Читать книгу A History of Germany 1918 - 2020 - Mary Fulbrook - Страница 12

What was Germany like in the decades prior to 1918? A ‘small’ Germany, excluding Austria, had been unified only as a result of Prussian chancellor Otto van Bismarck’s policies of ‘blood and iron’ in 1871. Although processes of industrialization had started earlier in the nineteenth century, the pace of change was dramatically quickened by unification. In the period from 1871 to the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany’s output of manufactured goods quintupled, while her population grew from 41 million to 67.7 million. Rapid changes in economy and society were associated with a host of strains in the autocratic political system that was Bismarck’s legacy for Imperial Germany.

Some areas were experiencing rapid modernization, with expansion in urban areas, such as the great metropolitan capital, Berlin, and in the heavy industry and coal-mining centre of the Ruhr. Workers migrating from the countryside to the towns were lucky if they were accommodated in the housing estates of paternalistic employers such as Siemens; many more found themselves living in cramped, dark tenement buildings with poor sanitation and limited backyards which were the only areas where their children could play. Meanwhile, the urban upper-middle classes led often rather stuffy lives in the somewhat pompous buildings that were characteristic of Imperial Germany. The ‘middle classes’ were a far from homogeneous entity. At the upper levels were the officials, professionals and state servants (the Beamten, in Germany a wider category than the British ‘civil servant’). Then, at a more modest social level, there were the increasing numbers of white-collar employees (Angestellten) as well as the older groups of the self-employed, traders and shopkeepers, and small artisans. These latter groups were increasingly challenged by the rise of ‘modern’, large-scale mechanized industry, run by major entrepreneurs and by the growth of big department stores as outlets for mass-produced wares. Urban life was clearly changing and expanding at a quickening rate.

Peasants in far-flung rural areas, such as southern Bavaria, might still appear to be living as they had done for centuries, although the notion of a static, unchanging ‘traditional’ rural society is something of a myth. While the urban bourgeoisie might be enjoying the fruits of modern technology – such as electricity – these peasants would be living in the old, wooden farmhouses, with their religious wall-paintings and flower-bedecked balconies, where they still relied on candlelight, water from the well and very rudimentary sanitary facilities. Small peasant economies in the south and west had been interpenetrated by artisanal activities for centuries, and had also begun to cater to the newer pursuits of tourism. In the northeast and, particularly, eastern areas of Germany, rural life was characterized by a rather different social pattern: estates owned by the aristocratic landowning class, the Junkers, were worked by landless agricultural labourers (often Polish) and were increasingly under strain in the competitive atmosphere of a rapidly industrializing nation. While retaining a socially and politically dominant position, the militaristic landowning caste was suffering a period of economic difficulty, necessitating a series of compromises with, particularly, increasingly important industrial interests.

There were many regional variations: the German Empire had by no means homogenized the differences between its constituent states, and in many ways regional and other loyalties overrode any ‘national’ identification. There were traditional antagonisms between, for example, Bavaria and Prussia, based on centuries of political, cultural and social differences. The Reich was ethnically diverse, with minority populations including Danes and Poles. Citizenship in the Reich under the 1913 law, while emphasizing the principle of descent, was based on citizenship within one of its constituent states, not on principles of ethnicity as such. German Jews had become increasingly assimilated over the later decades of the nineteenth century, and actively participated in civic life, shaping and challenging aspects of society and culture. In the early twentieth century increasing numbers of so-called Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) arrived in Germany, seeking better economic and social conditions and escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe. Religious differences among Christians were also of crucial importance: post-Reformation Germany was divided between Catholicism and a variety of forms of Protestantism (both Lutheran and Reformed). While some states – notably Prussia – were of a mixed religious complexion, divisions between Catholic and Protestant communities in many areas were highly salient. These divisions went right through the community: it was quite possible to live one’s life entirely within the framework, for example, of the Catholic church and its political, economic and social institutions: the Catholic Centre party in politics, the Catholic trade unions at the workplace, the reading, cycling and singing clubs when at leisure. Similarly, Protestants and others had their own penumbra of institutions. Political persuasion might be as important as religious confession: the Social Democrats, for example, had a comparable range of organizations and leisure activities, encompassing many aspects of life and helping to define a particular social and cultural milieu. It is difficult to evaluate the implications of these sociocultural environments; some historians have seen them as giving members of those subordinate groups that the architect of Imperial Germany, Bismarck, dubbed ‘enemies of the Empire’ (Reichsfeinde) an accepted place in society, while others have seen more subversive aspects to their varied activities. Then, too, there were those members of society who constituted different ‘under-worlds’: those who fell through the cracks, or resisted all attempts at organization of whatever kind.¹

