The Crucible of German Democracy: Ernst Troeltsch and the First World War (Beitrage Zur Historischen Theologie) 9783161598289, 9783161598296, 3161598288

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Beiträge zur historischen Theologie Herausgegeben von

Albrecht Beutel

197

Robert E. Norton

The Crucible of German Democracy Ernst Troeltsch and the First World War

Mohr Siebeck

Robert E. Norton, born 1960; B.A. in German from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1982); Ph.D. from Princeton University (1988); since 1998 Professor of German, History, and Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

Published with the support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame. ISBN  978-3-16-159828-9 / eISBN  978-3-16-159829-6 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-159829-6 ISSN  0340-6741 / eISSN 2568-6569 (Beiträge zur historischen Theologie) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibligraphic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021  Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copy­ right law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset and printed on non-aging paper by Gulde Druck in Tübingen, and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Otterweier. Printed in Germany.

For my children Grace Evelyn Millicent Sterling Frederick Augustus

For this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things that have once been done. Aristotle (quoting Agathon)

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Democracy in Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Der Kulturkrieg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Ideas vs. Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 The Einstein of Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Political Ethics and Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Chapter One:  To Arms! To Arms! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 A Summer Storm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 After the Declaration of Mobilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 The War of Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Belgium Burns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 The Death of Internationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Our People’s Army . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

Chapter Two:  Why Do Other Peoples Hate Us? . . . . . . . . . 101 The British Betrayal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Exterminating the Germ-Huns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 The Mobilization of Opinion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 The Battle of the Marne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 The Manifesto of the 93 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

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What does it Mean to be German? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 The German Essence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 War Aims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Imperialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Chapter Three:  Battleground Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Germany and the World War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 The Spirit of German Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 The Turn Inward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Explaining The Culture War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Blazing New Trails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Delbrück’s “Wednesday Evening” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Reorientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 The New Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Chapter Four:  The Ideas of 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Caesar Absconditus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 A General Theory of Cultural Relativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 The Importance of Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 The Free Patriotic Association . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 German Society 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Die Ideen von 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 The Idea of Mitteleuropa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

Chapter Five:  German Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Nemesis U-Boat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 Introit America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Exeunt Tirpitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Rallying Behind Bethmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320 National Committee for an Honorable Peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

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Sobriety and Courage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 The Primacy of Domestic Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Is there a German Idea of Freedom? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 The Duumvirate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Bread and the Franchise! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360 Finis Bethmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370

Chapter Six:  The Struggle over Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . 375 A Dispirited 1917 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 Reorientation Redux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 The Onslaught of Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381 What Does Freedom Mean? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 Are Germans Free? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 How Free are the Others? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396 A Democracy of Beggars? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402 The Second July Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411 The Peace Resolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 Two Varieties of Vaterland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 The People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 Politics and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439

Chapter Seven:  Between Reaction, Reform, and Revolution . 453 The Specter of Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 462 A Dispute with Dr. ­Troeltsch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469 Denunciations of Defeatism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473 A Growing Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481 Two Kinds of Realpolitik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487 The End of the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 492 Yet Another Imperial Chancellor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498 The Education of a German Prince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 Levée en masse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514

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Parliamentarization and Peace at Last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525 From Volksbund to Völkerbund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532

Conclusion: Spectator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 539 Politician . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 550 The Murdered Friend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554 Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 558

Postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579 Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605 Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619

Preface This book is about how and why Germany became a parliamentary democracy on October 28, 1918. That fact and that date – nearly two weeks before the ­November Revolution, before the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert assumed the post of the Imperial Chancellorship, and before Wilhelm II abdicated his throne – will come as a surprise to many readers, and that surprise in turn provides perhaps the most compelling rationale for this book. For a variety of reasons, we have neglected the rise and development of democratic thought in Germany during the First World War. As a consequence, we have lost sight of the many individuals and events discussed here that contributed to the complete transformation of the German political system in the final months of 1918. Although that formal change occurred in some ways unexpectedly, it also took place as a logical result of intentional efforts by a large number of people who had argued and fought for increased democratization in Germany over the previous four years, and in many cases for long before that. During the war, growing numbers of Germans even thought that democracy – for their own country and in general – was inevitable and unstoppable. That was probably too optimistic, but the fact that so many believed it tells us something significant about their outlook and helps to explain their actions. At the same time, of course, there had always been opposition to democracy in Germany, and as the conflict wore on that opposition grew into virulent hostility, only to intensify once the war was lost and the forces of democracy prevailed. But that is the point: democracy did prevail, and it did so not in the form of some foreign imposition, and not because there seemed to be no better alternative immediately available, but because it represented the conscious choice of countless Germans themselves who viewed it as providing the best path forward for the future. In this sensational sequence of events, Ernst Troeltsch, who lived from 1865 to 1923 and over the course of his life came to play a number of prominent roles in his country, occupied a decisive position. Troeltsch was an acclaimed philosopher, historian, theologian, and sociologist, first at Heidelberg and then at Berlin, arguably the two most important universities in Germany at the time. But he was also an active politician and more generally one of the most well-known and respected public figures of his day. Yet he, too, like the democratic movement of

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which he was an indispensable part, has been largely forgotten and, like it as well, deserves greater recognition. Troeltsch was by no means the only person in Germany who would advocate for democracy during the war. But given his ­stature and intellectual authority he was uniquely able to promote it in ways that made it seem both possible and palatable to a large segment of the population, many of whom continued to regard democracy with wariness and suspicion – or with open disdain. Following an introduction outlining its three principal themes – the general evolution of democratic thought and activity in Germany between 1914 and 1918; the nature and function of the so-called “culture war” during the same period, of which the debate about democracy (both for and against) was a central component; and finally the thought and personality of Ernst Troeltsch himself – the first chapter of the book begins with the events immediately surrounding August 1, 1914, the day mobilization was declared in Germany. Over the next four years, the country and its people would undergo many profound and wrenching changes, ultimately leading to the apparently abrupt transition from a constitutional monarchy to a parliamentary democracy on October 28, 1918. How that tectonic shift came to happen, the convoluted interplay of arguments, decisions, and actions that took place in those intervening years – all of which were the direct product of the war and its multiple pressures – forms the principal subject of the chapters that follow. Again, Ernst Troeltsch is far from the sole protagonist in this enormous drama and is certainly not the most important one. And to be clear: this book does not offer a conventional biography, tracing the entire span of Troeltsch’s life and thought, nor is it an intellectual biography of him alone. It presents, rather, a kind of intellectual-historical group portrait, depicting Ernst Troeltsch as he interacted with some of the most consequential people and ideas of his time, focusing on the last decade of his life and the role he played in defining and even shaping it. But there were also, as I have said, many others who dedicated their energy – and sometimes their lives – to realizing their vision of a democratic German future, and a large number of them appear in this book as well. Nevertheless, as one of the most famous intellectuals in the capital of Berlin, and at a time when intellectuals truly mattered, Troeltsch occupied a singular place at the center of a complex nexus of power and influence that gave him privileged access to information few others had and enabled him to apply his extraordinary abilities as few others could to the task of orienting his fellow Germans in a confusing and ever-changing reality. And he did not just comment on, he also actively participated in some of the key political events of the day, giving us, through him, an unusually direct and intimate perspective on those larger developments. As the war persisted and it became possible to speak more freely

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about political matters at home, ­Troeltsch and those who thought like him began to press ever more forcefully for democratic reform and peace. They did not succeed immediately, and their equally determined opponents almost won out. But in the end, and almost unbelievably, the proponents of democracy triumphed – even as Germany itself lost the war. That mixed legacy served to lay the groundwork for the troubled history of the Weimar Republic. This book, however, is not about that new state but about how the elements that enabled it gradually emerged and coalesced within the old one. Weimar endures as an object of even popular fascination in part because we know that this seemingly improbable experiment in democratic self-governance would not last and that it would fail after only fourteen years of existence, its end hastened by the ceaseless and ever more malevolent assaults by its enemies. In advancing a greater appreciation of the native origins of Germany’s first democracy, this book will, I hope, contribute to the on-going revisions in how we judge the Weimar Republic’s inherent chances for success and thus participate in the continuing reevaluation of twentieth-century German and European history more broadly. But the primary focus here is on those tumultuous and violent four years between August 1914 and November 1918 in which a German democratic state was originally conceived and then, against all odds, finally realized.

Introduction Democracy in Germany Among the received ideas surrounding the fall of the German Empire in 1918 and the subsequent declaration of what became known as the Weimar Republic is the notion that the first German democracy more or less suddenly appeared out of nowhere, emerging unexpectedly from within an otherwise deeply conservative and monarchical state, which made it all but destined to fail. On this reading, the nascent republic was mortally compromised from the outset because there was an insufficient number of actively committed democrats willing or able to defend it against a majority of enemies all too determined to see it destroyed. “The inner weakness and the death of the Weimar democracy,” Kurt Sontheimer concluded in his classic study of 1962, “are inextricably linked with the effectiveness of antidemocratic thought.”1 The congenital defect of the new state appeared to be two-fold: not only was Weimar under constant inner siege by virulent antirepublican adversaries, it was also, as the sardonic phrase has it, supposedly a “republic without republicans.” There were at best, so the familiar narrative goes, a handful of “rational republicans”2 – Vernunftrepublikaner – who regarded the new state with cool pragmatism as a necessary but only “provisional roof,”3 to use Heinrich August Wink­ 1 

Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933, 2nd ed. (Munich: Nymphenbur­ ger, 1964), 11. 2  This term was coined by the historian Friedrich Meinecke, who wrote in November 1918: “I remain, facing the past, a heartfelt monarchist, and will be, facing the future, a rational republican.” Friedrich Meinecke, “Verfassung und Verwaltung der deutschen Republik,” in Poli­ tische Schriften und Reden, Werke, ed. Georg Kotowski (Darmstadt: Siegfried Toeche-Mittler Verlag, 1958), 2, 281. See the pioneering essay on this subject by Harm Klueting, “‘Vernunft­ republikanismus’ und ‘Vertrauensdiktatur.’ Friedrich Meinecke in der Weimarer Republik,” Historische Zeitschrift 242 (1986), 69–98. On the entire phenomenon see Vernunft­republi­ kanismus in der Weimarer Republik. Politik, Literatur, Wissenschaft, ed. Andreas Wirsching and Jürgen Eder (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008). 3 Heinrich August Winkler, “Der deutsche Sonderweg: Eine Nachlese,” Merkur 35/8 (1981), 801.

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Introduction

ler’s evocative metaphor, and who were themselves all too eager to replace it at the first opportunity with a more robust and durable alternative. Such apparently grudging acceptance among an elite minority seemed debilitating enough. But even worse were the open scorn and active hostility directed toward the Republic by many others besides. Some detested it as the bastard child of both a shameful defeat and the ignominious end to the monarchy. Others viewed democracy in itself as fundamentally alien to German tradition and culture. The eventual collapse of the Weimar Republic, repudiated and undermined by the very people it was supposed to represent, thus seemed practically guaranteed. The unsteady construction of the reviled state, lacking a deep foundation in either popular sentiment or historical experience, eventually and seemingly inevitably fell in on itself, leaving a political vacuum that others quickly rushed in to fill.4 While much of the foregoing account is undeniably true – during the 1920s there were many talented and resourceful antagonists of democracy in Germany, perhaps none so generously equipped with cunning prowess and prosecutorial zeal as Carl Schmitt – it tells only part of the story. There were also considerable numbers of politicians, political theorists, and legal scholars, in addition to other intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds – not to speak of the countless ordinary citizens whose thoughts and actions went unrecorded – who throughout the decade after the war devoted themselves to upholding both the idea and the reality of democracy in Germany and in the rest of Europe. From the prominent Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen, who in 1920 published On the Essence and Value of Democracy,5 acclaimed as one of “the great foundational writings on democracy ever”6 written; to the now neglected but once widely esteemed German political economist Moritz Julius Bonn, who wrote perceptively about, and proposed solutions to, The Crisis of European Democracy in 1925;7 to the social democratic 4  The idea that a “power vacuum” led to the demise of the Weimar Republic is the central thesis of the influential book by Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik. Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie (Stuttgart: Ring-Verlag, 1955). 5  Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1920); translated as The Essence and Value of Democracy, eds. Nadia Urbinati and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti; trans. Brian Graf (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). Cf. also Horst Dreier, Rechtslehre, Staatssoziologie und Demokratietheorie bei Hans Kelsen (BadenBaden: Nomos, 1986). See also the collection of all of Kelsen’s essays on democracy in German and in English with an informative introduction by the editors: Hans Kelsen, Verteidigung der Demokratie, eds. Matthias Jestaedt and Oliver Lepsius (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). 6  Katrin Groh, Demokratische Staatsrechtslehrer in der Weimarer Republik. Von der konsti­ tutionellen Staatslehre zur Theorie des modernen demokratischen Verfassungsstaats (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 107. 7  Moritz Julius Bonn, The Crisis of European Democracy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1925); there quickly followed a German version, Die Krisis der europäischen Demokratie (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1925). For more on Bonn and his related writings, see Moritz Julius Bonn, Zur

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philosopher and legal theorist Hermann Heller, who was arguably the most brilliant political thinker on the left during the entire Weimar period and who became a fierce adversary of none other than Carl Schmitt: these and other able advocates of the Republic committed themselves in word and in deed to democracy by justifying its legitimacy and buttressing its institutions.8 Leading scholars of constitutional law such as Gerhard Anschütz, Richard Thoma, Hugo Preuß, and Gustav Radbruch were respected and influential voices who in their teaching and their publications steadfastly promoted democratic principles and defended the new German state founded on them. And some, such as Radbruch and Preuß, actively sought to put those ideas into practice by serving in governmental politics.9 What is more, many observers on both the left and the right during the Weimar period confidently assumed – or grimly accepted – that democracy in Germany, as throughout the West, had become so firmly entrenched as to be all but ineradicable. In 1926, Heller asserted that, despite the various and acute challenges facing it, democracy today is by far the predominant form of governmental authority; our democratic way of thinking, the result of a development of ideas over many hundreds of years, is today, despite many antidemocratic sentiments, inextricably linked with the general context of all of our epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political, and legal notions.10

Even Schmitt, in his provocative attempt to dissociate liberalism from democracy in his strident essay on The Intellectual-Historical Condition of Modern Par­ liamentarianism, also of 1926, conceded, if with evident reluctance: The history of political ideas and theories of the state in the nineteenth century can be summarized by a simple slogan: the triumphal march of democracy. No state within the Western European cultural sphere has withstood the spread of democratic ideas and institutions. Even where strong social forces resisted, as in the Prussian monarchy, they still lacked an intellectual energy going beyond their particular sphere that could have conquered the democratic faith. Progress was simply synonymous with the expansion of democracy, antidemocratic resistance Krise der Demokratie: Politische Schriften in der Weimarer Republik, 1919–1932, ed. Jens Hacke (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015). See also by Jens Hacke, “Moritz Julius Bonn – ein vergessener Verteidiger der Vernunft. Zum Liberalismus in der Krise der Zwischenkriegszeit,” Mittel­ weg 36: Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung 6 (2010), 26–59. 8  See David Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy. Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller in Weimar (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). In his preface, Dyzenhaus writes: “Heller is hardly known outside of Germany. This is unfortunate for, as I shall argue, his social democratic theory of the legitimacy of the legal order is superior to Schmitt’s and Kelsen’s positions;” xi. 9  Cf. Martin D. Klein, Demokratisches Denken bei Gustav Radbruch (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007). 10  Hermann Heller, Die politischen Ideenkreise der Gegenwart (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1926), 48. Cf. Marcus Llanque, ed. Souveräne Demokratie und soziale Homogenität. Das poli­ tische Denken Hermann Hellers (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010).

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Introduction

merely a defensive posture, an apology for historically antiquated artifacts and the struggle of the old with the new. […] Ranke called the idea of popular sovereignty the most powerful idea of the time and its conflict with the principle of monarchy the leading tendency of the century. Since then, that conflict has, for now, ended with the victory of democracy.11

And yet, because of the virtually single-minded focus on the forces that eventually undid the Weimar Republic, the debates about and, crucially, for democracy during that period, as well as the particular character of Weimar democracy itself as a political and legal reality, had long been all but ignored.12 Strikingly, as recently as the year 2000, the editor of a collection of essays on the subject stated that, as a result of this nearly universal neglect, “we still know almost nothing about democratic thought in the Republic.”13 A decade on, in 2010, it still had to be said about the 1920s in Germany that “democratic thought, particularly that of constitutional law professors, has so far been researched only in a fragmentary manner.”14 It will come as no surprise, then, that a similar state of affairs exists with respect to our general awareness of the immediate incubator of Weimar democracy, namely the domestic political developments that took place in Germany during the First World War itself. But the fact is that the Weimar Republic did not just suddenly emerge ex nihilo or solely in response to the unprecedented crisis that engulfed the stunned and reeling nation following the traumatic loss of both the war and the Emperor. Rather, throughout the conflict, and especially during its middle years, there had been a vigorous and constantly evolving debate among preeminent German politicians and other public figures – including many university professors, journalists, writers, and unaffiliated intellectuals – about their 11  Carl Schmitt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1926), 30–31; translated into English as The Crisis of Parlia­ mentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). 12  One important early exception is the excellent study by Herbert Döring, Der Weimarer Kreis. Studien zum politischen Bewußtsein verfassungstreuer Hochschullehrer in der Weimarer Republik (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1975). And the most recent significant corrective is by Jens Hacke, Existenzkrise der Demokratie. Zur politischen Theorie des Liberalismus in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018). 13  Christoph Gusy, ed. Demokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000), 12. Heiko Bollmeyer, Der steinige Weg zur Demokratie. Die Weimarer Natio­ nalversammlung zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 28, also writes that, before his own book, “the work of the Weimar National Assembly has never previously been treated to a systematic investigation.” 14  Groh, 1. It has recently been argued that, apart from its cultural aspects, the Weimar Republic as a whole “has not received the attention it deserves” from scholars; see Michael Dreyer, Andreas Braune, “Weimar als Herausforderung. Zum Umgang mit einer schwierigen Republik,” in Weimar als Herausforderung. Die Weimarer Republik und die Demokratie im 21. Jahrhundert, eds. Michael Dreyer and Andreas Braune (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016), xii.

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country’s political future. And for a significant portion of the participants in these debates, that future was, and had to be, democratic. The end of the war and the abdication of the Kaiser finally offered the opportunity to turn theory into practice. And even though the conditions were obviously far from ideal, it was in the eyes of many at least the culmination of a development that was on balance positive and in any case necessary – and above all unavoidable. On December 16, 1918, Professor Ernst ­Troeltsch announced in a lecture to the Democratic Student Union of Berlin: “Overnight we have become the most radical democracy in Europe.”15 After having presumably got his listeners’ attention by that bold declaration, ­Troeltsch took care to emphasize, however, that if one considers it more carefully, it did not in fact happen quite over night. Democracy is the natural consequence of modern population density, connected with the education of the people necessary for its sustenance, industrialization, mobilization, militarization, and politicization.16

It was these large and long-term social, economic, and political processes, ­Troeltsch argued, that had created the conditions that made democracy not just possible but also inevitable. Democracy was not one single thing or the result of a single event, he insisted, but an accumulation of events and experiences over time that had contributed to an enormous, and ongoing, process of social transformation. Moreover, that process was in ­Troeltsch’s view consistent, or even synonymous, with modernity itself and as such was a welcome but in any event inexorable force. Nevertheless, the intellectual developments that took place between 1914 and 1918 leading up to ­Troeltsch’s conclusion and everything it implies had long been overlooked. Marcus Llanque, the author of a pioneering work on democratic thought in Germany during the war, stated in 2000 that, “the theoretical reflections on democracy during the First World War had not yet been the subject of an independent inquiry” prior to his book.17 Yet there were many such “theoretical reflections on democracy” during the entire period that merit close attention. To mention only the most well-known example: at the end of 1917 and in early 1918, as the war still raged on and with no clear end in sight, no one less than Max Weber wrote two weighty treatises, “Voting Rights and Democracy in Ger-

15 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923), vol.  15, ed. Gangolf Hübinger and Johannes Mikuteit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 211. This edition will henceforth be referred to in the notes as KGA. 16 Ibid. 17 Marcus Llanque, Demokratisches Denken im Krieg. Die deutsche Debatte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akademie, 2000), 14.

6

Introduction

many”18 and “Parliament and Government in the Reordered Germany,”19 that together articulated his theory, and expressly announced his endorsement, of parliamentary democracy. And while these famous essays have certainly not been ignored by scholars, Weber was scarcely alone. Hugo Preuß, who would become the author of the Weimar constitution, published as early as mid-1915 The German People and Politics (with a second edition of 8,000 copies coming out the following year), which was quickly recognized as one of the most momentous publications of the entire war.20 Because German censorship officially forbade and actively suppressed public discussion of internal politics until the end of 1916, Preuß was not yet able to advocate openly for democratic reform in his book, and he even conspicuously avoided using the word “democracy” itself. He did, however, advance a bracing critique of the existing German state, and in so doing implicitly created a space for promoting such reform, by characterizing the Imperial Reich as an Obrigkeitsstaat, a word Preuß made famous and is usually rendered in English, somewhat misleadingly, as “autocratic state,” although “authoritarian state” would be preferable and more accurate.21 By imposing rule by and from above – that is, through the Obrigkeit –, the very structure of the German state, Preuß argued, impeded Germany’s broad-based political and social development from below – that is to say, by the people themselves. In a review of Preuß’s book, the liberal constitutional scholar Gerhard Anschütz noted that, “to be sure, the author’s terminology avoids, apparently intentionally, the word democracy.” But Anschütz felt that Preuß had nevertheless made it clear, and deplored the fact, that the existing German state stood as “an antidemocratic island in the ocean of a world that is becoming more and more democratic.”22 Hugo Preuß’s book – which also counted Ernst ­Troeltsch among its many admirers – was an exceptionally early, but hardly the sole contribution to the debate 18 Max

Weber, “Wahlrecht und Demokratie in Deutschland,” in Gesammelte politische Schriften, ed. Johannes Winckelmann, intro. Theodor Heuss (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1958), 233–79. 19  Weber, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland,” ibid., 294–431. 20  Hugo Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1915). Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 68, rightly asserts that the book “belongs among the outstanding publications of the World War.” 21  The word achieved widespread familiarity through a newspaper article Preuß published in the Berliner Tageblatt on November 14, 1918: “Volksstaat oder verkehrter Obrigkeitsstaat?” Reprinted in Hugo Preuß, Staat, Recht und Freiheit. Aus 40 Jahren deutscher Politik und Geschichte, with a foreword by Theodor Heuss (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1926), 365–68. 22  Gerhard Anschütz, review of Hugo Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, in Preu­ ßische Jahrbücher 164 (1916), 341.

Democracy in Germany

7

about the need for democratic liberalization and political reform in Germany. And even those at the time who were more skeptical, or merely cautious, about those larger tendencies and who reserved judgment about whether they were in themselves a good thing or not, nevertheless increasingly framed the discussion of Germany’s political future around the relative merits or viability of democracy in general in ways that sought to take into account the distinctive historical and cultural identity of Germany. In late 1916, the moderate historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote an essay called “The Reform of the Prussian Franchise” that provides a good example of how some tried to accommodate the incursion of democracy in Germany with existing social and political realities: We are also not out to win the satisfaction and complete agreement with democracy and social democracy. We are not arguing from the standpoint of democratic ideals, but rather from that of purely state interests. Germany is simply not made for pure democracy. Within its bourgeois classes and in the entire rural population the monarchical tradition is rooted so deeply that reasonable and pragmatic social democrats have now already begun to reckon with it and will know how to find their way to the grand duke as well as to the emperor. Despite all democratic mass movements, the aristocratic view of life is also so integral to the German sensibility, so supported not only by our social structure and custom, but also by the spirit emanating from our highest culture, culminating in Goethe, that, if one would only initiate our democracy properly and not disturb its natural progression, it would also give birth to a new aristocracy and thus organically grow into the old society and our national cultural context.23

Even for Meinecke, who is typically held up as the very model of the reluctant, “rational” republican, the question was clearly not if but rather how Germany would become more democratic.24 Or, as Gustaf Steffen, a Swedish social democratic professor of law and member of the Swedish parliament who was sympathetic to the German cause, pithily put it in his book of 1916, Democracy and the World War: “There must be democracy. But how should democracy be?”25

23 

152.

Friedrich Meinecke, “Die Reform des preußischen Wahlrechts,” in Politische Schriften,

24 See the richly detailed corrective to the conventional view of Meinecke by Stefan Meineke, Friedrich Meinecke. Persönlichkeit und politisches Denken bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995). See also Nikolai Wehrs, “Demokratie durch Diktatur? Meinecke als Vernunftrepublikaner in der Weimarer Republik,” in Friedrich Meinecke in sei­ ner Zeit. Studien zu Leben und Werk, eds. Gisela Bock and Daniel Schönpflug (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006), 95–118. 25  Gustav F. Steffen, Demokratie und Weltkrieg (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1916); cited by Johannes Unold, “Deutscher Bürgerstaat,” Deutschlands Erneuerung. Monatsschrift für das deutsche Volk 11 (1918), 49. Two years before the war began, Steffen had also published a probing historical and analytical work on Das Problem der Demokratie (Jena: Eugen Diede­ richs, 1912). Interestingly, ­Troeltsch, who wrote in 1915 that he knew only yet another book by Gustav Steffen, Die Demokratie in England. Einige Beobachtungen im neuen Jahrhundert und

8

Introduction

This is all not to deny that there were many outspoken and resolute opponents of democracy in Germany who, as the war progressed, grew increasingly alarmed at the widening acceptance of the idea that an expanding democratization would, and indeed must, occur in Germany no matter the outcome of the war. Speaking for countless others of similar mind, Kuno Count von Westarp, who was “probably the most influential conservative party politician in Germany during the first third of the twentieth century,”26 published an essay in 1916 in which he advocated, as its title bluntly states, “Order and Subordination – not Democratic Egalitarianism.”27 Twenty years later, in his authoritative history of conservative politics in Germany just before and during the war, Westarp justified his categorical rejection of democracy by stating that he harbored principled reservations toward the “opinion,” as he took care to call it, that the political institutions in our Western neighbors and in the United States were the result of an irreversible development of humanity and that the essence of all progress consisted in ever greater political freedom, which was understood as an unlimited participation of the masses in governing and constraining the state’s power with regard to all political endeavors.28

To Westarp, who viewed democracy less as a benefit and more as a threat to humanity, resisting its encroachment was not just a political necessity, it was an ethical obligation. “To the statesman who did not acknowledge democratic development even in itself as legitimate,” he explained, “but viewed it as pernicious, resistance appeared as a duty and by no means as futile, if it were mounted against the very first step and carried out with resolve.”29 Even taking into account the uncompromising opposition of Westarp and innumerable others like him, the larger point is that, even though there was often fierce disagreement about the meaning and value of democracy, and despite many challenges, setbacks, and reversals, some of the most intense political debates in Germany from 1915 onwards revolved around democracy itself: what it was or was not, how to promote and expand it, or how to check and contain it. That this fact has largely been forgotten says less about the importance or quality ein Renaissanceepilog (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1911), also said “I don’t rate him all that highly.” Cf. Ernst ­Troeltsch to Eugen Diederichs, 10 July, 1915; in KGA 21, 109. 26  “Ich bin der letzte Preuße.” Der politische Lebensweg des konservativen Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp (1864–1945), Larry Eugene Jones and Wolfram Pyta, eds. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 1. The editors note, however, that “there is no comprehensive study of his political life despite the abundance of available sources;” ibid. 27  Kuno Graf von Westarp, “Ordnung und Unterordnung – nicht demokratische Gleichmacherei,” Kreuzzeitung, 23 January, 1916. Republished in Preussen und die Folgen, ed. Achim von Borries (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1981), 88. 28  Kuno Graf von Westarp, Konservative Politik im letzten Jahrzehnt des Kaiserreiches, Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1935), 2, 217. 29 Ibid.

Democracy in Germany

9

of those contemporary discussions and struggles themselves than it does about our own subsequent failure, for whatever assorted reasons, to perceive their significance or even their very existence. One final illustration of the many complexities and ambivalences involved: no one could suspect the eminent historian and sociologist Otto Hintze – who has been described as “methodologically the most advanced, if not overall the most important German historian of the late Empire”30 – of harboring insufficient loyalty to the German state. A proud and unapologetic Prussian, Hintze, with a face bearing the deep scars giving testimony to his days as a member of a dueling student fraternity, was outwardly and inwardly unmistakably a figure of the establishment. In 1910, Professor Hintze had been contracted by the highest authorities to write the official history of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the ruling family of Prussia and after 1871 of the united German Empire. Five years later, in 1915, the House of Hohenzollern would celebrate the 500-year anniversary of its reign and wanted its triumphant story properly told. In preparation for the commissioned book, Hintze was even granted an hour-long audience with His Imperial and Royal Majesty, King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II, an event that Hintze fondly recalled until the end of his life.31 Clearly, the resultant portrait did not displease its subject. When The Hohenzollern and Their Crea­ tion. Five Hundred Years of Patriotic History32 appeared on schedule, it was distributed free of charge to all German schools, an act of largesse that was made possible by a generous subvention from the Prussian government.33 As the book makes clear over the course of its more than seven hundred pages, Hintze, although he privately harbored reservations about the person of the reigning monarch, could not conceive of a Germany without the monarchy. Nevertheless, as early as 1911, Otto Hintze was already entertaining the thought that “perhaps the gradual democratization of political life is an unavoidable, even if undesirable, fate of the modern world, but it is not a blessing and not 30  Jürgen Kocka, “Otto Hintze,” in Deutsche Historiker, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 3, 41. See also the collection of essays in Otto Hintze und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft. Ein Tagungsbericht, eds. Otto Büsch and Michael Erbe (Berlin: Colloquium, 1983). 31  See Wolfgang Neugebauer, Otto Hintze. Denkräume und Sozialwelten eines Historikers in der Globalisierung, 1861–1940 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015), 418. See also Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, Werke (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler, 1969), 8, 235. 32 Otto Hintze, Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk. Fünfhundert Jahre vaterländischer Geschichte (Berlin: Paul Parey, 1915). Dietrich Gerhard, “Otto Hintze: His Work and His Significance in Historiography,” Central European History 3 (1970), 18, said this work “is still regarded as the most substantial history of Prussia and, in spite of its occasion, as sober and balanced.” 33  Kocka, “Otto Hintze,” 44.

10

Introduction

a goal to aspire to, above all when it occurs at too rapid a tempo.”34 Just before the war in 1914, Hintze’s stance had moved again, ever so slightly, toward a resigned if still reluctant acceptance of such “democratization” as an undeniable reality: “Even if one admits that the tendency toward the progressive democratization of public life is present, there is hardly any question that an unbridled spread of this tendency would not be seen as a blessing.”35 By early 1917, some equivocation about the desirability of democracy in principle still remained in Hintze’s mind. But he had by then recognized that fighting against it would be self-defeating, whereas providing it with positive regulation might contain or correct some of its excesses. As he wrote in an essay that year on “The Democratization of the Prussian Constitution”: “The democratic movement is here and is acting with fundamental force; it would be foolish to want to resist it at all costs. One doesn’t need to promote it deliberately, but one must try to guide it in the right direction.”36 At around the same time, while commenting “On the Reform of the Prussian Franchise,” Hintze came to this remarkable conclusion: We are living in extraordinary times and have to acquaint ourselves with the thought that a decisive step toward the democratization of our political and social life has become an inevitable necessity. It does not matter if one greets that fact with jubilation or accepts it with silent gravity as a perhaps fateful imperative of the hour. We are about to enter into a new chapter of our history. Within the Empire, the European continent, indeed the world, we cannot alone resist the great momentum of our time toward progressive democratization. We would thereby withdraw into a dangerous isolation from the peoples of the earth.37

The political realism of Hintze’s assessment is impressive, as is the intellectual fairness it displays, leaving room as it does for differences of opinion about whether democracy as such was a positive or negative ideal. But the fact stands that, almost two years before the Weimar Republic was founded or could even be imagined as a remote possibility, Otto Hintze, the very incarnation of a loyal Prussian subject, left no doubt that, to his mind, there was no alternative for Germany but to join the world in following the democratic path. 34  Otto Hintze, “Das monarchische Prinzip und die konstitutionelle Verfassung,” in Staat und Verfassung. Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Gerhard Oestreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), 379. On these and the following passages, see Neugebauer, 446–49. 35  Otto Hintze, “Das Verfassungsleben der heutigen Kulturstaaten,” in Staat und Verfas­ sung, 400. 36  Otto Hintze, “Die Demokratisierung der preußischen Verfassung,” Europäische Staatsund Wirtschaftszeitung 2/18 (1917), 459. 37  Otto Hintze, “Zur Reform des preußischen Wahlrechts,” Europäische Staats- und Wirt­ schaftszeitung 2/17 (1917), 435.

Democracy in Germany

11

For Hintze, the embrace of democracy was not warm, but it was genuine and – this point is crucial – the product of a gradual evolution.38 And once he had made it, his hard-won commitment to democracy never wavered, and nothing indicates that Hintze, who was known and respected for the “high degree of intellectual honesty”39 he displayed in both his work and his person, would or could ever change his position. Nor did he. On May 21, 1933, Hintze resigned from the editorial board of the prestigious journal, Historische Zeitschrift, the leading organ for historical research in Germany and on which Hintze had served by then for four decades. He explained his reasons for this dramatic step to Friedrich Meinecke, then the Editor in Chief of the journal, this way: “I would like to avoid the appearance of any concession to a cultural and political direction that proclaims as its goal, among other things, that the year 1789 shall be deleted from world history.”40 The reference to the French Revolution was a veiled but unambiguous allusion to the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired the first European democracy, which the Nazis wanted to extinguish and Otto Hintze had come over the years to adopt as his own.41 Well before Woodrow Wilson delivered his famous message to Congress on April 2, 1917, declaring that the “world must be made safe for democracy” and urging his compatriots “to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included,”42 the German people had already long since embarked on the arduous project of their own self-liberation. But not only did Wilson’s appeal to his fellow Americans betray a manifest unfamiliarity with internal German affairs, it also revealed a rather shaky grasp on the very principles he was purporting to promote, showing him to be insensi38  This is why it is problematic at best to state, as Rainer Hering does in Konstruierte Na­ tion. Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Christians, 2003), 343–44, that “even the well-known historian Otto Hintze in 1914 considered parliamentarianism to be unsuitable for Germany.” 39  Kocka, “Otto Hintze,” 43 40  From a letter to Friedrich Meinecke, cited in Neugebauer, 565. See on this painful episode, Peter Th. Walther, “Die Zerstörung eines Projektes: Hedwig Hintze, Otto Hintze und Friedrich Meinecke,” in Friedrich Meinecke in seiner Zeit. Studien zu Leben und Werk, eds. Gisela Bock and Daniel Schönpflug (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006), 119–43. 41  Hintze was of course far from alone in making the difficult transition from proud monarchist to principled republican. Another similar case is the Heidelberg historian Karl Hampe; see his Kriegstagebuch 1914–1919, eds. Folker Reichert and Eike Wolgast (Munich: R. Oldenburg, 2004). 42 Woodrow Wilson, War Messages, 65th Cong., 1st Sess. Senate Doc. No.  5, Serial No.  7264, Washington, D.C., 1917; 3–8.

12

Introduction

tive to the contradiction involved in advocating the imposition of a political system by one sovereign nation onto another by force, all in the name of self-determination. Several months later, Eberhard Gothein, a distinguished economist and historian at the University of Heidelberg and the successor to Max Weber’s chair, felt moved to remind the American president about some of the finer points of political strategy as well as about some of the basic tenets of democracy itself: Mr. Wilson should inform himself that, through the insistence on negotiating over peace with Germany only after it has democratized itself, he complicates the battle to an extreme degree for precisely those parties which are striving to achieve that goal. We are fighting it [i.e. the battle for democracy] because we regard democratization as indispensable to the healthy development of our inner affairs and thus to a positive foreign policy; but it is grist to the mills of our political opponents if our enemies turn it into a precondition for a peace agreement. The ordering of our domestic matters is our concern, not that of any foreign power.43

It is to recovering and reconstructing the protracted struggle in Germany during the war to imagine, articulate, and finally to realize a democratic future for itself, to understanding how and why democracy emerged for a significant number of its leading figures as the best, indeed the only possible, political option for their country even while it was still in the midst of the most profound existential crisis it had ever faced, that a major portion of this study is devoted.

Der Kulturkrieg One of the most important obstacles preventing an adequate appreciation of the evolution of democratic thought in Germany during the First World War has been what has been variously called the “mobilization of intellect,” the “war of minds,” or, in the phrase made famous by Ernst ­Troeltsch, the Kulturkrieg, or the “culture war:” the unparalleled public debate that burst into being even before war was even officially declared only to continue and intensify as it progressed. Although there were similar developments in all the warring countries, in Germany the public discussion about the war was an effort in which seemingly every thinking person participated and reflected every conceivable standpoint across the cultural, political, and ideological spectrum. Communists, social democrats, liberal Protestants, conservative Catholics, reactionary aristocrats, progressive feminists, loyal monarchists, neutral pacifists, and everyone else in between: all weighed in on the war and how it affected their cause and what that might mean for Germany, and for the world, as a whole. To date, however, there still exists no 43  Eberhard Gothein, Leipziger Volkszeitung, 5 September, 1917; cited in Llanque, Demo­ kra­tisches Denken, 115.

Der Kulturkrieg

13

exhaustive accounting of the total output by all the participants in this extraordinary public exchange of ideas; even the precise number of publications they produced remains largely a matter of conjecture. One scholar who sought to compile the “most complete bibliography possible” listing the writings published during the war in Germany alone had by the year 1999 amassed no fewer than 13,001 relevant titles.44 In its magnitude, diversity, and consequence, the German intellectual engagement with the war and its attendant ramifications is one of the most significant, and most fascinating, cultural endeavors – one hesitates to call it an accomplishment – undertaken during the previous century. It is also one of the most poorly understood. When the subject of German commentary during the First World War has been addressed by scholars, it has frequently been portrayed as faintly embarrassing, certainly unsavory, and ultimately as incomprehensible. There has even been a basic uncertainty about what to call it. Most often, the phrase the “ideas of 1914” has served as a kind of shorthand formula to refer to the aggregate intellectual content of the German war of words as a whole. Not a little ironically, however, there has been at the same time almost universal agreement that, within the writings that are said to fall under the rubric of those “ideas of 1914,” actual “ideas,” or at any rate intelligible ones, seemed to be in markedly short supply. Klaus Schwabe, who contributed some of the earliest and still among the best-informed examinations of the whole phenomenon, admitted that he found it “difficult to analyze rationally,”45 and that, because of their “vagueness,” “it is not easy to render the quintessence of the ‘ideas of 1914’ in clear concepts” owing to “the predominance of a strongly emotional, irrational component.”46 In a more recent study, Kurt Flasch also candidly revealed how alien and off-putting he found the writings of the wartime authors. “I agonized over their texts for a long time,” he confessed. “I take the fact that their arguments almost never made sense to me as a sign of historical difference.”47 Others have thrown up their hands altogether and diagnosed, though presumably with something less than clinical precision, the entire German intelligentsia as having been afflicted by a “war psychosis.”48 44  Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung. Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg (Berlin: Alexander Fest, 2000), 11. 45  Klaus Schwabe, “Zur politischen Haltung der deutschen Professoren im Weltkrieg,” His­ torische Zeitschrift 193 (1961), 605. 46  Klaus Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral. Die deutschen Hochshullehrer und die politischen Grundfragen des Ersten Weltkrieges (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1969), 37, 43. 47  Flasch, 8. See the bracing online review of Flasch’s book by Peter Hoeres in the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte: http://library.fes.de/fulltext/afs/htmrez/80115.htm 48  Charles McClelland, The German Historians and England. A Study in Nineteenth-Centu­ ry Views (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971), 226.

14

Introduction

At a deeper level of discomfort, during most of the second half of the twentieth century, the “ideas of 1914,” or at least what they were taken to represent, came to symbolize a great deal of what had gone wrong in Germany during the first fifty years. They supposedly epitomized an arrogant and aggressive chauvinism that rudely proclaimed the superiority of a profound German Kultur over the shallow “civilization” of other, primarily Western European, nations – not to mention the barbarous hordes to the east. They stood for the hubris of an educated elite who condescended to instruct their fellow countrymen about their duties and obligations toward the state; they embodied the hypocritical legitimation of brute military force through an appeal to, and by, the realm of the spirit; in short, they were thought to represent the contemptible surrender of reason to the idol of power. It was Fritz Fischer who gave this conception of the “ideas of 1914” a canonical cast in his influential if controversial book of 1961, Griff nach der Welt­ macht, literally the “Grab for World Power,” translated into English with the less provocative title Germany’s Aims in the First World War. There Fischer wrote: The outbreak of the World War and the popular excitement which this produced evoked stronger demands than ever before that Germany should make her weight felt in the world. Two decades of German ‘world politics’ [Weltpolitik] had generated and fostered in the German people a conviction that it was called, and entitled, to the status of a world power [Weltmacht]. […] Behind this mixture of national emotion and very purposeful political thought stood an intellectual movement, the product of German professors – both humanists, social scientists, and economists – who saw their mission in providing a positive meaning of the war. In the ‘ideas of 1914,’ under which name this movement has gone down to history, the war was no longer merely a defensive struggle which Germany had to wage against a superior number of enemies who had attacked her, but something more than this: a higher, predestinate necessity rooted in the antithesis between the German spirit, German culture, German political forms, and the life and forms of her alien enemies. […] This philosophic interpretation of the war – which had nothing to do with any realistic political thought – helped to mobilise German public opinion and released unsuspected reserves of force, precisely because of its non-rational, emotional appeal. This background explains both the war enthusiasm of the two first years of war and the ‘nation’s’ claim to world power, with which the political and intellectual leaders of Germany identified themselves.49

This is, one might say, the classical, post-1945 articulation of the supposed “ideas of 1914” and of their broader significance, and it has had a correspondingly enduring influence. Almost three decades later, in 1990, the historian Wolfgang J. Mommsen drew the lines of implication even more clearly when he wrote that the ‘ideas of 1914,’ which arose under the impression of the unanimity with which the Germans had shown they were prepared to take up arms in the service of the nation despite sharp political 49  Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, intro. Hajo Holborn and James Joll (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 155–56. Translation slightly modified.

