Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour
"...given considerably more attention and import outside of Germany than within it, in part thanks to the sharp rise of Germanophobia in Russia and the United Kingdom after the Central European War left the Reich as the master of continental Europe. The reality was that the Volkisch strain of early 20th century German nationalism was a heterogenous collection of loosely-affiliated ideas and organizations on its best day; more often, it was an incoherent mess.
The most sophisticated and important organ of German chauvinism was the Alldeutscher Verband, or Pan-German League, a pressure group with relatively low formal numbers compared to its leveraged influence via its deep connections to the Agrarian League and other conservative outfits preeminent in the rural, agricultural and fervently traditionalist "East Elbia," the Prussian lands east of the River Elbe. The ADV was no minor outfit, to be sure. It was after all the fifth-largest party in the Reichstag in the mid-1910s with 27 seats at the 1913 elections, nearly as large as the traditional East Elbia-based Conservatives. Nonetheless, its calls for German "racial hygiene," the unification of German-speaking Austria by force into the Reich and the deportation of all Poles and Slavs from German lands and its more rabidly anti-Semitic notions of German nationhood placed a hard ceiling on its potential support in Germany's more cosmopolitan West and in densely industrialized Saxony, and it struggled to capture the attention of the government of Prince Furstenburg, who instead was focused on maintaining his clientelist "rotation" of major anti-Socialist parties rather than pursuing esoteric notions of hard-right nationalism.
Indeed, German nationalism had always in the 19th century been something of a liberal project, and Social Democrats were as much keen to promote a singular German identity - all the easier to soothe over the regional, cultural and confessional differences of the German working class that way! - as were the National Liberals whose conservative brand of liberalism was once more ascendant in the wake of the 1914 Olympics. This meant that the most sharp-edged elements of the nationalist camp were competing against strains of German sensibilities more grounded in liberal romanticism and against a particularistic conservatism that emphasized either Prussian chauvinism or Bavarian insularism, and left the far-right strangely and quaintly left to dabble in bizarre pursuits such as the occultism bordering on Germanic paganism for which the Germanenorden became infamous after a series of newspaper exposes in 1915. [1]
That being said, it is not so much that the ADV and other pressure organizations were completely irrelevant compared to the outsized attention British scholarship afforded them in the mid-20th century, but rather that their emergence speaks to something broader going on in German society: a general debate, around the fifty-year mark of the Unification, about what it meant to German and what the nature of that national project was. They were simply participants, unusually extreme ones, in a broader cultural and intellectual debate on a subject that had vexed Europe since the Napoleonic Wars: Was ist Deutschland?
The reality was that while the neo-pagans and petite bourgeoisie of well-educated reactionaries in ADV may have been a loud minority, the thinking from which they emerged was not invented of whole cloth. There was a very real sense amongst the East Elbian Prussian elites that composed the hierarchy of the German military that the traditional, old-fashioned patriarchal and semi-feudal hierarchy to which they were heirs was vanishing before their eyes. They were the inheritors of the Ostsiedlung of the Middle Ages, steeped in the legends of the Teutonic Knights who had been the tip of the spear of civilizing Christianity - Germanic civilizing Christianity - and saw in their own devotion to order, authority and discipline a facsimile of the monastic chivalry that had driven paganism from the shores of the Baltic Sea for good.