Politically, the old Prussian aristocracy retained preeminence nationally, through its domination of the largest constituent state of the federal empire – Prussia. The inegalitarian three-class voting system obtaining in Prussia entailed the division of the population of each electoral district into three classes according to the payment of wealth taxes. The minority that were the richest were entitled to one-third of the votes; the moderately wealthy the next one-third; and the large majority that fell into the poorest category were also allotted only one-third of the votes. The double effect of this system not only greatly disadvantaged the propertyless masses but also promoted the political position of the landowning Junker class (who were relatively the wealthiest within the sparsely populated rural constituencies) compared with the very much wealthier urban bourgeoisie. Dominating Prussian politics, the Junkers were then able to play a major role in the Prussian-dominated Reich. It was a role they were to exercise in the context of the autocratic political structure of the German Empire: real power lay not so much with the Parliament or Reichstag as with the emperor, his close circle of advisers, his chancellor, and leaders of the army and the civil service. Influence was exerted on these groups and individuals by the increasingly important pressure groups – many stridently nationalist – that circumvented parliamentary politics in pursuit of their aims. As the German sociologist Max Weber put it, no person with any aspirations to real power would seriously consider becoming a member of Parliament in imperial Germany.

Yet at the same time Junker domination was not unchallenged. For one thing, with Germany’s extraordinarily rapid industrialization, the propertied bourgeoisie (Besitzbürgertum) was becoming increasingly important, and compromises had repeatedly to be hammered out between policies reflecting bourgeois economic interests and the often conflicting interests of the landowning classes. At the same time, the working classes were emerging on to the political scene, particularly through the ever-growing Social Democratic Party (SPD). This latter, while professing a certain revolutionary rhetoric deriving from its Marxist heritage, was in practice rather moderate, with a marked focus on parliamentary representation and activity (partly as an ironic result of Bismarck’s antisocialist laws that effectively restricted Social Democratic activity to this sphere). Nevertheless, the growth of an explicitly radical party representing the expanding working classes struck fear in the hearts of the elites, who – on some accounts – resolved certain differences among themselves in order to present a more united front against a perceived threat from below. Whatever the wider merits of this interpretation, certainly one manifestation was the fostering of German nationalism, in the hope that loyalty to the German ‘fatherland’ would transcend bitter divisions between the classes. Fear of potential civil war at home contributed to willingness to engage in war abroad.

Bismarck’s complex juggling act among the European powers had been replaced by less stable foreign alliances within Europe, accompanied by imperialist ambitions in the reign of Wilhelm II. The long period of peace within Europe after the Franco–Prussian War of 1870 had, around the turn of the century, increasingly been marked by flashpoints abroad. The growth of the German navy appeared usefully to combine the militaristic values traditionally associated with the landed aristocracy with the economic interests of the bourgeoisie, contributing to the growth of a more strident and expansionist nationalism in some quarters. Germany’s newly acquired colonies abroad were in practice economically and politically relatively insignificant, but the militarist culture and the brutal practices deployed in the suppression of anticolonial revolts in German southwest Africa and east Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century served only to enhance the esteem in which military medals were held among a populace safely distant from any military action. On some views, the acts of brutality and the willingness to contemplate the ‘extermination’ of ‘inferior’ civilian populations played a long-term role in the background to German atrocities in the First and Second World Wars.² Meanwhile, growing strains between the European powers, accompanied by an arms race amidst an atmosphere of rising tension and expectation of war, contributed to increasing political instability within Europe itself. Although the causes of the First World War, and Germany’s own role in unleashing it, remain controversial, there is little doubt that it was a war that the Emperor and his advisors were at the time only too willing to entertain.³