Der Kulturkrieg

15

and social divisions, prepared the ground for the rise of extreme nationalism and later of National Socialism.50

With that, Mommsen made only explicit what Fischer’s overall thesis had strongly suggested: that the First World War – and the ideology that supposedly both justified and sustained it – formed part of that continuous development in modern German history which reached its logical culmination, or rather its nadir, in ­Nazism. The “ideas of 1914,” in other words, were thought to have provided an authoritative codification of the values and beliefs that paved the infamous Sonderweg that led Germany so disastrously astray in the first half of the twen­ tieth century. Yet, despite the professed importance of the “ideas of 1914” and of the role they supposedly played in forging the intellectual tools for Germany’s self-destruction, and despite the fact that those “ideas” have almost always been mentioned at least in passing in studies of the war, until relatively recently there existed no systematic, empirically based, and chronologically structured study of their origin, development, and contemporary meaning. It was not until 2003, when Steffen Bruendel published his pioneering book on the “ideas of 1914,” that the first such comprehensive work appeared.51 There, Bruendel persuasively showed that many of the judgments and conclusions about the “ideas of 1914” that had been drawn over the previous half century stand in direct contradiction to what those ideas actually were. That is not to suggest that the broader function performed by German professors and other public intellectuals during the war in attempting to shape not just opinion but actual policy as well has itself been ignored or underappreciated. Far from it: ever since the groundbreaking work performed by Klaus Schwabe and others in the 1960s, this aspect of war-time experience has received extensive and often meticulous attention.52 But Bruendel 50  Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Der Geist von 1914: Das Programm eines politischen ‘Sonderweges’ der Deutschen,” in Wolfgang Greive, ed., Der Geist von 1914. Zerstörung des univer­ salen Humanismus? (Rehburg-Loccum: Evangelische Akademie Loccum, 1990), 18–19. Representative of this view is also the essay by Reinhard Rürup, “Der ‘Geist von 1914’ in Deutschland. Kriegsbegeisterung und Ideologisierung des Krieges im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Ansichten vom Krieg. Vergleichende Studien zum Ersten Weltkrieg in Literatur und Gesell­ schaft, ed. Bernd Hüppauf (Königstein/Ts.: Forum Academicum, 1984), 1–30. 51  Steffen Bruendel, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat. Die “Ideen von 1914” und die Neu­ ordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akademie, 2003). 52  In addition to the previously cited publications by Schwabe, see also Rüdiger vom Bruch, Wissenschaft, Politik und öffentliche Meinung. Gelehrtenpolitik im Wilhelminischen Deutsch­ land (1890–1914) (Husum: Matthiesen, 1980); Gelehrtenpolitik und politische Kultur in Deutschland 1839–1930, ed. Gustav Schmidt and Jörn Rüsen (Bochum: N. Brockmeyer, 1986); Deutsche Hochschullehrer als Elite 1815–1945, ed. Klaus Schwabe (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt, 1988); Christian Jansen, Professoren und Politik. Politisches Denken und

16

Introduction

found that the virtual unanimity of the view that the “ideas of 1914” were ideological precursors of National Socialism, or at the very least that they entailed a broadly embraced and abiding “glorification of war”53 and were “tendentially […] reactionary,”54 was not justified, and in fact contradicted, by the vast majority of writings that fell under the rubric of what he called “intellectual war journalism,” or Kriegspublizistik. As Bruendel put it with considerable understatement, even “a glance at the sources shows in many respects a discrepancy between the contents of the intellectual war journalism and its interpretation in the previous scholarly literature.”55 How to account for this discrepancy is more difficult.

Ideas vs. Spirit Apart from the radically different attitudes toward patriotism, and toward German patriotism in particular, that have become commonplace in the meantime, one source of this almost uniformly negative assessment of the “ideas of 1914” stems from their peculiar conflation with another related but distinct phenomenon. One of the most persistently repeated clichés about the outbreak of hostilities in August of 1914 was that the war was initially greeted in Germany and throughout the rest of Europe as well with a wild enthusiasm bordering on a kind of giddy euphoria, given memorable visual form by well-known photographs of enormous crowds gathered in public places apparently expressing delirious joy and excitement over the grand adventure to come. It is a powerful image, made Handeln der Heidelberger Hochschullehrer 1914–1935 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992). Fritz Ringer’s study, The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969), has had a sizable impact, but is in many ways seriously flawed; see the probing review of the German translation of Ringer’s book by Bernhard vom Brocke, “‘Die Gelehrten.’ Auf dem Weg zu einer vergleichenden Sozialgeschichte europäischer Bildungssysteme und Bildungseliten im Industriezeitalter,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 10 (1984), 389–401, esp.  390–96. See also the excellent critical review by Kenneth D. Barkin, The Journal of Modern History, 43/2 (1971), 276–86. 53  From the introduction by Klaus Böhme, ed. Aufrufe und Reden deutscher Professoren im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975), 14. 54  Thus the conclusion by Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, “Wie gibt man dem Sinnlosen einen Sinn? Zum Gebrauch der Begriffe ‘deutsche Kultur’ und ‘Militarismus’ im Herbst 1914,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen with Elisabeth Müller-Luckner, eds., Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996), 77–96, here 96. 55  Bruendel, 9.

Ideas vs. Spirit

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poignant, if not mildly repugnant, by our superior knowledge about the gruesome carnage that ensued. But that familiar mental image does not conform entirely with reality; indeed, it largely rests on what scholarship over the last two decades has convincingly debunked as a “myth.”56 The main reason people congregated in large throngs in city centers and public squares was out of the basic desire for information. Before the advent and common use of radio and the telephone, the only source for news about current affairs, beyond the first-hand witnessing of events or gossip, were newspapers, posters, and public speeches, all of which necessitated physically going out to where the information was available. And although there were certainly demonstrations of what one may call “enthusiasm” – or perhaps it is better to say of a general patriotic fervor – in most European capitals and in many larger cities throughout the continent as the situation intensified in the last week of July as it became clear that war among the major powers was increasingly likely, the prevailing state of mind was often the rather more understandable one of anxiety, apprehension, and dread. In Germany, the response to the threat of war in the weeks and days leading up to August 4, and then to the actual events thereafter, was highly diverse and volatile, differing greatly according to the age, gender, social class, political affiliation, educational level, professional status, and geographical location of those involved. Displays of “enthusiasm,” or merely of intense curiosity, tended to occur more often in larger cities, but in many smaller towns and rural areas there was often no perceptible reaction at all. There one encountered no parades, no demonstrations, no spontaneous marches of solidarity, only silence and worry, or mute indifference. And as the war wore on and the deaths mounted, everyone retreated into whatever refuge was available. “Those passing through the countryside of Germany, France, or Russia in late 1914,” the British historian Hew

56  See Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914. Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); see also Thomas Raithel, Das “Wunder” der inneren Ein­ heit. Studien zur deutschen und französischen Öffentlichkeit bei Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges (Bonn: Bouvier, 1996); and the chapter by Niall Ferguson, “The August Days: The Myth of War Enthusiasm,” in The Pity of War. Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 174–211. Roger Chickering, “‘War Enthusiasm?’ Public Opinion and the Outbreak of War in 1914,” in An Improbable War. The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914, ed. Holger Afflerbach & David Stevenson (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 200–12, also offers a good corrective, as does, with some qualifications, the older study by Wolfgang Kruse “Die Kriegsbegeisterung im Deutschen Reich zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges. Entstehungszusammenhänge, Grenzen und ideologische Strukturen,” in Kriegsbegeisterung und mentale Kriegsvorbereitung, eds. Marcel van der Linden and Gottfried Mergner (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), 73–87.

18

Introduction

Strachan has written, “commented not on the enthusiasm of the population but on its calm and quietness.”57 One important reason for the persistence of the “myth” of widespread and enduring “war enthusiasm” is that the legend came into being almost simultaneously with the war itself, and politicians and opinion makers immediately seized on its usefulness as an instrument in waging the ideological battles that followed. There were, naturally, many good reasons in all of the belligerent nations for fostering and maintaining popular support for the war – or for manufacturing it if necessary. After all, the survival of a state may well depend on its people being willing to die for it. But in Germany in particular the experience of those first few days and weeks in August quickly took on a specific meaning and function, becoming widely known as the Geist von 1914, the “spirit of 1914.” After going through decades of increasingly divisive political and social struggles, so the thinking underlying that phrase went, Germans felt at the outbreak of the war, and then were subsequently repeatedly told or reminded that they had felt, a sudden and overwhelming sense of unity for the national cause in August 1914, allowing the previous grounds for individual discord to recede into comparative insignificance before the much greater need to stand as one country to face a threat that endangered them all. The “spirit of 1914,” in other words, stood for the spirit of a Germany united in its determination and posture against a common enemy threatening its very existence.58 But the phrase the “spirit of 1914” was itself actually a retrospective construct, formulated and actively promulgated in Germany at a later stage of the conflict when spirits were in fact sagging and in need of uplift as it became clear that the war would neither be short nor victory easy. It was this subsequent instrumentalization and exploitation of the experiences during the first days of the war, mythically shorn of all distracting contradictions and inconsistencies, that became crystalized in the notion of the Geist von 1914. Thereafter, invoking and preserving that Geist was an essential component of the notorious Burgfrieden, the government-mandated agreement to set aside, and not to discuss publicly, political differences during the war for the sake of the common cause. And, when the Burgfrieden itself, as well as the inner unity it was meant to symbolize and up-

57  Hew Strachan, The First World War. To Arms (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 149. Overall, Strachan takes the balanced view that “the picture of widespread enthusiasm does stand in need of modification and of amplification. But its fundamental message remains unequivocal. The belligerent peoples of Europe accepted the onset of war; they did not reject it,” ibid., 110. 58  This point is made forcefully in the otherwise highly critical book by Anon. (Franz Carl Endres), Die Tragödie Deutschlands. Im Banne des Machtgedankens bis zum Zusammenbruch des Reiches (Stuttgart: Ernst Heinrich Moritz, 1925), 29.

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hold, began to fray, the appeals to the “spirit of 1914” became more insistent – and hollow. It was precisely this recycled and repackaged experience of collective unity, ostensibly fed by what Fischer and his followers called the “popular excitement” and “national emotion” surrounding the opening of hostilities, which subsequently, and misleadingly, became identified with, and even as, the “ideas of 1914.” In the process, that phrase in turn was confused with the phenomenon of an ostensibly common “spirit of 1914,” which, as we have seen, was consciously created and increasingly artificially sustained by German propagandists in the effort to stifle internal dissent and even to suppress open revolt that grew as the war continued. As a result of the uncritical reproduction of that wartime German domestic propaganda campaign under the assumption that it accurately reflected popular sentiment and social reality, the retrospectively manufactured experience of national solidarity known as the “spirit of 1914” became so closely associated by scholars with the “ideas of 1914” that the two concepts have frequently been treated as being synonymous, prompting some to refer to “The Spirit (or: The Ideas) of 1914)”59 as if they were the same thing. But they were not. The actual “ideas of 1914” represent in fact a limited and fairly brief moment within the much larger contemporary debates. They were formulated at a specific juncture, within a particular context, and in response to particular developments, and they reflect neither the general state of mind nor the emotional tenor of the Germans in their entirety nor, even less, their attitude over the course of the entire war. As for the “enthusiasm” that supposedly supplied the fuel for the “spirit of 1914,” instead of persisting, as Fischer claimed, throughout “the two first years of war,” where such enthusiasm did exist, it actually faded quite quickly, and certainly it did not survive past the falling of the autumn leaves by which time the war was notoriously supposed to have been over. And far from being no more than the diffuse and inchoate effusions of raving chauvinists addled by war lust, the actual “ideas of 1914” are very much the product of deliberative thought and are fully susceptible to rational analysis, even though there was hardly unanimity about what they might mean among those (relatively few) who espoused them. Moreover, pace Fritz Fischer and his followers, those ­“ideas” do very much represent “realistic political thought” devoted to providing practical solutions to the fundamental political problems of the day. Thus, the historical “ideas of 1914” bear almost no resemblance to the familiar conception of them handed down to us. And making the matter even more complicated, some of the participants in the contemporary discussion themselves later changed their minds, gradually modified their views, or disowned them alto59 

Jansen, 125; also quoted by Bruendel, 18.

20

Introduction

gether. Among them was Ernst ­Troeltsch, who did more than anyone else to make the phrase famous and who gave the most compelling account of their meaning. But for him, as well, they were only one station on a much longer and more complicated journey. Over the course of four long and harrowing years, some of the best minds of the time attempted to make sense, both publicly and privately, of the great drama playing out before them, trying to comprehend the war and its repercussions for Germany and for the rest of the world from their perspectives as historians, sociologists, economists, political theorists, philosophers, and theologians. Most of them earnestly attempted to offer what they thought were realistic solutions for emerging from their collective nightmare. Together, the German professoriate active during the First World War formed one of the most learned and accomplished generations of scholars the world has ever seen. It would – or at least it should – be absurd to imagine that so many thinkers of such caliber and integrity would have simply taken leave of their senses en masse and would have done so for months or even years at a stretch. Similarly, it ought to seem implausible that, in attempting to come to grips with the violence and turmoil of the conflict, they would have contented themselves with merely reiterating patriotic bromides and cynically turning their backs on what they actually knew to be the truth. And, in fact, nothing could be further from the case. Although there were of course notable individual exceptions, as a group and in the majority, they did their best to train their formidable erudition and methodological rigor – in a word, their Wis­ senschaft – on the real-world events taking place around them in order to meet the greatest challenge of their lives in the only way they knew how and in conformity with the principles they had always upheld. But the German participants in the Kulturkrieg were also, as a group and as individuals, proud and self-conscious citizens of what they regarded as a great and honorable nation. And, we should take care to remind ourselves, these combatants of the word were not just thinking brains but also feeling persons, many of them fathers (and some mothers) who, in not a few instances, sacrificed their own sons to the cause of that nation. After August 1914, everything that everyone had previously known and loved had suddenly been cast into doubt, and where some imagined new and promising opportunities, most others feared, not unreasonably, that everything they cherished was acutely imperiled and might be taken from them forever. At various stages of the war, several succumbed to the temptation to launch ill-considered and intemperate attacks on their adversaries, and some also gave in to the surely forgivable urge to vent their feelings of anguish, rage, and despair over the monstrous escalation of death and destruction that refused to end. But often enough, and increasingly as the war progressed – or

The Einstein of Culture

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rather failed to progress – such outbursts were directed less often at external enemies and more frequently at what was perceived as the haughty, misguided, and even incompetent leadership at home. And the severe internal divisions that beset the still new German nation did not in fact fuse seamlessly together in the searing crucible of war. Instead, those chasms only grew deeper and wider, ultimately threatening to tear apart the country from within as the Germans began to turn on each other with a growing fury. Once the restrictions on publicly discussing ­political matters imposed by the Burgfrieden policy were formally lifted in late 1916, German citizens were finally free to say publicly what they had previously only thought and said in private, and many made use of this new license with a vengeance. Eventually, nothing was sacrosanct anymore because everything was at stake. To understand the development of democratic thought during the First World War in Germany demands taking a renewed look at the greater political, intellectual, and social context in which that development took place. It means returning to, and attempting to view with detachment, the fraught, turbulent “culture war” fought by German intellectuals in what they understood as an existential struggle against both foreign and domestic enemies over the future of their country. Revisiting this pitched battle of minds is not always easy or agreeable. But it will undoubtedly bring unsuspected rewards to those willing to look at it with open eyes. For one thing, receptive readers will discover, or perhaps come to regard differently, some works of exceptional historical importance and undiminished intellectual force. More broadly, we might also gain a better understanding of one of the most momentous periods in modern history. And, by contemplating the German fight both for and against democracy during the war, we may acquire a renewed appreciation for one of the most powerful but paradoxically also one of the most fragile ideas of our, or any, time.

The Einstein of Culture Ernst ­Troeltsch, who occupied a preeminent place in these wartimes debates and as time went on would speak out ever more forcefully about the necessity of a democratic future for Germany, has, like those subjects themselves, long remained underappreciated and unduly neglected. Yet there are few people who would repay careful study more than ­Troeltsch, whose thought and actions during the war form the ideational link uniting the other principal themes pursued in the pages that follow. Measured even against the extraordinarily high intellectual standards of the time, ­Troeltsch possessed an unusually incisive and expansive mind. A Protestant

22

Introduction

theologian by training and vocation, he was an insatiable polymath whose interests and voluminous writings ranged freely across the two and half millennia of recorded European cultural history, beginning with Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome, out of which Christianity emerged. Moving forward in time, the preternaturally historically minded ­Troeltsch retraced in his works the rise of the rich, heterogeneous culture of Late Antiquity, traversing the ascendency and consolidation of the bureaucratic Catholic church during the Middle Ages, the establishment of Protestantism and its principal components, Lutheranism and Calvanism, as well as the many sects and mystical movements that sprouted up in its wake. This vast cultural evolution was in fact the subject of his first and some feel his best book, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, which appeared in two large volumes in 1912.60 For ­Troeltsch, as he would put it in his final, uncompleted work on Historicism and its Problems, the totality of European culture consisted in the constant, composite interaction of its collective traditions throughout and across time: Our European world is not based on the reception of Antiquity or on its disengagement from it, but rather on a pervasive and simultaneously conscious fusion with it. The European world consists in Antiquity and Modernity, in the old world, which completely traverses all stages, from primitive origins to decadence and disintegration, and in the new world that begins with the Romanic-Germanic peoples since Charlemagne and also traverses its stages. At the same time, however, these worlds, which are deeply separated in their developmental history and significance, are so telescoped into one another and in conscious historical recollection and continuity so fused with one another that the modern world at every juncture, despite a completely new and individual spirit, is profoundly suffused and conditioned by ancient culture, tradition, legal and political formation, language, philosophy, and art.61

As this condensed paragraph suggests, ­Troeltsch defies any narrow disciplinary classification as a scholar or thinker. In addition to his searching, often highly original theoretical contributions to the philosophy of history (and, as a consequence, to the history of philosophy and religion), he is also regarded, along with Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, with all of whom he was personally acquainted, as one of the pioneers of the new field of sociology in Germany. ­Troeltsch was also an important figure in the rise and flourishing of Neo-Kantianism at the turn of the century, maintaining extensive 60 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 2 vols. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1912); translated as The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1931). It has been reprinted several times since and remains required reading for students of theology. 61 ­Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, KGA 16.2, 1035. See, for an overview, Brent W. Sockness, “Historicism and Its Unresolved Problems,” in Historisierung. Begriff – Geschichte – Praxisfelder, eds. Moritz Baumstark and Robert Forkel (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2016), 210–30.

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professional and personal contacts to representatives of both the so-called Marburg School, exemplified by Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and the Southwest School, chiefly identified with Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. And he made less systematic but no less significant contributions to psychology, pedagogy, and even to literary criticism and art history. Apart from his own independent academic works, ­Troeltsch additionally wrote over the course of his career a staggering 1,300 reviews of scholarly works by colleagues from around the world who worked in diverse disciplines and in a number of languages.62 In 1904, to name only one among hundreds of examples, he published a lengthy, probing review of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which had appeared two years before, and in 1907 he critically appraised Le divin. Expériences et hypothèses. Études psychologiques by Marcel Hébert.63 Overall, the list of the authors of the books ­Troeltsch commented on over the course of his almost thirty-year career, many of them now regarded as classics in their fields, reads like a Who’s Who of the contemporary international intellectual elite. This voracious mental absorption, the omnivorous, eclectic – but always discriminating – assimilation of the thought of others within the humanities and the social sciences both inside Germany and among the wider international learned community is indicative of ­Troeltsch’s own thinking more broadly. Over the last two decades of his life, ­Troeltsch strove ever more deliberately to find a way to encompass all of human endeavor (or at least its expression in the European sphere) within something like a unified theory of culture, an effort he gave the name of Kultursynthese.64 Unsurprisingly, it is a complex notion and requires patient analysis. Briefly stated, ­Troeltsch, who viewed himself foremost and essentially as a man of Wissenschaft and who regarded the twin revolutions of scientific and historical thinking in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the true motors of modernity, understood that both of these trends also called into question, where they did not actually controvert, the validity of many of the 62 On ­ Troeltsch’s activity as a reviewer, see Maren Bienert, Protestantische Selbstver­ ortung. Die Rezensionen Ernst T ­ roeltschs (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014). 63  See Ernst ­Troeltsch, Rezensionen und Kritiken (1901–1914); KGA 4, 364–71 and 534– 37. 64  The best account of ­ Troeltsch’s conception of the Kultursynthese is to be found in the forward by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf to Ernst ­Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme. Erstes Buch: Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie; KGA 16/1, esp.  32–82. See also Otto Gerhard Oexle, “­Troeltschs Dilemma,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 11 (2000), 23–64; and ­Andrzej Przylebski, “­Troeltschs Kultursynthese als halbierte Hermeneutik,” ­Troeltsch-Studien. Neue Folge 1 (2006), 137–53. The introduction to Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte (1902/1912), ed. Trutz Rendtorff, KGA 5, 1–50, also gives a good description of the genesis and place of the Kultursynthese in ­Troeltsch’s thought.

24

Introduction

normative values and certainties of the past, among them, and perhaps most crucially for European culture, the fundamental tenets of Christian religious belief. But just as the particular faith in the absolute truth and universal value of Christianity was being progressively challenged, if not undermined, by historical Biblical criticism, the very idea that there were unchanging, eternal truths of any kind was also coming under increasing pressure from the amassed weight of scientific and historical inquiry. As with everything else, ­Troeltsch resolutely embraced this challenge – turning one’s back on facts and evidence, which some of his more conservative theological colleagues primly chose to do, he considered a betrayal of Wissenschaft itself – and he sought to find the solution to the problems of modernity through the application of more, not less, reason. (Not incidentally, ­Troeltsch thought that the modern age in Europe, although it was obviously beholden to the liberating achievements of the Reformation, really commenced with the Enlightenment.65) ­Troeltsch intended to contain the threat of a debilitating relativism, even of a destructive nihilism, emanating from the findings of Wissenschaft by constructing a capacious conception of human thought and activity that placed the incontestable reality of values and norms themselves within an even larger, and historically dynamic, context. In this way, both the individual specificity of actual lived experience and the universality of abstract laws of historical change that are apparent within all cultures and at all times are given their appropriate due within a comprehensive, if admittedly somewhat metaphysical, “synthesis” that would ideally bind them all together. This project first emerged openly in his book The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religion of 1902. There T ­ roeltsch said he had explicitly sought to grapple with the inescapable conflict between what is “historically relative” and what is “objectively absolute,” already calling this “the central question of all philosophy of history,”66 and much of the the rest of his intellectual career consisted in the effort to address that question in the fullest and most extensive way possible. It was an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, attempting to embrace all of Western European culture within a single conception, and it was a goal that was conceivable only for someone with ­Troeltsch’s prodigious intellectual reach and his almost alchemical talent for integrating vast and disparate amounts of information within a generous frame65  See Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Die Aufklärung,” in Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religions­ soziologie, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hans Baron, (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1925), 4, 338–74; this essay first appeared in 1897. In a brief autobiographical sketch he wrote just before he died, ­Troeltsch reaffirmed the view he expressed there; see Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Meine Bücher,” in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923), 165. 66  See Rendtorff, “Einleitung,” ­Troeltsch, Absolutheit des Christentums; KGA 5, 3.

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work of dazzling subtlety and sophistication. Little wonder, then, that more than a few contemporaries likened ­Troeltsch to another grand theorist of the time – and of time – comparing the significance of his work to that of Albert Einstein: one, a great physicist representing the natural sciences, and the other, a great humanist embodying the cultural sciences, or Kulturwissenschaften, but both seeking to unlock the temporal secrets of our world.67 Testifying to his reach, ­Troeltsch’s universal conception of a Kultursynthese, his “unified theory” of human history, attracted a diverse but impressive collection of admirers. To name just a few: Erich Auerbach, who studied for several semesters with ­Troeltsch in Berlin, learned from him about Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher and historian, whose Scientia Nuova (1725) Auerbach translated into German in 1924 and who remained a lifelong inspiration.68 But the deep influence of ­Troeltsch’s thought on Auerbach is most evident in his own masterpiece, Mimesis, which is characterized by its transnational sweep across two thousand years of European literary history.69 Ernst Robert Curtius, in his no less pathbreaking book, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, explicitly took ­Troeltsch’s work as a model for his own. “The development of modern historical consciousness and its current complexity have been expounded here in unsurpassed fashion,” Curtius wrote, meaning by “here” ­Troeltsch’s book Historicism and its Problems: “I have adopted the universal-historical view of Ernst ­Troeltsch as my own.”70 And it was in a seminar led by Gottfried Salomon-Delatour at the University of Frankfurt in the summer of 1923 devoted to ­Troeltsch’s philosophy of history that the nineteen-year-old Theodor W. Adorno met Walter Benjamin, who was Adorno’s senior by a decade.71 Despite some initial reservations Benjamin had about ­Troeltsch’s approach to the history of ideas (and to much else), there are also clear resonances of ­Troeltsch’s 67  Thus Kurt Kessler, “Vom Lebenswerk Ernst ­Troeltschs,” Die Hilfe 29 (February 1923), Nr.  4, 15, 58–59; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 336; Albert Dietrich, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Archiv für Politik und Geschichte, 2, (March 1923), 97–112; cited in ibid., 394; Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, “Tote des letzten Jahres,” Die Eiche 12 (1924), Nr.  2, April, 354–56; cited in ibid., 616. 68  Giambattista Vico, Die Neue Wissenschaft über die gemeinschaftliche Natur der Völker, trans. and intro. Erich Auerbach (Munich: Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt, 1924). 69  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: A. Francke, 1946); translated as Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Lit­ erature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953). I am indebted to the introduction to Der Historismus und seine Probleme by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf for this insight, KGA 16.1, 28. 70  Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948), 14, 29; translated into English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953). See Graf, “Einleitung,” KGA 16.1, 81–82. 71  I owe this information as well to Graf, “Einleitung,” KGA 16.1, 80–82.

26

Introduction

thought in the theoretical opening chapter of Benjamin’s famous book on The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which Benjamin completed in 1925 as his Habilitation at Frankfurt and which, just as famously, was rejected. Yet due to a variety of factors – and in no small measure owing to the enduring enmity of Karl Barth, who towered over Protestant theology for most of the twentieth century and who strongly disapproved of ­Troeltsch’s historicizing liberalism – after ­Troeltsch died on February 1, 1923, just short of his fifty-eighth birthday, he quickly fell into obscurity and, outside of specialist academic circles, long ­remained unread and nearly unknown.72 In 1991, when the first and so far only biography of ­Troeltsch was published, its author, Hans-Georg Drescher, pointed out that “in the generation after [­Troeltsch], his name and his work had almost sunk into oblivion and his importance was taken for granted only within the narrow circle of professionals interested in the history of religion and theology.” While noting that there had been “intensive attention devoted to Ernst ­Troeltsch in the last decade and a half” before his biography appeared, Drescher also underscored that this development stood “in contrast to the broad neglect of earlier decades.”73 The situation began to improve after the formation of the Ernst-­ Troeltsch-Gesellschaft in 1981 and has been materially aided by the appearance of the critical edition of ­Troeltsch’s works, which commenced in 1998 and with over twenty substantial volumes already published is nearing completion.74 One result of the sustained neglect of ­Troeltsch is that very few of his many works have ever been translated into English, making him unavailable and thus 72 

Barth first formulated his fundamental objections to ­Troeltsch‘s conception of theology in the essay “Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte,” in Schweizerische theologische Zeitschrift 29 (1912), 1–12; cf. Hartmut Ruddies, “Karl Barth und Ernst ­Troeltsch: Aspekte eines unterbliebenen Dialogs,” in ­Troeltsch-Studien 4 (1987), 230–58. See especially Paul Silas Peterson, The Early Karl Barth. Historical Contexts and Intellectual Formation 1905–1935 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018). 73 Hans-Georg Drescher, Ernst ­ Troeltsch. Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 15; translated as Ernst T ­ roeltsch. His Life and Work, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); an earlier book by Walther Köhler, Ernst ­Troeltsch (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1941), is less about the man than about his thought; indeed, Köhler insists on the first page: “This is not a biography of Ernst ­Troeltsch […] the time for that, if it is possible at all, has not yet come,” v. 74  As of this writing, the volume of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe that will contain the texts ­Troeltsch wrote during the war, which form the principal focus of this book, has not yet appeared. Most of those texts have never been republished since their original appearance and I was therefore forced to cite from the original editions and sources. There was a small compilation of some of ­Troeltsch’s wartime writings published shortly after his death, Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa, ed. Hans Baron (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1925). But the texts it contains are heavily edited and many passages considered too “political” were excised, often without any indication of the omissions, and thus are not suitable for scholarly purposes.

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virtually absent within the anglophone world, where even a reading knowledge of German is becoming ever more rare. Not even his last great, though unfinished work, Historicism and its Problems, has been published in English translation, the first volume of which came out in 1922 a few months before he died. That book had been intended to lay the theoretical or, as ­Troeltsch put it, the “logical” foundation for the second, more genetically historical volume that never appeared, in which he would have finally provided the practical application of his vision of a comprehensive Kultursynthese.75 * * * After studying systematic theology at Berlin, Göttingen, and Erlangen and then becoming ordained as a Lutheran minister, Ernst ­Troeltsch began his academic career in 1894 at the comparatively young age of twenty-nine when he was appointed to the chair in dogmatics at the University of Heidelberg, where he remained for the next two decades. It was there that he met and befriended Max Weber, and after 1910 ­Troeltsch even inhabited the upper floor of the same house overlooking the Neckar river where Weber and his wife, Marianne, lived. In the small and famously convivial town of Heidelberg, ­Troeltsch also knew and socialized with other local luminaries, including the successor to Weber’s chair, Eberhard Gothein, the philosopher Kuno Fischer, the legal scholar Georg Jellinek, the historian Erich Marcks, and the art historian Carl Neumann, and many others besides. In 1915, mainly at the instigation and urging of the theologian, church historian, and cultural-political administrator Adolf von Harnack, ­Troeltsch then transferred to the University of Berlin, this time to occupy a chair in philosophy. Once there he was promptly recognized as the leading philosopher at the leading university in the country.76 In Berlin, too, ­Troeltsch formed personal friendships and close working relationships with many of the members of Berlin’s academic establishment, such as the historians Hans Delbrück, Friedrich Meinecke, and Otto Hintze. But he also became acquainted with, and was respected by, many prom75  See ­Troeltsch, “Meine Bücher,” 12. One important exception to the neglect of Troeltsch in the Anglophone world is the excellent book by Mark D. Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and ­Liberal Theology. Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). Although Chapman focuses almost exclusively on Troeltsch’s theological thought, we largely concur in our overall estimation of him. 76 Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Polymorphes Gedächtnis. Zur Einführung in die ­ TroeltschNekrologie,” Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 45. For a useful introduction to Harnack in English, see Douglas F. Tobler, “Scholar Between Worlds: Adolf von Harnack and the Weimer Republic,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 28 (1976), 193–222.

28

Introduction

inent economic and political powerbrokers in the capital, among them the business leader and politician Walther Rathenau, whom ­Troeltsch would call a “close friend.”77 ­Troeltsch likewise often met and collaborated with Theodor Wolff, Editor in Chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, the principal liberal newspaper in the nation, and Wolff himself was called at the time “the best informed journalist in Berlin.”78 Among many other people, ­Troeltsch also knew and admired the industrialist and philanthropist Robert Bosch, a man of fantastic wealth who also had pronounced Social Democratic leanings; ­Troeltsch was acquainted and socialized with Herbert Gutmann, the Jewish Director of the Dresdner Bank and an impassioned art collector;79 and ­Troeltsch knew personally and served as informal advisor to three Imperial Chancellors, Bernhard von Bülow, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and the last person to occupy the position, Prince Max von Baden.80 Through these high-powered connections, and through the brilliance of his published works and public addresses – in addition to everything else, he was renowned as a powerful, engaging, even charismatic speaker, whose lectures often drew large crowds of people willing to travel long distances to listen to him – ­Troeltsch became one of the most influential and celebrated intellectuals of his day, representing the epitome of German formal culture, or Bildung, when that culture itself had arguably reached its zenith. “It would not be saying too much,” one typical obituary of ­Troeltsch read in 1923, “to claim that the intellectual world in Germany – that intellectual world which is still the core of Germany and the hope of future renewal – has for years not been shaken as much by any other death as it has by that of Ernst ­Troeltsch.”81 Adolf von Harnack, who had also become a friend of ­Troeltsch and held the official eulogy at his funeral, went so far as to make the claim that “he was undeniably the German philosopher of history of our time, indeed, after Hegel, the first great philosopher of history Germany has experienced.”82 As effusive as his tribute was, it could be argued that Harnack was being too restrained. Rudolf Eucken himself “believed ­Troeltsch to be the most learned 77 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Dem ermordeten Freunde,” Die neue Rundschau 33 (1922), 787. Köhler, Der Chef-Redakteur. Theodor Wolff. Ein Leben in Europa 1868–1943 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 180. 79  Cf. Vivian J. Rheinheimer, ed., Herbert M. Gutmann. Bankier in Berlin. Bauherr in Pots­ dam. Kunstsammler (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang 2007). 80  See Bernd Sösemann, “Das ‘erneuerte Deutschland’: Ernst ­ Troeltschs politisches Engagement im Ersten Weltkrieg,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 3 (1984), 120–44. 81  Adolf Grabowsky, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Das neue Deutschland 11 (1923), Heft 3, March, 39–42; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 411. 82  Adolf von Harnack, “Rede am Sarge Ernst ­Troeltschs,” Berliner Tageblatt, Nr.  61, 6 February, 1923, 2–3; cited in ibid., 268–69. 78  Wolfram

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29

man the philosophical world has seen since the time of Leibniz.”83 Performing a kind of miniature “cultural synthesis” within his own person, ­Troeltsch combined, as we have seen, the roles of philosopher, historian, theologian, sociologist – and more – in his professional identity, and he brought that all-embracing perspective to everything he did. And he believed it was vital not just to think but also to act. Not content merely to wax eloquent about abstract theories or confine himself to the safety and comfort of his study, ­Troeltsch was one of very few academics who sought to translate his words into deeds by becoming an active politician, and he occupied several important posts in various state and national bodies before, during, and after the war. From 1906 to 1914, he served as a delegate of the University of Heidelberg to the First Chamber of the Parliament, or Assembly of Estates (Badische Ständeversammlung), in the Grand Duchy of Baden, long recognized as the most liberal state in the German Empire.84 He occupied a leading role in the first liberal-leaning political organization to form after the outbreak of the war, the Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland, or the Peoples League for Freedom and Fatherland, which was founded at the end of 1917. And from 1919 to 1921 he worked as an elected representative of the newly formed German Democratic Party, which he had helped to found, in the constituent National Assembly. In that capacity he also acted for a period as Undersecretary in the Prussian Ministry of Religious and Educational Affairs in the newly formed Republic. Through these offices, and in his many other activities, Ernst ­Troeltsch became one of the most tireless, fearless, and effective champions of the democratic idea in Germany. After his death in February 1923, many of the obituaries made a point of emphasizing his conspicuous political activity, stressing especially, as one put it, that ­Troeltsch was a “convinced member of the democratic party”85 and that his passing was “a heavy loss for Wissenschaft and an equally heavy loss for the political and social life of Germany.”86 Ludwig Marcuse, one of his students, even thought that ­Troeltsch had been a “born politician.”87 In this respect, ­Troeltsch’s gifts as a speaker were decisive, and his considerable political influ83  According

to the testimony of Charles Wooten Pipkin, “‘Days that are Beyond Remembering.’ ­Troeltsch’s Death and the Tragedy of Germany,” The Christian Register 102, 14 (1923), 319–20; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. T ­ roeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 438. 84  Cf. Hans Feske, Der liberale Südwesten. Freiheitliche und demokratische Traditionen in Baden und Württemberg 1790–1933 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1981). 85  Gottfried Brunner, “Ernst Tröltsch,” Germania, Nr.  32, 2 February, 1923, 2; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. T ­ roeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 204. 86 Rudolf Karl Goldschmit-Jentner, “Ernst ­ Troeltsch,” Heidelberger Tageblatt, Nr.  28, 2 February, 1923; ibid., 206. 87  Ludwig Marcuse, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Berliner Tageblatt, Nr.  55, 2 February, 1923, Morgen-Ausgabe, 2; ibid., 194.

30

Introduction

ence was owing in no small measure to his eloquent powers of persuasion, of which he made frequent and strategic use. “If he had not been a philosopher,” someone else wrote, “he would have perhaps become our greatest political rhet­ orician.”88 * * * When the First World War erupted, ­Troeltsch was forty-nine years old, at the height of his extraordinary physical and mental powers, overflowing with energy and ideas, and equipped with a stupendous knowledge of the Western world, past and present. (And not just a theoretical knowledge: a decade earlier, in 1904, he had been part of a delegation that included Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Werner Sombart that the German government had sent to the United States to represent German Wissenschaft at the St. Louis World’s Fair, an experience that left ­Troeltsch with an abiding fascination, if not always an unmixed appreciation, for America.89) It is no wonder, then, that of all of his colleagues who dutifully contributed to the war effort, ­Troeltsch became, with the sole exception of the indefatigable Rudolf Eucken, the most prolific public voice in Germany to comment on the great events of the day and to try explain what they meant. In all, during the four years of the conflict, he published more than forty substantial essays, many of them fifty pages long or more; he gave numerous private and public lectures, with some attracting huge audiences numbering in the thousands; he wrote shorter pieces for newspapers and other popular venues; and he actively participated in and helped to found a number of formal and informal political organizations, all the while continuing to pursue his more focused academic work and performing the regular teaching and administrative duties of a professor. It was a remarkable feat of mental and physical endurance, made possible only by the vast store of vital energy that so impressed everyone who met him and can have been sustained only by an enduring faith in the necessity and rightness of his actions. 88 Richard

Lewinsohn, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, Nr.  55, 2 February 1923, Morgen-Ausgabe Beilage, 5; ibid., 191. 89  See Hans Rollmann, “Ernst ­Troeltsch in Amerika. Die Reise zum Weltkongreß der Wissenschaften nach St. Louis (1904),” ­Troeltsch-Studien 2 (2001), 88–117. It was a productive trip: before and after it Weber completed the two long essays that came to form Die protestan­ tische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, which first appeared in 1904 and 1905 in the journal he co-edited, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik. Werner Sombart, his fellow editor on the journal and the man who first brought the term “capitalism” to prominence in his book Der moderne Kapitalismus, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902), also profited from the experience and after the trip published Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1906).

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Equally remarkably, and almost uniquely among his many other colleagues who spoke out on their country’s behalf during the conflict, ­Troeltsch also managed to preserve the respect and admiration of his international peers both during and after the war. Ernest Barker, an English political scientist and the Principal of King’s College London for most of the 1920s, wrote: He was a German, and he loved his country; but he so loved it that he did not forget the general cause of humanity. He was not one of those German scholars who wrote violent philippics against their country’s antagonists. All that he wrote on the war can be read without pain today, even if it cannot command universal assent.90

So it became that ­Troeltsch was among the first of very few German academics to be invited to give public lectures outside of the country soon after the war had ended. In December 1921, at the request of students at the University of Basel, he travelled to Switzerland and spoke there, and in March and April of the following year he gave lectures in Holland, visiting both Amsterdam and The Hague.91 Then, in March of 1923, ­Troeltsch was scheduled to make appearances in England and Scotland. Friedrich von Hügel, a wealthy private scholar originally from Austria with a particular interest in biblical studies and a naturalized British subject, had long admired ­­Troeltsch’s writings and tried to arrange for him to speak at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and at the London Society for the Study of Religion.92 Cambridge categorically refused to allow a German professor to speak there, and in Oxford a group of professors, displaying both a loose grip on facts and a striking lack of critical self-awareness, wanted to prevent him from coming owing to their belief that he was a “chauvinist.”93 In the end, ­Troeltsch died before the journey could take place. But the symbolic importance of the invitation alone was such that not a few of the obituaries written about him were at pains to point out that “he was supposed to hold lectures in England in a few weeks as a guest of the university of Oxford.”94 Even well after his death, ­Troeltsch was remembered by some as an exceptional example of decency and perspicacity during a time that was short on both. Mainly, contrary to the concerns of the Oxford faculty, it was his lack of chauvinistic nationalist sentiment that positively stood out. In 1963, the philosopher Hermann Lübbe attributed this trait in part to ­Troeltsch’s consciousness from the beginning that Germany’s defeat in the war was always possible, concluding that 90  Ernest Barker, “Ernst ­Troeltsch. A Great Thinker,” The Guardian 78 (1923), 9 February, 1923, 114–15; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. T ­ roeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 309. 91  Hübinger, “Einleitung,” KGA 17, 16–17. 92  Hübinger, “Einleitung,” KGA 17, 4. 93  Ernst ­Troeltsch, Briefe an Friedrich von Hügel 1902–1923 (Paderborn: Bonifacius, 1974), 40. 94  N.a., “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Hamburger Fremdenblatt Nr.  32, 2, February, 1923, 2; Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. T ­ roeltsch-Studien 12, 214.

32

Introduction

whoever takes seriously the role of the loser as a threatening possibility or as a reality, sees more. Among the outstanding philosophers during the World War it was ­Troeltsch above all who, against the horizon of his universal historical knowledge, in this sense was able to assert the sovereignty of political judgment against the ensnaring violence of national consciousness.95

And in 1975, Fritz Stern, who could otherwise be an unsparing critic, made a similar observation in his book on The Failure of Illiberalism about one of ­­Troeltsch’s wartime writings, saying that the “thoughtful tone [of] ­Troeltsch’s essay stands out amidst the poisoned literature of the war. By that very token it deserves to be taken seriously, as a manifestation of something deeper than an ephemeral patriotic outburst.”96 The same qualities that allowed ­Troeltsch to enjoy the esteem and to win the affection of so many people both in and outside of Germany had always defined his life as a thinker and scholar, and they likewise guided his activities as a politician, minister, and teacher. When the war began that would change everything, he confronted it with all of the intensity and determination he brought to every other endeavor in his life. To be sure, ­Troeltsch was not exempt from the often excruciating adjustments the war forced on everyone else and he underwent several agonizing, sometimes traumatizing, transformations in the process. Yet he also steadfastly adhered to the core values and ideals he had cultivated over the course of the nearly half a century he had lived prior to 1914.97 And central to those values, and therefore to what he thought and did in the remaining decade of his life, were the political and ethical ideals of democracy.

Political Ethics and Christianity ­ roeltsch had already begun thinking about the meaning of democracy in generT al well before the war began. Ten years earlier, in May 1904, he gave an address at the fifteenth annual meeting of the Protestant Social Congress in the Silesian 95 Hermann

Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland. Studien zu ihrer Geschichte (Basel/Stuttgart: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1963), 228. 96  Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism. Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Ger­ many (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 21. The chapter from which this quotation is taken was based on a lecture Stern gave in 1957 and first published in 1960. 97  Ernst ­ Troeltsch’s wartime writings have never before been the subject of an extended scholarly analysis. There are, however, a few good shorter accounts of ­Troeltsch’s political thinking during the war, foremost among them Sösemann, “Das ‘erneuerte Deutschland’;” G. M. Schwarz, “Deutschland und Westeuropa bei Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Historische Zeitschrift 191 (1960), 510–47; and Eric C. Kollmann, “Eine Diagnose der Weimarer Republik. Ernst ­­Troeltschs politische Anschauungen,” Historische Zeitschrift 182 (1956), 291–319.