It was out of this tradition that a theme of German mutual struggle, the Nationalkampf, was first noticed. It was posited by a variety of not just right-wing intellectuals but liberal and even socialist ones that the theme of the German experience was collective unity in the face of hardship, and that this often occurred in increments of fifty years, later called the "Saeculum Theory" despite its improper use of the term and erroneously ascribed to Center Party politicain Matthias Erzberger, who disavowed it. The idea looked back to the frequency of wars in Germany starting with the Liberation Wars against Napoleon and the Unification Wars of Bismarck as the fundamental building blocks of the German state, in which every generation had a new struggle that would gradually move Germany forward towards its destiny. The wars that concluded with the nationalist crucible of the Battle of Leipzig had ended the Holy Roman Empire and defined Germany as an entity; the wars that ended with Napoleon III's armistice near Chalons had united Germany as a single state. Previous saeculums in this line of thinking stretched back to the establishment of Prussia as a great power under Friedrich Wilhelm III, and the Thirty Years War and violence of the Protestant Reformation before it. [2]
The thrust of this line of thinking, which while a distinct minority but increasingly influential in German defense planning, was that the rising opposition to German goals and ambitions by France and to a lesser extent Austria was another episode in the continuous struggle of the German nation against external enemies, in this case - once again - the Bonapartist foe in Paris. France had been the enemy in the 1810s "Wars of Liberation," in the 1860s "Wars of Unification," and to a new generation, they were the likeliest enemy in a potential 1910s "Wars of Consolidation." This thread, when pulled at, explains why German defense planning came to view French provocations as not diplomatic angst but deliberate steps towards war, and perhaps over-committed itself to seeking to provoke France in turn into a blunder - a deliberate strategy of preparedness, of "choosing the place and time of battle," as von Kluck phrased it, a policy that was of course too clever by half..."
- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour
[1] What I'm trying to get at here was that some of the right-wing outfits in Wilhelmine (Heinrichine?) Germany that dabbled in pan-German nationalism (including some of the ADV) were composed of massive and complete dorks, and it took the chaos of November 1918 and the alienation of the traditional Prussian elite in the military and nobility from Weimar democracy to paper over that these people were not taken particularly seriously before there was a giant credibility vacuum on the German right for them to step into. This is not to minimize race essentialism, anti-Semitism, etc in pre-WW1 Germany, just noting that the really out-there stuff was out-there, and that the casual racism and contempt for Jews in Germany was similar to sentiments held by much of the French, British, Italian and Austrian public too, especially amongst academia.
[2] I should note that the Sonderweg theory is absolute, complete, and total bullshit in my opinion and does not deserve time and energy to debate, but there was a distinct sense in German intellectual circles that their nationhood was in some ways defined by a struggle against external opponents, in part due to Germany's unique political history and the geographic realities of being surrounded by larger "traditional" European powers such as France and the Habsburg realms. I wouldn't go nearly so far as to call it a siege mentality, but the sense of being hemmed in and that unity came through shared struggle was noticed by Bismarck and perhaps even before him
The most sophisticated and important organ of German chauvinism was the Alldeutscher Verband, or Pan-German League, a pressure group with relatively low formal numbers compared to its leveraged influence via its deep connections to the Agrarian League and other conservative outfits preeminent in the rural, agricultural and fervently traditionalist "East Elbia," the Prussian lands east of the River Elbe. The ADV was no minor outfit, to be sure. It was after all the fifth-largest party in the Reichstag in the mid-1910s with 27 seats at the 1913 elections, nearly as large as the traditional East Elbia-based Conservatives. Nonetheless, its calls for German "racial hygiene," the unification of German-speaking Austria by force into the Reich and the deportation of all Poles and Slavs from German lands and its more rabidly anti-Semitic notions of German nationhood placed a hard ceiling on its potential support in Germany's more cosmopolitan West and in densely industrialized Saxony, and it struggled to capture the attention of the government of Prince Furstenburg, who instead was focused on maintaining his clientelist "rotation" of major anti-Socialist parties rather than pursuing esoteric notions of hard-right nationalism.
Indeed, German nationalism had always in the 19th century been something of a liberal project, and Social Democrats were as much keen to promote a singular German identity - all the easier to soothe over the regional, cultural and confessional differences of the German working class that way! - as were the National Liberals whose conservative brand of liberalism was once more ascendant in the wake of the 1914 Olympics. This meant that the most sharp-edged elements of the nationalist camp were competing against strains of German sensibilities more grounded in liberal romanticism and against a particularistic conservatism that emphasized either Prussian chauvinism or Bavarian insularism, and left the far-right strangely and quaintly left to dabble in bizarre pursuits such as the occultism bordering on Germanic paganism for which the Germanenorden became infamous after a series of newspaper exposes in 1915. [1]
That being said, it is not so much that the ADV and other pressure organizations were completely irrelevant compared to the outsized attention British scholarship afforded them in the mid-20th century, but rather that their emergence speaks to something broader going on in German society: a general debate, around the fifty-year mark of the Unification, about what it meant to German and what the nature of that national project was. They were simply participants, unusually extreme ones, in a broader cultural and intellectual debate on a subject that had vexed Europe since the Napoleonic Wars: Was ist Deutschland?
