincing political, cultural and social justifications. In this way, the history of conscription, the struggle over alternatives, and the myriad acts of resistance against its introduction and implementation provide fascinating insights into how civil societies see themselves, a debate not only focusing on the relationship between civil societies and violence, and the state monopoly on violence, but equally questioning concepts of citizenship, social integration and gender policy. In theory and historical practice, civil societies are distinguished by their efforts to organise their internal relations without recourse to violent means. Through rational insight, the citizen elects to forego violence, and it is this that makes him or her by definition a civilian. As a private individual, head of a family, or member of the middle-classes, they trust to the validity of a legal code to regulate their concerns; as citoyen, citizen, or Staatsbürger, they seek agreement in political agency, resolving whatever conflicts arise via debate and decision- making processes. These principles of liberal political theory can be found in nineteenth-century encyclopaedias, where ‘bürgerlich’ and ‘civil’ were always considered synonymous and contrasted with the ‘military estate’, and civilian clothing regarded as ‘civil dress, the uniform’s antithesis’.4 ‘Military estate’ and ‘uniform’ represent that institution legitimately housing the violence civil society per se cannot contain. The military, organised by the state and financed by the public coffers, is intended to guarantee the citizens’ security, at home and abroad. The less it has to intervene in civilian life, the better, since its aims and governing principles stand so far removed from the nature of civil society that any contact ought to be avoided if at all possible. The military prepares its members to use physical violence, systematically practising its application as they learn how to overcome the culturally mediated barrier to killing. Soldiers are taught how to use lethal weapons, and how to obey commands given in combat ordering them to turn their weapons on the enemy. They also learn how to overcome their own fear of a violent death, using a mixture of group dynamics, ideological armament, and above all strict obedience, where cowardice before the enemy carries the death penalty. – 2 – Introduction On the one hand, adopting this sort of socialisation programme located the military outside the borders of civil society yet, on the other, it left the military providing civic society with a vital security service. In the early modern period, this ambiguity can be seen in the way continental European absolutist states maintained standing armies largely comprising mercenaries and volunteers, a segmentation abruptly halted by the modern invention of conscription. As the Brockhaus encyclopaedia noted in 1843, conscription removed ‘the opposition between civil and military’, since ‘the soldier is never to cease being a citizen, and the citizen is never to sever himself from the cause of defending the fatherland’.5 This was precisely the real revolutionary message in conscription: it blurred the borders between the military and civil spheres, carrying violence back into civilian life. From then on, citizens were forced not only to acknowledge the army as such, but actually to take an active role in it. But the question of how and to what extent the armed forces and civil society actually converged remains unanswered, with the consequences similarly hard to define. It is relatively easy to describe the ‘civilising’ effect conscription had on the army, with, for instance, the military criminal code gradually mirroring civilian law, the troops enjoying better conditions and more humane treatment, and corporal punishment abolished.

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