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capital of Breslau (today Wrocław). Ever since its founding in 1890, the Protestant Social Congress had regularly convened, as its charter stipulated, “to study the social circumstances of our people, to measure them against the standards of the ethical and religious demands of the Gospel and to make them more productive and effective than before for modern economic life.”98 Formed after the ­notorious Socialist Law of 1878 banning all socialist activities in the German ­Empire had been lifted in 1890, the Congress was intended to address many of the political and economic concerns that stood at the center of the newly relegalized Social Democratic Party’s platform, but with a distinctive emphasis on the moral and ethical problems they posed. Since the Social Democrats were either indifferent or actively hostile toward religion and tended to regard traditional institutions such as the Church primarily as instruments of repression and authoritarian control, the Congress was also designed to provide a more moderate and deliberative, but still theoretically compatible, complement to the comparatively radical political program of the Social Democrats. The Protestant Social Congress thus embodied a curious, though for the time entirely characteristic, mixture of high-minded idealism and an earnest commitment to practical real-world affairs, validated by the steadfast belief that knowledge alone – or, more precisely, Wissenschaft – could provide sound prescriptions for meaningful social and political change.99 The meeting in Breslau in 1904 conformed to that general pattern, and Ernst ­Troeltsch, one of four featured speakers that year, addressed the assembly on “Political Ethics and Christianity” in the same spirit. The title is somewhat deceptive, and in the preface to the published version ­Troeltsch wrote that he had originally proposed as his topic “The Democratic Principle and Christian Ethics,” because, he explained, “the ethical and political demands of democracy and the forces of opposition to it seemed to me to be at the heart of the ethical and political problems of the present.”100 Even though ­Troeltsch modestly professed to be “in no way an expert” on the subject and could, he said, offer no more than what “an educated and politically interested man tends to understand in general” about the matter, what followed was in fact a deeply informed, shrewd, and sympathetic account of what he called the 98 Klaus Erich Pollmann, “Evangelisch-sozialer Kongreß,” in Theologische Realenzy­ klopädie, ed. Gerhard Krause and Gerhard Müller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976-), 10, 645. See also Harry Liebersohn, Religion and Industrial Society. The Protestant Social Congress in Wilhelm­ ine Germany (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986). 99  See the informative essay by Harry Liebersohn, “­ Troeltsch’s Social Teachings and the Protestant Social Congress,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 6 (1993), 241–57. 100  Ernst ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rup­ recht, 1904), 3. Gustav Schmidt, Deutscher Historismus und der Übergang zur parlamenta­ rischen Demokratie. Untersuchungen zu den politischen Gedanken von Meinecke · ­Troeltsch · Max Weber (Lübeck: Matthiesen, 1964), 207, calls this essay “fundamental.”

34

Introduction

“democratic principle,” exploring both its meaning and possible function within contemporary – that is to say, Imperial – Germany. Beginning with a brief and somewhat abstract overview of Germany’s political development over the course of the nineteenth century, ­Troeltsch proceeded to outline what he thought were the essential features of the state – not as it perhaps ideally should be, but as ­Troeltsch thought it actually was, particularly in its German manifestation. The state was, ­Troeltsch said, and following the path marked out by the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, first and foremost the product and expression of power, of physical, intellectual, and economic might. The primary purpose of the state was to form, consolidate, protect, and expand that concentrated power. However, and now departing from Treitschke, ­Troeltsch added an important historical and ethical qualification: As long as a state is fighting to establish the foundations of its existence, the principle of power dominates all else. Once power is achieved, then alongside the concern to maintain and fortify it, there is also always the question: to what end a powerful state serves and how it should use this power. Power is the essential condition of life for a state, but not its entire life itself.101

As necessary as the power of the state was for regulating economic competition among individual groups within society and for protecting the nation from external harm, that could not, or should not, be in ­Troeltsch’s view the only or final aim of the state. Power could not be an end in itself, but only the means to some greater good: We certainly see the enormous importance of the question of population growth and sustenance and the connection between parties and class interests, but we also feel at the same time that the state has value and interest for us only when it also protects, promotes and administers the goods of intellectual and spiritual life. […] We must first exist in order to live; but if we are living, then we are not living for the sake of mere physical existence, but rather for thoughts and ideals.102

In other words, as undeniable, even requisite as the exigencies of Realpolitik were for the flourishing of a people, the state, as the ultimate embodiment and expression of political power, must likewise always be viewed as a means to some greater end. And the proper method of guiding the state toward such appropriate higher goals was, to ­Troeltsch’s mind, the construction and application of a “political ethics” that would shape its actual policies and give its power a sustainable purpose: Just as no state has ever been built by the instinct for power alone and been formed by economic interests alone, so too the political struggle today and political thought are also always co-de-

101 ­Troeltsch, 102 

Ibid., 8.

Politische Ethik und Christentum, 7.

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35

termined at the same time by the powers of ideas, by ethical conceptions of the state and by ethical demands of the state.103

In the body of his speech, ­Troeltsch then turned to the principal “ideas” that he thought could provide the content and guidance for such a political ethics. To that end, he identified four large “groups” of fundamental political (but not narrowly partisan) “principles,” or what we would now probably call ideologies: the first he termed the “constitutional state that served only free culture,” or what we would identify as classical European liberalism.104 ­Troeltsch said its central goal was “the greatest possible limitation of the state and the maintenance of order and economic prosperity.” Yes, such liberals allowed, “there should be freedom,” but that meant primarily a “freedom of culture from the state.” Fundamentally, ­Troeltsch concluded, the liberal principle consisted in a “mistrust of an all too great governmental authority.” S ­ uch a conception was, Troeltsch thought, perhaps feasible in small polities, but was simply inadequate and unrealistic for a large, complex, modern state. 105 The second “group” was defined by what ­Troeltsch called “the purely nationalistic ethics of patriotism,” or, in a word, nationalism. “It is the most obvious,” he said, as well as the “most basic and strongest principle of political ethics,” but it was hardly the most admirable or desirable one. In the nationalist credo, “the citizen lives for one idea, the idea of honor that adheres to our flags, that is carried by our institutions and our ships and cannons.”106 In his role as the universal historian who never forgot that, despite all the genuine and important differences setting all cultures apart, we are all human beings first and share a common humanity, ­Troeltsch made no attempt to conceal his distaste for such an exclusive and restrictive nationalism as the foundational principle for a state. “This idea of nationality,” he emphatically declared, “cannot possibly be the last word of a political ethics.” At best, ­Troeltsch said, one might indulgently regard “the entire gruesome sham of nationality” as a “childhood disease.”107 After rejecting both the solipsism of classical liberalism and the atavism of a primitive nationalism, ­Troeltsch considered the two remaining “groups” of ideas 103 Ibid.

104  In calling them “principles” that intersect with but transcend party divisions, ­Troeltsch was probably following the example of the influential book by Wilhelm Roscher, Politik. Geschichtliche Naturlehre der Monarchie, Aristokratie und Demokratie (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1908), which originally appeared in 1892. 105 ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum, 9. The classic statement of this conception of liberalism is of course by John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), which ­Troeltsch did not mention by name in his Breslau address, but knew well and cited often in other contexts, and he included an extensive discussion of Mill’s thought in Der Historismus und seine Probleme. 106 ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum, 11. 107  Ibid., 12.

36

Introduction

that he thought could alone “give a state, whether large or small, an inner ethical value,” namely, democracy and conservatism. Proposing to enumerate the several attributes of each that made them uniquely qualified as sources of political moral authority, ­Troeltsch began with “the democratic principle.” Viewed “in itself,” he declared, “it is virtually the abolition of class warfare and, according to its inherent ideal, the establishment of social peace.” No doubt, with this blanket assessment ­Troeltsch was himself being idealistic, but was doing so intentionally, even ostentatiously: he was attempting to describe the essence of the democratic idea, as a principle, before considering its practical application or political reality. And considered in this light, ­Troeltsch went on: the idea itself is an ethical one, it is the great idea of human rights. Human rights mean the ethical right to personality, to represent an independent value for oneself, or, as Kant put it, the right never to be considered as a means but rather always as an end in oneself.108

Here ­Troeltsch’s stance was unequivocal and it led him to make one of the most extraordinary pronouncements of his entire address and even, one might hazard, of the entire period. “The declaration of human rights in the American and French constitutions,” ­Troeltsch proclaimed, “is thus one of the most consequential, but also one of the ethically most significant deeds of modern history.”109 On the basis of that singularly momentous historical achievement, ­Troeltsch asserted that the democratic principle was in its very essence a “purely ethical” precept, but one that was also eminently capable of political application, as he put it, “on a grand scale.” For instance, and not least of all: “democracy also liberated women from the ancient bonds of absolute patriarchy to achieve not just independent personality, but also appropriate public occupations.”110 In addition, just as the inherent tendency toward the equality of citizens within democracy fostered the development of individual personalities in sovereign nations – again, of both male and female personalities – it also encouraged similar proclivities on the international level in the form of a “league of nations.” “From there stems the democratic idea of external politics, an international league of nations 108 

Ibid., 13. Ibid. ­Troeltsch was clearly influenced in his thinking on this matter by the work, just reissued in an expanded edition that year by his Heidelberg colleague and friend Georg Jelli­ nek, Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte. Ein Beitrag zur modernen Verfassungs­ geschichte, 2nd exp. ed. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1904). The first edition had been published in 1895. It is still considered one of the most important scholarly works on the history of the concept of human rights. Recently, there has arisen considerable controversy over human rights; see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); and Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010), and by the same author, Not Enough. Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018). 110 ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum, 14. 109 

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37

of democratic states and the adjudication of all conflicts through arbitration.”111 A further consequence of this internationalizing, cosmopolitan tendency, forming in fact in ­Troeltsch’s view the “essence,” of democracy, was that it would serve to promote those fundamental human rights wherever else in the world democracy was active. In other words, ­Troeltsch felt that the democratic principle, fully realized, could help to alleviate the abuses that were known to occur particularly, and shamefully, in European colonial possessions, saying that, once truly implemented, “then of course all exploitative colonial politics cease and the human rights of foreign races are also preserved in peaceful colonization.”112 Finally, ­Troeltsch announced that the democratic principle also implied something like a “teleological Weltanschauung, a metaphysics, and a religion”: The world must be so arranged that the victory of the ethical state is possible within it despite all of the constraints of nature and all external adversity, despite all differences of race, color, class and individuality; and human beings must be so organized that despite all foolishness and indolence, all malevolence and selfishness, this ideal must arise from their more noble striving. It is a metaphysics of optimism.113

­ roeltsch was adamant that the rights democracy conferred on those who lived T within it belonged truly and equally to everyone: “everyone who bears a human face, not merely to those who, through the grace of circumstances, belong among the cultivated, propertied and powerful, but also to those countless children of the dark masses.”114 Indeed, it is this fundamental optimism intrinsic to democracy, combined with its constitutive emphasis on the “love of humanity and justice” with regard to all people that creates “the close connection of democratic ideals with Christianity,” and, conversely, makes Christianity “the strongest confederate and helper of present-day democracy.”115 Taken together, ­Troeltsch’s arguments were, on every level, an altogether astonishing appeal for the democratic principle to have come from a member of the German academic elite just after the turn of the century. But ­Troeltsch also made it clear that this was only one side of his conception of the most desirable political structure. Following his extended meditation on the ethical character of democracy, ­Troeltsch then weighed against it the contrasting “essence” of “conservatism”: as opposed to democracy, he said, conservatism meant “authority, not majority!” “If the democratic principle,” he reasoned, “rests on the presupposition of the fundamental, if not realized, equality of human beings, then the conservative one rests on the presupposition of the fundamental and ineradicable 111 Ibid. 112 

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. 114  Ibid., 13. 115  Ibid., 17. 113 

38

Introduction

inequality of human nature.”116 The recognition of the obvious reality of the basic differences that exist among human beings with respect to their abilities, strengths, intelligence, and so on, forced the further realization that individuals possessed varying degrees of power based on those differences, and the internal logic of conservatism was to preserve the advantages of power those imbalances conferred. However, ­Troeltsch stressed that he was not talking about “the absolute conservation of given authorities, but rather about the principle of authority itself. It is thus basically the aristocratic principle.”117 In one of his more intriguing observations, ­Troeltsch tied the conservative “principle” thus defined to an inherent sense of history more broadly: The historical spirit pervades every aristocracy, because all power is a product of history, whereas the aristocratic character of a monarchy, a republic or an actual dynastic rule is basically always the same. And in the same way, the nature of things entails that the essence of this kind of aristocracy is primarily rooted in the possession of land, which itself is closely connected with the original forms of human society and with the immobility of mother earth.118

Or, as ­Troeltsch pithily summed up this notion: “everything historical is aristocratic and all aristocracy entails conservatism.”119 The rest of his lecture was devoted to fleshing out how the two political principles he favored did – or, more realistically, could – align with Christianity, which, ­Troeltsch claimed, “according to its entire meaning and essence can have no direct political ethics. It inherently has no political ideas at all.”120 To be politically operative, Christianity needed something outside of itself, in fact ­Troeltsch felt it required a political creed, in order for its ethical impetus to assume practical shape and exert itself on the real world. That is, just as the basic political principles needed, in ­Troeltsch’s view, Christian ethics to make them humane, Christianity in turn needed those principles in order to make itself real. Again, ­Troeltsch was thoroughly attuned to the many ongoing social and political challenges that threatened the stability of the German Empire – most explosively, the growing ranks of Social Democrats, some of whom were moved by the desire to eliminate the monarchy, not to speak of official religion, entirely – and he proposed a way of bringing about a “reconciliation of differences” within German society through what he called a “combination of democratic and conservative principles.”121 116 Ibid. 117 

Ibid., 18. 19. The fundamental importance of the ownership of land was something that Adam Smith had also famously emphasized in his On the Wealth of Nations (1776). 119 ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum, 20. 120  Ibid., 23. 121  Ibid., 42. 118  Ibid.,

Political Ethics and Christianity

39

The ethical personality, the self-determination, and personal responsibility ought to gain a real stake in governance, but they will then also have to learn to appreciate the ethical value of conscious, free, and robust subordination to the indispensable powers. Conservatism may sustain the historical German state and its monarchical-military foundation, but it will be permitted to do so only with the willing recognition of personality, its self-assertion, and its participation. That is the only way for there to be an ethically higher development of our state and above all a reconciliation of the groups that in it are becoming ever more alien to one another.122

­ roeltsch finally brought his speech to a close with a remarkable piece of Real­ T politik of his own. Conceding that in the less than ideal arena of actual politics, maintaining a balance between the democratic and conservative principles may not always be possible, and one may, and probably will, be forced to choose between one or the other ideal in reality. In such a case, ­Troeltsch argued and even seemed to recommend that one ought to vote for the liberal-democratic party as a means of achieving at some point in the future the more desirable fusion required by the ideal. That is, confronted by intractable real events, it may prove to be prudent, and even necessary, to abandon an absolute adherence to principle for the sake of concrete and attainable pragmatic gains. “It may very well be,” he explained, in view of the current situation here, that it is our duty to vote for the liberal party even if one is not liberal. It may well be that, in practical politics, a decision between the liberal and conservative parties is necessary. But the political-ethical ideal itself demands the unification of the liberal-democratic and the conservative idea.123

In practical politics, in other words, it is preferable to be right. But it is best to be effective. Clearly, ­Troeltsch was awake to the many weaknesses and shortcomings of democracy as such; he was, among other things, also an attentive reader of Alexis de Tocqueville. For that reason, although he plainly prized the idealistic, optimistic, and forward-looking drive of democracy, he also wanted to balance and temper its elemental, often fractious energy with the steadying, sober restraint of conservatism, which anchors itself so firmly in the past because it has so much to lose. ­Troeltsch thus favored a compromise solution, advocating a balanced, moderate approach – to wit, a synthesis – not just in the realm of the mind, but in politics as well. In his Breslau speech he therefore proposed what he regarded as a realistic, achievable formula in the amalgamation of the democratic and conservative “principles.” It was not perhaps the boldest political program, nor did it seem likely to resolve the many acute problems pressing on German society any time soon. But it is very much worth contemplating what it meant for a German professor to stand 122  123 

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 43.

40

Introduction

before his colleagues in 1904 and to single out, and to applaud, the declaration of human rights as one of the most significant events of the modern period; to explicitly acclaim democracy for granting those rights to everyone, and not just to previously excluded categories of people such as women, but to people of all social classes and ethnicities as well; and, finally, to endorse the formation of a “league of nations” (this, too, an idea originally formulated by Immanuel Kant) long before it became a popular rallying cry on the other side of the Atlantic.124 All in all, ­Troeltsch’s speech was a bravura performance, one that, despite his opening protestations to the contrary, was obviously deeply informed and conceptually broad but also grounded by a clear-eyed understanding of realistic political possibilities, subtly critical of current conditions while offering plausible suggestions for an alternative and better future. And he showed himself to be both heedful of the pragmatic requirements of actual politics and animated by a recognition of the necessity of values to instill politics, even Realpolitik, with meaning, dignity, and life. One of the participants in the spirited discussion that followed ­Troeltsch’s lecture was Friedrich Naumann, a prominent Protestant pastor and liberal politician who, a convinced democrat himself, had presented his own, similarly inspired synthesis of the democratic and aristocratic-conservative principles four years earlier in his book Democracy und Emperorship.125 Naumann responded enthusiastically to ­Troeltsch’s talk, eagerly declaring at one point that “in my eyes, the good and excellent thing about today’s lecture by Dr. ­Troeltsch is that he portrayed sympathy with democratic currents as what is truly programmatic.” What is more, Naumann proposed, again somewhat over-excitedly, ­Troeltsch had “fundamentally placed Protestantism today, as good as it already was, on the democratic side, and that to me is from a church-historical perspective the essential thing about the entire process we are experiencing together.”126 That went a bit too far for ­Troeltsch himself, and in his reply he protested that “Mr. Naumann escorted me further toward democracy than is my intention.” Rather, ­Troeltsch insisted that he had “wanted to establish guidelines for a funda124 

See Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795). Friedrich Naumann, Demokratie und Kaisertum. Ein Handbuch für innere Politik (Berlin: Buchverlag der “Hilfe”, 1900). The book was a popular success, with a third edition of fourteen thousand copies appearing in 1904. 126  Verhandlungen des fünfzehnten Evangelisch-sozialen Kongresses, abgehalten in Breslau am 25. und 26. Mai 1904. Nach dem stenographischen Protokoll (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1904), 48. See Klaus Erich Pollmann, “Friedrich Naumann und der Evangelisch-soziale Kongreß,” in Friedrich Naumann in seiner Zeit, ed. Rüdiger vom Bruch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), 49–62. On Naumann, the biography by Theodor Heuss, Friedrich Naumann. Der Mann, das Werk, die Zeit, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Rainer Wunderlich, 1949), remains indispensible. 125 

Political Ethics and Christianity

41

mentally ethical consideration that is removed from the immediate battles of the present, and for that reason identifies nonpartisan criteria based on principle and history.” In conclusion, ­Troeltsch again emphasized: “In no way do I consider the radical application of the democratic idea to be desirable, but rather in all battles I also demand consideration for the ethical value of the aristocratic-conservative idea.”127 ­Troeltsch’s objection was fair enough and ought to be taken seriously. But, as we will see, history would eventually prove Naumann right. ­Troeltsch would not always have the luxury of remaining aloof from partisan battles, fastidiously consolidating all points of view within a comprehensive system of abstract thought tied up in a neat, unifying synthesis. Soon enough he would come to realize that he also had to make a choice, and when he did, Ernst ­Troeltsch decided that, both for himself and for his country, the future belonged to democracy.

127  Ibid., 55. ­Troeltsch’s biographer, Hans-Georg Drescher, goes too far in the opposite direction when he asserts: “On the whole, one perceives that ­Troeltsch’s own position, despite all of the considerations of the principle of social responsibility and of the possible linkage in principle with democracy, tends overall more strongly toward aristocratic-conservative thought;” Drescher, 178. A more nuanced and accurate view was expressed by someone who actually knew ­Troeltsch personally: “He was an aristocrat of the mind in the fullest sense of the word. But he proved that this does not stand in contradiction to genuine democracy, but rather can be its purest fulfillment.” Franz Varrentrapp, “Ernst Tröltsch,” Echo der Jungen Demokratie 5/4 (April 1923), 63–65; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. T ­ roeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 463.

Chapter One

To Arms! To Arms! When it finally came, the end to the month-long emergency triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo arrived with disorienting swiftness. In the afternoon of July 31, acting on information that, even as diplomatic efforts were still underway to avert an all-out confrontation, Russia had begun general mobilization the day before and was moving troops westward, the German Emperor signed an order placing the entire country under a “State of Imminent Danger of War,” a formal precursor to actual mobilization, followed a few hours later by the even more ominous “State of Siege.”1 Just before midnight, the German government sent an ultimatum to St. Petersburg demanding that it stand down its forces before noon of the following day or risk full-scale armed conflict. It was this brief interval of time – half a day – that represented, “by any rational calculation, the last twelve hours of available peace” on the continent.2 That same evening of July 31, with the fate of Europe and the world hanging in the balance, some ten thousand people gathered in the square facing the Imperial Palace in Berlin, insistently calling out for the Kaiser to appear and speak to them about the confusing and alarming events taking place. At 6:30 p.m., accompanied by the Empress, Wilhelm II stepped up to the open second-story window outside the White Hall of the palace and addressed the crowd with these apparently spontaneous words: Today a difficult hour has descended upon Germany. All around, people who envy us are forcing us to our just defense. The sword is being pressed into our hand. I hope that, if at the last moment I am not successful in my efforts to bring our opponents to an agreement and to preserve the peace, we will, with God’s help, wield the sword so that we will be able to sheathe it again with honor. A war would demand immense sacrifices of treasure and blood. But we would show our opponents what it means to provoke Germany. And now I commend you all to God, go to the churches, kneel before God, and ask him to aid our good army.3 1 Raithel,

Das “Wunder” der inneren Einheit, 256. John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage, 1998), 67. 3 Eduard Engel, 1914. Ein Tagebuch. Mit Urkunden, Bildnissen, Karten (Berlin: Georg Wester­mann, 1915), 1, 17. The speech was quickly reprinted in the many newspaper “extras” circulating at the time. See Michael A. Obst, “Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche,” Kaiser Wilhelm II. als politischer Redner (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 347. 2 

44

Chapter One:  To Arms! To Arms!

The mood of the people listening to the Kaiser reflected his uncharacteristically muted tone. At the conclusion of his brief speech, many in the crowd joined in singing the official national anthem of the Empire, “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” (Hail to Thee in Victor’s Wreath), which shared the same melody as the English anthem, “God Save the Queen.”4 But numerous observers were also struck by the subdued demeanor, even the pensive silence that descended on many of those present as they absorbed the implications of what they had just heard.5 Elsewhere in Germany, reactions to the published accounts of Wilhelm’s pronouncement on July 31 were similarly restrained. In Leipzig, a newspaper article from the following day reported that “nowhere was there the faintest glimmer of spontaneous enthusiasm, as one might have expected after the experiences of the last few days … The seriousness of the situation did not allow any demonstrations.”6 In Stuttgart as well “the horrible seriousness of the moment dominated all souls.”7 And in the industrial city of Essen “the crowds everywhere behaved seriously and gravely. One could see on the tense faces of mature men that they were fully aware of the seriousness of this decisive hour, that they were attempting to come to grips with their worries as to their loved ones and their own uncertain situation.”8 It was not war, yet; the Emperor’s careful use of the subjunctive in his speech underscored that fact. But on that last afternoon and evening of July everyone was confronting the awareness for the first time that a major conflict was all but inevitable. Part of the reason for the solemn, brooding stillness noted all across the country was that everything had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly, making it difficult for people to process what it all might mean. Although we have in the meantime grown accustomed to referring to the month leading up to the outbreak of the war as the “July Crisis,” contemporaries – apart from the hundred-odd decision-makers within the principal government cabinets of Europe frantically working behind the scenes – experienced it as anything but. What immediately happened after the murders in Sarajevo was in fact – nothing. For weeks, the only thing emanating from Vienna was silence, and while many assumed that the Habsburg monarchy would respond to the crime in some appro4  The

text, by the now obscure poet Heinrich Harries (1762–1802), was originally written for the forty-first birthday of King Christian VII of Denmark in 1790. The melody made the Prussian hymn unpopular among German nationalists after the outbreak of the war and led to its abandonment in 1918. 5  Cf. Raithel, 257–60. 6  “Vor dem Kriege,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, 1 August 1914, no.  175, 2. Beilage. Cited in Verhey, The Spirit of 1914, 63. 7  “Stuttgart in Kriegszustand,” Schwäbisches Tageblatt, 1 August 1914, no.  176, 2; cited in ibid. 8  “In höchster Spannung,” Arbeiter-Zeitung (Essen), 31 July 1914, describing the previous day; cited in ibid.

Chapter One:  To Arms! To Arms!

45

priate fashion at the appropriate time, no one had any idea what that response might eventually be, let alone that the entire continent could somehow become involved in what seemed to be only a regional dispute. So, that July everyone throughout Europe went about their normal summer routines: the workers continued to work, the farmers tended their fields, and those who could took their usual holidays in the mountains and by the sea, all of which was made even more pleasant by the unusually fine weather. The German High Command, likewise at their summer retreats, showed by their movements, or the lack thereof, no undue concern. And the Kaiser himself, after having enjoyed the annual regatta at the Kiel Week, which was held as always at the end of June, took his family and coterie to enjoy an extended northern cruise on his yacht, the Hohenzollern, leisurely sailing through the fjords of Norway, not to return until July 25.9 What seems in retrospect to have been an inconceivably heedless indifference to an approaching calamity thus felt for most people at the time like the most natural thing in the world. The art historian Werner Weisbach remembered being at a formal dinner at the end of July in the home of Franz Oppenheim, the director of the firm that later became I. G. Farben. Responding to Weisbach’s concerns about the possibility of a war, Oppenheim assured him that “industrial magnates were of the opinion that an outbreak of war would fail because the economic position of Germany had become too strong, that foreign countries had an essential interest in not losing German industrial products and in not disturbing the existing economic integration.”10 The liberal constitutional scholar Gerhard Anschütz, who was then Professor of Law at the University of Berlin and anything but an apologist for the state, also recorded in his memoirs in 1936 how for similar reasons the very possibility of war in Germany, much less a European conflict, had seemed to be not just remote that summer but virtually unimaginable: 9 

For detailed accounts of the complex maneuverings in the European cabinets, see Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012); and T. G. Otte, July Crisis. The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014). There is of course a veritable library devoted to the July Crisis and the origins of the war. Here is a partial list of some recent accounts: James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1992); Edward E. McCullough, How the First World War Began. The Triple Entente and the Coming of the Great War of 1914–1918 (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999); Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War (New York: Berg, 2004); William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013). See also the excellent review article by Samuel R. Williamson Jr. and Ernest R. May, “An Identity of Opinion: Historians and July 1914,” The Journal of Modern History 79/2 (2007), 335–87. 10  Werner Weisbach, Geist und Gewalt (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1956), 117.

46

Chapter One:  To Arms! To Arms!

Whoever today looks back to the Germany of the period before the war, in particular to the last years of that era, is struck by the amazing optimism with which the European situation, the place of the German Empire in the middle of a world of hostile powers, was generally viewed. If there were still any need of proof of how little German public opinion expected a war, much less wanted one, then I would see such a proof in this mood of the time. The bourgeoisie enjoyed a level of prosperity, of economic advancement, that had never been experienced in Germany to such a degree. Most businesses were doing well, some extraordinarily so, no one felt any inclination to be disturbed in the enjoyment of that boom. […] People were accustomed, since the time of Bismarck, to being able to rely on the fact that the political leadership was in the best of hands. The critical control of the government by parliament was limited as a rule to domestic policy, but they usually stopped at foreign affairs, perhaps in the consciousness of their ignorance of these matters, perhaps in the naïve belief, wide-spread even in the opposition parties, that the government will know how take care of everything.11

A Summer Storm When the silence from Austro-Hungary was finally broken on the late Saturday afternoon of July 25 by the news that Serbia had rejected the ultimatum sent by Vienna two days before, which meant that Austria would almost surely undertake military measures against it, there was concern but no great alarm. Even though it was understood that, as Austria’s coalition partner, Germany would of course come to the aid of the Donau monarchy in time of need, there was as yet no indication that it would require any such assistance, especially against such an insignificant adversary. True, it was also known that should things escalate, the Russian Empire would likewise support its Serbian ally, which was a much more worrisome prospect. But there was comfort in the thought that the many “crises” and contretemps of the past decade had all eventually blown over and ended in a peaceable continuation of the same, familiar, even slightly dull patterns, and so far there seemed to be no compelling reason to think this time would be much different. So, on July 25 in Berlin, as was usual when one of those disconcerting international incidents took place, large crowds gathered in public squares, in cafés, and in front of newspaper offices to read the extras and learn the latest news. To many, the throngs of people and the general atmosphere even seemed reminiscent of the endless mass public events from the previous year held to mark the Silver Jubilee of Wilhelm’s reign and the centenary of the defeat of Napoleon in 1813 – with a noticeable difference. “In 1913, the mood was festive, relaxed. That Saturday afternoon, however, people were tense and worried.”12 11 

Gerhard Anschütz, Aus meinem Leben, ed. and intro. Walter Pauly (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 150. 12  Verhey, 26–27. See Ferguson, 174–211.

A Summer Storm

47

Then, later that same evening of July 25, in what was in fact an unanticipated and unprecedented development, there erupted what has been called “one of the most spectacular spontaneous patriotic demonstrations in German history.”13 It began unspectacularly enough, when a few hundred, perhaps as many as two thousand Austrian citizens who happened to be in Berlin, many of them students attending the universities in the capital, converged on the embassies of Austria and Italy, shouting relatively benign slogans – “Hurrah for Austria!” “Hurrah for Italy!” “Down with Serbia!” – and singing patriotic songs. Soon, other groups, now composed of Germans, started to coalesce and assemble their own makeshift processions, marching down major boulevards, especially Unter den Linden, while engaging in boisterous singing and chanting. The revelers almost instinctively congregated before significant symbolic monuments – the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great at the end of Unter den Linden, the giant one of Wilhelm I in front of the still dark and empty palace, and the statue of Bismarck standing before the Reichstag – and at each stop they recited familiar poems, made improvised speeches, and sang a succession of patriotic standards. The original crowd in front of the Austrian embassy remained in place as the evening progressed, its size enhanced by ever new reinforcements, eventually prompting the ambassador to come out and address them, thanking everyone for their support. By 3:45 the next morning everyone had finally gone home to bed.14 In all, it is estimated that approximately 30,000 Berliners, or around one percent of the total population of the metropolis, participated in these unplanned demonstrations, which made it an exceptional occurrence, certainly – the unplanned part of it, anyway – but in terms of public display hardly remarkable in itself, nor even close to the largest such recent event in the capital. In 1910, hundreds of thousands had turned out to protest against the unequal restrictions of the Prussian suffrage system and to clamor for its reform.15 And, just as significant, on the evening of July 25 there were many places outside of Berlin where no crowds were reported at all, including in large cities such as Königsberg and Danzig, as well as in smaller towns throughout the industrial Ruhr region.16 Elsewhere reactions varied: impromptu parades like the one in Berlin demonstrating solidarity with their Austrian alliance partner did take place in Leipzig, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, and Hamburg, among other cities, whereas in Hanover, Darmstadt, and Cologne the streets stayed empty and quiet.17 13 

Verhey, 27–28. Ibid., 31. See also Raithel, 228–29. 15  Verhey, 31. 16  Ibid., 34. 17  Ibid., 35–36. 14 

48

Chapter One:  To Arms! To Arms!

Nevertheless, it was in the waning hours of July 25 that what later came to be known as the “spirit of 1914” first sprang into being. Or rather, it was out of the isolated events that occurred that evening that the basic elements of the “myth” that goes by that name came to be forged. The conservative press was quick to seize on the political potential of the moment. The Tägliche Rundschau, a local Berlin paper with an overtly nationalist agenda, programmatically announced two days later: “we have experienced in these hours that we are a single people. Differences, usually far too emphasized, have disappeared in these hours behind the grandeur of a greater idea.”18 That single statement was triply, even quadruply disingenuous: the scattered, spontaneous outbursts across the land were not representative of the collective, much less the universal, sentiment of the “people;” the political, economic, and religious differences among many segments of German society had neither been “far too emphasized,” nor had they somehow suddenly “disappeared,” but were instead very real and still operative. And whatever “idea” and its “grandeur” the writer may have had in mind that the people had apparently rallied behind as one had, in fact, so far failed to be articulated at all, let alone with any clarity or coherence. Yet here in this compact statement was the germ of what became one of the most distinctive German domestic policies of the first two years of the war: the appeal to national unity upheld in the name of the initial eruption of spontaneous patriotic emotion displayed by the people – while forgetting or overlooking the inconvenient fact that the people who had initially expressed those emotions were not Germans at all, but Austrian exchange students. Over the next few days following the Serbian rejection of the Austrian ultimatum, as the full weight of what was happening gradually sank in and people began to assess soberly the possible consequences to come, a less uplifting pattern of behavior started to emerge. Once the excitement of the weekend had subsided, more mundane concerns intruded on people’s minds, and on Monday morning, July 27, long lines began forming in front of banks as early as 5:00 a.m., filled with anxious customers who wanted to withdraw their savings.19 Many people kept their deposits at the Post Office, and large numbers converged at postal branches throughout the city as well, trying to convert their paper money into gold or silver coin.20 Panic buying of foodstuffs was also reported across the country, and large-scale hoarding of basic supplies became a serious problem as the week progressed, with nervous shoppers emptying out store shelves as soon 18 

“Eine Hoffnung für …,” Tägliche Rundschau, 27 July 1914, no.  346, 1; cited in Verhey,

19 

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 50.

31.

20 

A Summer Storm

49

as they were stocked. Price gouging seems to have been fairly limited, but occurred as well.21 Then, even more dramatically, the leadership of the Social Democratic Party announced it was organizing anti-war protests to take place on Tuesday, July 28. That evening in Berlin alone, thirty-two anti-war demonstrations involving more than 100,000 people marching through the streets took over the the capital – vastly outnumbering the spirited, spontaneous crowds from the previous Saturday – carrying banners calling for peace and chanting anti-war slogans.22 In one of the peace demonstrations organized by the Berlin unions, protesters loudly shouted: “Down with war!”23 Similar scenes were repeated all over Germany, involving in total more than 750,000 people in the entire country, mainly but not solely from the working class, who loudly voiced their opposition to any war. Tellingly, the common thread of the many speeches and commentaries delivered at these events was that it was Austria who was at fault for allowing a war to be possible, and that they, the Germans, wanted no part of it. A journalist for the Social Democratic Leipziger Volkszeitung noted that the demonstrations ought to prove to “the rulers that this rapture for war is not the opinion of the German people.”24 Nevertheless, when the deadline set by Germany to respond to the ultimatum it had sent to Russia on the afternoon of July 31 passed by without satisfactory response, the iron logic of the German battle plan demanded that certain inexorable steps be taken. In the morning hours of August 1, Germany initiated its own mobilization against Russia, a move that, as everyone knew, was tantamount to war.25 It also put into effect the notorious Schlieffen plan, which, in the event of a dreaded two-front war on the western and eastern frontiers, dictated a rapid deployment to France, which the Prussian planners were confident could be quickly dispatched in six weeks, allowing for a full concentration of force on what was felt to be the far more serious threat to the east.26 21 

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 53. On the peace demonstrations and the role of Social Democrats generally at the beginning of the war, see Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration: eine Neuinterpre­ tation des sozialdemokratischen Burgfriedensschlusses 1914/15 (Essen: Klartext, 1993). 23  Theodor Wolff, Der Krieg des Pontius Pilatus (Zurich: Oprecht & Helbing, 1934), 330. 24  Verhey, 55. 25  See the meticulous unfolding of these events in Otte, 462–89. 26  There has recently been a great deal of scholarly discussion about whether the classic characterization of the Schlieffen plan is correct or not, or even if a single “plan” ever existed. The controversy was started by the essay by Terence Zuber, “The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered,” War in History 6 (1999), 262–305, who argues on the basis of archival documents that came to light after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 that “there never was a ‘Schlieffen plan’” (p.  305). In doing so, Zuber contradicts the classic account by Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan. Critique of a Myth (London: Oswald Wolff, 1958). Zuber’s contentions are subjected to 22 

50

Chapter One:  To Arms! To Arms!

However, no public declaration of the mobilization was made until the early evening of August 1 – even the Imperial Chancellor did not learn of the order until after it was issued27 – and all day long there hung an agonizing uncertainty over Berlin, causing ever larger crowds of people to congregate in the usual places in search of news or merely human companionship. Everywhere, people pored over whatever they could lay their hands on, they approached complete strangers in the hope of gleaning some new tidbit of information from them, and mainly everyone simply waited. Singing songs helped to ease the tension and pass the time. As had been the case the previous evening when the Kaiser had spoken, the largest crowd of people gathered in front of the Imperial Palace, this time forming a crowd 40,000 to 50,000 strong, all anxiously awaiting the emergence of the Emperor.28 At last, at around eight in the evening, Wilhelm appeared and addressed the throng with these now famous words: From the bottom of my heart I thank you for the expression of your love, your loyalty. In the battle that now lies before us I know no more parties in my people. There are only Germans among us. And to those in parties who in the course of the battle of opinion may have turned against me, I forgive them all. The only thing that matters now is that we all stand together as brothers, and then God will help the German people to victory.29

This time, unlike the day before, it was definitive: mobilization and thus war was upon them. And this time there was an eruption of – what? Is it accurate to call it “enthusiasm”? Certainly many, if not everyone, must have felt overwhelmed by powerful, though no doubt also powerfully conflicting, emotions, overcome by an almost sublime experience of awe and dread before an unknown future that had instantly lost all of its comforting predictability. Just a week before – a mere seven days – the horizon as far as anyone could see had been almost completely untroubled. Now, having rushed in with the speed and ferocity of a summer thunderstorm, a stark new reality had descended on them for which no one had had time to prepare. There were of course those who relished the thought of war in itself and the adventure it promised. But since the youngest Germans to have seen critical discussion in the many contributions to The Schlieffen Plan. International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I, eds. Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans and Gerhard P. Gross (Lexington: U Kentucky P, 2014). 27  Cf. Conrad Haußmann, Schlaglichter. Reichstagsbriefe und Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 1924), 4–5. 28  Verhey, 65. 29  Michael A. Obst, ed. Die Politischen Reden Kaiser Wilhelms II. Eine Auswahl. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011), 362–63. In some recorded versions of the speech, the third to the last word, “people,” is rendered as “sword.” See also the thoughtful analysis of the speech and its aftermath in Obst, “Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche,” 347–59.

After the Declaration of Mobilization

51

actual combat were now old men in their sixties and seventies, no one really had any idea of what to expect. Partly, it must have been a relief that the preceding heavy days of doubt and uncertainty had given way to a kind of clarity, at least for the moment, and such a release would have dispelled, or masked, many deeper worries about things to come. There is also an inherent energy in any large crowd that generates its own dynamic, often causing individuals to lose their normal restraint in a collective swell of shared emotion that feeds off of itself and carries everyone along in a wave of reciprocally sustained momentum. One thing is certain: in its singularity, its intensity, and its sudden, radical difference from everything that came before, the declaration of German mobilization on August 1, 1914 was something that anyone who experienced it would never forget. But as Frederic William Wile noted, who was an American correspondent working in Berlin and among the multitudes standing in front of the palace, whatever emotions people may have felt that night also quickly gave way, as had been the case the previous evening, to quiet, private reflection. “Desultory processions of young men and boys continued to march hither and thither across the city,” Wile wrote of the aftermath to Wilhelm’s speech. “But an atmosphere of soberness and grim reality presently descended upon the community […]. The crowds in Unter den Linden and the Lustgarten melted homeward, silently, immersed in heart-searching.”30

After the Declaration of Mobilization The following day, August 2, was a Sunday. Throughout the night, trains had begun delivering men, horses, and arms to the two fronts on Germany’s western and eastern borders. That morning, all across the country, indeed throughout the rest of Europe and beyond, the churches were overfilled with millions of faithful looking to their spiritual leaders for guidance, reassurance, and hope. In Berlin, there was an improvised mass religious service held on the open square in front of the Reichstag at 11:30 am, presided over by the court minister Bruno Doehring and attended by tens of thousands of Berliners.31 That same afternoon, many municipalities in the German Empire also quickly organized assemblies of various kinds for a similar, though more secular, purpose, driven by the need to try to comprehend, or at least to confront together, the ex30  Frederick William Wile, News is Where you Find it. Forty Years’ Reporting at Home and Abroad (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939), 272–73. 31  Cf. Christoph Weiling, Die “Christlich-deutsche Bewegung”: eine Studie zum konserva­ tiven Protestantismus in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 47, who writes that Doehring’s sermon on August 2, 1914 made him “famous.”

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traordinary events of the day. Heidelberg was no exception, and both the city and the university had jointly made hasty arrangements for a public gathering open to all who were able to attend. The meeting was held in the large new Stadthalle, or civic center, standing on the southern bank of the Neckar River. The Stadthalle has a capacity of almost three thousand and, according to local newspapers, every available spot was occupied that afternoon. The audience seems to have represented most segments of Heidelberg society: workers and professors, soldiers and officers, shopkeepers, doctors, merchants, and many women and girls were all in attendance, with the galvanizing atmosphere punctuated by frequent outbursts of applause and shouts from the rows of the assembly.32 There were four speakers. The first was Ernst Walz, mayor of Heidelberg and an honorary professor of law at the university, who conscientiously delivered a respectable performance befitting his station. Walz admonished the troops moving out to remember the “legacy of their fathers” from the last war of 1870 and he praised the “unity of the Germans” while condemning the “envy of our enemies.” Walz also took care to emphasize the “peaceful attitude of the Empire,” and in conclusion the mayor called out for cheers to the Kaiser and the Grand Duke of Baden, Friedrich II.33 The Rector of the university and respected economist Eberhard Gothein spoke next, but he seemed to have some difficulty summoning the requisite ardor for the task, even openly admitting that he could “find no enthusiastic words, but only words of gravity and the fulfillment of duty.” A little strangely, for a man of the word, Gothein even appeared to question the use of saying anything at all in the face of such seemingly inexpressible events. “What is the word now?” he rhetorically asked. “Nothing! The deed is every­thing.”34 More helpfully, Gothein did remind his listeners of the importance of a “just war,” hinting that he may have already had an inkling of the changes that such a war would, or should, bring to the political life of the nation. He implied rather cryptically that a “just war” would involve not only military success, but also might provide “a beneficial, cathartic influence.” Such an outcome, as Gothein also vaguely put it, perhaps referring to the lack of unity that still bedeviled the nation, would amount to “an inner victory.”35

32 Folker Reichert, “Wissenschaft und ‘Heimatfront.’ Heidelberger Hochschullehrer im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik. Studien zur deutschen Universitäts­ geschichte. Festschrift für Eike Wolgast zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Armin Kohnle and Frank Engehausen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001), 494. 33 Ibid. 34  Ibid., 494–95. 35  Ibid., 495. See the biography of Gothein by his wife for an account of some of the reasons

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The third speaker was the historian Hermann Oncken, whose assignment was to explain the origins of the war. He, like everyone else, laid the entire blame at the feet of Russia and of otherwise unspecified “Pan-Slavic agitations.” Oncken also insisted that Germany, as the major Central European power, must uphold the current status quo, stressing that, with regard to the Russo-Serbian offensive, Germany also found itself in an “absolutely defensive posture.” Oncken, who had been busy the previous year exploring the meaning of the “Ideas of 1813” commemorating the centenary of the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig, ended his remarks by reminding his audience, clearly with the aim of bolstering their confidence with an edifying historical analogy, that the successful defeat of their external enemy a century before had been made possible through united effort and shared sacrifice.36 But the real attraction that afternoon was the last person to speak. As one of Heidelberg’s most famous professors and as a Privy Councilor – Geheimrat – in the Parliament of Baden in Karlsruhe, Ernst ­Troeltsch combined both academic and political authority in his person, lending his words additional weight and import. Characteristically, even in such a highly charged situation, ­Troeltsch had decided to speak freely, without a prepared text, relying entirely on his formidable skills of intellectual improvisation.37 (His speech was transcribed, however – and presumably edited – for later publication. The cover of the printed pamphlet included the notice that all proceeds from its sales would be divided evenly between the Red Cross and a civic fund to support families who had lost their male providers.38) And, as we will see, speaking without the constraint of a written text not only permitted ­Troeltsch to respond to some of the points that had just been raised by the speakers who had preceded him, it also allowed or perhaps even impelled him to make some bold, not to say hazardous, predictions about some of the consequences that he felt would, in fact must, emerge from the coming war. What is a war address supposed to be or do? How should it be pitched? For a scrupulous speaker these are not easy questions to answer. It is, fortunately, not a frequently employed genre, and in Germany it had lain dormant for so long that for his diffidence; Marie Louise Gothein, Eberhard Gothein. Ein Lebensbild. Seinen Briefen nacherzählt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1931), 251–55. 36  Reichert, 495. 37  The account published in the Heidelberger Tageblatt reported that he spoke extemporaneously; Reichert, 495. This not irrelevant fact is otherwise never mentioned in the secondary literature on ­Troeltsch’s speech. 38  Ernst ­Troeltsch, Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung. Rede gehalten bei der von Stadt und Universität einberufenen vaterländischen Versammlung am 2. August 1914 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1914).