The reality was that while the neo-pagans and petite bourgeoisie of well-educated reactionaries in ADV may have been a loud minority, the thinking from which they emerged was not invented of whole cloth. There was a very real sense amongst the East Elbian Prussian elites that composed the hierarchy of the German military that the traditional, old-fashioned patriarchal and semi-feudal hierarchy to which they were heirs was vanishing before their eyes. They were the inheritors of the Ostsiedlung of the Middle Ages, steeped in the legends of the Teutonic Knights who had been the tip of the spear of civilizing Christianity - Germanic civilizing Christianity - and saw in their own devotion to order, authority and discipline a facsimile of the monastic chivalry that had driven paganism from the shores of the Baltic Sea for good.
It was out of this tradition that a theme of German mutual struggle, the Nationalkampf, was first noticed. It was posited by a variety of not just right-wing intellectuals but liberal and even socialist ones that the theme of the German experience was collective unity in the face of hardship, and that this often occurred in increments of fifty years, later called the "Saeculum Theory" despite its improper use of the term and erroneously ascribed to Center Party politicain Matthias Erzberger, who disavowed it. The idea looked back to the frequency of wars in Germany starting with the Liberation Wars against Napoleon and the Unification Wars of Bismarck as the fundamental building blocks of the German state, in which every generation had a new struggle that would gradually move Germany forward towards its destiny. The wars that concluded with the nationalist crucible of the Battle of Leipzig had ended the Holy Roman Empire and defined Germany as an entity; the wars that ended with Napoleon III's armistice near Chalons had united Germany as a single state. Previous saeculums in this line of thinking stretched back to the establishment of Prussia as a great power under Friedrich Wilhelm III, and the Thirty Years War and violence of the Protestant Reformation before it. [2]
The thrust of this line of thinking, which while a distinct minority but increasingly influential in German defense planning, was that the rising opposition to German goals and ambitions by France and to a lesser extent Austria was another episode in the continuous struggle of the German nation against external enemies, in this case - once again - the Bonapartist foe in Paris. France had been the enemy in the 1810s "Wars of Liberation," in the 1860s "Wars of Unification," and to a new generation, they were the likeliest enemy in a potential 1910s "Wars of Consolidation." This thread, when pulled at, explains why German defense planning came to view French provocations as not diplomatic angst but deliberate steps towards war, and perhaps over-committed itself to seeking to provoke France in turn into a blunder - a deliberate strategy of preparedness, of "choosing the place and time of battle," as von Kluck phrased it, a policy that was of course too clever by half..."
- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour
[1] What I'm trying to get at here was that some of the right-wing outfits in Wilhelmine (Heinrichine?) Germany that dabbled in pan-German nationalism (including some of the ADV) were composed of massive and complete dorks, and it took the chaos of November 1918 and the alienation of the traditional Prussian elite in the military and nobility from Weimar democracy to paper over that these people were not taken particularly seriously before there was a giant credibility vacuum on the German right for them to step into. This is not to minimize race essentialism, anti-Semitism, etc in pre-WW1 Germany, just noting that the really out-there stuff was out-there, and that the casual racism and contempt for Jews in Germany was similar to sentiments held by much of the French, British, Italian and Austrian public too, especially amongst academia.
[2] I should note that the Sonderweg theory is absolute, complete, and total bullshit in my opinion and does not deserve time and energy to debate, but there was a distinct sense in German intellectual circles that their nationhood was in some ways defined by a struggle against external opponents, in part due to Germany's unique political history and the geographic realities of being surrounded by larger "traditional" European powers such as France and the Habsburg realms. I wouldn't go nearly so far as to call it a siege mentality, but the sense of being hemmed in and that unity came through shared struggle was noticed by Bismarck and perhaps even before him
), I'd say that the countries in Europe guaranteed to be wanked are Germany and whoever the winner is in I+G/O . I believe you've indicated that there will not be a WWII level war in Europe (No idea in Asia, Japan may take advantage of France's ability to protect the countries it was doing prior to the CEW)