In the event, the First World War did little to resolve the domestic strains of Imperial Germany. Despite a brief moment of apparent and much celebrated (if not exaggerated) national unity in August 1914, social tensions were exacerbated rather than eased by the experience of total war. Even among the males of military age who were called up to serve on the front, war experiences were by no means always those of the idealized ‘comradeship of the trenches’ so celebrated in later nationalist mythology. Officers and members of privileged groups observing from behind the lines of battle had very different experiences from those in the front lines, surrounded by enemy fire and daily witnessing the loss of lives and the physical and psychological maiming of previously healthy young men, with little end in sight.⁴ Experiences on the Eastern front, and in other arenas of war, were quite different from the stalemate trench warfare on the most written-about Western front. The notion of a uniform ‘front generation’ glorifying war and determined to make good its losses and the humiliating defeat of 1918 was a convenient construction in right-wing quarters in later years, rather than a genuine outcome of the military experience itself. This would become significant under changing political conditions: a minority on the nationalist fringes continued to foment unrest and glorify physical violence, particularly in the postwar Free Corps units; and some members of a younger generation, who had been too young to fight and experience violence firsthand, would be easily mobilized for militaristic nationalist causes as young adults in the following years.⁵

Nor were social divisions on the home front in any way ‘healed’ by the brutal demands of economic preparedness for ‘total war’. Industry became more concentrated, with cartels fixing prices and production quantities, but organized labour also became more powerful, since the government and employers had to find ways of avoiding strikes and maximizing production in a war economy and therefore had to treat with the recognized representatives of labour. With the continued expansion of industrial capitalism, the ‘old’ middle classes – the small producers, shopkeepers and traders – found their already declining position ever more threatened. New sections of the population were increasingly politicized: with many men away at the front, and with the large numbers of war casualties, women and young people were drawn into sectors of the economy in which they had not previously worked and gained firsthand experience of union organization, confrontation with employers and notions of ‘class war’. Even those women who were not part of the paid labour market may have become somewhat politicized through the sheer struggle for survival and the realization that the government – rather than the individual – might be held responsible for the difficulties they found in feeding their families. This awareness of the responsibilities of the state continued after the war, heightened by more widespread dependence on state benefits and pensions.

During this protracted war – in which progress was measured from the trenches in terms of yards rather than miles – circumstances on the home front soon deteriorated. Food supplies became a problem as early as 1915. In April 1917 the first major strikes occurred, a consequence of the cutting of bread rations. Civilian government broke down with the resignation of the moderate Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in July 1917, and the country was under the effective military rule of Chief-of-Staff Hindenburg and General Ludendorff (in conjunction with two short-lived and ineffective civilian chancellors, Georg Michaelis until October 1917 and Count von Hertling until October 1918). In 1917 there were two successful revolutions in tsarist Russia: a far less economically advanced autocracy and one that, according to a Marxist analysis, should not have been the first to experience communist revolution. Following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in the autumn, Russia concluded an armistice with Germany and entered into negotiations for peace. After abortive discussions, Germany renewed hostilities in February 1918, and, from a position of strength, was able to impose the annexationist Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Russia in March 1918. This harsh treaty was greeted with a mixed reception at home and hardened the attitudes of Western powers against Germany.

Meanwhile, rising domestic unrest in Germany played a role in the army leaders’ decision, in winter 1917–18, to ignore the chance of achieving peace with Western powers on relatively moderate terms, since they had begun to believe that only a spectacular military victory could now avert the threat of domestic revolution. In January 1918 there were more strikes, and a widespread war weariness and desire for peace, even as the Army High Command, supported by the recently founded right-wing Vaterlandspartei, propagated ever more extravagant military aims. Yet on the Left, the political forces opposing both the military and the right-wing nationalist parties were themselves divided. The Social Democratic Party, since its formation in 1875 out of two preexisting parties with different traditions, had long experienced tension between its reformist and revolutionary wings. Under the strain of responding to the war effort, the SPD finally split in 1917. The more radical wing formed the so-called Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), while the majority remained with the more moderate SPD, sometimes known as the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD). A loose, more radical grouping further to the Left of the Social Democrats was the Spartacus League, whose leading lights were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It was in this complex domestic configuration that the new Republic was born.