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one had to go fairly far back in time to identify usable models. Conveniently for ­Troeltsch, however, and thanks to the continuous evocations of the Wars of Liberation during the centennial commemorations that had taken place the previous year, which Professor Oncken himself had also helpfully just mentioned again, there was already a familiar frame of reference that everyone would have immediately recognized and understood. The “spirit of 1813” was obviously also on Ernst ­Troeltsch’s mind as he spoke, and at one point he explicitly mentioned the “giant battle of 1813” as an appropriate guide for comprehending the current situation.39 But even though both the recent and the more distant past inevitably formed the lens through which the present was viewed – what lay ahead of course nobody could know – the afternoon of August 2 was not, ­Troeltsch realized, the time for extended historical reflection. ­Troeltsch understood that the people who had come to the Stadthalle that day were looking for help in making sense of what was happening at that very moment and how they could or should, respond. “As of yesterday,” ­Troeltsch began, “we are a people in arms” – ein Volk in Waffen.40 (Actually that was already an overt historical reference: it was an expression that the founding father of the Empire, Wilhelm I, had originally used in 1860 to declare universal conscription for the Prussian army, and in 1883 it had served as the title for a popular book by an influential Prussian Field Marshal and military writer.41 But no one needed to know any of that for the phrase to resonate.) ­Troeltsch also quickly identified the proximate causes he saw as being responsible for forcing the Germans, as a people, to arms. “Slavic imperiousness and malice, with which the French desire for revenge is somewhat fearfully and hesitantly aligning itself:” those two motives, ­Troeltsch offered, were principally, if not equally, to blame.42 Granted, these are not analytically sharp judgments, nor would they remain uncontested, but at the time they were serviceable enough. Russia had, after all, been the first to mobilize, making it easy to portray it as the prime aggressor, and the topos of French revanchisme over the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine, which the new German Empire annexed after the Franco-Prussian War, had stood as a convenient shorthand for describing French attitudes and intentions toward Germany ever since.43 Of the two, however, Russia was considered by almost 39 

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 3. 41  Colmar von der Goltz, Das Volk in Waffen. Ein Buch über Heerwesen und Kriegführung unserer Zeit (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1883). The phrase was also later used as the title of the book by Swedish Germanophile Sven Hedin, Ein Volk in Waffen (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1916). 42 ­Troeltsch, Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung, 3. 43  There is, surprisingly, relatively little scholarship on this subject; for an informed over40 

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everyone to be by far the more serious adversary, and there were good reasons for such fears.44 That ­Troeltsch had also described the French as allying themselves only “somewhat fearfully and hesitantly” with the Russians even seemed to be a kind of compliment to the French, albeit a rather backhanded one.45 Ominously, however, ­ Troeltsch then added: “No one knows what enemies will follow 46 these.” By that, he could have had only Britain in mind, even though the British were of course at that point not involved – yet. As for Germany itself, ­Troeltsch was frighteningly blunt: “we are fighting,” he said, “for our being and life.” More: “by not letting Austria be trampled, we are also fighting for ourselves, for freedom and human dignity.”47 That final phrase is arresting. In formulating it, ­Troeltsch had just claimed, in the first hours of the conflict and in the opening words of perhaps the first significant speech held on the subject in Germany, that the war placed the very existence of the nation and its way of life in highest jeopardy and that both had to be vigorously defended. But even more important, ­Troeltsch had also said that what the Germans were positively fighting for were the values of freedom and dignity. As ­Troeltsch would subsequently make clear, he meant something very specific by those words, and indeed he thought that the end of the war would entail an equally specific political outcome. But here, in his speech on the day after mobilization and the declaration of war against Russia, his primary goal was to sketch out the overall situation at home as he saw it in order to impress on his audience what they now needed to do, and how difficult that would be. Notably, the first thing ­Troeltsch said about Germany itself was that, for “forty-four years, almost half a century, we have had peace and labored in the arts and works of peace.” Germany had prospered, ­Troeltsch reminded everyone, precisely because it had enjoyed such a long and unbroken respite from war ever since the Empire had been formally consolidated in 1871. To drive home his point, he view of the state of research, see Bertrand Joly, “La France et la Revanche (1871–1914),” Re­ vue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 46/2 (1999), 325–47. See also Markus Völkel, “Geschichte als Vergeltung. Zur Grundlegung des Revanchegedankens in der deutsch-französischen Historikerdiskussion von 1870–71,” Historische Zeitschrift 257 (1993), 63–107. 44  See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011). 45 ­Troeltsch’s biographer, Hans-Georg Drescher, had obvious difficulties coming to terms with ­Troeltsch’s wartime activities generally. About this speech in particular, Drescher wrote: “­Troeltsch’s address gives in to emotions and takes up propagandistic phrases, such as that about Slavic malice and French thirst for revenge. Rational political judgments, by contrast, recede;” Drescher, 413. As we will presently see, this blanket judgment would be hard to defend. 46 ­Troeltsch, Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung, 3. 47 Ibid.

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enumerated some of the fruits of those peaceful decades, so familiar to everyone listening to him that they hardly need to be reiterated at all: the astounding growth in material prosperity that they all benefited from, enabled by the flourishing manufacture and trade, as well as the many extraordinary scientific and cultural advancements of the last twenty years, all of which had brought comfort and security to all and for some even a “stately and luxurious way of life.”48 But ­Troeltsch was not offering self-congratulatory platitudes to flatter his listeners but rather to open their eyes to a truth that he thought those very comforts may have obscured. For, he warned, those long, sheltered years of peace and progress had perhaps lulled people into the assumption – he pointedly called it an “illusion” – that reason alone governed the world, that the “power of the mind” by itself would forever ensure that they – and, indeed, everyone – would be brought without interruption ever closer to the “great goals of human culture.” However, as the impending war was already demonstrating with stark clarity, it was in the nature of things that there always unfortunately comes a point when “this spiritual and intellectual development” had to be actively “asserted and defended” by physical measures to protect it from injury or ruin: For all intellectual culture and all material progress is always threatened by a dark, volcanic substratum of human foolishness and passions, confused conflicts of interest, bestial savagery, that are hard to conciliate. In certain circumstances, all of that can come together and then, with its furious flames erupting, attempt to destroy the house that we have built.49

Peace and everything that peace made possible, ­Troeltsch was saying, was perpetually endangered by the opposite human propensity for violence and destruction. That was a regrettable but an all too familiar fact of human existence – and it is significant that ­Troeltsch stressed its universally human character – one that could at best be managed and controlled, but, as the events unfolding on that very day demonstrated, could apparently never be entirely eliminated. At this juncture of his speech, the inveterate historian ­Troeltsch could not help himself after all and he proceeded to give a brief history lesson to his listeners illustrating the general reflection he had just offered. He noted what appeared to be the odd historical fact, or merely the curious coincidence, that Germany had never been permitted to enjoy more than half a century of unbroken peace at a time. To demonstrate that observation, ­Troeltsch looked back over the previous several centuries, first to the devastating Thirty Years War that ended in 1648 (during which, among other things, the Heidelberg castle hanging above the town had been destroyed), then to the War of the Palatinate Succession, which began in 1689 and for Heidelberg was even more ruinous. During that campaign, 48 

Ibid., 4.

49 Ibid.

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French soldiers under Louis XIV had razed virtually the entire city, necessitating its complete rebuilding. That was then followed by the Seven Years’ War, between 1756–1763, when Frederick the Great was able to consolidate and expand Prussia, but at a heavy price for all involved. Everyone in the audience knew about the Wars of Liberation exactly fifty years after that, and then, right on schedule, there was the last war with France in 1870 that led up to the founding of the Empire. This brief chronology did appear to reveal a disturbing and apparently inescapable pattern, one which seemed to be confirmed yet again by the latest eruption of violence. Perhaps ­Troeltsch really did want to suggest by all these instances of past devastation that a kind of historical necessity, or some sort of diabolical law, was inexplicably at work. But he probably simply wanted to disabuse his listeners of any complacent notion they may have had that, during the last half century of peace, war had somehow been rendered defunct and that the death and destruction it invariably caused would not or could not happen to them. The fact that ­Troeltsch used so many examples in which Heidelberg had been afflicted by the ravages of war to deflate such assumptions was probably not lost on his audience, either. Following this scholarly but unsettling aside, ­Troeltsch returned to the question of what he thought, in the current instance, motivated their enemies against them. He repeated the view that they all felt “envy” at recent German accomplishments. That was, as we have seen, a common motif at the time – Mayor Walz had mentioned it in his own speech opening the event that afternoon and the Kaiser himself had said the same thing in his own address two days before, which was of course widely reprinted in all the newspapers.50 But even in reiterating it ­Troeltsch seemed to realize that “envy” alone could not be a sufficient reason for starting a war, so he added that their enemies also felt “hatred.” Even this stronger feeling, though, would need to be aroused and focused to become active. This is how ­Troeltsch described that process: Fed by an agitating journalism without scruples, working with all the arts of criminal conspiracy, barbaric rage, and Asian guile, the Slavs are breaking loose against us, and a brilliant people such as the French, the people of European democracy and freedom, want to attack us with their contradictory alliance and cook its soup of revenge over this general conflagration. The flames of unreason and malevolence, of hatred and envy, the enigmas of opaque conflicts of interest and mass sentiment are bursting forth from the ground and remind us that all human culture is a house standing on volcanoes.51 50  See, however, the discerning comments on the subject of “competetive envy” in Hugo Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 20–21, who identified not Germany’s industrial strength but rather its growing navy as the reason for foreign enmity. 51 ­Troeltsch, Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung, 5.

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Whatever its causes – and few people, perhaps no one, truly knew what they were – the bleak fact remained that war in all of its fury lay just ahead, and what mattered was how to respond to that no longer avoidable reality. And it was at this point in his address that ­Troeltsch exclaimed words that have since become notorious. “What is there to be done?” he asked, rising rhetorically to that all-important question: “There is only one thing, to cry: To arms! To arms!” – Zu den Waffen! Zu den Waffen!52 With this phrase, we enter into the heart of the issues raised in the introduction about how the so-called “culture war” in Germany, and especially ­Troeltsch’s role in it, has been presented in almost all of the scholarly literature on the subject. This moment in ­Troeltsch’s speech, and especially the words he had uttered calling his fellow Germans “to arms,” have been repeatedly held up by scholars as being representative of an unbridled “war enthusiasm,” even of a wide-spread, deep-seated militaristic mindset, that supposedly characterized many Germans, including ­Troeltsch, and not just on this one occasion but also during the weeks, months, and even years that followed. Moreover, several scholars have presented ­Troeltsch’s summons “to arms” as exemplifying the fever that ostensibly gripped many other intellectual leaders in Germany.53 What none of ­Troeltsch’s latter-day accusers seems to have realized is that the words he delivered to summon his compatriots to arms were not in fact his own. His emphatic call zu den Waffen was a quotation from one of the most famous poems by Ernst Moritz Arndt, the “Schlachtgesang” (Battle Hymn), of 1810, that lent voice to the “spirit of 1813.” Arndt was an ardently patriotic scholar and poet who had composed strident martial verses against the French occupation under Napoleon, whose forces were finally defeated in the Battle of Peoples, or the Völkerschlacht, just outside of Leipzig in October 1813. Arndt’s poems were intended to encourage and motivate the German peoples – and the plural form is deliberate, for at that time there was of course no single country called “Germany” yet – to come together in spirit and in arms to vanquish their common enemy. Many of Arndt’s poems – including the “Schlachtgesang” and his “Vaterlands­ lied” (Song of the Fatherland), written in 1812 – became famous in the German-­ speaking lands and were widely anthologized throughout the 1800s, often set to

52 

Ibid., 6. Karl Hammer, Deutsche Kriegstheologie (1870–1918) (Munich: Kösel, 1971), 72; Ringer, Mandarins, 180–81; Robert J. Rubanowice, Crisis in Consciousness. The Thought of Ernst ­Troeltsch, foreward by James Luther Adams (Tallahassee: UP Florida, 1982), 102–03; Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung, 46; and Peter Hoeres, Krieg der Philosophen. Die deutsche und die britische Philosophie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004), 263. 53  See

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music and sung at official speeches and public celebrations up until the end of the century. The phrase Zu den Waffen! Zu den Waffen! forms the first line in each of the five strophes in the “Schlachtgesang.” Underscoring their pugnacious nature, Arndt’s own words may themselves have been a defiant, ironic appropriation of the first line in the refrain of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” which also exhorts: Aux armes, citoyens – “To arms, citizens.” The first stanza of Arndt’s poem reads: Zu den Waffen! zu den Waffen! Als Männer hat uns Gott geschaffen, Auf! Männer, auf! und schlaget drein! Laßt Hörner und Trompeten klingen, Laßt Sturm von allen Türmen ringen, Die Freiheit soll die Losung sein! To arms! to arms! God created us as men Arise! Men, arise! and lay into them! Let the horns and trumpets sound, Let the assault be unleashed from all the towers, Freedom shall be the slogan!54

­ roeltsch, in order to make his frame of reference absolutely clear, explicitly T mentioned Arndt’s name just after citing this famous line from his poem, even though ­Troeltsch could have assumed most of the people in the hall knew it by heart. Nor was ­Troeltsch the only one to summon the spirit of Arndt during these early, tumultuous days. The day before, on August 1, Adolf von Harnack had given a speech in Berlin in which he had also quoted the “Vaterlandslied,” citing its beginning lines “The God who let iron grow / Wanted there to be no servants – Der Gott das Eisen wachsen ließ, / Der wollte keine Knechte – which Harnack said delivered “the highest justification of the war,” namely to ensure that no people should be robbed of their liberty.55 And ­Troeltsch’s intention, just as surely, must have been to connect the unknowable battle to come with that great, victorious struggle a century before, which had been fought under the banner of what was universally regarded as a just and virtuous cause: namely, securing the independence and freedom of the German peoples. Granted, it is true that, even if the phrase was not his own, ­Troeltsch was employing Arndt’s words to urge his countrymen to fight, to inspire them to take up 54 

Ernst Moritz Arndt, “Schlachtgesang,” Gedichte (Berlin: Weidmann, 1860), 158–59. Christian Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die deutsche Politik 1890–1930. Eine biographische Studie zum Verhältnis von Protestantismus, Wissenschaft und Politik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 378. 55  See

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arms in the defense of their nation. But what, one might fairly ask, should he have done otherwise? As far as ­Troeltsch or any of his fellow Germans knew at that point, their country was being forced into war and thus into a defensive position, called upon to respond to the aggression of Russia, which had undeniably been the first to rush “to arms.” The Kaiser himself, in his speech of July 31, had accordingly said that their adversaries were “forcing us to our just defense.” ­Troeltsch himself and, with the exception of the few actual committed pacifists in Germany, virtually all of his compatriots were convinced, in fact did not need any convincing, that Germany was about to be engaged in a defensive war, that it was under attack by its enemies, and that it had to fight for its life.56 This question – who was actually responsible for starting the war and why – has of course been endlessly debated, and it is unlikely that an answer will ever be found that will satisfy everyone. But ­Troeltsch’s own actions and words, as well as those of countless others, simply do not make sense if we do not remind ourselves that the belief in Germany’s own “innocence” at the beginning of the war was a bedrock conviction held by almost every German across the ideological spectrum.57 And the accusation, or merely the suspicion, that ­Troeltsch himself was speaking out of bad faith or, worse, indulging in bald cynicism would require a great deal of substantiation to validate and, on the face of it, stands in blatant contradiction to the person he had always shown himself to be and, as we will see, would remain until the end. After summoning the figure of Arndt, the guardian spirit of 1813, and reciting the familiar words of Arndt’s poetic call “to arms” against Napoleon and in de56 

Cf. Ottokar Czernin, Im Weltkriege (Berlin: Ullstein, 1919), 91–92. On August 19, 1914, Friedrich Meinecke published an essay expressing this view under the title “What Goods are We Fighting For?” which began: “There is a great and powerful conviction of the people in Germany that this war was forced upon us by foreign culpability, that we must fight a defensive battle for home and hearth in the most sacred and highest sense. This is not an intoxicated and bewitched mass delusion, but rather a clear, sharp, and sober knowledge about the causes of this war that is spread throughout the broadest circles of our people.” Friedrich Meinecke, “Um welche Güter kämpfen wir?” in Die deutsche Erhebung von 1914. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1914), 47–52. The same was said by Karl Alexander von Müller: “I remember only as a contemporary the sentiment of the German people at the outbreak of this first World War: it was profoundly and honestly supported by the consciousness of fighting a defensive war that had been forced on them, a war that had been imposed by an unprecedented preponderance of opponents, that was not about this or that possession, none of which we had claimed for ourselves, but rather about our bare existence and that of our children.” Karl Alexander von Müller, Mars und Venus. Erinnerungen 1914–1919 (Stuttgart: Gustav Klipper, 1954), 17–18. Naturally, such perceptions are not to be taken as “proof” of the reality beneath them, which we now know to have been exceedingly complex, but they do go some way in explaining people’s behavior and attitudes at the time. See further Meineke, 231 f., and also Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 389. 57 

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fense of German liberty, ­Troeltsch then entered into a broader consideration not just of what poetry in particular, but what words in general can or should be expected to do. Picking up on what the Rector of the University of Heidelberg, Eberhard Gothein, had said earlier about the apparent futility of words in such an extreme situation, ­Troeltsch also asked, repeating Gothein’s question: “What use are words in this moment next to arms and deeds?”58 To begin his own answer, ­Troeltsch acknowledged that in actual, physical combat words were obviously of little use at all. And here he allowed himself to make a comment that, on further reflection, he may have wanted to reconsider. “Oh, if the speaker of this hour could only turn every word into a bayonet, turn it into a rifle, into a canon!”59 That is not a particularly attractive image and, predictably, this sentence has also been frequently singled out as revealing ­­Troeltsch’s supposedly real, deep-rooted proclivities.60 But as unsavory as one might find this momentary eruption of martial language to be – although we would do well to remind ourselves he was speaking extemporaneously – it did not in fact express his main point. For what followed ­Troeltsch’s outburst was what he actually wanted to say about the true value of words, and it forms one of the most important parts of his entire speech: But we also do not want to disdain words, and those who are able to wield them should not remain silent in inappropriate modesty. The giant battle of 1813 had its Ernst Moritz Arndt, its Fichte, its Schleiermacher, and it needed them. Thousands yearn for clear words about our situation, want to know how it occurred and understand what will come of it. They want a watchword and an image of the immediate future for their imagination, they want their faith and confidence to be strengthened. And words that can truly do this do not require any great rhetorical ability. I would like to see the intelligence and acumen, the prudence and incisiveness, the fire and energy of all of our scholars and artists spill forth in flaming, strong, faithful and admonishing words, which will precede the army columns of our nation as the emblem of the German disposition and strengthen the courage, clarity, and vigor of those laboring and waiting at home. Let us therefore not disdain words and may all those who are given the ability to speak with truthfulness and sincerity do their utmost in newspapers and speeches, in songs and appeals. May they speak and act with flaming tongues and with heroic effort spread calm and sober-mindedness, alleviate agitation and increase ardor in the inner depths, assuage oppressive worry and an imagination that obsesses about all of the dangers and instead impresses a clear image on all souls of what will come and must be at all costs.61

58 ­Troeltsch, 59 Ibid.

Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung, 6.

60  Cf. Hans Peter Bleuel, Deutschlands Bekenner. Professoren zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Bern: Scherz, 1968), 75, who (mis)quotes this sentence, describing it as being “in the style of cheap pamphlets.” Bleuel also does not cite the lengthy paragraph that follows it and is reproduced here. 61 ­Troeltsch, Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung, 6–7.

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There are several noteworthy aspects of this lengthy passage. The first and one would think most obvious point, and contrary to the assertion that ­Troeltsch sought to arouse “enthusiasm” with his speech, is that he was arguing for just the opposite. He was explicitly calling on his educated colleagues – on all German intellectuals, scholars, and artists – not to remain silent, but rather to use their words and their talents to inform, enlighten, but also and especially to reassure, to calm, and to console their compatriots about the conflict that was only just beginning. Second, and perhaps even more significant, ­Troeltsch had asked, even demanded, that those who can and do speak publicly – professors, writers, journalists, and politicians – should do so in a way that strictly upheld truth and honesty and adhered to the same intellectual standards and qualities that had characterized them as a group in their previous work and that should still guide them as they undertook the common and, ­Troeltsch underscored, vital effort of public education and encouragement. And as we will see, to an impressive degree ­Troeltsch himself subsequently abided by the strictures he asked others to observe in the many contributions he would also make over the next several years to educate and reassure his compatriots. After this general exhortation concerning the importance and efficacy of words in a time of war, ­Troeltsch proceeded to give an example of the kind of message he also wanted others to convey. He said: “we have to preach bravery.”62 But he immediately added that he did not mean “the bravery of the arm and the physical courage of our soldiers.” Instead, “I mean the innermost and most genuine bravery, the bravery of the heart and sentiment, which does not let itself be intoxicated by war romanticism.”63 “I mean that bravery which is without any pose and without any theatrics, without spurring oneself on with boastful figures of speech.” “It is a bravery that has to be drawn from good nerves and a serious ethical disposition.” In other words, in clear and simple terms, what ­Troeltsch was doing was explicitly encouraging his listeners not to be “enthusiastic,” but on the contrary to be calm, resolute, and mindful of their moral responsibilities. What is more, that kind of restrained courage would be needed, he said, because “everyone will have to make heavy sacrifices. We will have hours of uncertainty and ambiguity. […] We will be worried about the ones we love who in the next few days will tear themselves from our hearts.” Obviously in response to some of the reports from the tense week leading up to that day, ­Troeltsch also urged against succumbing to “panic of any kind,” adding that “the temptation to exploit the state of emergency must be resisted, all profiteering, cornering of markets and loansharking must be 62  63 

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8.

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firmly opposed,” and “banks and savings institutions may not be overrun.” “However,” he also cautioned, “unavoidable price increases and shortages have to be born and overcome.”64 Practical, sensible, sober, and reassuring – perhaps also, one might object, somewhat paternalistic: these were in any case not the words of someone who was attempting to whip up enthusiasm in his listeners, for war or for anything else, but rather to inspire quiet resolve and fortitude in the face of the unimaginable challenges to come. Yet ­Troeltsch also knew that he could not leave his audience with such an uninspiring and unrelievedly grim picture, one in which he focused only on the sacrifices the German people would have to make without indicating the rewards that would, or should, come as a result of their efforts. And it was in describing what he thought the positive gains of the war might, indeed must, be for Germany – apart, of course, from obtaining a victory that would enable the nation to continue to exist and thrive – that ­Troeltsch made the most astounding political argument of the address. While acknowledging that “there is now apparently no very clear and definite goal before us,”65 he also insisted that certain concrete political results must follow the conclusion of the war: We will bring something home that was worth the battle. We will bring home the continuance of our Fatherland and the victory of freedom, the freedom not just from czarist absolutism, but also the inner freedom of the German citizen. Where that is still lacking, then one will be reminded that the welfare of the Fatherland was entrusted to all men between 17 and 45 years of age in equal measure and that only their good will, their joyful zeal for the Fatherland, made that great work possible. And those who seek and desire freedom will be convinced through experience that only a strong central leadership and an ordered discipline can sustain the enormous modern state. A new Germany will return, whose ethnic groups and classes will find trust in each other, whose leaders and higher nobility will understand the indispensability of the free common man; but there will also return a common man who grasps the necessity of discipline and unity not only for the class struggle of the agrarians or manual laborers, but also for the entirety of the nation.66

“A new Germany”: the language is still, at this point, vague, tentative, euphemistic, but the underlying meaning is unmistakable.67 Like everyone else, ­Troeltsch wanted the country, beyond winning the war, to overcome its internal divisions. But the solution he proposed here for creating that unity consisted in an exten64 

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. 66  Ibid., 10–11. 67 Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 131, singled out this passage as being one of the very few public calls during the earliest period of the war for “the necessity of an expansion of the political rights of the German people.” Schwabe himself seems to be one of the very few scholars to recognize that fact. 65 

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sion of freedom, genuine political freedom, to “the German citizen,” in other words: to everyone. Where Eberhard Gothein had envisioned some vague “inner victory” as a fruit of the war, ­Troeltsch imagined an increase of freedom and the easing or even overcoming of class antagonisms. This was, we ought to recall, the same ­Troeltsch who a decade before had spoken so powerfully and eloquently before the Protestant Social Congress in Breslau about “democracy” and described the declaration of human rights as “ethically one of the most significant deeds of modern history.”68 And even though ­Troeltsch conspicuously avoided using the word in this particular context, he had just as conspicuously praised the French earlier in his speech as “the people of European democracy and freedom,” and it is hard not to hear that phrase resonating here, too. Moreover – and perhaps he had the French model in mind here as well – ­Troeltsch was even suggesting that if at the conclusion of the war there were resistance to the expansion of freedom to all citizens, there would be a reminder, a pointed one if necessary, that one could not deny the full benefits of citizenship to the very people of the nation who had given the most to preserve it “in equal measure.” And although it was not entirely clear what ­Troeltsch meant by a “strong central leadership,” the very fact that the phrase was ambiguous may have been deliberate.69 Not just freedom, but discipline and order were also necessary for a state to function and its citizens to flourish, and for that to occur, strong, responsible leadership was equally required. With these words, ­Troeltsch was not putting forward a fully elaborated political program. But his impromptu speech in the Heidelberg Stadthalle on the day after mobilization unquestionably contained the potential elements of one. Finally, at the conclusion of his remarks, ­Troeltsch called on all those present to confront the present and the future by relying on their faith, of whatever confession they might be – and he explicitly included his Jewish compatriots in his invocation, referring to them as “devout Israelites” – and he ended with the wish for the departing troops that they go forth “With God for Kaiser and Empire! God help us to keep it.”70 With that, he urged them not to go out to expand the German

68 ­Troeltsch,

Politische Ethik und Christentum, 13. Flasch’s conclusion that ­Troeltsch meant by this passage that the soldiers “should come home more monarchical and militarized than when they had been deployed,” is unsupported by the text; Flasch, 44. As previously mentioned, only Klaus Schwabe seems to have noticed, if only in passing, that ­Troeltsch already here in this speech emphasized the “necessity of broadening the political rights of the German people,” while underscoring that his position was “infrequent” and “isolated,” especially at this early stage of the conflict. Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 131 and 251n37. 70 ­Troeltsch, Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung, 14. 69 

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Empire by conquering or subjugating other peoples, but to defend, uphold, and safeguard their country, and to do so in order to preserve it. We have lingered so long over the speech Ernst ­Troeltsch made on the afternoon of August 2, 1914 not so much because of its intrinsic merits (although its actual contents will probably surprise someone who relied solely on secondary accounts about what he said or what his words meant), but because, when read carefully, it illustrates so well many of the complexities involved in the wartime debates and highlights the need to place them within the precise context in which they occurred. But we might also take the opportunity to make clear what ­Troeltsch did not say on that remarkable day in Heidelberg. He did not assert that Germany was fighting for some narrowly defined “German” culture. Rather, he explicitly said that they were fighting for all “human culture.” He made no claims about “German” superiority or about the inferiority of others. He spoke instead and repeatedly of a larger shared “intellectual culture” – geistige Kultur – that was the common possession of all peoples who participated in it. And he did not say that German intellectual culture alone was being threatened by the irrational forces of hatred and hostility. He said that “human culture” as a whole – including the peace that makes it possible and sustains it – was not just at that moment but always imperiled by dangerous, destructive impulses – the “volcano,” in ­Troeltsch’s vivid metaphor, that human culture perilously rests upon – and that it was vulnerable to those dark instincts which, he more than implied, were no less a part of our collective human nature. He had emphasized that culture, and again all culture, was perpetually endangered by and had to be defended against “human foolishness and passions.” To deny the fundamental truth of ­Troeltsch’s argument, which some commentators have wanted to do, would seem to contradict the evidence of history and even our own experience.71 (­Troeltsch’s conception even strikes one as a socio-historical equivalent to the theory of the mind elaborated by his contemporary Sigmund Freud: substitute “volcano” with the “id,” and Freud probably would have approved.) And while ­Troeltsch did reserve his harshest language for Russia, there is no vituperation or invective directed toward any enemy, still less any suggestion of retaliatory or punitive action that should be visited on their enemies, and he certainly made no mention of specific war aims outside of Ger71  Drescher offered the following comment on this part of ­Troeltsch’s speech: “Appeals to the anti-bourgeois, anti-intellectual view, which saw the war as the outbreak of basic forces […], are also audible;” Drescher, 414. Flasch inexplicably claims that ­Troeltsch was arguing that “the lower element wants to destroy the higher, the wild element threatens the intellectual, namely German culture;” Flasch, 42.

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many itself. If anything, despite the often pragmatic advice he dispensed, ­Troeltsch’s speech overall seems improbably idealistic and high-minded, focused mainly on lofty values and ideals, including political ones – all of which seems to indicate that he, too, like everyone else, did not yet fully grasp the scope of the butchery that would soon characterize the war only just commencing. But then, how could he have foreseen that? The world had never witnessed anything like it before.

War A week earlier, on July 27, the Monday after the Serbian non-response to Austria’s ultimatum had been announced, ­Troeltsch had written to a long-time friend and colleague in Göttingen, the theologian Wilhelm Bousset. In his letter, ­Troeltsch told Bousset that, in light of the political upheaval that had suddenly erupted on the continent, all of the normal routines of university business – the inescapable administrative duties, the hiring committees, and of course his own theological and historical studies and teaching – had receded almost completely into the background. “To be sure, the threat of war makes one think of other things,” ­Troeltsch wrote, adding: “God save us from a world conflagration.”72 Eight days later, on August 3, Germany declared war on France. The following day, after German troops heading for Paris crossed over the border to Belgium, thereby violating its neutrality, Britain joined its Entente partners Russia and France and declared war against the German Empire. And with that, the “world conflagration” that ­Troeltsch and so many others had dreaded and hoped would never occur was ignited. Within days, nearly two million men in Germany had to be quickly marshalled, clothed, equipped, and sent to out to join their comrades massing on the frontiers. During the first week of August, in scenes repeated all across the Empire, many wives, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts accompanied the departing young soldiers to the train stations. “Crying faces of women and young girls”73 were a common sight, as were streets lined with people somberly and silently watching the troops as they filed past. It was “the most hungover mood I have ever seen,” one recruit wrote in his diary on August 1. “Mothers, women, and brides and other relatives take their young men to the train and weep. Everyone has the 72  From an unpublished letter on 27 July, 1914, in the University Library of Göttingen; cited in Drescher, 413. Now in KGA 20, 684. 73  “Die Stimmung in Berlin,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 3 August, 1914, no.  213; cited in Verhey, 78.

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feeling they are going directly to the slaughterhouse.”74 On the following day, in Magdeburg, “large quiet crowds waved their handkerchiefs to the departing troops,”75 and in Berlin the Tägliche Rundschau reported that, as a regiment marched down Unter den Linden, “a couple of hurrahs accompany them; otherwise one quietly takes off one’s hat.”76 By August 8, the Rheinische Zeitung already relayed that “it is only seldom that one still hears war songs. If one did not see reserves in gray field uniforms at every turn, one might imagine having gone through a wild and confused dream […] One should never forget that every victory celebration is also a funeral celebration.”77 Fathers tended to be more stoic than their wives, but they, too, had to struggle with the overwhelming feelings stirred by seeing their sons off to war. Conrad Haußmann, member of the Reichs­ tag for the Progressive People’s Party, had one son who enlisted right away, but for many of his party colleagues who were the fathers of several boys, the farewell was even more agonizing. “Everyone was emotional, a few were excited, others quiet,” Haußmann noted in his diary that day. “[Jan] Fegter is sending five sons, [Immanuel] Heyn four, [Ernst] Siehr two and is going himself along with a brother, [Carl] Braband is also signing up. The enormous sacrifice of contributing only one son suddenly seems small.”78 All available trains in Germany – some eleven thousand in total – were requisitioned to transport the gray-clad troops westward and eastward. Many civilians on holiday whom the war had caught by surprise encountered serious difficulties in getting back home. On July 31, Gerhard Anschütz, for example, had hurried down on an overnight train from Berlin to Lake Constance to retrieve his wife and two children who had been summering there. It took them four full days to return. The leg between Munich and Hof alone, which normally took only three hours, lasted sixteen.79 At all the stations Anschütz saw mountains of supplies and materiel stacked on the crowded platforms, hundreds of thousands of cavalry horses loaded into repurposed cattle cars, and of course long columns of field artillery and heavy cannons lumbering by every few minutes. In short order, an immense mass of men and weapons stood poised on the Western border, eventually forming a corps that would stretch twenty-nine kilometers long.

74 Wilhelm

Eildermann, Jugend im Ersten Weltkrieg. Tagebücher, Briefe, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Dietz, 1972), 62; cited in Kruse, “Die Kriegsbegeisterung im Deutschen Reiche,” 78. 75  “Die Stimmung in Magdeburg. Ausmarsch,” Mageburgische Zeitung, 3 August 1914, no.  566; cited in Verhey, 78. 76  “Der zweite Kriegssonntag,” Tägliche Rundschau, 10 August 1914, no.  372; ibid. 77  Koszyk, 115–16. 78 Haußmann, Schlaglichter, 8–9. 79 Anschütz, Aus meinem Leben, 154–56.

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The Schlieffen plan dictated a rapid westward march through the neutral countries of Holland and Belgium, followed by a swing to the south in order to bypass the heavy fortifications France had preemptively built on her eastern borders over the previous four decades since the last German incursion. Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, wanting to observe Dutch neutrality so as to keep the supply of needed imports from other neutral countries freely flowing through Dutch ports, had elected to proceed only through the narrow Belgian corridor, squeezing six hundred thousand men and materiel through a ten-mile pass.80 As it turned out, that decision was perhaps the single most consequential error the German military committed during the entire war. For not only did it force the deliberate invasion of a neutral country, which had always been foreseen by the plan, by confining the incursion to Belgium alone it also significantly slowed down the German advance, thereby granting France and Britain invaluable time to amass their own forces and prepare their defenses. Exacerbating the problem were other unanticipated obstacles. General Otto von Emmich, who lead the invasion troops, had been assigned the task of taking the formidable fort at Liège, the first major city across the border from Germany, in order to secure the invasion route. Although Emmich had issued a declaration that “the Belgians were not considered an enemy and the Germans merely sought transit,” the invading forces nevertheless immediately encountered determined resistance from the Belgians themselves.81 Contrary to German expectations and hopes, the Belgians did not simply afford the advancing juggernaut free passage through their country. King Albert of Belgium called on his small army to defend the national honor, and instead of encountering the approximately 6,000 regular soldiers and 5,000 members of the civic guard they expected, the German forces descending on Liège faced 32,000 defiant enemy troops.82 That unpleasant surprise, compounded by the understandable jitters experienced by the untested German recruits on the first full day of the war, created an extraordinarily tense and volatile situation. Not all of the Belgian reinforcements could find room in the fort at Liège, so they deployed out into the town, blew up the main bridge over the Meuse river and fired on the advancing Germans from private houses on the opposite bank, making it appear 80  Holger H. Herwig, The Marne, 1914. The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2009), 43. 81  John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 13. For an important amplification and partial corrective of this study, see the meticulously researched book by Ulrich Keller, Schuldfragen. Belgischer Untergrundkrieg und deutsche Vergeltung im August 1914 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017). 82  Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 10–11.

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that civilians were engaging in combat as well. This apparently willful flouting of the laws of war and accepted military conduct infuriated the Germans.83 With the memory of having been harassed by the French snipers, or francs-tireurs, during the Franco-Prussian War on their minds, the Germans responded with extreme severity to what they regarded as the unlawful behavior of non-enlisted irregulars and summarily executed anyone suspected of being a guerilla fighter. By August 8, nearly 850 Belgian civilians had already been killed and as many as 1,300 structures had been deliberately destroyed to punish known or suspected transgressors and to deter further acts of resistance.84 And things were about to get much worse.

The War of Words Meanwhile, in Berlin, it was becoming apparent that the government was no better prepared politically or economically than it was militarily for what the actual war would soon unleash, as opposed to the imaginary one many had expected. At one o’clock in the afternoon of August 4, the Emperor opened a special session of the Reichstag held in the White Hall of the Imperial Palace by giving a speech from the throne. Wearing a helmet and dressed in a field-gray uniform in a show of solidarity with his troops, Wilhelm read from a prepared text that the Imperial Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, standing by his side, had handed to him. In another sign of how unanticipated everything was, the Reichstag had been closed since May 20, 1914, and it was only on July 31 that the scattered delegates had been notified by telegram that, should war break out, they were to reconvene in Berlin on August 4.85 In addition to the hastily summoned delegates, there were numerous other onlookers gathered in the White Hall. The Empress and the princesses sat on the dais next to the Emperor, and members of the diplomatic corps were joined by various representatives from the neutral countries, including several officials from Japan.86 Many journalists were present as well, but to his chagrin the American reporter Frederic William Wile was not among them. “I had applied for admission,” he regretfully explained, “after the supply of available press tickets was exhausted.”87 83 

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 13. 85  Ernst Rudolf Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Band V. Weltkrieg, Revo­ lution und Reichserneuerung (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1978), 26. 86  Haußmann, 6. 87 Wile, News is Where you Find It, 283. 84 

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“For almost half a century,” the Kaiser began in a tone of voice that one observer found “rather sharp and forced,”88 “we were able to persevere on the path of peace. […] The world has been witness to how tirelessly we stood in the front row during the stress and confusion of the last several years to spare the peoples of Europe a war between the great powers.”89 This was the Friedenskaiser speaking, portraying himself as the defender of peace even as he amassed the means to prosecute war. Wilhelm continued that, given the hostile actions by the Russian Empire, it was “with heavy heart that I had to mobilize my army against a neighboring land,” despite the fact that, as he said, “my government and my Chancellor tried until the last moment to avoid the most extreme outcome.” “We are not driven by the lust for conquest,” the Emperor assured his audience, but rather “we are animated by the unbendable will to maintain the place that God has accorded us, for ourselves and all coming generations.”90 It was a solemn and dignified address, but also a carefully calibrated one, acknowledging no blame for the developing events, claiming nothing but national self-preservation as the goal, and depicting the enemy in measured, even respectful terms. The speech had been written, in part or perhaps in its entirety, by ­Adolf von Harnack, which may have accounted for its restrained, judicious tone.91 But when Wilhelm reached the end of the written document, he added a few extemporaneous words of his own. Referring to his already famous declaration of mobilization on August 1, he said: “Gentlemen, you have read what I said to my people from the balcony of the palace. I repeat, I know no more parties, I know only Germans.”92 At this restatement of the Kaiser’s impromptu slogan expressing national unity, there arose a storm of “rousing bravos” in the hall, which prompted Wilhelm to further embellish his unplanned remarks by issuing a sort of challenge to the members of parliament gathered before him: “To testify that you are steadfastly determined to stick together with me through thick and thin, through hardship and death, without distinctions of party, without differences in class or confession, I invite the leaders of the parties to come forward and to pledge this to me by their hand”93 That last utterance, spoken spontaneously and with apparent sincerity, “made a very strong and dramatic impression, without theatricality,” according to Conrad Haußmann, a delegate of the Democratic People’s Party who was in attend88 

Haußmann, 6. Die Politischen Reden Kaiser Wilhelms II., 364–66. 90  Ibid., 365. 91  See Axel von Harnack, “Der Aufruf Kaiser Wilhelms II. beim Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges,” in Die Neue Rundschau 64 (1953), 612–20. 92 Obst, Die Politischen Reden Kaiser Wilhelms II., 365. 93  Ibid., 365–66. 89 Obst,

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ance.94 The historian Gerhard Ritter even judged it “doubtlessly by far the most effective declaration that Wilhelm II ever made.”95 By repeating the words that he had impulsively delivered three days earlier before the mass of people standing in front of the palace to the assembled parliamentarians and then asking for the party leaders to give him their personal vow to uphold them, the Emperor had lent them a more binding political significance. But there was also almost certainly an element of calculation in the Kaiser’s request. Although he did not require the assent of the Reichstag to declare war, the constitution demanded that he did need the representatives to approve the war credits that would finance it. The Social Democrats, the largest single bloc in the Reichstag, had the votes and thus the ability to withhold those credits and effectively stop the war before it even began. For the Kaiser to ask the delegates to put aside their partisan differences for the sake of the nation was all well and good, but there were also real material motives underlying such apparent high-mindedness. The Social Democrats themselves had good reason to be skeptical of the Emperor’s intentions. As one party member later wrote to Karl Liebknecht: “On the eve of the war, when the Berlin workers demonstrated against the war, our beloved police struck at us with sabers. And one day later! Our Herr Kaiser said: ‘I know no more parties’! What rubbish!”96 Indeed, only a few days earlier, after the massive anti-war demonstrations organized by the Social Democrats had taken place on July 28, Wilhelm had personally threatened in a private communication “to have the whole lot arrested.”97 And providing further evidence that he was more than capable of artful dissimulation in his public pronouncements, as the Kaiser left the White Hall after his diplomatically modulated speech, he was overheard saying to Hans Graf von Schwerin-Löwitz, President of the Prussian House of Representatives: “But now we want to give them a thrashing!”98 It was unclear who, precisely, the Emperor felt deserved a beating, but the Social Democrats would have been justified in thinking that they were on the list. As it turned out, the suspicions surrounding the loyalty of the Social Democrats to their country proved unwarranted.99 It was true that the program of the German Social Democratic Party rejected national wars of aggression, capitalist 94 

Haußmann, 6. Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk. Das Problem des “Militarismus” in Deutschland (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1964), 3, 32. 96 W. Bartel, “Unbekannte Briefe an Karl Liebknecht anläßlich seiner Ablehnung der Kriegs­kredite im Deutschen Reichstag am 2. Dezember 1914,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswis­ senschaft 7 (1959), 628–29. 97  See Obst, “Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche,” 358, note 50. 98  Ibid., 353. The comment was later widely reported in newspapers. 99  See on this issue and concerning the developments within the party prior to the war, Dieter Groh, “‘Unpatriotic Socialists’ and the State,” Journal of Contemporary History 1/4 95  Gerhard

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wars of expansion, and imperialist conquest. But the majority of those in the party did not adhere to absolute pacifism, or advocate universal conscientious objection, or even reject all war in and of itself, and they always recognized the legitimacy of a genuine national defensive war.100 They, like everyone else, had counted on a peaceful resolution to the current crisis, and the sudden arrival of war found them equally surprised and unprepared. The decisive factor in shaping their thinking was the threat they saw posed by the Russian preparations for war. “Even before 1890, and just as much thereafter, Czarist Russia was considered by the German Social Democrats to be the true danger for peace, for humanity, for social progress,” the constitutional historian Ernst Rudolf Huber has written.101 And for that reason, “in view of the fact that Russia had exposed the Empire to an imminent attack through is general mobilization, the great majority of the caucus affirmed their conviction that the criteria for a defensive war had been met and that, therefore, according to the traditional maxims of the party, the workers were bound by duty to fight for the existence and the independence of the nation.”102 When the vote took place that afternoon, 85 percent of the Social Democratic caucus agreed that, for the sake of their country and to preserve their own values, the party should grant the necessary war credits to the government. The leader of the radical wing of the party, Hugo Haase, although personally opposed to the measure, read the joint resolution aloud before the assembly: For our people and for its future freedom, much, if not everything, is at stake in a victory of Russian despotism, which has stained itself with the blood of the best of its own people. We must avert this danger, secure the culture and the independence of our own country. We will then make good on what we have always emphasized: we will not forsake our own fatherland in the hour of danger. We feel in doing so that we are in agreement with the International, which has always recognized the right of every people to national autonomy and self-defense, as we in agreement with it condemn every war of conquest.103

Haase spoke these words during the second working session of the Reichstag that took place that day, which began just after three in the afternoon and, unlike the earlier ceremonial event held in the White Hall of the palace, had assembled in the parliament building itself. The proceedings were opened by Imperial Chan(1966), 151–77. Groh expanded this work into his book, Vaterlandslose Gesellen: Sozial­ demokratie und Nation, 1860–1990 (Munich: Beck, 1992). 100  Huber, 27–28. 101  Huber, 28. 102  Ibid., 32. 103  Ibid., 36. See also the account of the deliberations within the Social Democratic caucus in early August 1914 in Philipp Scheidemann, Der Zusammenbruch (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1921), 6–20.

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cellor Bethmann Hollweg, who, as distinct from the Emperor’s earlier speech, spoke freely, without any text, and in the estimation of Conrad Haußmann gave an “honest and warm” impression.104 The Chancellor used the opportunity to explain to the members of the Reichstag how, from his perspective, the things now confronting them had come to pass. Stressing that not Germany, but “Russia laid the torch on the house,” Bethmann Hollweg reiterated that “we stand in a forced war with Russia and France.”105 But then, in describing the action just beginning to unfold in Belgium, Bethmann performed either an honorable feat of integrity or he committed one of the gravest political blunders in German history – or, perhaps more accurately, he did both at once. He said: Gentlemen, we now find ourselves in the necessity of self-defense; and necessity knows no law! Our troops have occupied Luxemburg, perhaps already entered Belgian territory. Gentlemen, that is contrary to the precepts of international law. To be sure, the French government declared in Brussels that it intended to respect the neutrality of Belgium as long as the enemy respected it. But we knew that France was ready to invade. […] Thus we were forced to dismiss the justified protests of the Luxembourgian and Belgian governments. We will seek to compensate for the injustice – I’m speaking openly – for the injustice we are thereby committing as soon as our military goal has been achieved. Whoever is so threatened as we are and is fighting for his highest good, may think only of how he hacks his way through!106

Perhaps surprisingly, given later developments, Bethmann’s acknowledgement that Germany had violated international law by invading Belgium was met at the time with “unanimous appreciation,”107 both by the gathered representatives of the Reichstag as he made it and subsequently in the press. According to the published minutes of the session, there was “prolonged, thunderous applause in the entire room and in the grandstands”108 immediately following Bethmann’s words. And in its report of the proceedings the next day, the Deutsche Tageszeitung judged that the openness with which the Imperial Chancellor yesterday mentioned and justified our invasion of Belgium was necessary and appropriate to the hour. Some will probably think that he should have chosen and shaded his words differently. We do not share this opinion. Nothing would have been changed by diplomatic pussyfooting, and we would have only come into the reputation of disingenuousness that presses an ugly stamp on the actions of our enemies.109

104 

Haußmann, 7. “Reichstagsrede vom 4. August 1914,” in Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, ed. and intro. Friedrich Thimme (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919), 4. 106  Ibid., 8–10. 107  Ibid., 11. 108  Ibid., 10. 109  Deutsche Tageszeitung, 5 August 1914, no.  392; cited in ibid., 11 105 

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The Vossische Zeitung similarly found that “it is manly to admit to an injustice committed, and it is chivalrous, as the Imperial Chancellor declared, to redress the injustice as soon as the circumstances permit.”110 What few people seemed to appreciate at the moment Bethmann Hollweg made his declaration was that, in his desire to adhere to the truth and to demonstrate good intentions by making a public admission of fault at having deliberately infringed the sovereignty of another state – although he later revealed to a friend that he had also admitted to the “injustice” for tactical reasons, namely as a means of cementing the Social Democrats’ commitment to the patriotic cause111 – he had squandered much of the invaluable moral and political capital that rested in the claim that Russia had attacked first and that Germany was fighting a purely defensive war. Later, the lingering memory of Bethmann’s admission of guilt would also become a factor in German domestic political arguments and played a central role in the effort to remove him as Chancellor. Wolfgang Kapp, who would vault out of obscurity in 1916 by attacking the Chancellor in a published pamphlet, deplored “the unfortunate word about the injustice to Belgium,” insisting instead that: “No injustice was done to Belgium; Belgium itself is to be blamed for and deserved its fate.”112 In his memoirs, Alfred von Tirpitz made the sweeping and inflammatory accusation that Bethmann’s demonstration of probity “confused the sense of justice of our own people in the most disastrous way.”113 The invasion of Belgium itself was a serious error in military and diplomatic judgment, and in itself possibly, although not definitively, constituted a crime.114 But whatever the legal case may have been, the political situation was undeniably complicated by the Imperial Chancellor’s unilateral admission of Germany’s guilt. A few hours later on that the same day, and in one of the most dramatic scenes in a time not short on drama, Bethmann would again utter words that would exacerbate the political damage his earlier confession regarding Belgium would wreak. In the late afternoon of August 4, Sir Edward Goschen, the British Ambassador to Germany, requested to speak with the chancellor in the Reichs­kanz­ lei. For the last several days there had been frantic negotiations playing out be110 

Vossische Zeitung 6 August 1914, no.  394; cited in ibid. See Bernhard von Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg. Staatsmann zwischen Macht und Ethos (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt, 1969), 209. 112  Wolfgang Kapp, Die nationalen Kreise und der Reichskanzler. Denkschrift (Königsberg: n.p., 1916), 7. 113  See Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1919), 245. 114  The legal issues are discussed in great detail in William A. Schabas, The Trial of the Kaiser (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018). Schabas argues that in fact no crime was committed because, at the time, neither aggressive war nor breaking treaties – Belgian neutrality had been guaranteed by a treaty – were considered to be a crime under international law. 111 

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tween Berlin and London, with Germany trying to secure a British commitment to stay out of the impending conflict. Goschen came to inform Bethmann that he could give no such assurance, thus delivering London’s final decision. On receiving this news, which raised the specter of a prolonged war on two fronts, the German Chancellor became extremely agitated, subjecting Goschen to what the British ambassador called a “harangue,” arguing that Germany was fighting for her “life against two assailants.”115 If Britain would join the war against Germany, Bethmann said, his voice rising, it would be nothing short of a catastrophe. Goschen replied by reiterating the same official mantra that Britain had been repeating for days, stating that it was “honour-bound to preserve Belgium’s neutrality.” At this, Bethmann became irate, yelling at Goschen: “But at what price!” Bethmann exclaimed that fixating on this single and, as he saw it, merely technical, issue was “terrible to a degree; just for a word – ‘neutrality,’ a word which in war-time had so often been disregarded – just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her.”116 Goschen replied that he would not, indeed could not, change the British position, and in his own extreme agitation Goschen burst into tears and retired to the antechamber to compose himself before taking his leave.117 In his memoirs, Bethmann Hollweg reflected on this scene and the fallout caused by his soon-to-be infamous reference to the British treaty with Belgium as a “scrap of paper.” He allowed that his remark had perhaps been an imprudent “lapse” – Entgleisung – but explained that my blood boiled at the repeated hypocritical emphasis of Belgian neutrality, which was not in fact what drove England to war, and at the complete lack of sensitivity to the fact that the English declaration of war would annihilate world values against which even the violation of Belgium weighed little.118

Goschen, for his part, once he had returned to London, hurried to publish a verbatim account of the confrontation – a breach of protocol about which Bethmann piquantly observed: “that private conversations are officially exploited seemed to me an unusual diplomatic custom”119 – over which the world could then sit in judgment. 115 

Otte, 502.

116 Ibid.

117  Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Betrachtungen zum Weltkriege (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1919), 1, 180. 118  Ibid. See on this episode T. G. Otte, “A ‘German Paperchase:’ The ‘Scrap Of Paper’ Controversy And The Problem Of Myth And Memory In International History,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 18 (2007), 53–87; and more generally Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper. Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2014). 119  Bethmann Hollweg, 180.

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One cannot help but wonder, on calmer reflection, what precisely led Bethmann to make these self-incriminating statements. Part of it, surely, is that he was convinced he was merely stating the facts. It was Bethmann, after all, who had insisted, much to the astonishment and puzzlement of the military leaders, that Germany issue a formal declaration of war before entering Belgium. The reason, he had argued, was that “according to international law” there first needed to be “a confirmation.”120 But his reference to the legal obligations to protect Belgian neutrality as nothing but a “scrap of paper” appeared to cast doubt on the degree of his adherence to such niceties. What is certain, however, is that the Chancellor’s perhaps admirable frankness was ill-suited to the new circumstances, and his candid but incautious words were subsequently used to great effect to inflict incalculable injury on his own cause and country. His admission of guilt before the Reichstag, followed by what appeared to be an even more troubling disregard for international agreements and treaties, and for the rule of law more generally, allowed his nation’s opponents to portray Germany in the most punishing light by using its leader’s own words against it. Ironically, Bethmann’s utterances could be seen as reflecting an abiding peacetime sensibility, in which trustworthiness and rectitude are supreme virtues, and in which deviousness and lies are deplorable. If so, that might indicate that he, too, had not yet fully realized what it meant to be at war. Whatever the Chancellor’s intentions, in the “war of words” that sprang to life at the same time as the war of fire and steel, Germany lost the very first battle through self-inflicted wounds.

Belgium Burns As the German troops on the Western Front made their way south through Belgium during the first three weeks of August, they continued to encounter strong if scattered resistance both from the Belgian army and from armed portions of the civilian population.121 With the Germans frustrated and then infuriated by the slower pace the unexpected opposition forced on them, and outraged by what they felt was a flagrant violation of the rules of war, the number of Belgian citizens killed and the amount of property destroyed through shelling and arson 120 

From notes taken by Admiral Tirpitz of a meeting with Bethmann Hollweg on 2 August 1914; in Imanuel Geiss, Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch 1914. Eine Dokumentensammlung, 2 vols. (Hanover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1963–64), 1, 574. In his memoir, Tirpitz wrote: “This reason has remained incomprehensible to me.” Tirpitz, Erinnerungen, 244. 121  Cf. Keller, Schuldfragen, especially Chapter VI, “Hintergründe: Die Organisation des Zivilwiderstands,” 217–54.

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rapidly escalated. Adding to the anxiety caused by the constant fear of francstireurs, both real and imagined, rumors soon spread about Belgians poisoning or mutilating wounded German soldiers – gouging out eyes, severing tongues, chopping off limbs – most of which were unfounded but effective nonetheless in sowing uncertainty and fear. At the same time, accusations began circulating that the German troops were raping and murdering Belgian women and girls, bayoneting and dismembering babies, and executing fathers and sons before their families.122 Many of these allegations against the Germans were based on all-too provable facts: many villages and towns were deliberately destroyed and reprisal killings of Belgian civilians occurred, sometimes involving large groups of males, including priests, who were rounded up and immediately shot in what can only be described as massacres. “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal,” General Moltke obliquely admitted in a letter to his Austrian counterpart, Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf, “but we are fighting for our lives.”123 On August 19, having already left a two-week long trail of death and ruin behind them, German troops entered the university city of Louvain (Leuven), located about one hundred seventy kilometers west of the German border and famed as the “Oxford of Belgium.”124 A wealthy town of some 45,000 residents, Louvain was filled with handsome buildings dating back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. On the main square in the center stood the church of St. Peter, the City Hall, and the University Library, all exquisite examples of the Brabant Gothic architectural style. The university had been founded in 1425 and the library housed a large collection of valuable books and manuscripts.125 Before the Germans had arrived, and in an effort to forestall the violence and mayhem that the terrified residents had been hearing about from other parts of the country, the authorities in Louvain had ordered all privately held weapons be handed over in order to forestall any spontaneous acts of resistance that would prompt similar reprisals. The army had also withdrawn the day before, leaving a frightened and seemingly defenseless population behind. Over the next several days, more and more German troops poured into the city, accompanied by supply vehicles filled with ammunition, provisions, and medical stores. By August 25 as many as 15,000 German soldiers were roaming through the city streets of Louvain and demanding food and drink from their reluctant hosts.126 122 

See Horne and Kramer, passim. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 174. 124  Keegan, 82. 125  Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 6. 126  Ibid., 7. 123 

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Then, that evening, at around 8  p.m., something happened. The alarm was raised that shots had been fired. It is possible that some drunk and carousing Germans may have been the first to fire, but there were also reports that some Belgian civilians who had retained their weapons had shot at the German troops from their windows and rooftops.127 Panic quickly ensued among the Germans as the fear of further snipers spread. Soon a number of men found to be armed were dragged out of their houses and promptly shot, others had to watch their houses be set on fire and burn to the ground before being bayoneted and then shot as well for good measure. Shortly before midnight, some soldiers broke into the library, doused its interior with gasoline and set it ablaze, incinerating its contents in a fire that lasted several days, leaving nothing behind but the blackened shell of its four walls.128 Most of the other buildings surrounding the Old Market Square burned to the ground as well, as did many private dwellings throughout the city. In all, over one thousand private residences in Louvain were destroyed, one ninth of the city’s total, and many of the principal civic buildings, including St. Peters, the theater, the concert house, the academy of the arts, the courthouse, and several university buildings vanished in the flames.129 Four days later, on August 29, two articles appeared in the London Times reporting on the events in Belgium. One confined itself simply to stating the facts that were known. “Louvain in Ashes” read the headline; “Terrible Act of Vandalism.”130 The other one, however, took the liberty of interpreting the events in Belgium for the benefit of its readers. “The Germans have committed an atrocious act,” the anonymous author wrote, “which will turn the hands of every civilized nation in the world against them”: The beautiful Hôtel de Ville – a wonderful example of pointed Gothic – the stately church of St. Pierre, the famous University, all are gone. Even the library of 70,000 volumes and priceless manuscripts was committed to the flames by the ruthless barbarians who have set forth to spread “German culture” throughout the globe. Louvain, the most celebrated seat of learning in the Low Countries, is to-day “nothing more than a heap of ashes.” Fourteen years ago Kaiser William enjoined upon his troops: – “Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Gain a reputation like the Huns under Attila.” The lesson has been learned only too well, and the reputation has been thrice gained, but deep and deadly must be the vengeance which the defenders of civilization will exact from these new apostles of brutality.131 127 

See Keller, Schuldfragen, esp. Chapter 2 “Die Verwüstung Löwens,” 43–99. Dynamic of Destruction, 8. See also Horne and Kramer, 38–42 and Keegan, 83. See also the compelling account by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Die Bibliothek von Löwen. Eine Episode aus der Zeit der Weltkriege (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1988). 129  Schivelbusch, 17. 130  The Times, 29 August 1914, 8. 131  Ibid., 9. See on the speech by Wilhelm II referred to in the Times article, Bernd Sösemann, “Die sog. Hunnenrede Wilhelms II,” Historische Zeitschrift 222 (1976): 342–58. 128 Kramer,

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The English reporter claimed that the rampage in Belgium was an example of savagery that was entirely new, an act that was unprecedented not just in the modern age but unseen since the end of Antiquity. “The infamous crime of the destruction of Louvain,” he wrote, “is without a parallel even in the Dark Ages.” But of course it was the toll in human life that aroused the greatest outrage: Some of the men of Louvain were shot, the rest were made prisoners, the women and children were flung into trains and carried off to an unknown destination, and the city was razed to the ground. Louvain has ceased to exist. A town of 45,000 inhabitants, bigger than Crewe or Dover or Colchester or Keighley, has been completely wiped out. The wickedness of this abominable act shall be expiated to the uttermost when the day of reckoning comes. […] Such is the character of the warfare of the modern Huns. They seek to strike terror into the hearts of their foes by methods which belong to the days of the old barbaric hosts, who were thought to have vanished from the world for ever.132

And with that, less than four weeks into the war, the essential contours of the British and then of the combined Allied depiction of their enemy had already taken shape and would change little in the months and years to come. The German invaders were barbarians, indeed they were self-described “modern Huns,” who with their brutal, primitive behavior were dismantling civilization itself. There is no question that some German soldiers committed terrible crimes in Belgium, that they engaged in acts that cannot be explained, much less excused, by any strategic aim or by any provocations they may have experienced from the Belgian populace. As the military historian John Keegan has written: The ‘rape of Belgium’ served no military purpose whatsoever and did Germany untold harm, particularly in the United States, where the reputation of the Kaiser and his government were blackened from the outset by reports of massacre and cultural despoliation. The reputation of the German army was dishonoured also.133

Of course, the British were being dishonest with themselves and repressing memories of their own military and imperialist adventures when they acted as if what happened in Belgium was a unique, and uniquely wicked, expression of the German character and culture.134 But as hypocritical, or merely hyperbolic, as they might have been, the Allied denunciations of Germany as the embodiment of evil proved to be among the most decisive acts of the war, with extraordinarily destructive consequences that were both immediate and enduring.

132 Ibid. 133 

Keegan, 82. See, for example, Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Robert T. Harrison, Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt: Techniques of Domination (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995). 134 

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At a blow, the not quite month-long war had been transformed into a fundamental conflict of world views, a mortal struggle not just for physical survival, but also a clash of ideas, and in particular of political ideas. The writer of the article in The Times made explicit what he thought those ideas were: the men fighting for England and France (Russia was conspicuously omitted) were fighting for “a great and free and enlightened democracy,”135 and, it was heavily implied, the Germans were fighting for the very opposite. The outlines delineating the portrait of their enemy would soon be filled in with greater detail, but the authoritative voice of The Times had already made it clear that the British viewed themselves as the champions of freedom and democracy, and even of civilization itself, against a barbaric and despotic foe. For better or for worse, the Germans themselves – at least the general population and at least for the moment – were almost entirely unaware either of the terrible events occurring in Belgium or of the international outcry that arose in their wake. Ever since July 31, when the decree of a “State of Imminent Danger of War” had been proclaimed, the country had been under martial law, which involved, among other things, placing the press under strict military censorship.136 That, together with the emerging policy of the Burgfrieden to maintain public unity and support for the war, meant that no foreign or domestic news reports that could possibly endanger morale were allowed to be published or distributed inside of Germany. Many individual citizens also regarded it as their duty to support their country by privately censoring themselves even if they disagreed with what they saw or heard. As Conrad Haußmann put it: “While the weapons speak, criticism is silent, not because it is merely worthless, but rather harmful, even when, and especially when, it is valid.”137 Theodor Wolff, who in his role as Editor in Chief of the Berliner Tageblatt – in prestige and influence the German equivalent of the London Times and according to the American journalist Frederic William Wile “probably the best all-round newspaper in Germany” – was one of the few civilians in the capital permitted to read foreign papers and thus often knew what his compatriots did not.138 Wolff was able to note in his diary as early as August 12 that “the entire public mood abroad is against us.”139 But, again, apart from a privileged few, that was something that only Wolff could have known. For, as he complained the next day in his diary: “the military 135 

The Times, 29 August 1914, 9. July Crisis, 446. 137  Haußmann, 10. 138  Frederich William Wile, Men Around the Kaiser. The Makers of Modern Germany. London: Heinemann, 1913), 130. 139  Theodor Wolff, Tagebücher 1914–1919, ed. Bernd Sösemann (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt, 1984), 1, 74. 136 Otte,

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censorship is becoming more and more impossible. Nothing may be printed, of the fifty dispatches and excerpts from foreign newspapers that one submits, forty-five come back with the stamp: ‘publication not permitted’.”140 Of course, people did know that the German armies were advancing westward because their successes – but only their successes – were widely reported in the papers and shouted out in their incessant Extras!. And, owing to the publication of long and growing casualty lists, people also knew that more and more young men – their sons, fathers, brothers, and cousins – were being injured and killed. As illustrative of many other comparable scenes being repeated across the country, Wolff related an encounter he had with Princess von Bülow, wife of the former Imperial Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. She was dressed in half mourning, wearing a black dress with a white collar and a black veiled headscarf. Her husband’s younger brother, Major General Karl Ulrich von Bülow, had died on August 7 near Liège, making him the first German general to fall in the war.141 After Wolff offered his condolences, Princess von Bülow told him “with tears in her eyes how much her husband had loved his brother.”142 “I will confess to you,” she said, “I think the entire war is terrible, I still cannot understand how people who knew each other yesterday are shooting at one another today.”143 Just over two weeks later, on August 28, Theodor Wolff gloomily noted in his diary that “the news about the destruction of Louvain makes a depressing impression on me and on every cultured person. I fear that the impression abroad will be extremely unpleasant.”144 After another four days, he again recorded his thoughts about Louvain in his journal, saying that “I have, in order to assuage my soul, written an article on the destruction of Louvain – insofar as that is possible given the censorship.”145 On September 2, hundreds of thousands of readers of the Berliner Tageblatt had the opportunity to mull over Wolff’s considered ruminations on “The Burning of Louvain:”

140 

Ibid., 76. circumstances of Karl Ulrich von Bülow’s death are complicated. He committed suicide apparently out of despair and shame after failing the previous night to prevent the men under his command from destroying Lincé, a village of about 800 inhabitants just south of Liège, and the next morning from executing 23 men between the age of 16 and 73. The actual cause of von Bülow’s death was of course kept secret from the public. See Peter Winzen, Reichs­kanzler Bernhard Fürst von Bülow: Weltmachtstratege ohne Fortune, Wegbereiter der grossen Katastrophe (Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt, 2003). 142  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 71. 143  Ibid., 72. 144  Ibid., 94. 145  Ibid., 97 141  The

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Cool indifference toward the obliteration of renowned works of art and beauty truly does not correspond to the German mind. Nowhere are the treasures of ancient centuries tended and maintained more fondly than here. And we may thus say that our sorrow over the tragedy of Louvain is at least as sincere and deep as the sorrow of any other people of culture. No, we do not take these things lightly and do not wear the superior smile with which long ago the French Count de Mélac quit the rubble of the Heidelberg castle. […] We are convinced that the men who stand at the head of the German government and the German armies will endeavor with all of their heart and out of their own impulse to lend their protection to the places that the fame of centuries permeates. That was how it was in the war of 1870 and that is the way it should and will be in this war if a malevolent and devious opposition does not thwart such endeavors.146

Wolff had previously spent over two decades in France, having begun his career there in 1894 as the Paris correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt (he made his name reporting on the protracted Dreyfus Affair), and the French language and culture had become as much a part of his identity as his own native German one. But his affinity for the French had not prevented him, even as expressed his regret and sorrow over the devastation of Louvain, from pointedly mentioning the name of Ezéchiel du Mas, comte de Mélac, the most fearsome general under Louis XIV and the man who in 1689 ordered Heidelberg to be burned to the ground. That was a fate the merciless count had visited on many other cities throughout the Rhineland Palatinate, where his deeds long remained seared in the collective memory.147 By bringing up the vicious seventeenth-century French commander, Wolff presumably wanted to make a general comment about the eternal nature of war. But he could have also meant it as a cautionary tale against pointing the finger of blame at others before carefully examining one’s own history and conscience first.

The Death of Internationalism Initially, as was the case with the German population at large, there was also little awareness among intellectuals of the firestorm of negative opinion about their country that rapidly swept across the globe. The last word German academics had heard from their scholarly colleagues abroad would have given them confidence that at least the learned world would continue to affirm their shared values. On August 1, just as the censorship rules were going into effect in Germany, there had been a “peace manifesto” published in The Times signed by prominent professors from Oxford, Cambridge, and several other British universities announcing that they “all in different ways enjoy the friendship and cooperation of Ger146 Ibid.

147  See Michael Martin, “Ezéchiel du Mas, comte de Mélac (1630–1704). Eine biographi­ sche Skizze,” Francia. Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 20 (1993/94), 35–68.

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man colleagues” and issued what they called a “Scholars’ Protest against War with Germany:” “We regard Germany as a nation leading the way in the Arts and Sciences, and we have learnt and are learning from German scholars. War upon her in the interest of Servia and Russia will be a sin against civilization.”148 That had been an encouraging message, but the subsequent entry of England into the war three days later inevitably forced a reassessment on both sides. Just as inevitably, some news of the reversal in opinion toward Germany in the outside world did manage to get by the censors. What Germans began to learn was appalling. One of the first major responses to the changed international climate came in the form of a special issue of the influential Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik that appeared on October 1, 1914. Most of the essays it contained had been written in August or in early September. The journal had been founded in 1907 by the cultural politician Friedrich Althoff with the express purpose of broadening and strengthening intellectual exchange among German scholars and scientists with their colleagues around the world. In the preface to the special issue, the editor recalled its founding principles: If the representatives from all sides, from Washington and Tokyo, from London and St. Petersburg, from Oslo and Madrid, from Stockholm and Rome, come together to a conference, then it will become apparent that, at least on the neutral terrain of Wissenschaft, the unifying force of love has become stronger than the divisive one of hate.149

Obviously, several weeks into the conflict, no one was speaking of love anymore, but the editor felt that there at least remained enough good will to justify offering “Comments by Leading Men about the War” to their colleagues around the world: As outrageous as this war of annihilation conducted by modern peoples of culture against one of their own is, the lies and defamation that our enemies are piling up about us day after day are equally outrageous, misleading even level-headed foreigners who were previously not adversely disposed toward us. It is true that several notable scholars in England, a few days before their government actually declared the predictable war, publicly called it “a sin against civilization;” other courageous and truthful sons of that land here in Germany let themselves be heard loudly and with same intention. We are also certain of the inner sympathy with our struggle on the part of the best of Sweden and Norway. And we hope that in other countries not involved in this battle, if the full truth of its origin and development is clearly and constantly recognized there, the voices of the reputable men advocating for us will be heard.150

The list of the contributors to the special issue of the Internationale Monats­ schrift included the names of some of the most prominent figures in Germany. 148 

The Times, 1 August, 1914, 6. Max Cornicelius, “Vorbemerkung des Herausgebers,” Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 9/1 (1 October 1914), cols.  1–2. 150  Ibid., cols.  3–4. 149 

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The General Director of the royal museums in Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode, wrote about “German Art History and the War;” the economist Lujo Brentano weighed in on “Germany and its Opponents, especially England;” the classicist, Hermann Diels, who was also the Permanent Secretary of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, described the war as “A Catastrophe of International Science;” and there were further reflections by the philosopher and Nobel Prize-winner, Rudolf Eucken, the politician and professor of law, Otto von Gierke, by Adolf von Harnack, the theologian Reinhold Seeberg, as well as by Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and many others. Given the lack of current and reliable information about anything happening outside of Germany – apart from what the military and government censors permitted to be published – most of the writers were forced to address their subjects in general terms, and they focused on how they imagined the war, and the isolation and acrimony it occasioned, would affect their specific discipline or field. Among the other “reputable men” asked to offer their thoughts on the effect the war was already having on scholarship were Ernst ­Troeltsch and Otto Hintze. In their brief essays, dated September 5 and 9 respectively, each sought to balance a forceful refutation of what they both regarded as the misperceptions of Germany – the “lies and defamation,” as the editor had combatively put it – with the attempt to put forward a positive representation of German cultural and intellectual – even political – attainments. In “Germany, the War, and the International Community,” Hintze began by giving a cursory account of what he saw as the origins of the war – despite “our Kaiser’s love of peace,” he suggested, the French “thirst for revenge,” the Russian “greed for territory” and the English “trade envy” had proved too strong to prevent it – but Hintze concentrated his analysis on Britain and the naval competition with Germany and what that meant for the conflict, and the future, more generally.151 Hintze pointed out that we live in a time in which the ocean is the highway of cultural traffic and only those great powers stand in the front row which are also sea powers. The European state system has broadened into a worldwide state system; and under these changed circumstances the English claim to absolute sea supremacy means nothing other than that of world domination.152

As for Germany, Hintze wrote: “One has to emphasize again and again that our Weltpolitik pursued no other goal than the maintenance of the independence and authority of the German Empire among the great peoples of the earth. We never thought of world domination.”153 Indeed, Hintze insisted: “The one who sought 151  Otto Hintze, “Deutschland, der Krieg und die Völkergemeinschaft,” ibid., cols.  27–40, here col.  9. 152  ibid., col.  31. 153  Ibid., col.  32.

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world domination is England” and that “it is a scandal that the world has put up with this foreign domination for so long.”154 Hard on this indictment of British imperialism, Hintze was no less searing in his assessment of the English justification for its entry into the war, which he portrayed as a purely cynical effort to cloak power politics in a moral mantle: “Our invasion of Belgium gave English politicians only a pretext – to be sure an enviable one,” for “the government needed some pretext with respect to public opinion.”155 For Hintze, the war was ultimately about who would henceforth rule the world, and to that end he made a dire and, as it turned out, all too accurate prediction: Now begins the era of world wars in which the future face of the earth will be formed. For one should be under no illusion: we are standing at the beginning of a war era, even if this war itself lasts a shorter or a longer time. It is a matter of whether the European state system will result in a British world empire or whether in the new world state system the independence and equal status of the powers will be preserved. We stand before a great world change.156

Hintze’s sobering prognosis by no means meant that he welcomed what he foresaw. On the contrary: “This war will destroy an infinite amount of cultural values,” he wrote, adding this extremely notable example of what he had in mind: It is already palpable that the advanced democratization of the states is making the conduct of the war more difficult, more harsh, more vicious. The seeds of hatred and revenge that this war is sowing will stifle for generations the trust and benevolence among peoples that are necessary for a thriving cooperation in the service of human culture and civilized behavior.157

Turning to Germany, Hintze began by recalling how auspicious the signs had been just before the war began for ever greater and more meaningful cooperation among all nations. There had been, he wrote, “an international community of interests that was becoming closer and closer, a growing mutual understanding of peoples of one another seemed to be forming and created a considerable counterweight to the one-sidedly nationalistic conception of cultural and economic life.”158 Germans especially embraced and benefited from this widening and deepening of international exchange because, Hintze felt, “we Germans have a certain need for an international expansion of our intellectual horizon.”159 Here Hintze could not stop himself from taking another stab at the British by comparing them unfavorably to his own people:

154 Ibid. 155 

Ibid., col.  33. Ibid., col.  34. 157  Ibid., 35. 158 Ibid. 159  Ibid., col.  36. 156 

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We are in this respect the precise opposite of the English, who in their arrogant insular parochialism are accustomed to seeing the world only from the standpoint of the ruler and exploiter and have a certain inclination to view other peoples as representatives of an inferior species, and not just the exotic ones but also the European ones.”160

Germans, on the other hand, Hintze claimed, were characterized by a “need to admire and imitate foreign things,” so much so that Hintze labeled this emulative tendency “a weakness of our national character,” a deficiency he attributed to the late consolidation of Germany into a nation state: “it is the result of our lagging behind our Western neighbors in political, social, and literary formation.” Still, Hintze saw a relative advantage in this delayed development, namely that it fostered an openness to other cultures, a sympathetic curiosity, a disposition toward empathetic scrutiny that was perhaps fed by a sense of inferiority regarding the other, long established European nations, a sense that Hintze said expressed itself as a receptivity to foreign nationalities, the drive to understand them, to immerse oneself in the foreign character, the ability to expand one’s own being to universal conceptions and to raise it above the limited sphere of a narrow-minded nationalism to the ideal of a common human ethos and culture.161

Hintze concluded: “Our German national character is intimately connected to the cosmopolitan ideals of the 18th century, and even today, when things have become harder and more natural, in no way entirely disowns this origin.”162 What are we to make of this relatively compact essay? Hintze’s indignation over what he saw as British duplicity and hypocritical posturing is manifest. But so is his genuine regret over what had already been lost in the realm of international relations through the effect of the war and would not soon be recovered even long after it was over. Too, his fear that a new era of world wars was just then commencing bespeaks a profound sense of gloom that is only further reinforced by having been so prescient. The brief character sketch of the German sensibility he offered may have been too one-sided and self-flattering. But it is, as far as it goes, certainly defensible, and is made more remarkable by his frank endorsement of the ideals of the Enlightenment in making it. It is also important to know, if this short text did not already adequately demonstrate it, that despite his taking exception to British sanctimoniousness Otto Hintze was anything but a patriotic zealot. Thanks to the scrupulous notes taken by one of his students, we have a detailed picture of how, on the eventful day of August 1, Professor Hintze finished his lecture course on “The History of 160 

Ibid., cols.  36–37. Ibid., col.  37. 162  Ibid., col.  38. 161 

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the Prussian Constitution and Administration” held at the University of Berlin on Unter den Linden, only a few hundred feet from the crowds of people standing on the square in front of the palace. On that momentous afternoon he brought his lecture to a close by calmly covering the “Tax Reform of 1891,” speaking at length about the subject of tariffs and classifications, giving an overview of the legal system of Walter von Miquel, and finally reviewing the various new fields of administrative competence in the Empire. Over the course of the four hours the presentation lasted, there was “no word about the events of the day, no trace of the agitation of the time, no pathos and no call to arms.”163 Yet even if he gave no perceptible indication of it in the lecture hall, there was a personal reason why Otto Hintze might have felt some agitation over what was happening quite literally right outside his window. As he wrote a little later to a colleague at the university: “I have a brother in the East serving there as a Lieutenant of the reserve in the Fifth Foot Guards Regiment; another brother of mine is Chief Physician in the field hospital of the Guard Corps near Reims; two nephews of mine are also now in the field.”164 Less than two months later, on 25 November 1914, Otto Hintze’s brother, Reinhold, acting under the overall command of General Paul von Hindenburg, was killed during the Battle of Łódź, which took place between November 11 and December 6. In the end, the Germans decisively won the battle and captured the city despite facing unfavorable odds, with a fighting force half the size of the opposing Russian army (and despite losing 35,000 men who were killed, injured or captured; the Russians lost 90,000). In a letter to Friedrich Meinecke, his colleague and co-editor at the Historische Zeitschrift, Hintze wrote about the death of his brother that, given the outcome: “he thus did not die in vain.”165 Ernst ­Troeltsch’s contribution to the special edition of the Internationale Mo­ natsschrift is, compared to Hintze’s piece, more optimistic and less strident, even though ­Troeltsch was equally concerned about the destructive influence the war had already had on the international scientific and intellectual community during the less than one month the war had by then existed. “The internationalism of European intellectual culture,” ­Troeltsch had concluded already by early September 1914, “and with it, next to the economic exchange community, the most important bond of the whole of Europe, have been seriously damaged for a generation or more.”166 Within his own particular professional sphere, ­Troeltsch 163 

See Neugebauer, Otto Hintze, 430. From a letter to Max Lenz on 6 October 1914; cited in ibid. 165  Letter to Friedrich Meinecke, 18 December 1914; cited in ibid. 166  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Der Krieg und die Internationalität der geistigen Kultur,” Internatio­ nale Monatsschrift 9/1 (1 October 1914), col.  52. 164 

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thought things were, if anything, even worse: “The situation of Wissenschaft is much more difficult and more serious. It is, as pure science, damaged in itself.” ­Troeltsch tried to explain in concrete terms what he meant: It is the essence of science to gain knowledge that is universally valid, that is valid for all, and to that end to maintain the broadest possible exchange of knowledge. Out of both requirements and basic tendencies there indeed arose a scientific-intellectual cultural community of the modern European-American world, which closely joined the educated circles of our peoples and above all the academic world through international congresses, journals, organizations, by reciprocal visits of scientific places of learning and personal exchanges of researchers, in translations and popularizations.167

This broadly based work had been possible, ­Troeltsch continued, because it rested on a shared sense of “justice,” a readiness among his European and American colleagues to “understand” each other and it relied on a “scientific, objective appreciation of mutual conditions and on personal and friendly relationships.”168 Such open-mindedness was a matter of course in the natural sciences, ­Troeltsch acknowledged, but even the historical sciences had established a spirit of objectivity that was justly appreciative and essentially explanatory in nature, one in which historical research became no longer a passionate national journalism but rather genuine, calm investigation of social, political, and intellectual development.169

“All of that today has been torn to shreds,” ­Troeltsch lamented, “and torn most painfully and emphatically with regard to the congeneric English.”170 As opposed to Hintze, however, ­Troeltsch resisted the temptation to lash out at the British: We German scholars deeply deplore this rupture of the community and do so, in accordance with our entire character, more with sorrow than with indignation. Chauvinism is completely foreign to German science, which always worked for understanding even if it never lost sight of its own dignity. […] To us the internationality of European science is still sacred.171

Since ­Troeltsch, unlike Hintze, was an experienced politician, a certain degree of diplomacy and tact probably came more naturally to him. Whatever private feelings ­Troeltsch may have harbored toward his country’s enemies – and there is no evidence that his personal views differed from his public statements – he seemed to have acted on the principle that it is always much easier to hold the higher ground than it is to climb up out of the mud.

167 

Ibid., col.  54.

168 Ibid. 169 

Ibid., cols.  54–55. Ibid., col.  55. 171  Ibid., col.  56. 170 

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Concluding his short essay, ­Troeltsch ventured his own prediction about the outcome of the war and in so doing revealed that he had even loftier aims for the future than merely restoring the broken sense of solidarity and cooperation within the international scientific community: German science will learn anew from this war and in particular in its historical, sociological, and ethical disciplines what immense significance is due to the state and the political education of the people. Already a whole series of misleading or partially oriented ideologies have collapsed under the effects of this war. We see today throughout the entire European world that the political-military community is stronger that that of race and blood, than that of class and social position, that the strength, health, and unity of the state are more important for future developments than all the consistency of the logical and scientific masses of thought. The state is not the highest human good but it is the best one, it is the foundation for everything else and only its health also secures the growth of all the rest.172

Once again, ­Troeltsch showed here his ability to employ his already considerable political talents and instincts in the most unlikely contexts, using even the occasion of a scholarly article in a specialist journal to make a fundamental political argument about the future not just of the German state but of the larger European system of states as a whole. He left it tantalizingly equivocal which “ideologies” he felt had been dismantled or disproven by the war, but given his already revealed leanings, one could make some educated guesses about what those were. Yet here, as well, he was probably being strategically imprecise about the actual nature of the political goals he envisioned – and we always need to remind ourselves that the censorship rules were real and enforced – but he was more than clear about his conviction that, whatever was to come, the new order would not be the same as before.

Our People’s Army Two months later, ­Troeltsch was apparently willing to be more open about his larger intentions. On November 3, ­Troeltsch held one of the first major public speeches about the war in Germany, and it was one of the most widely received as well. He gave the address in the so-called Nibelungen Hall in the city of Mann­ heim, eighteen kilometers to the northwest of Heidelberg. The Nibelungen Hall was housed in an immense civic building called the Rosengarten, bordering the formal Friedrichsplatz, the largest public square in Mannheim. The Nibelungen Hall could hold up to 6,000 people, making it one of the largest public auditoriums in Germany, and ­Troeltsch mentioned in a letter to Herbert Link the next 172 

Ibid., col.  58.

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month that there had been 5,000 people present for his remarks.173 The speech he gave there in early November was thus in every way a significant public event, held in front of what was perhaps the largest audience of ­Troeltsch’s career (and reaching many more when the text was subsequently published), and it confronted some of the most urgent issues of the day. It also presented a sophisticated, if necessarily fairly oblique, political argument. Although it would be difficult to know what his listeners expected, one might imagine that at least some of those who understood his message were encouraged by what they heard. ­Troeltsch began his remarks by sketching out a portrait of Germany just before and after the outbreak of the war, which by then had lasted, as he surely needed to remind no one, already “a quarter of a year.” He recalled how the summer leading up to it, which had been “golden and blue, stable and cloudless in a way not seen in twenty years,” had suddenly been interrupted by the “growing agitation and the sultriness of souls, when silent masses moved through the streets, serious faces betrayed the tension of danger and worry about the future, crying eyes of women bringing to mind the imminent moving out of the men.”174 (One notes, incidentally, how this evocation of the days surrounding the start of the conflict closely corresponds to what we now know to have been the pervasive atmosphere of the time, as opposed to the images of supposed euphoria that were retrospectively projected onto the period.) When the first victories in France were reported, there had been, ­Troeltsch said, “the first great sigh of relief” – again: relief, not exultation – followed by a second one at the end of August in the wake of Hindenburg’s victory at Tannenberg on the Eastern Front.175 Then there came a month of “apparent or real stalemate” in France thanks to what, with remarkable magnanimity, ­Troeltsch called “the valiant French columns” (­Troeltsch was referring to the Battle of the Marne, to which we will later return). Now, in early November, ­Troeltsch declared, the fighting continued on, battles were still being waged. But, he said, even if the war seemed far from over, “Germany itself is saved.”176 Although Germany had not yet won the war, it had not lost it, either, and there was no visible or immediate danger that the physical integrity of the Empire would be compromised. There was every reason, ­Troeltsch reassuringly said, for the country to be of “good spirit and good hope. We know sorrow only for the heroes whom foreign soil covers.” Following this brief survey of the war’s progress thus far, ­Troeltsch then rhetorically asked: “Whom are we to thank for this great thing?”177 meaning: who 173 

See Ernst ­Troeltsch to Herbert Link, 23 December 1914; KGA 20, 714. Ernst ­Troeltsch, Unser Volksheer (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1914), 3. 175  Ibid., 4. 176  Ibid., 6. 177  Ibid., 7. 174 

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should receive credit for having secured the safety of the nation through selfless effort, bravery, and self-sacrifice? And here ­Troeltsch performed the first of a number of subtle maneuvers that shifted his address from the plane of an ordinary patriotic oration to something else entirely. As would become gradually clear, in his lecture ­Troeltsch was embarking on nothing less than an analysis of the profound social transformations that the war and the way it was being fought – and most importantly by whom – would eventually bring about in Germany and that were in fact already underway. As an initial approach to that issue, ­Troeltsch offered that one possible answer to the question he had posed about who deserved their collective thanks came from a familiar source. “His Majesty the Kaiser gives thanks in every one of his pronouncements to the Lord of the world.” As an ordained minister and professor of theology, ­Troeltsch could hardly have disagreed with that sentiment. “However,” ­Troeltsch continued, God works through people, and in this secular assembly we want to direct our thanks to the people through whom he accomplished it. We all know these people: they are our beloved fieldgrey brothers, it is our magnificent great armed forces, it is our people’s army – Volksheer – in which everyone of us participates in worry and in pride.178

The implication was clear: it was not the Emperor, or even God, at least not directly, who deserved the people’s gratitude for keeping them and the nation safe. Rather, it was the people themselves, as embodied in their army, which ­Troeltsch pointedly referred to as a Volksheer, who were entitled to the indebtedness of everyone they were keeping safe at home. The word Volksheer was an unusual one. It was not exactly ­Troeltsch’s coinage, but at the time it was far from common. ­Troeltsch underscored the relative unfamiliarity of the term by saying “it is with consideration that I call it a Volksheer. The German army of 1914 is a Volks­ heer as the German army has never been before.”179 That had not been the case, he took care to emphasize, in either 1813 or 1870: “but today it is truly the people in arms.”180 In a very real sense, ­Troeltsch was saying that in acknowledging the Volksheer in the field, the German people at home were in essence expressing their gratitude to and for themselves. Anyone who had heard ­Troeltsch speak three months earlier on the day after mobilization in Heidelberg or who had read the printed transcript of that speech would have heard an echo of those earlier remarks in the phrase “people in arms.” If so, that impression would have been strengthened by the next thematic strand of his speech in Mannheim, which he introduced by announcing, in what may have been something of a surprise to his listeners, that in the remainder of his 178 Ibid. 179 Ibid. 180 

Ibid., 8.

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remarks: “I shall not be speaking of the military significance of this people’s army.”181 Instead, he proposed “to consider the general political and human significance of such an army for our national and ethical life.”182 Such an army, ­Troeltsch explained, was “the symbol of the entire, wonderful unity and determination of the entire nation.” More, “it embodies the result of the entire political education of the last forty years and shows us being finally politically mature.” Explicitly referring to the Kaiser’s famous proclamation from the balcony of the royal palace on August 1, repeated three days later to the delegates of the Reichs­ tag in the White Hall of the palace, ­Troeltsch also explicitly said that the Volks­ heer “reflects the sense of self-sacrifice and patriotic devotion in which all parties and confessions, estates, and classes have disappeared.” Although these claims were perhaps more hopeful than strictly true, they did allow ­Troeltsch to align his observations at least nominally with the Burgfrieden policy and preempt any objection to what was to come. For then, in a dramatic gesture, although one conveyed in somewhat veiled language, ­Troeltsch rejected any deliberately expansionist or annexationist aims in the conflict and insisted, to the contrary, that its political effect be limited solely to domestic goals: Any possible goals for such a war are also contained in the character of this army. With this army there is no world conquest and no adventurist politics. With it there is only self-preservation and self-protection and the will to translate all of the ethical acquisitions of this war into the further development and consolidation of our own domestic political life.183

Although we will return to this issue later on as well, it is important here to realize what it meant that one of the most influential and increasingly visible public figures in the country, speaking before thousands of people and just three months into the conflict, had just renounced any desire for the territorial enlargement of Germany as either a motive or justification for continuing the war. Of course, ­Troeltsch’s words could be seen simply as a reiteration of the Emperor’s own promise that Germany was not driven by any “lust for conquest.” But it was also officially forbidden to speak publicly at all about any war aims of any sort. Yet ­Troeltsch had done just that, and in doing so he had articulated a position that, were it to be formally adopted, could even have been seen as unacceptably restricting German options. Further, it was a position that ­Troeltsch would maintain throughout the war, also and especially when the issue became a flashpoint in the increasingly acrimonious internal German discussions about war aims. But we should not underestimate how sensitive the topic already was even then, in 181 Ibid. 182  183 

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 9–10.

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early November of 1914, and how politically explosive it would become as the death toll relentlessly continued to mount. All of those lives, it was increasingly argued, could not be allowed to have been sacrificed in vain, particularly in the absence of any other compelling or even clear reason for the mass immolation. To many it seemed appropriate, even an obligation, to redeem all those deaths by material compensation in the form of confiscated land and the resources it contained. That Ernst ­Troeltsch categorically and consistently repudiated this notion from the very beginning stands as a testament not just to his political beliefs, but also to his ethical sensibility. But taking such a position did not relieve ­Troeltsch of the responsibility of stating what positive indemnifications the war could or should bring to Germany. And here ­Troeltsch turned to the most audacious part of his speech. He introduced the subject by saying that the Volksheer to which the thanks of the entire German people belonged essentially consisted of two principal “but very different components.”184 The first “component” of the “people’s army” – and it was no coincidence that ­Troeltsch gave this element the priority of first mention, for he would be making a chronological, that is to say an historical, as well as a sociological argument – “is derived from its properly Prussian spirit and essence.” What had originally given the Prussian army its “abiding core,” ­Troeltsch explained, was the officers’ corps that Frederick the Great had first consolidated in the mid-1700s, which had adhered “not to a patriotic, but rather a royalistic mindset of unity” and was trained “in all of the carefully calculated arts of education and drill.”185 The eighteenth-century Prussian army had received its distinctive cast from this corps of professional officers who also carried within themselves all of the habits of rule and the expertise in rule of the Prussian nobility, which they had acquired as lords of their manors since time immemorial and could then be made fruitful for the military organization of the troops in the form of unconditional obedience.186

These, then, according to ­Troeltsch were the historical origins underlying the first “component” of the present-day army, namely the famed Prussian “spirit of discipline, drill, and organization.”187 “The other element of our army,” ­Troeltsch continued, turning to the second component, namely the element that constituted “its character as a Volksheer, derives from an entirely different direction.” That second element, ­Troeltsch said, stemmed from the opposing inheritance from the early nineteenth-century 184 

Ibid., 10.

186 

Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 11.

185 Ibid. 187 

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reformer of the Prussian army, General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, who promulgated a new, more popular mentality within the Prussian forces, one taken, ­Troeltsch explained “ultimately from the army of the French Revolution, which with the people in arms was able to drive the old, rigid armies of the dynasties from the field.”188 That was a courageous, perhaps even rash assertion to be making in such a public setting: ­Troeltsch was saying that the German army embodied, at least in its more modern element, the spirit that had swept away the ancien régime in France and established the First Republic.189 (Interestingly, Theodor Wolff later wrote in a different context that before the war “Scharnhorst was never mentioned in official speeches. […] One did not speak of this reformer of the Prussian army, whose intellectual appearance had something embarrassingly democratic about it.”190). And if ­Troeltsch had not already been explicit enough, he then added with even greater emphasis: Thus the aristocratic-feudal army of Frederick the Great became the general democratic Volks­ heer, absolute discipline and organizational skill became voluntary, duty-bound obedience for the sake of the Fatherland and became the elastic initiative of the individual within the strict a strict leadership and order.191

In ­Troeltsch’s account, the German army that stood facing enemies on two fronts in 1914 and was responsible for safeguarding the nation, was the direct product of those two larger historical forces, or in his words was “founded on the social and political developmental state of the German people. Germany is in the process of transitioning from a feudal-aristocratic-patriarchal societal constitution to an individualistic-democratic one.”192 And the most visible sign of that transition to “an individualistic-democratic” order in Germany was nothing other than what he had just defined as the Volksheer in its entirety. To drive his point further home, ­Troeltsch reminded his audience that the Kaiser tended to speak of the German military forces by referring to them possessively, calling them “‘My army and My navy’,” a practice that ­Troeltsch admit188 Ibid. 189 

In his book published in May, 1915, Hugo Preuß would also refer to the French revolutionary origins of general conscription: “The idea of a universal arming of the people that arose from the Revolution was thus, as is well known, at first opposed in Prussia as well with mistrust and reluctance by the representatives of the old state principle; while the innovators, the ‘nivelleurs and the Jacobins’ of the Prussian reform era who passionately advocated for it.” Preuß went on to argue that the revolutionary, or at least reformatory, potential of the “people’s army” was blunted in Germany by the overwhelming power of the Obrigkeitsregierung or authoritarian state; Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 62. 190  Wolff, Der Krieg des Pontius Pilatus, 240. 191 ­Troeltsch, Unser Volksheer, 11–12. 192  Ibid., 13.

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ted foreigners may find “difficult to understand.”193 Conversely, ­Troeltsch continued, the soldiers of the army always referred to their monarch, as did everyone else, as “‘our Kaiser’” – unser Kaiser – in what was for outsiders perhaps an equally bewildering way. But what ­Troeltsch had just proposed regarding the Volksheer was not only a new and different designation for the army, but also a new and different recognition of authority as such, and it was the appreciation of this difference that gave the title to his lecture: Unser Volksheer. Once again, ­Troeltsch had ingeniously found a way of taking a seemingly conventional subject – in this case, the ritualistic offering of praise and thanks to the men fighting at the front on behalf of a grateful nation at home – and fashioning it into a meditation on larger social, historical, and political matters of unexpectedly far-reaching consequence. For, in his hands, the term Volksheer had become not merely a neutral designation for the armed forces, but by implication it also stood as a symbolic marker of a new kind of popular sovereignty. It was an expression that, by adopting and modifying the familiar apostrophe of the Kaiser, also represented the very process of democratic transformation ­Troeltsch had described. Where before Germans had looked to unser Kaiser as the protector, paragon, and personification of the nation, they now had – in fact themselves were – unser Volksheer. One wonders if his listeners fully appreciated what Professor ­Troeltsch had just said, whether they had actually grasped the nuanced political thrust of his remarks.194 ­Troeltsch certainly took care not to be misunderstood. At one point, he stressed that what he was describing, “this, our people’s army, is not a militia” – Miliz.195 That was an important qualification. By distinguishing the Volksheer from a “militia,” ­Troeltsch evidently wanted to avoid any identification with paramilitary and specifically revolutionary movements associated with that term. The memory of the violent and bloody Paris Commune of 1871, for example, in which the French National Guard militia had fought against the regular army troops loyal to the government, was still fresh in many people’s minds. ­Troeltsch sought to alleviate any potential concerns that he was advocating something similarly seditious with his notion of a Volksheer. No, ­Troeltsch seemed to be saying, the conception of the army he was proposing more closely resembled the compromise solution he had offered in his speech before the Protestant Social Congress in Breslau in 1904 as a means of reconciling the differences in Germany society, something that was capable of uniting conservative and democratic prin193 

Ibid., 12. His biographer, Hans-Georg Drescher, evidently did not. Referring to this speech, Drescher noted only: “To be sure, one may discern that ­Troeltsch was averse to all massively imperialistic notions, nevertheless nationalistic tones are clearly sounded.” Drescher, 415. 195 ­Troeltsch, Unser Volksheer, 10. 194 

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ciples within a single “political ethics.” Here, too, ­Troeltsch argued in a similar vein that the “transition” from a feudal-patriarchal social organization to an individualistic-democratic one “allows us to combine the advantages of each developmental stage.” The new type of army in Germany, ­Troeltsch explained, in this way “unites the discipline, leadership skills and the strength of organization of the aristocracy with the drive and sense of duty of the people in their entirety, discipline and comradeship, authority, and freedom.”196 We see here once more ­Troeltsch’s habitual attempt to integrate and balance contrary categories within a single conceptional framework – to perform, in a word, an ideational “synthesis” – in his treatment of cultural and social phenomena. Granted, one could object that he was perhaps for the sake of argument consciously exaggerating the presence of the democratic principle within the German army, portraying it more as part of an aspirational strategy than as a statement of current reality. But we should not underrate the importance of the very fact that he did so. Matthias Erzberger, a member of the Reichstag representing the Catholic Center Party, recorded a meeting that he, along with several other members of parliament, later had with Wilhelm II on July 20, 1917. In the course of the session, the Kaiser typically indulged in a long monologue about various matters, including the battle in Galicia that had just concluded in which the German and Austro-Hungarian armies had finally and definitively subdued the Russian forces there. According to Erzberger, and to the “horror” of the delegates listening to Wilhelm, “the Kaiser mentioned that the Prussian Guard led by his son Fritz had knocked ‘the democratic dust out of the Russian’s vests.’ ‘Wherever the Guard appears, there is no democracy,’ the Kaiser added verbatim.”197 ­Troeltsch’s public claim that of all institutions the Volksheer was, at least in part, an emblem of the democracy and freedom that were gradually expanding in Germany, and his doing so especially at a time when the Burgfrieden was still intact and policed, was thus more courageous than would first appear. But beyond ­Troeltsch himself, there were others who also saw in the army a symbolic power that reflected and embodied the social, economic, ideological, and regional diversity of the entire country that constituted it. As the legal scholar Franz von Liszt wrote in the early months of the war: Poles and Danes, Alsatians and Lorrainers have staked their lives with joyful enthusiasm for their common fatherland. Jews and Christians have shed their blood next to one another on the battlefields. The East Elbian Junker and the Social Democratic factory worker from the industrial regions of the west have fought shoulder to shoulder against the same enemy. Those are 196 

Ibid., 13. Matthias Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1920), 53. See generally Christopher Dowe, Matthias Erzberger. Ein Leben für die Demokratie (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2011). 197 

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experiences that cannot be forgotten at the conclusion of peace, that must continue to have an effect in the memory of the entire people, through all of its levels up to territorial sovereigns and up the Kaiser himself.198

As we will see, in the following years it would become a common refrain in the ever more pronounced calls for political reform at home, which centrally meant greater participation of all people in their shared self-governance, that the troops who had fought at the front, who had been drawn from all levels of German society – who formed, as a totality, the Volksheer – had won their claim to expanded political rights by submitting to the crucible of combat. And it was Ernst ­Troeltsch in November, 1914, speaking in Mannheim only three months into the conflict, who was among the first to give the notion public and prominent expression that service in the military, or das Heer, purchased for those who composed it – das Volk – the right to greater political representation in the state.199 But the sacrifices of the people and the political claims that those sacrifices were thought to justify represented only one factor in the political process set in motion by the war. Like the rest of German society, the army, too, experienced significant and ongoing change after the war began. What had previously been the very embodiment of Prussian power and prestige was transformed into something far different not just by the inclusion of previously excluded elements in its ranks, but also by the wholesale slaughter of the Prussian elite that had previously formed its core. If it had not been not for the Volksheer, Germany would have soon had no army at all. As the historian Arthur Rosenberg observed: The German army of 1916 was politically not the same as the peacetime army. Just before the war, the German peacetime army counted approximately three quarters of a million men. Of them, a third were professional soldiers: officers, noncommissioned officers, and other enlisted men who had been trained in the most strict monarchical ethos. The peacetime army had been the steadfast stronghold of the Hohenzollern. The field army of 1916 was a militia army of four million men who reflected all currents of the population. Only the smallest portion of the officer corps was composed of old Prussian aristocracy. When the Prussian guard was freshly stocked for the Galician offensive in May 1915, the famous Potsdam regiments already had many bourgeois reserve officers. The aristocratic lieutenants lay dead in the mass graves by the Marne or shot to pieces in some military hospital. The Prussian military nobility was not overthrown only in November 1918. The terrible blood sacrifices of the Prussian aristocracy during the Western offensive in 1914 also annihilated its authority in the army and the empire. The way in which 198 

Franz von Liszt, Ein mitteleuropäischer Staatenverbund als nächstes Ziel der deutschen auswärtigen Politik (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1914), 10. 199 See Sven Oliver Müller, Die Nation als Waffe und Vorstellung. Nationalismus in Deutschland und Großbritannien im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). Kevin Cramer, “A World of Enemies: New Perspectives on German Military Culture and the Origins of the First World War,” Central European History 39 (2005), 289, writes: “Müller’s key insight from his comparative perspective is that the ‘call to the nation’ in total war must always set in motion demands for changes in the social and political order.”

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the Prussian officer corps went to its death in 1914 must elicit the highest respect even from its political opponents. But then one should also openly admit that the old Bismarckian Germany perished physically and morally during the Battle of the Marne, and one should let the dead lie in peace.200

The long-term historical and political transformation of the German army that, according to ­Troeltsch, had occurred over the course of the nineteenth century certainly did exist, but it had been magnified and accelerated by the unprecedented pace and scale of mass death that had commenced in August 1914. In his remarks in Mannheim ­Troeltsch barely acknowledged the international furor that had arisen over Germany and its actions since the war had begun, and he referred only in passing to “the hatred of our enemies”201 toward them. But by the time he gave his speech on November 3, 1914, the war of words among the great nations of Europe had long since burst into a raging rhetorical inferno. The ideological terrain was still shifting, but the broader boundaries had already largely been fixed within which opinions on both sides would only become ever more deeply entrenched over the next four years. The ensuing “culture war” would become one of the most distinctive, and most destructive, phenomena of the entire conflict, and it would preoccupy ­Troeltsch in particular until its very end, and even beyond. But of course it was not a war of words only. By the beginning of November on the Western Front, the British Expeditionary Force had already been cut down from its original contingent of 160,000 men to a body no more than half that size, and by then Germany itself had suffered a total of some 240,000 casualties as well. France had amassed the most grievous losses, with almost half a million killed, wounded, captured or missing.202 On the Eastern Front conditions were incredibly even more horrific: in the same period Russia had already lost a staggering million and a half of its soldiers.203 The physical war did not leave ­Troeltsch and his immediate circle untouched, either. His mother, Eugenie, had been so overcome by worry and fright in early August that she had suffered a stroke and died that October. His father, Ernst Senior, severely shaken by her death, would live on in an apathetic state for only 200 Arthur Rosenberg, Die Entstehung der deutschen Republik (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1928), 109. See also the comments on the German army by Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 109–12. Watson notes that “whereas 13.3 per cent of the German soldiers were killed, 15.7 per cent of reserve officers and a horrifying 24.7 of professional officers died in the course of duty;” Watson, 110. 201 ­Troeltsch, Unser Volksheer, 18. 202  Keegan, 135–36. 203  Keegan, 170.

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three more years. One of his sisters, Wilhelmine, lost her only son at the age of nineteen, a mere two weeks after he had entered service, whereupon her husband, the well-known musician Wilhelm Weber, suffered a breakdown and died a year later, as ­Troeltsch said, “of a broken heart.”204 At the end of December 1914, one of ­Troeltsch’s most promising students, Hermann Süskind, the author of a probing study on Christianity and History in Schleiermacher, was also killed at the front.205 Süskind’s death seems to have deeply affected ­Troeltsch and he memorialized the young scholar by mentioning his death in one of his own most important works, which was the one and only time he would permit himself even such a restrained public expression of personal loss.206 The deaths and suffering of those closest to him drove home for ­Troeltsch the unnecessary reminder that it was not just the cultural values he cherished that were being systematically ripped to shreds by the war. Yet for that very reason his continued political optimism, his unflagging generosity of spirit, and his own principled humanity before the grotesque inhumanity of the war seem all the more extraordinary.

204  These details are reported in a letter by ­ Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, 31 January, 1920, in ­Troeltsch, Briefe an Friedrich von Hügel, 104–05. ­Troeltsch also wrote about these events in a letter to Hans von Schubert, 7 November 1918; KGA 21, 499. 205  Hermann Süskind, Christentum und Geschichte bei Schleiermacher. Die geschichtsphi­ losophischen Grundlagen der Schleiermacherschen Theologie. Erster Teil. Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsphilosophie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1911). 206  See Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Über Maßstäbe zur Beurteilung historischer Dinge,” Historische Zeitschrift 116 (1916), 14, footnote 1. Earlier ­Troeltsch had published a moving obituary commemorating Süskind and another one of his students killed in the war named Otto Lempp; see “Zum Gedächtnis Otto Lempps und Hermann Süskind,” Die Christliche Welt. Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt für Gebildete aller Stände 29/33 (1915), cols.  653–57. ­Troeltsch also wrote in a private letter that “Süskind’s death moved me most deeply;” Ernst ­Troeltsch to Robert Gradmann, 12 January, 1915, in KGA 20, 724. For more information on this constellation and its significance, see Hans-Hermann Tiemann, “Hermann Süskind, Otto Lempp und die Anfänge der theologischen Schule ­Troeltschs,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 2 (2001), 266–89.

Chapter Two

Why Do Other Peoples Hate Us? As the animated language in the editor’s introduction to the special issue of the Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik in October had revealed, word of what was being published in the foreign press quickly found its way into Germany despite the heavy restrictions the military censorship had imposed on information flowing into and out of the country. And while the Germans should have perhaps expected the abrasive language being used by foreign journalists and publicists to describe them, no one seemed to have been prepared for what some of the leading intellectuals in Britain and France had also begun to say almost as soon as the war commenced. As early as August 8, only four days into the conflict, Henri Bergson, then probably the most famous philosopher in the world, had appeared before the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris, of which he was then President, and declared: The battle begun against Germany is the battle of civilization itself against barbarism. The entire world senses that, but our academy has perhaps a special authority to say it. Largely dedicated to the study of psychological, moral, and social questions, it fulfills a simple scientific obligation by expressing that there is, in the brutality and cynicism of Germany, in its contempt for all justice and all truth, a regression to the state of nature – l’état sauvage.1

That winter, following the events in Belgium and reflecting what had already become the prevailing view of German conduct in the war and of the German people as a whole, Archibald Sayce, a Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford, sent a letter to The Times likewise condemning the “savage state” to which he said the Germans were reducing the world. “A people who have destroyed the art treasures of Belgium and Eastern France,” Sayce wrote, who have deliberately aimed their guns at the noblest and most sacred of buildings, and have wantonly burned the books and manuscripts of the past are outside the pale of culture and civilization. They are still what they were 15 centuries ago, the barbarians who raided our ancestors and destroyed the civilization of the Roman Empire.2 1  Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 1102. 2 A. H. Sayce, “‘Hermann’s a German.’ A Review of Teutonic Pretensions,” The Times, Tuesday, December 22, 1914, 6.

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When German readers began to learn of these and many other declarations coming from abroad, most were taken aback and many were shocked by how they were being characterized by their fellow Europeans, which conflicted with how the Germans saw themselves and, it almost went without saying, with what they considered to be the obvious truth. A few months later, in early 1915, Hugo Preuß acknowledged that we had always known and accepted with a shrug of the shoulders that we did not enjoy an especial popularity in the outside world. What we now had to experience in mistrust and aversion, in dislike and hatred toward Germany, and not just from the openly hostile peoples, but from almost all of the neutral ones as well – that exceeds by a large margin the measure of unpopularity that a strong person can overlook with smiling equanimity.3

As a result, there soon arose within Germany loud and resentful protests against the “lies” and “slander” that most Germans were convinced were being maliciously spread about them, which quickly built into a cacophony of offended anger and wounded indignation. To help assuage those bruised collective feelings, many commentators in Germany sought to explain the origin and nature of what they identified as the “hate” being universally aimed against them. Magnus Hirschfeld, the famous Berlin physician and sexologist, published a brochure in early 1915 offering his compatriots what he labeled a “war-psychological examination” of the entire phenomenon in the attempt to answer the question: Why Do Other Peoples Hate Us? Hirschfeld reached the perhaps comforting but not very useful diagnosis that it all amounted to no more than a collective delusion. Those who professed hatred for Germany, the doctor counseled, were directing “their animosity toward a barbaric people who don’t even exist, toward a product of the imagination, a vision, toward a specter,” and Hirschfeld serenely suggested that one could safely ignore it.4 Others, not much more helpfully, saw the sudden upsurge of antipathy toward them as merely the most recent and condensed articulation of a long-simmering stew of hostile emotions cooked up by Germany’s international competitors who envied and feared them for their new-found economic, technological, and scientific prowess. In a similarly titled pamphlet, Why are the Germans so Hated?, Emil Mackel speculated that English and French feelings of “vanity, the thirst for glory and revenge, an avidity for territory and cultural enmity, and above all mistrust and envy – completely ordinary competitive envy – created the hatred

3 Preuß,

Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 15. Hirschfeld, Warum hassen uns die Völker? Eine kriegspsychologische Betrach­ tung (Bonn: A. Marcus & E Webers, 1915), 40. The publication has a copyright date of 1914. 4  Magnus

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that led to this war.”5 Given the complex interplay of cultural, political, and economic forces that fed into it, Mackel concluded that there was, unfortunately, little chance of eliminating or even mitigating such deep antagonism. The only thing to be done was to endure it. “There was and is nothing to be done against this hatred,” Mackel wrote, “we simply have to bear it. People hate us because we are here.”6 Somewhat more positively, the philosopher and sociologist Max Scheler also devoted a probing book to the attempt to uncover The Causes of the Hatred to­ ward Germans, an effort he described as a “national-pedagogical consideration” designed to help his fellow countrymen cope with the painful realization that the “hatred of almost an entire world” was being leveled at them. Rather than ignoring or denying that hatred, Scheler suggested, the Germans should instead acknowledge and try to comprehend it. “The more honestly it is recognized,” he wrote, “and the more deeply this suffering is endured, the more fruitful it can become for the soul of Germany.”7 Scheler never made it entirely clear why he thought embracing the nearly universal animus against the Germans could prove beneficial to their soul. But the general appeal to reflect seriously on the issue as a problem did produce at least one very significant result.8 In the effort to understand what made them so odious in the eyes of the world – and in order, presumably, to prove everyone wrong – many Germans, and preeminent among them Ernst ­Troeltsch, dutifully trained their view inward on themselves in the effort to identify what, exactly, was meant or understood by the word “German.” This publicly performed communal introspection became one of the most important outcomes of the entire war. But, like so much else, it is also something that has frequently been misunderstood. The conclusions drawn from this con5  Emil Mackel, Warum sind die Deutschen so verhaßt? (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann, 1915), 21. 6 Ibid. 7  Max Scheler, Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses. Eine national-pädagogische Erörte­ rung (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1917), 4–5. In 1915, Johann Plenge, who would coin the phrase “the ideas of 1914,” also made this comment in passing: “And then there is the hatred. We will always know that they wanted to annihilate our existence, that they wanted to starve us out. In the future, every German boy will have to go through this lesson. From now on, it will determine our appearance as individuals and as a people both externally and internally.” Johann Plenge, Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft, 2nd. exp. ed. (Münster: Borgmeyer & Co., 1915), 23. 8  Scheler himself published two other lengthy books delving into intellectual, social, and psychological aspects of the war; see Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher, 1915); and Krieg und Aufbau (Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher, 1916). The latter book contains an interesting discussion of Hugo Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, focusing on the question of democracy in Germany and Europe; see Scheler, Krieg und Aufbau, 154–66.

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certed self-analysis have most often been seen not as a product of the war but erroneously as one of its root causes. The Kulturkrieg, in which Germany was portrayed as being essentially different from, even antithetical to, Western civilization – which in practice mainly meant Britain and France – did not rest on any long-standing and broadly-acknowledged understanding of fundamental cultural and political differences setting them apart. Much less did it deliver the intellectual fuel that kindled the war. Rather, the perception of such fundamental differences came about as a result of the war and of the retrospective attempts both during and after it to understand how and why it occurred in the first place.9 The Entente, by describing the Germans not merely as their enemies in combat but as the very enemies of civilization itself, inadvertently provoked a prolonged process of self-examination among the Germans, causing an unprecedented and unanticipated mass soul-searching. It was undertaken not so much, as Scheler proposed, to internalize the hatred of others toward them, but rather to understand what that hatred signified and to discover what, precisely, was so different about themselves that could have given rise to such a violent reaction.10 The fact that this greater appreciation of what “German” might mean to the Germans themselves was undertaken just as everyone else was subjecting everything that it and they represented to remorseless assault was perhaps not the least of the many ironies involved.

9  See the lengthy and meticulous article by Jörg Fisch, “Zivilisation, Kultur,” in Geschicht­ liche Grundbegriffe, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1992), 7, 679–774. Fisch demonstrates that prior to 1914, the two terms were mainly seen as complementary, if not largely identical, with the main difference between them being chronological. However, as he writes: “The concepts ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ became nationalistically loaded and opposed to one another in the twentieth century, which led to this opposition being projected back onto the 19th century;” Fisch, 740. More specifically: “The outbreak of the war of 1914 activated at a stroke the nationalistic potential of the culture-civilization antithesis. Writers from almost all camps, politicians, academics, intellectuals, and artists rushed to portray the antagonism between German and the Western powers as an opposition between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization.’ The two concepts became the embodiments of national characteristics;” Fisch, 760. 10  This attitude among more reflective Germans would continue long after the war; see, for example, Ernst Robert Curtius, Maurice Barrès und die geistigen Grundlagen des französi­ schen Nationalismus (Bonn: Fredrich Cohen, 1921), vii: “As people who want to understand, we must be strong and confident enough to take the measure of these regions of hatred. In these difficult years, in which a new German historical era is beginning, we need the most searching examination of ourselves, our character, and our environment.”

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The British Betrayal Otto Baumgarten, a prominent preacher and professor of theology at the University of Kiel and the man who had become the successor to Adolf von Harnack as the President of the Protestant Social Congress in 1912, spoke for countless numbers of his fellow Germans when he wrote in his memoirs that “the English declaration of war struck many, indeed almost everyone with me, like a lightening bolt from out of the blue. I will never forget as long as I live how I was crushed by that news on the morning before prayer service.”11 This widely shared astonishment over the English declaration of war against Germany may itself strike us as equally surprising. It was after all no secret that the German and British empires were the two most powerful nations in Europe, and arguably the mightiest in the world, and worries about their mutual relations had never been far from mind over the previous two decades. Yet in spite of all the jockeying that had gone on between the two supposedly kindred nations as Germany pursued its Weltpolitik, and despite the obvious provocation that the rapidly expanding German naval fleet represented in particular, the vast majority of Germans had still remained unable to believe that the British, with whom they felt they had so much in common, could or ever would actually go to war against them – and most especially not in league with the Russians, who in German eyes were the very personification of everything that the British, and thus they, were not. “For most, the heaviest blow was England’s entry into the war,” the historian Karl Alexander von Müller wrote. “To find England on the side of Russia against us seemed to more than one person at the time like a betrayal of humanity.”12 When the news of the British declaration of war reached Berlin in the late evening of August 4, the initial incredulity quickly gave way to burning anger and then unbridled fury. The American correspondent Frederic William Wile, who was staying at the Adlon Hotel on the Pariser Platz next to the Brandenburg Gate, recalled hearing crowds that evening outside of his windows “roaring with rage against Britain. ‘Peddler nation!’ ‘Race treachery!’ ‘Down with England!’ ‘Death to the English!’ were the shouts shrieked in stentorian staccato.”13 That same day, Otto Baumgarten, whose wife was of English descent and who harbored more complex feelings toward the island nation than many of his compatriots, admitted that he had felt “completely isolated” among his countrymen who were marching in the streets and chanting the popular slogan “God punish English” – Gott strafe England. But Baumgarten appeared to understand, if not sympathize with, the 11 Otto Baumgarten, Meine Lebensgeschichte (Tübingen: J.  C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1929), 267. 12 Müller, Mars und Venus, 19. 13 Wile, News is Where you Find it, 294.

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emotions behind such displays. “The hatred toward England was, as a result of disappointed love, soon much greater than that toward the ‘hereditary enemy,’” – i.e. France – “from whom one could not expect anything else.”14 Over the next several weeks, as Germans at home tried to establish their bearings within the new and distressing reality, and as intellectuals began their attempts to explain it, there also arose, in addition to feelings of outrage and disbelief, an outpouring of regret and even real sorrow over what many regarded as the incomprehensible and thus all the more traumatic treachery committed by Britain. The conflict with France, as Baumgarten had indicated, seemed more or less inevitable, and in light of recent history at any rate explicable. Nearly everyone agreed on the more elemental menace posed by Russia. But Britain was different. On August 12, the renowned biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who over the years had developed many close ties to British scientists, including Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution Haeckel had substantially helped to popularize, announced that “for eight days cultured humanity has stood horrified, even stunned before the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of the world.”15 Whoever was responsible for bringing the calamity about, the eighty-year-old Haeckel wrote, could be justly branded “the greatest criminal in world history.”16 And for Haeckel there was no question who should be held accountable for what he already called the “world war.” “The greatest portion of the weighty responsibility for the outbreak of the world war,” Haeckel declared, “now falls immediately on England alone.”17 Two days later, on August 14, Eduard Meyer, a distinguished professor of ancient history at the University of Berlin, concurred, asserting – in a brochure published in an impressive edition of 43,000 copies – that “morally and historically England and only England alone bears the responsibility for the most massive conflict that Europe has ever seen.”18 In September, Hermann Oncken also wrote, although somewhat more measuredly, that “among all the experiences that are assailing us, the war with England is the one event whose world-historical importance extends the furthest and that disturbs most profoundly.”19

14 

Baumgarten, 267. Haeckel, Englands Blutschuld am Weltkriege (Eisenach: Oskar Kayser, 1914), 3. On Haeckel, see Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life. Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008). 16  Ibid., 5. 17  Ibid., 6. 18  Eduard Meyer, Deutschland und der Krieg (Berlin: Kameradschaft, 1914), 13. 19  Hermann Oncken, “Deutschland oder England?” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 11/2 (1914), 801. 15  Ernst

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But – and this is a crucial point – it would be a mistake to imagine, on the basis of such enraged or merely anguished outbursts, that there existed a pervasive “anglophobia” in Germany during, and much less before, the war.20 On the contrary, at least among the educated classes there was an equally pronounced anglophilia. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there existed among cultured Germans an intense yearning to be like, as well as to be liked by, the British. Oskar A. H. Schmitz, a popular and prolific writer of the time, representatively wrote in 1915: When the cultivated German of the last decade proclaimed anything like an ideal, then it was that of the English ‘gentleman.’ He was viewed as the truly modern man, as someone who unified a decency of temperament, integrity of methods, and a goal-oriented mastery of life with friendly manners.21

Arnold Schröer, a German-Austrian professor of English at the University of Cologne and later the rector there, also wrote a book in 1915 called On the Char­ acterization of the English, in which he claimed that “the English people are basically honest and truth-loving – I say that and still loudly maintain it even today despite all the bitterness about England’s nefarious policies.”22 And there were countless others who thought the same way. That is not to say, as Schröer himself had also noted, that within Germany there were not many ardent detractors of Britain and its imperial posture, particularly where British policies were seen to conflict with German ambitions. Those critics were especially concentrated within right-wing nationalist groups who mainly wanted Britain to step aside – and if it did not make way willingly, to try to force it to do so. In 1912, Heinrich Claß, the Chairman of the Pan-German League, confirmed his compatriots’ anglophilia by harshly criticizing it. “Everyone in Germany who possesses an education loves and reveres England – apart from its politics,” Claß complained; “more than is healthy, the nationally disoriented and half-educated mimic English culture.”23 The British declaration of war against them certainly helped to change many people’s minds, but more would have to be done, Claß thought, to cure the rest of their delusions.

20  This is the governing thesis in the book by Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). For a different perspective, see Hew Strachan’s critical review in The Journal of Modern History 76 (2004), 225–27. 21  Oskar A. H. Schmitz, Das wirkliche Deutschland. Die Wiedergeburt durch den Krieg (Munich: Georg Müller, 1915), 14. 22  Arnold Schröer, Zur Charakterisierung der Engländer (Bonn: A Marcus & E. Webers, 1915), 33. 23  See the book Claß published under the pseudonym, Daniel Frymann, Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’. Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1912), 146.

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One of the most notorious anti-British agitators was Ernst Count zu Reventlow, also a leading figure in the Pan-German League and from 1908 to 1914 the Editor in Chief of its main organ, the Alldeutsche Blätter.24 In 1915, Reventlow published a work in which he promised to unmask “English politics according to its motives, methods, and consequences,” lending his book the piquant and provocative title The Vampire of the Mainland.25 But, as Reventlow laid out in his preface with the heading “Why this Work Arose,” his purpose was precisely to disabuse his obstinately anglophile countrymen of any remaining illusions they might still be nurturing that the English returned their affection, or even meant the Germans well. In pointedly mocking tones, Reventlow noted how “even after the outbreak of the war […] the notion was widespread in Germany and deeply rooted: it was completely incomprehensible that Great Britain would involve itself in a war against Germany.”26 In his book, Reventlow seemed to relish recreating the contradictory thoughts he imagined must have raced through his fellow Germans’ minds at the opening of hostilities. “How can it be,” Reventlow supposed them thinking, “that England is attacking Germany, and Germany of all nations, whose population has shown the British the most friendly and familial sympathies and wished for nothing more fervently than to live with their ‘cousin’ in a close, if possible contractually regulated relationship.”27 This, the imagined but, Reventlow insisted, completely imaginary confraternal closeness between the English and the Germans is what made the British declaration of war so difficult for his compatriots to understand and even more to accept. Even that, however, was not enough to extinguish entirely the respect and genuine affection many Germans continued to hold for the British. Karl Alexander von Müller, a conservative and wistful anglophile, basically admitted as much in saying that I still esteemed this opponent more highly than all of the others, indeed inwardly loved them; nothing was more repugnant to me than the vulgar denigration of the supposed “peddler nation” or the absurdly self-righteous song of hate, Gott strafe England. Even in the most bitter hostility I saw in it the people of Shakespeare and Milton, the greatest representative of the white race on our planet, and despite all differences our closest relative among all the great nations.28

Notably, most of the German writers who published indignant denunciations of English “perfidy” during the opening weeks of the war also largely refrained 24  Johannes Leicht, Heinrich Claß 1868–1953. Die politische Biographie eines Alldeutschen (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012), 128. 25  Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, Der Vampir des Festlandes. Eine Darstellung der englischen Politik nach ihren Triebkräften, Mitteln und Wirkungen (Berlin: Mittler und Sohn, 1915). 26  Ibid., 1. 27 Ibid. 28 Müller, Mars und Venus, 26–27.

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from wholesale denunciations of the British people, and some even went out of their way to underscore their abiding appreciation of British culture and manners. Hermann Oncken, for example, assured readers that in his criticism he was targeting only the “immoral character of British politics.” Oncken emphatically declared: “I do not intend thereby to insult the individual Englishman, who in my opinion represents one of the highest moral types one can imagine.”29 Ernst Haeckel as well, despite accusing the British of “blood guilt” for the war, insisted that “we do not want the annihilation of an independent Great Britain, the destruction of its unique nationality and cultural work, but we do want the complete liberation from the unbearable yoke under which the British Empire wants to bend all other peoples.”30 (Prophetically, Haeckel did believe that in the long run history would validate his view that the hegemony of Britain over many parts of the world represented an illegitimate exercise of power, adding: “Just as the United States of America separated from its tyrannical Motherland England in 1789, so too, sooner or later, will Canada and Ireland, India and Australia, Egypt and South Africa follow its example.”31) Even Eduard Meyer, the most bitter critic of the three, regretted that “the most serious loss that civilization has sustained through the war is the break between England and Germany.”32 Nevertheless, Meyer argued that it was vital to recognize that “England really is our mortal enemy” and to accept that “the old ties between Germany and England will not be able to be reestablished; in place of the close bond there will be an acrimonious, irreconcilable antagonism for many, many decades.”33

Exterminating the Germ-Huns For the British themselves, of course, the situation was politically and psychologically far different. They were still the dominant world superpower and over the previous century they had grown accustomed to viewing everything from that privileged perspective. Although most Germans, as we have seen, were convinced they were fighting an exclusively defensive battle for their very survival and believed that the nature of that battle justified some actions that they themselves would have ordinarily deplored, for the British the war, and particularly Germany’s actions, represented an unacceptable threat to the delicate balance of power that protected their national and imperial interests. The invasion of Belgium and 29 

Oncken, “Deutschland oder England?” 810. Haeckel, 11. 31 Ibid. 32 Meyer, Deutschland, 20. 33  Ibid., 21. 30 

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the violation of its neutrality, compounded by the unmotivated declaration of war against France, further delivered an unassailable casus belli to the Entente, standing as incontestable facts that no amount of rationalization could ever render moot. As we know, the German Imperial Chancellor himself had also openly acknowledged that entering Belgium had constituted a breach of international law. The seemingly arbitrary killing of Belgian civilians and the wanton destruction of villages and towns, however motivated – and despite the ignorance of those actions among the German populace at large – only deepened the moral pit the Germans had subsequently dug for themselves. The British, armed with righteous indignation over these irrefutable facts, forcefully prosecuted their case with all the means at their disposal, which they did with relentless and ruthless determination. In a book published on October 10, 1914, Why We are at War: Great Britain’s Case, which represented, as its subtitle announced, the joint effort of “Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History,” the “case” it argued was straightforward and undeniable. “The war in which England is now engaged with Germany,” the authors stated, “is fundamentally a war between two different principles – that of raison d’état and that of the rule of law.”34 And although some British writers initially showed some hesitation about indiscriminately maligning their opponents as a people and as a culture, as time went on, and especially after the events in Belgium became known, the tone in Britain became coarser, more ferocious, and soon enough all vestiges of moderation were cast aside. The writer H. G. Wells, for instance, in a brief article published on August 10, initially affected a high-minded, though haughty, pose, stating: “We are fighting Germany. But we are fighting without hatred of the German people. We do not intend to destroy either their freedom or their unity. But we have to destroy an evil system of government and the mental and material corruption that has got hold of the German imagination and taken possession of German life.”35 Despite the patronizing generalizations and the vague but hardly complementary comments about the nature of the German mentality and government, Wells’s words would soon seem like a model of restraint compared to what followed. George Saunders, a lead writer for The Times and regarded as “one of the, if not the, most distinguished foreign correspondents of his day,”36 was credited for having done “more than any writer to reveal to the world the true character of 34 

Why We are at War: Great Britain’s Case (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1914), 108. H. G. Wells, “Why Britain Went to War,” The War Illustrated. Album de Luxe. The Story of the Great European War told by Camera, Pen and Pencil, ed. J. A. Hammerton (London: Amalgamated Press, 1915), 1, 10. 36  George Saunders on Germany 1919–1920. Correspondence and Memoranda, ed. and intro. Keith M. Wilson (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1987), 1. 35 

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German policy and its militant tendencies.”37 On August 20, 1914, in a private letter to his sister, Saunders revealed his personal view of the Germans’ “true character.” “The Prussians have never been wholly civilised,” Saunders told his sister. “They are still semi-savages.”38 Nine days later he wrote to her again in a similar vein: “the whole edifice built up by William II has been a piece of barbarism and ought to be abolished from the face of the earth. That will be difficult, however, even if the Allies win; […] But tamed and cowed the German spirit must be.”39 Publicly, Saunders aired his opinions in his many newspaper articles, capping them off with a book he published in the autumn of 1914 called The Last of the Huns, in which he launched a scabrous assault on Wilhelm II and his twenty-six-year reign.40 And things only deteriorated from there. In late 1914, Ramsay Muir, professor of history at the University of Manchester, issued a book outlining his own version of Britain’s Case Against Germany, concluding that the war was “a struggle between honour and dishonour, between freedom supported by law and tyranny of brute force, between the morality of civilisation and the morality of the jungle.”41 Stoked by such sentiments, everything German became anathema throughout Britain. The Anti-German Union, which formed in the early days of the war (later to be refashioned as the British Empire Union) called for a country-wide boycott of German products and employees, asking shopkeepers to put up signs that read “No German Goods Sold” and “No Germans Served.” It also sponsored a “Consumer’s Pledge” that stated: “We pledge ourselves not to deal with any firm which to our knowledge is German controlled, has Germans in its employ, or knowingly deals with German goods.”42 A nadir of sorts was reached on May 15, 1915, just over a week after the sinking of the Lusitania, when Horatio Bottomley, a former MP for the Liberal Party and an infamous rabble-rouser, announced in the journal he published called John Bull that he was declaring in the name of all England a “blood feud” against the Germans – or, as Bottomley preferred to call them, the “Germ-huns” – adding: “you cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it.”43 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 

Ibid., 1–2. George Saunders, The Last of the Huns (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1914). 41  Ramsay Muir, Britain’s Case Against Germany. An Examination of the Historical Back­ ground of the German Action in 1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1914), 194. 42  Panikos Panayi, The Enemy In Our Midst. Germans in Britain During the First World War (New York: Berg, 1991), 205. 43  Cited in G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 772. 40 

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The Mobilization of Opinion Just as the war itself had caught nearly everyone off guard, if in different ways and to different degrees, it also found every country completely unprepared for the deluge of information it immediately unleashed. And, like everything else, information, too, had to be assembled, organized, and managed in order to be effective. As Harold Lasswell wrote in his pioneering study of propaganda during the World War, it was only after the conflict had begun that “it came to be recognized that the mobilization of men and means was not sufficient; there must be a mobilization of opinion.”44 And, for all of the importance of propaganda, it was often enough the lack of information that played a decisive role in shaping the perceptions and actions of the participants. It has, for example, often not been sufficiently appreciated, as Lasswell’s remark implies, that at the beginning of the conflict there was no central, government-controlled office in any of the combatant nations that was responsible for gathering, coordinating, and disseminating the masses of information that entered into and emanated from each country.45 In Britain it was only the day after it entered hostilities that the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, mandated that a “Press Bureau” be created that would assume authority for censoring the British press and for reporting on military activities. Yet it was not until September 5 that the government finally appointed C. F. G. Masterman, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, to establish the so-called “War Propaganda Bureau.” Masterman set up his new bureau in the same block of flats known as Wellington House that had previously housed the National Insurance Commission in Buckingham Gate.46 “For the next two years, Wellington House was the main centre of British propaganda organization, working very effectively but in such secrecy that even parliament was largely ignorant of its existence.”47 Under Masterman’s leadership, the War Propaganda Bureau would quickly become a highly efficient if somewhat shadowy operation, and by June of the following year it would have already issued more than 2.5 million books, pamphlets, government proclamations, and bro-

44 Harold

Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1927), 14. 45  Lasswell writes: “The Military Authorities had to build their work from the ground up. At the outbreak of the war there was but a single official who had contact with the Press;” Lasswell, 22. 46  See M. L. Sanders, “Wellington House and British Propaganda during the First World War,” The Historical Journal 18/1 (1975), 119. 47 Ibid.

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chures in seventeen different languages, aimed principally at influencing opinion in America and other neutral states.48 At first, the situation in Germany was no less disorganized and chaotic. Kurt Kosyk, a scholarly authority on the subject, found that “there is no evidence of a central supervision of the coverage of foreign affairs in the German press before the outbreak of the First World War.”49 Matthias Erzberger, the Catholic Centre Party politician, symptomatically complained in his memoirs that “the world war found the German people militarily, economically, and politically unprepared.”50 That general verdict applied equally, Erzberger added, to the critical management of information. It was not until a full three weeks after the conflict had begun that Erzberger was first approached by two naval officers to discuss the establishment of a central press office for influencing foreign opinion.51 One of the officers was Heinrich Löhlein, Chief of the News Bureau of the Imperial Navy Office, which Admiral von Tirpitz had turned into such an effective instrument for promoting his naval plan. Erzberger, who was known as a reliable advocate of naval expansion in the Reichstag and enjoyed the respect and trust of Tirpitz, was nonetheless initially skeptical about the proposal, saying he feared that, given the late start, “successful work in this area” had already become all but “impossible.” It was only after the two officers urged him to take on the assignment by appealing to his “love of fatherland” that Erzberger reluctantly agreed.52 However, in the ensuing weeks even more valuable time was wasted on internal politics – there were twenty-seven independent agencies throughout the German military that had to be persuaded and even forced, often against great resistance, to cooperate with a central civilian authority – and it was not until the first week of October that the Zentralstelle für Auslandsdienst, the “Central Office for Foreign Service,” began operating under the aegis of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 48  Michael Jeismann, “Propaganda,” in Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, ed. Gerhard Hirsch­ feld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz, 2nd. ed. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004), 204. See also Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany. British Academics 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 171. 49  See Kurt Koszyk, Deutsche Pressepolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1968), 84. This older work has been partially superceded by Martin Creutz, Die Pressepolitik der kaiserlichen Regierung während des Ersten Weltkriegs. Die Exekutive, die Journalisten und der Teufelskreis der Berichterstattung (Franfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1996). See also the comments in Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt!’ Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Welt­ krieg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996), 15. 50 Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 1. 51  Ibid., 4. See Klaus Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959), 98–105. 52 Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 5.

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But just how unprepared the Germans were, and how devastating the initial absence of coordinated planning could be, would fully emerge in those two intervening months. One of the first actions Britain had undertaken after the declaration of war demonstrated a shrewd understanding of the incalculable value of information, which meant controlling its flow and, where possible, suppressing it altogether. On August 5, England severed all German undersea telegraph cables running under the Atlantic Ocean and disabled or interfered with German wireless transmitters and telegraph stations around the world, making it exceedingly difficult for Germany to communicate outside of Europe or even very far beyond its own borders.53 The German cables and coaling stations in the Pacific [as well as] the long range wireless telegraph station in South-West Africa, the radio telegraphy post in Togoland – the entire system of German colonial communications and naval forces that depended on them: these the authorities in London regarded as a menace both to Britain’s control of the seas and protection of her colonial territories.54

Through those targeted actions on the first full day of the war, England made sure that Germany was literally cut off from the rest of the world. Compounding the problem, German military officials, in addition to imposing strict domestic censorship, had also inexplicably ordered that no printed materials be permitted to leave the country during the first several weeks of the war. As Erzberger observed: “German newspapers, which could have been the most effective means for providing calm elucidation to the neutral countries and our enemies, were stuck lying in enormous bales at the border stations.”55 There was even one reported instance of a bag of official German dispatches that was sent back to Berlin from the border, undelivered and unopened.56 For almost all of August, with virtually no news or other information either entering or leaving the country, most of Germany subsisted in an informational vacuum, sequestered behind a wall of silence that was imposed from without and reinforced from within. This nearly total isolation not only kept the German people ignorant of 53  David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918. The Sins of Omission (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000), 22. 54 Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 36. See also Aloys Meister, Ka­ belkrieg und Lügenfeldzug (Münster: Borgmeyer & Co., 1914). 55 Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 4. The Assistant Minister of Education of Prussia, Friedrich Schmitt-Ott, also deplored the “foolish ban on exporting newspapers” at the beginning of the war; see Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, Erlebtes und Erstrebtes 1860–1950 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1952), 143. 56 Hammann, Bilder aus der letzten Kaiserzeit, 125. Hammann also mentions that the German military censors did not permit German newspapers to leave the country.

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the full reality of the unfolding situation outside of the country, it also, and no less decisively, gave their adversaries almost complete control from the outset in shaping the developing narrative of the conflict.57 The consequences that this virtual informational quarantine had for Germany cannot be overstated. For one thing, although German newspapers often provided detailed, if highly selective, accounts of German victories in battle, they resolutely downplayed or omitted entirely any mention of setbacks or challenges, and German defeats were never reported or acknowledged. All operational details that the censors felt might aid the enemy were suppressed, and any attempt to circumvent official strictures was met with a harsh response. On August 8, General Gustav von Kessel, who possessed executive power over all of Berlin during the war, announced that “the printing of news regarding military affairs is prohibited,” adding that “from now on, measures of force will be resorted to against the transgressors. Public warnings have not been lacking.”58 The policy of publishing only positive news and burying all negative reports also inevitably created unrealistic expectations at home, leading most people to the logical but erroneous conclusion that the war was going well, and certainly much better than many had initially feared.59 Most crucially, few people in Germany had any awareness of the actual nature and scope of the incidents taking place in Belgium. This ignorance would also prove to have significant political repercussions. For as August unfolded, the anxiety of the initial days and weeks began to give way to a growing but false sense of relief and even optimism, prompting some, particularly but not solely within nationalist groups such as the Pan-German League, to begin indulging in fantasies of territorial expansion on both the eastern and western frontiers of the country and to dream of extensive additional acquisitions outside of Europe itself.

57  Thus

M. L. Sanders’s claim that “at the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Germans poured out propaganda in the form of posters, leaflets and pamphlets, in an attempt to explain Germany’s entry into the war and discredit the motives of the allies,” is inaccurate, as is the assertion that British efforts were thus undertaken “in order to counteract the dissemination by Germany of false news abroad;” M. L. Sanders, 119. Similarly inaccurate is Messinger’s assertion that in Britian “official propaganda expanded mainly in reaction to German propaganda;” Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992), 19. 58  Cited from Alice Goldbarb Marquis, “Words as Weapons: Propaganda in Britain and Germany During the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 13/3 (1978), 471. 59  See Koszyk, 19.

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The Battle of the Marne But already on September 5, there commenced one of the most fateful events of the entire war. On that day, what became known as the Battle of the Marne began, fought along a tributary of the River Seine east of Paris. The battle would last a mere six days, but it delivered to the Entente its first major military success and, more important, it permanently halted the German advance on the French capital, which in turn effectively derailed the Schlieffen plan and upended the entire German military strategy. The person in command of the German forces, General Helmuth von Moltke, was acutely aware of the stakes involved, and he wrote in his diary on the first day of the battle that “today the great decision will be made.” “If I have to give up my life today in order to win thereby a victory,” he reflected, “I would do it cheerfully a thousand times over, just as thousands of our brothers are doing today and thousands have already done.”60 Only four days later, on September 9, as the likely outcome of the battle became evident, Moltke knew he was witnessing a disaster: It is going badly. The battles to the east of Paris are going to fall out to our disadvantage. One of our armies must retreat, the others will have to follow. The start of the war, which had begun so full of hope, will turn into the opposite. – I must bear what happens and I will stand or fall with my country. We will be smothered in the battle against the east and west. – How different it was when we began the campaign so brilliantly a few weeks ago – the bitter disappointment now follows. And we will have to pay for everything that has been destroyed.61

It soon turned out that Moltke’s apprehensions were fully justified, but the consequences were exponentially worse. The inability to advance past the Marne to take Paris was perhaps the single greatest tactical failure of the war, resulting in the virtually immobile entrenchment of the opposing armies along the seven hundred and twenty-five kilometers of the Western Front. During the next four years the line shifted little in either direction despite many desperate efforts to move it on both sides, consuming millions of lives in the process. Here, too, however, and perhaps most egregiously, German officials rigorously adhered to their policy of not informing the public about any negative developments in the prosecution of the war. Almost unbelievably, no mention of the Battle of the Marne and its outcome ever appeared in any official German publication for the entire duration of the conflict.62 60 Helmuth von Moltke, Erinnerungen, Briefe, Dokumente 1877–1916. Ein Bild vom Kriegs­ausbruch, erster Kriegsführung und Persönlichkeit des ersten militärischen Führers des Krieges, ed. Eliza von Moltke (Stuttgart: Der Kommende Tag, 1922), 384. 61  Ibid., 385. 62  See the introduction by Fritz Fischer to Karl Lange, Marneschlacht und deutsche Öffent­

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To be fair, even the German military leadership did not seem to comprehend, or to accept, the full consequences of the defeat until months later, preferring to see it more narrowly as a personal failure on the part of Moltke himself, which they thought could be solved simply by replacing him.63 And to his credit, Erich von Falkenhayn, who succeeded Moltke as Chief of the German General Staff following the debacle on the Marne, began pressing the civilian leadership by the end of September to let the German people know about the unfavorable military situation. But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stubbornly resisted any such candor, fearing otherwise unspecified “unpredictable consequences abroad.”64 Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg himself agreed with this judgment and he personally prevented any public discussion or mention of the loss. Even Clemens von Delbrück, the Vice Imperial Chancellor and Secretary of the Interior – which meant that he held “essentially the leadership of domestic politics” in his hands while Bethmann Hollweg was absent from Berlin – said that “the turnaround the war experienced through the Battle of the Marne was discernable only much later to all civilians, and I, too, was unable to obtain a clear picture about the military situation either from the Imperial Chancellor himself or from the military authorities before the beginning of 1915.”65 In his memoirs, Bethmann sought to justify this prohibition on telling the truth by saying that he had not wanted the German people to be “bewildered” in their “absolute certainty of victory,” which “regardless of all the self-deception that it entailed was a factor of immense importance for morale.”66 Bethmann even revealed that he was convinced that the dangers of “such a disillusionment” were so great that it could have led to a weakening of “resilience” and perhaps even threatened the monarchy itself.67 In hindsight, the decision to restrict information so tightly is obviously questionable on any number of grounds. Bethmann’s patronizing attitude toward the German people and even toward his own staff could not have been more clearly expressed, indicating that he had little faith in their ability to confront reality and make rational judgments for themselves. And it revealed an even more troubling lichkeit 1914–1939. Eine verdrängte Niederlage und ihre Folgen (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1974), 7. 63  Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn. Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1994), 185. 64 Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 210. 65  Clemens von Delbrück, Die wirtschaftliche Mobilmachung in Deutschland 1914 (Munich: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1924), 115–16. 66  Bethmann Hollweg, Betrachtungen, 2, 25. 67  Ibid., 26. See on this issue more broadly Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg und die öffentliche Meinung 1914–1917,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 17 (1969), 117–59.

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willingness to manipulate information, and hence the nation, in order to achieve political ends, as reasonable as those ends might have been in themselves, no matter how costly the means. Granted, the military applied its draconian censorship rules on everyone, including the Imperial Chancellor, and even his own “influence on newspapers – the most important means of exercising political power – was monitored and bound by the supervision of the military authorities.”68 But it also stands as yet another example of the self-defeating political obtuseness and even naiveté within the German leadership that had already produced a number of self-sabotaging results. For they ought to have realized that the truth would eventually and unavoidably emerge, which would lead to the same effect on public opinion as they originally feared. But once that truth did come to light, the effect would be even worse because the revelations exposed the German government as having been either incompetent or dishonest – or, rather, as was in fact the case, both at once. Predictably enough, by mid-September 1914 what the French began to hail as le Miracle de la Marne was being celebrated throughout Western Europe in posters, leaflets, and newspapers, making it only a matter of time before the news made its way to Germany as well – at least unofficially. For, in another instance of poorly thought-out policies, although the flow of information across borders was strictly if not always effectively regulated, German citizens themselves were still allowed to travel freely to and within neutral countries, where they inevitably learned of the “miracle of the Marne” and much else besides, leaving them understandably perplexed and unsure about what, or whom, to believe. In late September, Otto Baumgarten went to Amsterdam in neutral Holland to visit relatives there, where he also met some refugees who had fled the Belgian town of Antwerp. Baumgarten wrote that he was positively struck by the friendly and sympathetic welcome his hosts showed him, but noted that they were “surprised that I apologized for the scandalous violation of international law in the Belgian invasion.” But what disturbed Baumgarten most was when he read “on all the walls the French reports of victory in the Battle of the Marne; I was deeply shocked. To be sure, I refused to believe the news, but I retained a thorn of mistrust in my heart toward our war coverage.”69 Similarly, during the early part of September the Social Democratic economist Lujo Brentano was on vacation in Florence, in likewise neutral Italy, and only on his return home through Switzerland did he hear about what had happened in France. “As long as the war lasted,” Brentano wrote in his memoirs, “nothing was published by the German government about the Battle of the Marne and its unfortunate outcome, and I 68 

Otto Hammann, Bilder aus der letzten Kaiserzeit (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1922), 127. Lebensgeschichte, 271.

69 Baumgarten,

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remember how, when I spoke about it after I returned, I was ridiculed by my colleagues in Munich for my ‘credulity’.”70 Gerhard Anschütz also recalled that he learned “practically nothing from the German newspapers about the importance and the far-reaching implications of the Battle of the Marne,” adding that he gained “clarity only through the press of the neutral states,” which he said left him “deeply alarmed.”71 The same consternation mixed with skepticism regarding foreign news reports applied to the scattered accounts of abuses in Belgium and Northern France that began to trickle into Germany at the time. While he was in Italy, Brentano had seen placards “on every corner” blaring that the Germans had bombarded Reims, which he considered a “blatant lie, because the last thing that we had heard on our departure from Munich was that the Germans had conquered Reims on September 7 after a fourteen-day siege, and one does not bombard a city that one occupies.”72 Brentano was so agitated by what he read in the Italian papers, which he thought contained “such an abundance of obviously false accusations toward the German military leadership and the German troops,” that he wrote to his colleague Gustav von Schmoller, a fellow economist at the University of Berlin, saying that he did not understand why nothing was being done in Ger­ many to counter these “defamations.”73 Schmoller quickly informed Brentano that a plan to issue a “declaration” was in fact already underway, backed by a number of writers, academics, and artists “of the first rank,” and Schmoller asked Brentano to add his name to the list. Since Brentano did not know what the exact wording of the declaration would be, he initially declined to take part without reading it first. Schmoller sent another urgent telegram to Brentano telling him that, given the sensitivity of the matter, it was impossible to telegraph the full text of the declaration and that time was of the essence. Schmoller tried to reassure him by saying that the unimpeachable reputations of those who were already on board should give him confidence that the declaration would not contain anything objectionable, adding that great importance was attached to Brentano’s own endorsement. “In the firm conviction that the universally known discipline of the German army excluded the possibility that the accusations leveled against it were true,” Brentano later explained, “I gave my consent.”74 70 

Lujo Brentano, Mein Leben im Kampf um die soziale Entwicklung Deutschlands (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1931), 318. 71 Anschütz, Aus meinem Leben, 158. 72 Brentano, Mein Leben, 316. 73  Ibid., 316–17. 74  Ibid., 317.

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The Manifesto of the 93 The “declaration” that Schmoller encouraged his colleague to sign, and to which Brentano, ignoring a cautionary inner voice, finally agreed to add his name, was the infamous appeal “To the Civilized World!” – An die Kulturwelt! – published on October 4, 1914 and sent to over 10,000 influential people throughout the world.75 It was endorsed by some of the most prominent figures of the day in Germany, including numerous leading lights in politics and academia such as Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Lamprecht, Friedrich Naumann, Eduard Meyer, Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. It was also signed by a number of well-known artists and cultural figures, including Max Liebermann, Max Reinhardt, Franz von Stuck, and Hans Thoma. In all, there were ninety-three signatories on the appeal – causing it to be informally known as the “Manifesto of the 93” – most of whom, like Brentano, had not seen the text before agreeing to commit their names and reputations to it.76 No doubt, many of them, like Brentano as well, were convinced that the wild allegations about German misdeeds were not just baseless but also the product of rank malice. And given the informational blockade since the war had begun, almost no one would have heard anything besides rumor and innuendo to the contrary. What reports did make it into Germany – the furious vilifications of the Germans as “huns” and “barbarians,” the lurid accounts of wanton mutilation, arson, and vandalism – seemed so absurd and inconceivable, not to say grotesque, that it is easy to imagine many Germans thought that the more specific allegations about atrocities committed in Belgium and elsewhere were either gross exaggerations or merely cynical fabrications. The appeal An die Kulturwelt! thus had inauspicious origins, reflecting both the effects of the stringent German censorship policy and the continuing lack of a centrally organized professional information bureau to implement it. On the one hand, “the military men in charge had little contact with ordinary people” and thus had little sense of what German citizens wanted or needed to know. And on the other, “those who had such experience – the publishers and journalists – were systematically excluded from information policy-making.”77 People out75 

See Bernhard vom Brocke, “‘Wissenschaft und Militarismus.’ Der Aufruf der 93 ‘An die Kulturwelt!’ und der Zusammenbruch der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Wilamowitz nach 50 Jahren, eds. William M. Calder 111, Hellmut Flashar and Theo­ dor Lindken (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 649–719. 76  See Hans Wehberg, Wider den Aufruf der 93! Das Ergebnis einer Rundfrage an die 93 Intellektuellen über die Kriegsschuld (Charlottenburg: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik u. Geschichte, 1920), 11. 77  Marquis, 489.

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side official circles, hearing scattered reports from abroad about events that their own government shrouded in silence, felt that they had no choice but to take matters into their own hands to come to the defense of their national reputation. To make matters worse, contrary to Schmoller’s assurances to Lujo Brentano, the proclamation did not emerge from a well-planned strategy but was instead the product of an impulsive, emotional reaction to rapidly evolving and poorly understood events. Schmoller had not even come up with the idea himself; an ordinary concerned citizen with international ties had originally suggested it to him. On September 9, an article had appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt with the title “On the Effect of the English Lie.”78 The author, Anka Mann, had wanted to enlighten readers about the impact that English propaganda was having on world opinion, especially in the neutral states. The depictions of Germany in the English press, Mann wrote, were depressing and deeply damaging. Among other things, Mann explained, one read in English papers that: In times of war, Germany is and remains a “barbarian state,” but in peace a barely cultivated land, where industriousness and goodwill and discipline – above all discipline – substitute for any higher refinement. That is what the Englishman preaches and that is what the world believes. If I could actually find among foreigners the ten Just Ones who believe in Germany, as I do, who are capable of seeing how tremendous the inner victory that Germany achieved in the first days of August, I know in advance that not one of these “ten” would grant to Germany an unrestricted external victory. For they all imagine the specter of militarism, which will then dominate the world in order to trample everything under its iron heel and crush every fine blossom that is produced by art and science. No one, unless it is a German, believes that this is a people’s war, a crusade, for Germany. One sees only the Prussian soldier with his spiked helmet and drill, and not the people who have arisen in order to fight for their culture, for the finest, dearest, most tender thing they possess – for their German soul.”79

The day after the article appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt, a businessman named Erich Buchwald wrote a letter to the well-known dramatist Hermann Sudermann drawing his attention to the piece. Buchwald told Sudermann that, thanks to his own extensive professional connections throughout the world, he was able to confirm that “the public opinion of basically all countries has been poisoned by the system of English lies and is completely turned against us.” To counter this development, Buchwald suggested that an “appeal” delivered by “great minds” would convincingly set the record straight by telling the “truth” to the world.80 That seemed like a good idea to Sudermann, who immediately set about turning Buchwald’s proposal into reality. In close cooperation with another popular playwright, Ludwig Fulda, who wrote a first draft, and with the logistical support of 78 

Ungern-Sternberg, “An die Kulturwelt!,” 17. Ibid., 18. 80  From a letter by Erich Buchwald to Hermann Sudermann, September 10, 1914; cited in Ungern-Sternberg, “An die Kulturwelt!,” 164. 79 

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the mayor of Berlin, Georg Reicke (who was also a successful novelist), a text was quickly assembled, a list of suitable luminaries drawn up to sign it, and in just over two weeks after its inception the appeal was ready to be sent out to enlighten a hostile and, they thought, benighted world. In retrospect, it is easy to see that the entire undertaking provided the recipe for a public relations disaster. A group of well-meaning but dilettantish private citizens, acting on incomplete, second-hand information and relying predominantly on personal conviction rather than on demonstrable facts, took it upon themselves to defend their nation’s honor by repudiating supposed “lies” they thought were being deliberately spread about it. But in the heat of their feelings of offense and outrage over the perceived injustices being done to Germany and its reputation, and in their unshakable certainty that German troops were incapable of committing the deeds they imagined were being slanderously ascribed to them, they forgot that in order to tell the truth one first has to make sure that one knows what is true. The manifesto, issued simultaneously in German as well as in translation into ten other languages, read in full (in the contemporary English version):

To the Civilized World! As representatives of German Science and Art, we hereby protest to the civilized world, against the lies and calumnies with which our enemies are endeavoring to stain the honour of Germany in her hard struggle for existence, – in a struggle which has been forced upon her. – The iron mouth of events has proved the untruth of the fictitious German defeats, consequently mispresentation and calumny are all the more eagerly at work. As heralds of truth we raise our voices against these. It is not true that Germany is guilty of having caused this war. Neither the people, the government, nor the “Kaiser” wanted war. Germany did her utmost to prevent it; for this assertion the world has documental proof. Often enough during the 26 years of his reign has Wilhelm II shown himself to be the upholder of peace, and often enough has this fact been acknowledged by our opponents. Nay, even the “Kaiser,” they now dare to call an Attila, has been ridiculed by them for years, because of his steadfast endeavors to maintain universal peace. Not till a numerical superiority which had been lying in wait on the frontiers assailed us, did the whole nation rise to a man. It is not true that we trespassed in neutral Belgium. It has been proved that France and England had resolved on such a trespass, and it has likewise been proved that Belgium had agreed to their doing so. It would have been suicide on our part not to have been beforehand. It is not true that the life and property of a single Belgian citizen was injured by our soldiers without the bitterest self-defence having made it necessary; for again, and again, notwithstanding the repeated threats, the citizens lay in ambush, shooting at the troops out of the houses, mutilating the wounded, and murdering in cold blood the medical men while they were doing their Samaritan work. – There can be no baser abuse than the suppression of these crimes with the view of letting the Germans appear to be criminals, only for having justly punished these assassins for their wicked deeds.

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It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our troops with aching hearts, were obliged to fire on a part of the town, as a punishment. The greatest part of Louvain has been preserved. The famous Town Hall stands quite intact; for at great self-sacrifice our solders saved it from destruction by the flames. Every German would of course greatly regret, if in the course of this terrible war any works of art should already have been destroyed or be destroyed at some future time, but inasmuch as in our love for art we cannot be surpassed by any other nation, in the same degree we must decidedly refuse to buy a German defeat at the cost of saving a work of art. It is not true that our warfare pays no respect to international laws. It knows no undisciplined cruelty. But in the east, the earth is saturated with the blood of women and children unmercifully butchered by the wild Russian troops, and in the west, Dum-Dum-bullets mutilate the breasts of our soldiers. Those who have allied themselves with Russians and Servians, and present such a shameful scene to the world as that of inciting Mongolians and Negroes against the white race, have no right whatever to call themselves the upholders of civilization. It is not true that the combat against our so-called militarism is not a combat against our civilization, as our enemies hypocritically pretend it is. Were it not for German militarism, German civilization would long since have been extirpated. For its protection it arose in a land which for centuries had been plagued by bands of robbers, as no other land has been. The German army and the German people are one, and today, this consciousness fraternises 70 millions of Germans, all ranks, positions and parties being one. We cannot wrest the poisonous weapon – the lie – out of the hands of our enemies. All we can do is to proclaim to the world, that our enemies are giving false witness against us. You, who know us, who with us have protected the most holy possessions of man, we call to you: Believe us! Believe that we shall carry on this war to the end as a civilized nation, to whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Kant is just as sacred as its own hearth and homes. For this we pledge you our names and honor.81

Unlike those who put their name to the appeal To the Civilized World!, Theodor Wolff, with his privileged access to the international press, knew what the truth was, or rather knew that the truth was more complicated than the authors of the appeal seemed to assume. On October 8, four days after the declaration was published, Wolff wrote in his diary: it is a continuously unpleasant task to read the foreign papers, whether they are French or English, Italian or Dutch, Danish or Western Swiss. Only one chorus: Germany is defeated and at the abyss, only one leitmotif: the atrocities of the German vandals. Nothing but depictions of devastation, with burned-down villages and towns, shot hostages, women and children stabbed to death, looted private houses, museums, and palaces.82

All of those reported incidents, however, were not lies, but true. Wolff went on to record that he had been privy to an official army order that had been signed by General Karl Baron von Plettenberg, the Commander of the Guards Corps on the Western Front. The order, Wolff wrote, was something “that I would not like to see made public: in it, the troops are under strict orders: if, after the demand to 81  82 

Ungern-Sternberg, “An die Kulturwelt!,” 162–63. Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 104.

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hand over weapons, any weapons are found anywhere, to shoot the hostages immediately.”83 Kurt Riezler, the chief political adviser to Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, also kept a diary in which he revealed he had access to similar information. “A cuirassier officer told of the executions in small towns, all men between the ages of 16 to 60, thousands shot in rows on the meadows, every tenth corpse lay one step up. The women had to bury them.”84 At the end of November, Wolff relayed another highly sensitive incident regarding German actions, noting that he had spoken with an officer who had been serving on the Western Front at Ypres. Wolff asked the officer “if he had established that our soldiers killed English prisoners.” The officer responded that “he knew of such a case.”85 And in a conversation somewhat later between Wolff and the Imperial Chancellor – whose eldest son, Friedrich, was killed in early December at the age of twenty-four on the Eastern Front at Srocko – Bethmann Hollweg told Wolff: “In general I am against publishing too many stories of atrocities. German atrocities – French, Russian – people talk too much about that.” Wolff countered by saying: “Unfortunately, much of what they say is true. And that includes, despite all the exaggerations, much about the stories of German atrocities.” “Yes,” Bethmann frankly admitted, “that can by no means be denied.”86 But beyond having access to reliable information few ordinary people had, Theodor Wolff, as a professional newspaper man with almost three decades of experience behind him, was also in a better position to judge the likely impact the appeal To the Civilized World! would have on public opinion abroad. Not surprisingly, his verdict was damning. Referring to the organizers of the initiative, he wrote in his diary, again on October 8: “They are all people who have no idea what they are doing, but, because they have stayed home, would like to be engaged or push themselves to the fore.”87 Wolff noted that, in addition to the many factual inaccuracies he knew the manifesto contained, which would inevitably undermine whatever credibility and effectiveness it could have otherwise had, the signers themselves had taken on a moral burden that they were surely unaware of and, had they considered it, could not support: they “had assumed the guarantee that no German soldier was capable of an act of depravity.”88 As the

83 

Ibid., 105. Kurt Riezler, Tagebücher – Aufsätze – Dokmente, ed. and intro. Karl Dietrich Erdmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), 216–17; this is from a diary entry on October 11, 1914. 85  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 124. 86  Ibid., 154. 87  Ibid., 104. 88  Ibid., 104–05. 84 

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actual facts revealed, and as any impartial survey of history would have shown, crimes and atrocities of all sorts are the inevitable companion of all war. But of more pressing practical importance, Wolff thought, was that the declaration in and of itself would necessarily fail. “Of course,” Wolff went on to write, all such proclamations and demonstrations will remain ineffective and would achieve only the opposite of the intended goal because they testify to ignorance and sacrifice the whole for a part. One sees from them, for example, that the authors know nothing at all about the retreat from the Marne and they are being ridiculed outside of Germany, where the retreat in all of its details is being followed so closely. Needless acts of violence, senseless shootings of hostages, etc. have occurred, far too many villages have been incinerated, theft of private property and so on is also not unknown.89

The contrast between Wolff’s cool recitation of established facts and the hyperventilation of the manifesto’s false claims could hardly be greater. Yet Wolff himself was caught in the opposite and unenviable predicament of knowing the truth but being unable to reveal it. It was impossible to issue a public rebuttal of the manifesto correcting its distortions and falsifications. For one thing, it would have publicly given the lie to the Burgfrieden policy of maintaining national unanimity at all costs. And for another, the resulting revelations of the actual truth would have been not just embarrassing but potentially devastating to the German cause. The only available course of action was to try to contain the damage already done. The Press Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Otto Hammann, revealed to Wolff that he, too, had been “beside himself” when he read To the Civilized World! and that he had immediately “prevented any further dissemination” of it.90 But it was already too late. Given the German decision not to allow any information to leave the country at the beginning of the war, the declaration An die Kulturwelt! self-righteously proclaiming “the truth” was the first thing that many people outside of the country had heard directly from Germany since August 1. To say that it failed to achieve its aim would be an understatement. The manifesto, adorned by the ninety-three illustrious names, became one of the greatest propaganda triumphs of the war – for the West. In the assessment of the future and last Imperial Chancellor of Germany, Prince Max von Baden, the document that “wanted to deny war atrocities itself became a famous war atrocity.”91 At a stroke, the “Manifesto of the 93,” instead of shoring up the national cause, almost entirely wiped away whatever goodwill remained toward Germany among the dwindling number of its friends abroad. Where such sympathy sur89 

Ibid., 105. Ibid., 116. 91  Prinz Max von Baden, Die moralische Offensive. Deutschlands Kampf um sein Recht (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1921), 13. 90 

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vived, the manifesto rendered it politically and socially untenable. And for those who needed no persuasion to think ill of “the Huns,” the German appeal merely proved what they had been thinking and saying all along. As Alfred Capus wrote in Le Figaro on October 15: The notorious German intellectuals have, through their declaration that their culture is inseparable from Prussian militarism, covered themselves with shame before the entire world … Nonetheless the document, through which they have made their names despicable and ridiculous for all time, possesses a certain interest, for it permits us to form an image of public opinion in Germany. The basic tenor of this text is arrogance … and this arrogance apparently is, day by day and more and more, coming closer to insanity. One offers to this conceit distortions of the truth that are as crude as the inventions that savages employ to explain the secrets of nature; and a Röntgen, a Haeckel, a Sudermann seem to be satisfied with them.92

Even after the war was over, in 1919, the President of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, still described the appeal as the “astonishing self-prostitution of German scholarship and science.”93 That same year, in a speech before the French Senate, the Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau remained so incensed over the manifesto that he went so far as to call it a “worse crime than all the other deeds we know of.”94 Even a decade later, Clemenceau devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to excoriating the “German professors” who had lent their names to the offensive document, sarcastically deriding them as “superintellectuals” who had sought to “justify the most bloody and the least defensible military aggression against the great seats of civilization.”95 But more than the reputations of individual German intellectuals and of the institutions they represented were tarnished by the episode, and the backlash did not come just from abroad.96 Immediately after the war, Kurt Mühsam published a book called How We were Lied To, in which he mounted a furious indictment against the German media. Mühsam subjected newspapers, publishing houses, and official state press offices to scorching criticism for their distorted reporting, or non-reporting, of known facts and events.97 He denounced the German government and military for the same reason, condemning them for having exploited 92 

Ungern-Sternberg, “An die Kulturwelt!,” 97. Cited in Wehberg, 30. Butler had studied in Germany in the mid-1880s. 94  Ibid., 31. 95  Georges Clemenceau, Grandeurs et misères d’une victoire (Paris: Plon, 1930), 234–35. This passage is from Chapter 15, sardonically titled “Sensibilité allemande.” 96  The appeal gave the impetus to the physician and pacifist Georg Friedrich Nicolai to write a counter-appeal “To the Europeans” and eventually lead to his fascinating “peace book;” see Georg Friedrich Nicolai, Die Biologie des Krieges. Betrachtungen eines Naturforschers den Deutschen zur Besinnung (Zurich: Art. Institut Orell Füssli, 1919). 97  Kurt Mühsam, Wie wir belogen wurden. Die amtliche Irreführung des deutschen Volkes (Munich: A. Langen, 1918). 93 

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an only selectively true and thus spurious picture of the war for their own immediate ends, which meant, among other things, that the authorities were responsible for sending many hundreds of thousands of men to their early and senseless deaths. Some members of the government later admitted as much themselves. Lieutenant Colonel Erhard Deutelmoser, the last Chief of the War Press Office, openly acknowledged in 1919: “No one can deny that the German public was indeed disastrously led astray.” Deutelmoser elaborated by way of explanation, or as an excuse: Those who heralded a faith in victory … deceived themselves first of all before they deceived others. If, however, they believed in our victory, then it was also their duty to spread this faith among the people. The deception of the German public, insofar as it consisted of whitewashing the situation, created above all a flawed means of reporting, which, at decisive moments, inevitably produced false conceptions.98

In their perhaps well-intentioned but misguided efforts to defend their country from external enemies, the authors of the “Manifesto of the 93” and those who abetted them did incalculable and lasting harm to the German cause by helping to undermine its credibility from within. The signers of the declaration acted recklessly, even foolishly – and, it turned out, self-defeatingly – by abandoning their intellectual scruples and misusing their considerable authority at a critical moment in order to bolster extravagant claims that they should have known they could never support. But – and this point has rarely been stressed enough or even fully acknowledged – the authors of the declaration, too, were the unwitting victims of a deliberate policy of deception and misinformation on the part of their own government.99 Those responsible for the Burgfrieden seemed not to realize that the obligations the policy entailed went two ways: if the people were to be asked to place their trust in their country by setting aside their individual interests and offering their lives to defend it, then they were equally justified in the expectation that their country placed an equivalent amount of trust in them. The signers of the manifesto, and most other Germans as well, were perhaps all too gullible in believing that their leaders were telling them the truth or even the whole story. But those leaders arguably bear the greater burden of responsibility for consciously misleading their own people and failing to entrust them with what the signers of the declaration To the Civilized World had all too credulously claimed they possessed: namely, the full and unadulterated truth. 98 

Erhard Deutelmoser, Die deutsche Nation 1 (1919), 18–22; cited in Koszyk, 19. See the searing chapter “Unter Kriegszensur” in the memoir by Hellmut von Gerlach, Von Rechts nach Links, ed. Emil Ludwig (Zurich: Europa, 1937), 236–39. 99 

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Lujo Brentano obliquely made the same point in an open letter he published shortly after the war ended. There he wrote: At the beginning of January 1916 I learned from absolutely trustworthy persons about certain actions that individual German troop units had been guilty of already at the beginning of the war. That made me bitterly regret my signing and defending the declaration of the 93.100

Although he did not stress the fact in offering this mea culpa, it was perhaps the greater scandal that it had taken a year and a half, and even then only through private, informal channels, for Brentano, a distinguished professor at a major university with extensive contacts throughout the highest circles of government and society, to learn finally what had occurred at the hands of the invading German army in Belgium in August 1914. As it happened, one person who remained untouched, at least directly, by the whole ignominious affair was Ernst ­Troeltsch. For whatever reason, although he possessed the stature to have been included among those invited to lend their names to the manifesto, his own does not appear among the ninety-three signatories.101 Since there are no surviving documents that might shed light on why ­Troeltsch did not sign the appeal or indicate whether he was even asked to do so, one would have to speculate about why his name is so conspicuously absent. What we do know is that the fact that he was not associated with the single most infamous event of the “culture war” was one of the major factors that allowed him to preserve his standing and reputation abroad. As Clement Webb, Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oriel College, Oxford, wrote in The Oxford Magazine after ­Troeltsch’s death: “In 1914 he showed his lack of sympathy with the warlike policy of his nation by declining to sign the notorious manifesto of the ninety-three professors; thereby exposing himself to accusations by some of his colleagues of being a traitor to his country.”102 Although Professor Webb obviously made several unfounded assumptions of his 100 

Lujo Brentano to Charles Gide, November 29, 1919, cited in Wehberg, 21. Wallace, 195, incorrectly asserts that ­Troeltsch was “one of ‘the ninety-three’.” ­Troeltsch did, however, put his name to the so-called “Declaration of University Professors of the German Empire” issued three weeks later. It was initiated by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and signed by over 3,000 faculty members at all fifty-three universities in the country. The declaration consists of a single, short paragraph in both German and French proclaiming that the signers “serve science and perform a work of peace,” while insisting that there was no difference between the “spirit” of the German people and that of the army, which found itself in a “struggle for Germany’s freedom and thus for all of the benefits of peace and of civilization – Gesittung – not only in Germany.” See the Erklärung der Hochschullehrer des Deutschen ­Reiches, October 23, 1914, 1. 102  Clement Charles Julian Webb (attr.), The Oxford Magazine 41 (1922/230, No.  13, February 22, 1923, 237; cited in ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 344. 101 

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own here (and the accusation that ­Troeltsch was a traitor would come later and in a different context), the point is that the positive perception that Webb and others retained of ­Troeltsch during the war was based primarily on ­Troeltsch’s having been untainted by the disaster of the “notorious manifesto.” Nevertheless, the appeal An die Kulturwelt! and everything connected with it did come to mark a major turning point for ­Troeltsch, one that would have a transformative effect on his own thinking and actions during the remainder of the war. Before, ­Troeltsch and virtually everyone else in Germany had thought, reasonably enough, that they were engaged in a struggle for the physical survival of their people and their state. Now, as the appeal and the blistering international reaction to it had made clear, they were also fighting a no less pitched battle for the continuance of the intangible values that allowed them to think of themselves as a people and as a state in the first place. The reaction to the manifesto had revealed to the Germans that on every level, on the physical as well as on the metaphysical plane, they were engaged in an existential struggle with enemies who were determined to annihilate their entire way of life. The Germans had been forced to realize that the hatred against them was all too real and that, whether they accepted it or not, they were regarded as the very antithesis of civilization, indeed as the embodiment of evil itself, and that their enemies wanted to crush and obliterate them, first morally, and then in fact.

What does it Mean to be German? Over the better part of the next six months, ­Troeltsch concentrated much of his energy on erecting a defensive line against the Allied propaganda campaign, resulting in a series of essays and lectures with titles such as German Faith and German Custom, The German Essence, “The Spirit of German Culture,” and “The German Idea of Freedom.”103 These works, obviously focused on elucidating the specifically “German” qualities of his people and their culture, formed the core of ­Troeltsch’s personal effort to shield his country from the verbal onslaught being waged against it. He sought to fend off those attacks reactively, by demonstrating what he thought actually constituted “German culture” as opposed to the 103  Ernst ­Troeltsch, Deutscher Glaube und Deutsche Sitte in unserem großen Kriege (Berlin: Kameradschaft, 1914); Das Wesen des Deutschen. Rede gehalten am 6. Dezember 1914 in der vaterländischen Versammlung in der Karlsruher Stadthalle (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1915); “Der Geist der deutschen Kultur,” in Deutschland und der Weltkrieg, ed. Otto Hintze, Friedrich Meinecke, Hermann Oncken, Hermann Schumacher (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1915), 52–90; “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” Die neue Rundschau 27 (1916), 50–75. The latter text is based on a lecture ­Troeltsch gave in Vienna in October the previous year.

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Allied characterizations of it, and in the process he explored the related questions of how and why – or indeed if – German culture essentially differed from that of Western Europe. Not surprisingly, this insistent emphasis on the specifically German qualities of the various phenomena he addressed, as well as his robust defense of their inherent significance and worth, have not always been easy for readers to appreciate, especially after 1945. In some of the scholarly commentary – what little of it there is – on this early phase of ­Troeltsch’s wartime activities, one occasionally encounters the opinion that he had adopted a “militaristic” stance from which he later, and only gradually, perhaps even reluctantly, distanced himself.104 To other scholars, what ­Troeltsch wrote in these essays devoted to expounding the particularities of German history and culture betrays, only slightly less damningly, a “nationalistic” bias,105 or is said to reveal that he endorsed, indeed promoted, a more general “chauvinism of published opinion.”106 Yet, as we will see, these blanket judgments are either partial, misplaced, or simply incorrect. It is undeniable that ­Troeltsch vigorously defended his country and its culture, and he did so not just as a matter of principle but also because he thought it indispensable to the German cause as he understood it. In April 1915, he wrote in a letter to the philosopher Paul Natorp saying that, “to be sure, the official England and the English war literature act and write in a way that is infuriating and disgusting. The English arrogance is, as I have felt myself in reading it, outrageous. And we cannot practically do without a strong counter-perception against this English nastiness. A basic strain of indignation and closed opposition is psychologically necessary for us.”107 But it is also important to remind ourselves that an evolution was constantly taking place in ­Troeltsch’s thinking as he considered the changing world around him, a process that necessarily both responded to and reflected the complex, shifting course of the war itself. As we have seen, in his first reactions to the conflict during its opening weeks, he had concentrated most of his comments on what he hoped would eventually be the salutary effects of the war on German domestic political life once it was over, despite its anticipated horrors and privations. Now he realized that he had underestimated its full destructive potential and he increasingly saw that both the external and internal challenges Germany faced were both greater and more dangerous than he had initially assumed. That did not mean, however, that his fundamental convictions changed or still less that he abandoned or even diminished his commitment to the values of Eu104 

For example, Hoeres, 265, but this is a common view in the secondary literature. Drescher, 415. 106  Flasch, 147. 107  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Paul Natorp, April 15, 1915; KGA 21, 86. 105 

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ropean culture that he had so often articulated before the war and continued to do after it had begun. As he wrote in one of these essays: “We will never cease to draw from the common foundations of Europe, of Antiquity and Christianity, we will never forget how to enrich our own spirit through exchange with others.”108 Yet, as he also put it more pragmatically in a letter at the end of the year with reference to his work during the war: “I do not have to save Christianity or my theory, but rather the German Empire.”109 ­Troeltsch knew that Germany first had to survive physically and morally if it wanted to continue to be part of European culture. And he viewed the mortal threat to the values that constituted the German state as immediate and dire, representing a danger to the political reality, and even to the very idea, of something like an independent Germany. As he wrote in German Faith and German Custom, published in mid-November 1914, only two weeks after his confident speech on the Volksheer in Mannheim: “Within the great international world struggle, there exists the intention to annihilate the German spirit and German culture morally and intellectually through a monstrous campaign of defamation and vituperation.”110 In ­Troeltsch’s eyes, then, the war had become quite literally a life-or-death struggle over both the body and soul of Germany as a whole, which demanded from all of its citizens, including himself, a total commitment to sustain and defend it. After the failure at the Marne and the resulting stagnation on the Western Front, the danger facing the German homeland was no longer abstract but concrete and pressing. On November 2, 1914, Britain declared the entire North Sea a war zone and the Royal Navy imposed a comprehensive blockade on all German ports. Foreign wares destined for Germany, including foodstuffs and other vital supplies, were declared “contraband,” and any ships entering the restricted area risked being captured or sunk. At first, as Friedrich Meinecke wrote, “we still thought, as unexperienced as we were, entirely within the horizon of 1870 and feared the effects of the English blockade only with regard to our trade.”111 But Germany depended on imports for many of the most necessary materials and goods, and it imported fully a third of its food (making it the largest agrarian 108 ­Troeltsch,

Wesen des Deutschen, 31. Ernst ­Troeltsch to Paul Wernle, 21 December, 1914; KGA 20, 710. 110 ­Troeltsch, Deutscher Glaube, 5. This text appeared as part of a series supported by the “Kaiser Wilhelm Dank” organization, a self-described “League of Friends of Soldiers” that published popular works that were widely distributed among the combatants on the front as well as to those who remained at home. The copy available to me indicates that is the second or third edition of “twenty-five thousand” copies. In a footnote, Peter Hoeres noted that the copy he consulted showed a publication number of “36–42 thousand;” Hoeres, 265. 111 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 224. 109 

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importer in the world), and the effects of the blockade almost immediately made themselves felt. That autumn, shortages already began to ripple through the German economic system and rationing soon became unavoidable.112 Raw materials for the manufacture of critical war materiel were also affected, creating the terrifying possibility that Germany would soon run out of armaments. On 13 November, 1914, General Falkenhayn reported to the Kaiser at General Headquarters that the German army had already expended almost all available munitions stores, leaving them with only six days worth of shells.113 ­Troeltsch could not of course have known such intimate operational details, but by the middle of November at the latest it was obvious to everyone, precisely because the war was still raging on, that things were not going well. As some of ­Troeltsch’s own words have already revealed, he was not immune to the emotions that the traumatic events of the previous several months had stirred in everyone else. The composure and reserve, the even-handedness and magnanimity that he had displayed at the outset of the war were being put under increasing strain as the full import of the unfolding catastrophe continued to sink in, and it seems only natural that such a realization, and the feelings of helplessness and frustration it engendered, would find some expression in his writings as well. Although fairly brief, his essay German Faith and German Custom from mid-November 1914 accordingly makes a strikingly unbalanced impression overall, which may be a reflection of a similar kind of turmoil taking place in its author. It is certainly one of the least well-written and insightful texts he wrote during the war, and it is also one of the darkest. Although ­Troeltsch nowhere mentioned the manifesto An die Kulturwelt!, it is evident from his reference to what he called the “monstrous campaign of defamation and vituperation” being directed at Germany that his essay emerged from a similar impetus.114 In that same vein, in German Faith and German Custom ­Troeltsch railed against the “mass sentiment against everything German” that he said was being deliberately fostered through otherwise unspecified “calumny and lies” that were “spreading a repulsive image of German militaristic barbarism that produces hatred and mistrust.”115 In words exuding contemptuous sarcasm, ­Troeltsch bitingly described this organized effort as “the major accomplishment thus far in this war of pious and moral England; it severed the German overseas connections, confiscated private German mail on neutral ships, censored telegraph agencies, and pays the 112 See Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Deutschland und der Erste Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1980), 169–82. 113  Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, 198. 114 ­Troeltsch, Deutscher Glaube, 5. 115 Ibid.

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world press for negative news about the Germans.”116 England, he continued, and now resorting to an ugly rhetorical register himself, “fights like a physically impotent woman by means of a calculatedly venomous tongue and tries to achieve through the destruction of moral credit what it cannot win on the field of weapons.”117 With rising indignation, ­Troeltsch went on to denounce the actions of Britain by saying that its dominance of the seas and its pressure on vassal states cuts off direct news about Germany, and its press gives world currency to the well-known malicious formulations that decadent French cultural arrogance has lent to judgments about German strength and German earnestness. The phrases of the tabloids go around the world thanks to English telegraph stations and English money and they seek to mobilize at least the invisible moral forces everywhere against Germany by also using lies to turn our indisputable victories and accomplishments into defeats, thus robbing them of their effect on the world.118

In the same vein, ­Troeltsch argued at length that the entire Allied propaganda campaign, and in particular the unremitting British denigration of Germany, amounted to a vast and “carefully calculated, dangerous system, one of the most poisonous and abject instruments of war.”119 Again and again, ­Troeltsch repudiated “the most monstrous invectives against Germanness,”120 condemning the verbal weapons of war that were being manufactured, as he put it, in the “English factory of lies.”121 All of that constituted an orchestrated effort that, he said, was being cynically produced as part of “a completely Machiavellian, basically immoral measure, whereby ethical suspicions at whatever price and by whatever means are intended to create a world sentiment that is unfavorable to us.”122 Although ­Troeltsch was not claiming that any specific allegations against Germany were untrue and was also not making any positive claims about what, alternatively, was true, the proximity in tone and substance of these passages in German Faith and German Custom to the “Manifesto of the 93” was close enough to do neither him nor his cause any favors. Still, despite ­Troeltsch’s unrestrained lashing out against what he called the “crude unfamiliarity and ignorance concerning the German character and German history,”123 it must be admitted that in objective terms his protests were not wholly unjustified, and it was not unreasonable for him to want to correct willful 116 Ibid. 117 

Ibid., 7. Ibid., 6. 119  Ibid., 7. 120 Ibid. 121  Ibid., 11. 122  Ibid., 8. 123  Ibid., 7. 118 

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or merely uninformed distortions. Whether there was any realistic hope he could be successful in changing anyone’s mind was another matter of course, as was the question of who the intended audience for his defensive actions was. Perhaps realizing this quandary, ­Troeltsch seemed to catch himself up short at one point in German Faith and German Custom and he pointedly reminded his reader (and was perhaps reminding himself) that he should not follow suit and respond to the abuse against Germany with insults in kind. “Our objective and need is not revenge and invective in return, but rather to make clear our right, to make known the enormous moral seriousness, the impression of our deep inner faith.”124 That was a principle that ­Troeltsch would seek to follow, and remind others to observe, for the remainder of the war. That he had to repeat it so often was a sign of how difficult such restraint was when so much was at stake. But it is notable that German Faith and German Custom also seems to lose focus at this very juncture, and the subsequent reflections it contains feel disjointed and somewhat arbitrary. It is as if ­Troeltsch himself did not quite know what positive point he was trying to make, what “faith” or “custom,” exactly, he was attempting to explain and defend. Aiming to refute Allied claims that the Germans were driven by war lust and innate aggression, ­Troeltsch insisted that in the period leading up to the conflict, entirely in contrast to hostile fantasies, war was and is something worrying and dangerous for the great mass of our people, we thought that a rapprochement and a delineation of spheres of interest would in fact be possible in the end, and we concentrated our entire, immense capacities on works of peace, with the intention of making domestic social, ethical, scientific progress, which required military security on land and sea only in order to support our 70 million in a relatively small territory and to protect them against dangers all around that were all too obvious. Here as elsewhere there were enthusiasts of raw violence who revel in suggestions for changing the map and enthusiastic soldiers who want to see the handiwork of arms stand its test; but they never possessed or even influenced the leadership of our state.125

Far from wanting war, ­Troeltsch argued, the majority of Germans desired and worked for peace, even if there was, he admitted, a small but vocal minority who indulged in fantasies of conquest and martial adventure. Even more remarkably, there are some passages in German Faith and German Custom that appear to suggest that ­Troeltsch was indulging in doubts about the legitimacy of the war as a whole, even about the possibility of a just war as such, that hardly seem conducive to encouraging his countrymen to fight: In their theoretical and reflective nature, Germans do not want a war whose inner justice they are not convinced of. […] For them, that turns into a question about the justice of war in general, and if the justice and significance of the current war in particular is all too clear, then 124  125 

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 8–9.

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doubts and dread befall them with respect to a humanity and world order in which such a war has to be seen as just and necessary. These questions recur in numerous field post letters, and citizens who are working here at home and who are fervently roused by every victory report intermittently feel again and again moments of terror in which everything seems like a bad dream, like a horrible, criminal madness, like a European suicide into which we have been dragged without choice and freedom and for which all the talk about the ethical greatness of the war and about the coming splendor of Germany cannot console us.126

These are strong words, openly critical of the war itself, if notably not critical of any particular actor or any individual state for having caused it. In mid-November 1914 it was inconceivable that anyone, and especially someone of ­Troeltsch’s standing, would have already advocated publicly for specific measures to end the war. But even to speak of it as “criminal madness” and as a collective “suicide” was, to say the least, highly unusual. There were other signs in German Faith and German Custom that the war, by then in its third month, had also made ­Troeltsch skeptical toward many of the beliefs that he and his fellow Germans had nurtured in the comparatively calm years leading up to it. Perhaps thinking back to all the self-congratulation that had taken place in Germany during the countless jubilee festivities in 1913, he now wrote: the wonderful, half-century period of peace that lies behind us and brought a powerful development, both international and national, of all intellectual and economic forces, also produced many deceptive and misleading theories by which we thought we understood the meaning and law of things and which we now abandon only with difficulty.127

Among the “theories” that ­Troeltsch felt the war had proved to be specious, he mentioned that, previously, “people taught us that the international world economy of the last half century made a war impossible.”128 That was the argument made most famously by Norman Angell, who had proposed in his book The Great Illusion of 1910 that the interdependence of the European and world economies made war so costly and disruptive that it had effectively been rendered defunct.129 Another “theory” obliterated by the war was that solidarity among the working classes throughout the continent would prevent those from different nations taking up arms against each other: “They taught us that the social problem was the great modern task and had replaced all other problems of the state and politics, that the internationalism of the rising working class would make war 126  Ibid., 12. Cf. Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 32, who cites a few isolated words from this important paragraph, but distorts their overall meaning, and he describes ­Troeltsch as being filled at this point with “national enthusiasm.” 127 ­Troeltsch, Deutscher Glaube, 14. 128 Ibid. 129  Norman Angell, The Great Illusion. A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Economic and Social Advantage (London: William Heinemann, 1910).

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impossible.”130 In addition, theories about national and racial identity had made it seem unlikely if not impossible for people who saw themselves as related in that way to turn on one another. On the contrary, ­Troeltsch wrote, “the dogmas of an exaggerated idea of nationality or, even more, the mythology of racial doctrine have been destroyed precisely by this war.”131 Finally, “religious and philosophical enthusiasts taught us that a true and genuine Christianity of brotherly love would gain power over the lives of people and states and bring a Christian culture of mutual restraint not just of individual egoism, but of collective egoism as well.”132 As it turned out, none of those “theories” had prevailed, none had proved sufficient in stemming the waves of violence and hatred that had engulfed Europe. “The opposite has occurred,” ­Troeltsch concluded: all of those presumed lessons had turned out to be no more than naive assumptions; indeed, he said, they “were all illusions.”133 Following these gloomy ruminations, ­Troeltsch did finally turn to making the more positive attempt to identify “the actual faith and the actual strength of Germans in these difficult days.”134 They consisted, first, in “the German belief that our war is a defensive war.” But that, he wrote, was “only half of the truth.”135 “We are fighting not only for what we were, but for what we want to and must become.”136 That is, “the German faith is the faith in the inner moral and intellectual substance of Germanness, the faith of Germans in themselves, in their future and their world mission.”137 As an articulation of a positive war aim that seemed appealing, if frustratingly vague. But ­Troeltsch must have realized that the idea of a “world mission” – Weltaufgabe – awaiting the Germans was not just ambiguous but also open to ungenerous interpretation, as if he were wrapping Weltpolitik in missionary garb. He therefore stressed that the German victory that he assumed, or at any rate hoped, would conclude the war did not mean “German domination of the world, which is a utopia and which the vast majority of our people does not even demand, but rather the maintenance and healthy further development of our state.”138 That sounded like an even more modest, not to say downbeat goal, amounting to not much more than the wish for a resumption of the status quo 130 ­Troeltsch,

Deutscher Glaube, 15. Ibid., 21. 132  Ibid., 15–16. 133  Ibid., 16. 134 Ibid. 135  Ibid., 17. 136  Ibid., 18. 137  Ibid., 19. 138  Ibid., 24. 131 

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ante when it was all over. Given the sustained ferocious attacks its enemies were mounting on the very idea of a German state, however, merely preserving the state must have come to seem daunting enough to ­Troeltsch. Finally, this last consideration led ­Troeltsch to mount a vigorous defense of the concept of the state itself and of its necessity for realizing and sustaining the highest aspirations of the individuals who embodied it. Without a Germany, he reasoned, there could be no German culture. “There is no naked spirit, no culture in and of itself, all of that exists only in the state and through the state.” Not everyone viewed the state the same way, of course, and it meant something different to every observer. But it was precisely its character as the collective expression of its constituent parts that made it the indispensable vehicle for the continued self-understanding and self-preservation of a people: It appears to the common man not in an abstract manner as state, but rather as Emperor, King, Grand Duke and, at most, in the form of an officer, civil servant or administrator. For the historically educated observer it appears as one of the rare great organizational deeds in which the devotion and labor of generations are embodied, the genius and industriousness, the loyalty and self-sacrifice of uncounted thousands, immeasurable historical destinies, and a magnificent dispensation of providence. It is the vessel and the creation of a common feeling of honor, the expression of a constant ethical will, the precondition of all economic and intellectual flourishing, not a giant formula of collective egoism, but rather a constantly renewing establishment of ethical self-surrender to the creation of a collective will, which for its part involves every individual in its dignity and honor.139

Again, it is important to emphasize that ­Troeltsch was not arguing here for any superiority of the German state and the culture it embodied over any other, nor was he making an apology for the preeminence of the state in general over the individual. Rather, implicit in his comments was something like a recognition of the mutual interdependence necessary for all within the state to thrive. This, too, would be an insight he would develop ever more explicitly in the months and years to come. That it came within the context of a sober acknowledgement of the many delusions previously harbored on every side, including by ­Troeltsch himself, about the willingness and ability of people to cooperate with, instead of killing, each other made even the attenuated idealism it conveyed seem more plausible.

The German Essence Despite the somewhat uneven performance he delivered in German Faith and German Custom, the essay nevertheless contributed to ­ Troeltsch’s growing prominence in Germany as one of the most authoritative commentators on the 139 

Ibid., 22.

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war and its broader implications. His reputation was further enhanced by the next public statement he made on related issues. On December 6, 1914, only a few weeks after German Faith and German Custom had appeared, ­Troeltsch gave another major speech in front of another enormous audience, this time in the municipal hall of Karlsruhe, a spacious neoclassical building that accommodates 4,000 people. The address appears to have been attended by a cross section of the population of the Duchy of Baden, including the Grand Duke, Friedrich II, and his consort, Hilda, as well as other members of the ruling entourage, in addition to many other people across the social spectrum. ­Troeltsch used his remarks principally to sharpen his analysis of the meaning and effect not so much of the material battle at the front but rather of the concerted spiritual assault, as the lecture is titled, on The German Essence itself. Somewhat jarringly, ­Troeltsch opened his lecture – after acknowledging the “Royal Highnesses” in attendance – by pointing out that “whoever goes now through the streets of our cities and villages notices very little of the war.”140 Certainly, he said, there were many people mourning members of their family who had fallen, but such grief remained private and largely invisible, and otherwise life appeared to be going on much as usual. But this superficial impression disguised a deeper reality. For, if one “could look into the houses, the workshops, the offices, and above all into the hearts and minds” of people, one would see that the war had already made a deep impact.141 The problem was that much of the most devastating effect the war was having remained invisible to the eye, wreaking devastation in the intellectual and spiritual realm, and that ruin was becoming only more widespread and bewildering. Particularly those people, as ­Troeltsch put it, who were sufficiently familiar with the world and historically educated to understand the particularity of this world war compared to earlier ones, perceive with growing anxiety the complexity that increases almost daily and the difficulty of solving the entire situation not just of Germany, but of the cultured world as a whole.142

It was to elucidating that great and constantly increasing complexity, and explaining what it meant for the “cultured world as a whole,” that ­Troeltsch devoted his thoughts in The German Essence. The war in all of its facets had already become so complicated, in fact, that ­Troeltsch felt that one had to separate it into several discrete components to have any chance of understanding it. “It is not a simple war,” he declared; instead, “it is a bundle of simultaneous wars.” First, and most obviously, it was “the war of 140 ­Troeltsch, 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid.

Wesen des Deutschen, 3.

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the actual armies facing each other.”143 But, second, and speaking specifically if indirectly about the events in Belgium, it was also a “guerrilla war of the indigenous population against the occupying troops, the war of irregular militias against the soldiers.” Third, it was “a commercial war and a war of starvation,” by which he meant the naval blockade Britain had imposed on Germany, which brought an immediate experience of the war to the civilian population at home as well. Fourth, and closer to what interested ­Troeltsch the most, it was a “war of lies that uses the promotion of belief in German defeats, catastrophes, inner dissolution and revolutions, labor shortages and hunger riots, atrocities and barbarities as instruments of war of the first order.”144 In these words we see that ­Troeltsch at this point was no better informed than most of his compatriots, and he also dismissed the “legends of atrocities”145 that were said to have occurred in Belgium. Moving to what he saw as the fifth major element of the conflict, he said: Finally, and above all, however, there is a culture war of the mind and of the pen raging through all of this confusion and horror, in which not merely a tirelessly inventive journalistic press of unprecedented poisonousness but also the intellectual leaders and most famous authors of the enemy nations disparage, vilify, and slander German culture and want to present to the world as an enormous threat of barbarism and cynicism, of despotism and slavery, [it is] a crusade against the German spirit, a moral continental blockade against Germany, an intellectual hell of incomprehension and hate against the very thing that we regard as best about us.146

Specifying that, for the occasion of his speech in Karlsruhe, it was “about this last war, the war of the pen and the mind, that I want to speak,”147 ­Troeltsch began by reiterating a pledge he had made in German Faith and German Custom. Despite the venomous things being said about Germany by its enemies, he said that he would not respond in kind. “We cannot give back as we are given,” he affirmed. “That does not correspond to our reflective nature.”148 What is more, ­Troeltsch said that he did not think that trying to dispute every individual claim their opponents were making about Germany, however preposterous it might be, would be very effective: “People who have been excited to feel a passionate hatred whipped up by the war and by all of the diabolical arts of an overheated journalism will not listen to any refutations because they do not want to hear them.”149 Rather, ­Troeltsch suggested,

143 Ibid. 144 

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 7. 146  Ibid., 5. 147 Ibid. 148  Ibid., 6. 149 Ibid. 145 

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we can demonstrate the nobility and superiority of our spirit by suppressing our indignation over such ignorance, misrepresentation or even bald impertinence and by instead asking ourselves where these antagonisms come from, on what deeper intellectual differences they are founded and what follows from them for our own work on ourselves.150

This was a remarkably dispassionate, even dignified position to adopt and it stands in marked contrast to the often perceptible anger ­Troeltsch himself had evidenced as recently as in his essay on German Faith and German Custom. But it also provides the first expression of ­Troeltsch’s increasing determination to achieve an objective and impartial – or wissenschaftlich – understanding of the underlying motives for what he had called the “crusade against the German spirit.” Characteristically, that effort essentially meant for ­Troeltsch making the attempt to understand the historical causes for the current divisions among the combating nations. These differences, he decided, had been obscured in the years leading up to the war by the apparent but, as he now believed, in fact illusory unity of European culture. In truth, in such a crisis the great, ancient intellectual and cultural antagonisms of the European peoples as a whole break through the surface of international civility and polite association and emerge into the open along with the passions of war. The ‘good European,’ a homogeneous European civilization, is one of the great illusions of peace.151

In the earlier German Faith and German Custom, ­Troeltsch had asserted that the war had exposed a number of previously imagined “truths” to have been no more than wishful self-deceptions. But it was in The German Essence that he first formulated the view that the very idea of a common European culture, the belief that there existed not just a core of commonly shared values, but also a communal spiritual “essence” that united the independent European states within a single, homogeneous cultural framework, was itself a fiction as well. Instead, he now expressed the belief that fundamental and perennial differences existed among all the principal national traditions of Europe. Yes, ­Troeltsch allowed, the people of the five major powers of Europe all believed in the same Christian God, and it was also true that they all had more interests in common with each other than with the inhabitants of other, more distant lands. Nevertheless: “Much more separates the discrepancies of mind, taste, moral feeling, custom and habit, all of which have developed historically and are in truth inexplicable, indeed identical with the being of the individual peoples themselves. These differences are irresolvable.”152

150 Ibid. 151  152 

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14.

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It is unclear why ­Troeltsch had, apparently abruptly and with no discernable gradual evolution leading up to it, come to this seemingly radical conclusion that there were essential, irreconcilable disparities distinguishing the peoples of Europe from one another and, by implication, from those of the rest of the world as well. We will see that it was a view that emerged from his earlier work on historical biblical criticism and would later inform his most searching thinking on the philosophy of history. But whatever its immediate origins, it would be hard to overstate the importance of ­Troeltsch’s conclusion, both for the evolution of his own thought and even more significantly for the subsequent development of German self-understanding more broadly – and, by extension, of how others also came to view the Germans, their history, and their culture as a whole in the years and decades that followed. For in ­Troeltsch’s thinking during the final months of 1914 there is the nascent germ of the conception of a “special path,” or a Sonder­ weg, of the independent cultural identity and growth unique to every collectivity. And we see that here, too, one of the supposed causes of the war – namely, the idea that there existed a divergent, separate path toward modernity that Germany fatefully followed – was in fact one of its products, and Ernst ­Troeltsch was the first to articulate it so explicitly. But – and this is a crucial, often overlooked point – ­Troeltsch postulated that such a “specialness” applies to every culture and not just to Germany alone. He insisted that each cultural entity is characterized by what he called its own, peculiar “special nature,” or in his word its Sonderart, which in a profound sense necessarily set it apart from all others. ­Troeltsch considered this insight to be one of the principal lessons of the war and in particular of the “culture war” he was commenting on. As he would put it at the very end of The German Essence: We want to learn from this war and from the experience of this culture war that every people receives the special nature – Sonderart – of its spirit through its character and historical situation and that the depth and productivity of its being can be developed only through conscious self-limitation.153

In order to explain more clearly what he meant, ­Troeltsch drew an analogy between the growth and development of entire societies on the one hand and of individual people on the other. No one person can exhaust all the possibilities of the mind because the developmental conditions and the guiding principles that emerge from them are in every case different, and in particular because the mysterious, individual special characteristics – Sondereigentümlichkeiten – of the mind themselves inherently prescribe its peculiar nature and its own law.154

153  154 

Ibid., 31. Ibid., 19.

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And just as no single individual can realize all of the potential aspects and abilities inherent in the human mind, but rather cultivates only some partial mixture of them to produce a discrete personality, every culture also possesses what ­Troeltsch likewise called its own “special formation”155 – Sonderbildung – that results from the combination and transformation of certain qualities over time to produce a distinctive cultural identity. Remarkably, and importantly, ­Troeltsch went on to drew the further lesson from this argument that each individual culture, as each individual person, is valuable in and for itself, that there are no grounds, no criteria, that would enable us to judge one culture as being superior – or, for that matter, inferior – to another. ­Troeltsch made this argument explicitly with regard to his own culture: We also cannot explain the right of the German mind by making the radical claim that it corresponds to pure human reason itself after extensive knowledge of the world and historical research have demonstrated to us the abundance of individual special beings – Sondersein – and has shown the right of individuality precisely in its particular, unfathomably rich intellectual constituents.156

Although expressed somewhat abstractly, that amounted to a declaration that any kind of nationalism, German nationalism included, and especially the more virulent forms of chauvinism or xenophobia, not only lacked any historical or philosophical basis, it also prevented any genuine understanding of all the other Sondersein that existed apart from one’s own. Even if they are expressed somewhat obtusely, these are all cogent principles and show that, even as he was questioning the universality of European culture, ­Troeltsch had not abandoned his own basic intellectual and scholarly values. Moreover, they also conformed to central tenets of the German historiographical tradition originating in the mid-eighteenth century.157 From Johann Gottfried Herder to Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel to Wilhelm Dilthey, it had been axiomatic in German historical thinking that every culture had its measure in itself and was to be understood and evaluated according to its own individual nature. A little over a year after he gave his lecture in Karlsruhe, ­Troeltsch would return to this same theme and explore it at length in a speech held on the occasion of the Kaiser’s birthday on January 27, 1916, in which he said that “to understand an epoch means to measure it against its own essence and ideal, however complicated it 155 

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21. 157  See most recently Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011); see also the older study by Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of Histo­ ry. The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1968). 156 

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may be.”158 Of course, what centrally concerned ­Troeltsch here in his address on The German Essence was precisely that: the specific nature, the “essence” of the German character, as it expressed itself in its own, distinctive culture. That did not mean that in the limited space of a public lecture he could or wanted to paint a comprehensive portrait of the German Sonderart in its entirety. He intended only to sketch out its essential social and, especially, its political constitution and to do so partly by contrasting it with those of its opponents, Britain, France, and Russia. Significantly, ­Troeltsch sought to distinguish those different cultures according to their respective understanding and practice of democracy. At one point, ­Troeltsch referred to the on-going conflict as “the most democratic of all wars,”159 by which he seems to have meant that it was exceptional, and all the more incomprehensible, for being fought by and among all the great democracies of the world. In the condensed summaries he offered of what he considered the primary and differing characteristics of each state, he accordingly focused on the particular expression of democracy he observed within the combatting nations. Beginning with the French, ­Troeltsch concentrated on what he termed “the ethical-political particularity of the French form of the democratic idea.” In a stark break from the ecclesiastical Christian past and in exclusive adherence to a clear, rational science the French found state and society on the equality of individuals, on a transparently regulated and legally constructed cooperation of individuals in the formation of a public common will and social public opinion.160

By contrast, ­Troeltsch found that the “Anglo-Saxons” adhered to a “concept of freedom in the greatest possible absence of personal restraint by the state or bureaucracy, in free economic initiative, in one’s own choice of upbringing, education, and political engagement,” which ­Troeltsch summed up as amounting to what he called an “irrational, individualistic democracy.”161 Finally, in the case of Russia, toward which he said the Germans stood in “the most profound intellectual and cultural opposition,” ­Troeltsch detected at least the potential for a similar development as well. “From out of their rustic, communistic primitiveness and from their contemplative disposition toward love,” he allowed, “they can accomplish a direct transition to the highest social ideals, to a democracy founded on love and freedom or to a socialism that incorporates a refined anarchism.”162 158 ­Troeltsch, 159 ­Troeltsch, 160 

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. 162  Ibid., 18. 161 

“Über Maßstäbe zur Beurteilung historischer Dinge,” 31. Wesen des Deutschen, 7.

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But again, as informative as these mini-profiles of Germany’s main opponents may be – and, given that they were delivered in December 1914, as unusually fair-minded as they are – ­Troeltsch’s main interest was to identify the defining elements of his own culture – and, implicitly, to encourage foreign observers to adopt a similarly impartial and sympathetic stance toward the German “essence.” Nevertheless, ­Troeltsch did not believe that Germany was blemishless and he enjoined his listeners in Karlsruhe to listen to what outside observers perceived: “We do not want to become indignant over foreign criticism and learn from it what can be learned.”163 As examples of the less than flattering characteristics exhibited by Germans noted by foreigners, ­Troeltsch mentioned, without contradicting, “the loud and yet insecure manner of the arriviste, saber-rattling and boastfulness, clannishness and the worship of Mammon, the love of bickering and grumbling, petty-mindedness and aestheticism, servility and pedantry.”164 But he also wanted to correct the patently distorted, misleading, or simply false images of Germany being manufactured and propagated by its adversaries. And for that there was only one remedy: “There is therefore only one answer and only one defense: self-reflection and self-immersion in the essence of the German mind.”165 “If the war in and of itself already causes us to turn in on ourselves, then the war of the mind and of pens forces us doubly and triply to dive into the depths of our own essence.”166 After issuing this appeal for self-analysis, ­Troeltsch finally turned to the actual business at hand, asking: “But what is the essence of the German character?”167 In answering his own question, ­Troeltsch identified three major features. First, and presumably most important, he claimed that: “We are a monarchical people.”168 Arguing that Germany represented basically a one-hundred-year-long political experiment in self-transformation under Prussian dynastic rule, ­Troeltsch insisted that “only under monarchical leadership could and can the work of unifying and developing a nation that is consolidating itself while facing the most extreme dangers be accomplished.”169 Elaborating his point further, ­Troeltsch insisted that the extremely heterogenous nature of the still relatively young state demanded a nonpartisan arbiter, a national leader not beholden to any particular interest or group to ensure its cohesion, and that, not only for the lack of a better alternative, was a role that the monarchy could uniquely fulfill. 163 

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 30. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid. 167  Ibid., 20. 168  Ibid., 22. 169 Ibid. 164 

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Unified Germany embraces the greatest social differences, from old Prussian nobility to the modern industrial worker, it is in transition from an agrarian state to an industrial state and thus especially requires leadership that is independent of all social differences, but to the extent possible must do justice to all. No parliamentary majority can do that, no plutocracy, no committee of intellectuals and no syndicate of unions. That is something only the monarchy can do.170

At the same time, however, ­Troeltsch insisted that “our personal freedom never and in no way suffers from that, if we disregard those influences which emanate from any governance and thwart any number of individual wishes, often even legitimate ones.”171 The next outstanding feature of the German “essence,” ­Troeltsch continued, was that “we are, secondly, a military people.” ­Troeltsch carefully chose the adjective “militärisch,” or “military,” in deliberate contrast to the highly charged and provocative word militaristisch, “militaristic,” that the Entente countries were so fond of leveling at the Germans. The distinction is more than semantic. ­Troeltsch used “military” to counter the negative connotations of “militaristic,” saying that it corresponded to his affirmative view of the “people’s army” that he had elaborated only a month earlier. After recapitulating his argument that the Volksheer combined “the sense of honor and the esprit de corps of Frederick the Great’s officers with the people’s army of Scharnhorst, the governing and organizational skills of Prussia with the ethical idealism of German culture,” ­Troeltsch now went so far as to claim that, “like the monarchy, the national unity also rests in the final instance on the army.”172 But that unity was formed as a reciprocal relationship: the army possessed “all of the ideal forces of education, science, technology, the sense of duty, local patriotism” that distinguished the German people in general, just as the “military organization” of the army served as the model and source for the “extraordinary organization of the German people in which the initiative of the individual and the discipline of the whole are successfully combined.”173 Third, and finally, ­Troeltsch said that the Germans “are furthermore an endlessly hard-working people.” The unification of the Empire had unleashed incredible economic forces that demanded ever greater numbers of workers, further increasing productivity, which created a powerful feedback loop of explosive growth on the continent and beyond – so much so that ­Troeltsch made the intriguing suggestion that this trait and its unforeseen consequences were itself an indirect cause of the war. “We owe the war precisely to this fact, because our 170 

Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 23. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid. 171 

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labor and the increase of population resulted in our maritime politics and that led to the conflict with England, which claims the ocean for itself alone.”174 Later ­Troeltsch would make explicit that he saw the sources of the war in economic competition among the major powers, but here we see the germ of that idea in its nascent form. Monarchical, military and industrious: it seems a somewhat odd choice of attributes to single out as constituting the core of German identity, especially when offered as a rebuttal of charges that the Germans represented those very things to an extreme degree. (In his book on the origins of the hatred toward Germany, Max Scheler recounted an anecdote from a few years before the war in which a German diplomat had asked a cultivated Frenchman why the Germans were so disliked around the world. The Frenchman replied that it could be summed up in three words: Ils travaillent trop – “they work too much.175) But there is reason to think that ­Troeltsch saw this trio of qualities more as the foundation than as the ultimate core of what he considered to be the German “essence.” For he aligned next to the militärisch “sense of order” also a rich “emotional and intellectual life”176 that expressed itself at the highest level in abiding works of literature, music, and philosophy. But it was the advancement of comprehensive historical understanding, combined with a practical knowledge of the world, that according to ­Troeltsch allowed the Germans to develop a singularly sympathetic and well-informed appreciation of humanity. “We are the most objective and open-minded people on earth,” he asserted, sounding perhaps a bit too self-congratulatory. But he pointed to the very assembly before which he was speaking in Karlsruhe, in the southwestern part of Germany, as evidence for his contention: If one needed proof of it, then this very gathering itself offers it. To speak here, close to the border, in such a way about the nature of foreign and domestic peoples before a gathering of several thousand people – and, as I believe I can assume, with their approval – in the middle of the war and amid all of the vilifications is something that – we can say without exaggeration – is possible only in Germany.177

The very fact that he could speak so freely, even self-critically, about his own people even as he tried to provide a fair assessment of their adversaries without fearing the censure of his listeners represented in itself, ­Troeltsch was saying, an essential, perhaps even exemplary, trait of the Germans. 174 

Ibid., 24. Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, 65. Scheler has many astute observations on this issue. 176 ­Troeltsch, Wesen des Deutschen, 24–25. 177  Ibid., 27. 175 Scheler,

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That emphatic allusion to tolerance and liberal-mindedness – he was, after all, in Baden – led ­Troeltsch to a concluding reflection about The German Essence. But all of these character traits are concentrated in one final one, in the German idea of freedom. It is not the Anglo-Saxon freedom from the state and bureaucracy, nor is it the French freedom of the equally calculated contribution of everyone to the self-government of the people. We can and must make many more advances in both of these directions without compromising in any way our German nature. There is also still much we can and must learn concerning social freedom in the behavior and manners of the various classes toward one another. But the essence of the German idea of freedom does not lie in any of that. In its most proper sense it is not a formal freedom uniformly applied to all individuals, but rather the substantial freedom of an unlimited diversity of personal self-cultivation and self-expression, the wealth and depth of the individual and personal mind, which in every instance mixes the general elements in a particular manner and adds to this mixture something of its own unique inwardness.178

These are all themes that ­Troeltsch would continue to explore in the years ahead in various ways and in a variety of contexts: the existence and nature of a specifically German notion of freedom, its similarity to or difference from the other great national conceptions of it, as well as the interrelation between the individual and the state in the realization of that freedom. But it is important to register that it was here, in his speech in Karlsruhe in early December 1914, that he was already focusing on the phenomenon of freedom as perhaps the central question of the war. At the very end of his remarks, ­Troeltsch closed by saying, while tellingly evoking once more the “Spirit of 1813”, that “the great task of all human life” was “to unify freedom and community, individual and state in a way that creates a new relationship among them, but also that grows out of the old meaning and nature of German culture.”179 This would be a message that ­Troeltsch would later often repeat: that the only way to achieve genuine freedom is for the individual to find a place and purpose within a larger community, and for that community to protect the flourishing of the individuals within it.180 That did not represent the endorsement of a specific political program, yet. But it was the next logical step.

War Aims Just over a month later, in January 1915, ­Troeltsch delivered yet another contribution to the war effort, this time in the form of an essay with the one-word title “Imperialism.” It appeared in the Die neue Rundschau, the most respected and 178 

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. 180  See the comments by Bruendell, 116. 179 

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widely-read journal among the contemporary German educated elite, or Bil­ dungsbürgertum. The essay marks an abrupt, even startling shift in tone and focus from all of ­Troeltsch’s previous comments on the war and, perhaps for that reason, has received even less attention from scholars than his other writings of the time – which is to say, almost none at all.181 But it is one of the most significant texts he would write during the entire period. For it unambiguously, and at a very early date, announces a clear political stance, one that would put him in direct conflict with some of the most powerful interests in the country. But it also stakes out a position that would align him with others who, like and with him, dedicated their energies to creating the conditions for a viable political future for Germany after the war ended. The context in which ­Troeltsch wrote his essay on “Imperialism” is complex. But having some sense of that context is necessary for appreciating its full meaning and scope, and even more for understanding the increasingly explosive developments in German domestic political life that followed in 1915 and there­ after. No issue concerning the First World War has caused so much debate or been the focus of so much scholarly attention as the question of German aims during the war. It was this problem that stood at the center of Fritz Fischer’s work and provoked the fierce disputes it aroused.182 Most recently and persuasively, Thomas Otte has written that, far from pursuing specific, well-defined aims, Germany was instead afflicted by “a deeper strategic malaise.” Stated simply, Germany knew how to fight a war, but it had no idea what for. As Otte put it: “Germany had a war plan, but the leadership at Berlin had no clear idea what kind of war they meant to fight, and for what objectives.”183 However, once the war had begun, there arose fierce internal arguments within leading political and economic circles about what precise goals Germany could and should achieve, and what sort of political future it should strive to secure through those objectives. As the war continued, the dispute over war aims, which naturally involved both foreign and domestic policy, became “next to the 181 

It is not mentioned, for example, by Drescher, Flasch or Rubanowice. A notable exception is the essay by Kollman, 296–98. Significantly, Kollman claims that T ­ roeltsch essentially retained the position that he took in this essay throughout the entire remaining course of the war. Hoeres, 270–71, also devotes a page and a half to the essay. 182  First articulated in Fritz Fischer, “Deutsche Kriegsziele, Revolutionierung und Separatfrieden im Osten 1914–1918,” Historische Zeitschrift 188 (1959), 249–310, and expanded in Griff nach der Weltmacht. The first comprehensive assessment of Fischer’s arguments was by Egmont Zechlin, “Deutschland zwischen Kabinettskrieg und Wirtschaftskrieg. Politik und Kriegführung in den ersten Monaten des Weltkrieges 1914,” Historische Zeitschrift 199 (1964), 347–458. 183 Otte, July Crisis, 477, 513.

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question of parliamentarization the dominant topic of the war years and its effect was polarizing to an eminent degree.”184 Although virtually everyone within Germany was convinced, or persuaded themselves, that it was not responsible for starting the war, there were many differing ideas, and often bitter disagreements, over how it should end. While general observance of the Burgfrieden, as well as the active imposition of military censorship, initially prevented those disagreements from being aired publicly, soon enough they broke into the open with dramatic and increasingly uncontrollable results. Here, too, as will become apparent, the information policy pursued by the German government, and in particular the role of Bethmann Hollweg, proved to be not just ineffective, but also disastrously counter-productive – so much so, as we will also see, that the clash over the ends to which it was thought the war should be fought, and how those ends should be pursued, ultimately contributed to the downfall of the Chancellor himself. Since its founding in 1891, the Pan-German League had never been a large organization.185 For most of its existence before 1914, it had been a minor if noisy faction, certainly not insignificant, but marginal enough to be thought relatively harmless.186 That began to change during the second Morocco Crisis in 1911, when it appeared to many conservative nationalists that Germany was willing to accept any indignity to avoid armed confrontation. But the Pan-German League still remained a negligible quantity. At the beginning of the war it listed only 18,000 registered members,187 which was minuscule compared, for example, to the approximately half million registered in the Naval League. In the ­Reichstag elections of 1912, the Pan-German faction had even lost nineteen representatives, shrinking to only fifteen among the total number of 397.188 The Social Democrats, by contrast, the direct ideological opponents and political adversaries of the Pan-Germans, had posted significant gains at the same time to become, with 110 representatives, the leading party in parliament.189 184 Heinz Hagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. Die nationale Rechte am Ende des Kaiserreiches (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1997), 49. 185  Cf. Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the PanGerman League, 1886–1914. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984). 186  See Schwabe, “Zur politischen Haltung der deutschen Professoren im Ersten Weltkrieg,” 615, who writes that the Pan-Germans were unsuccessful in breaking out of their “obscurity” before the war. 187  According to Gerd Fesser, “Mutterlauge der Nazis,” ZEIT-Online, 8 July, 1994, http:// www.zeit.de/1994/28/die-mutterlauge-der-nazis. 188  Konrad Jarausch, “Die Alldeutschen und die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg,” Viertel­ jahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 21 (1973), 439. 189  Alfred Kruck, Geschichte des Alldeutschen Verbandes 1890–1939 (Wiesbaden: F. Stei­ ner, 1954), 59.

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But the influence of the Pan-German League, or at least its resonance, belied its actual size, and as time went on its tone became ever more belligerent and radical. Its leaders tactically cultivated relationships with sympathetic members of the political, military, economic, and cultural elite who could act as partners to help advance their goals. When Bethmann Hollweg became Imperial Chancellor in 1909, the Chairman of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Claß, characteristically wrote a letter to him offering to lend the support of his organization to the new government, saying: that it is inherently a natural and desirable situation if the sum of good will and intellectual forces at the disposal of a large national association such as ours, which is mainly composed of the independent ranks of the educated middle class, could work in tacit collaboration with the government.190

Bethmann Hollweg sent a gracious though wary reply to Claß’s unsolicited offer of help: “I will, as I have done in the past, lend my active interest to the efforts of your association and happily welcome it if the exertion of the forces within it would lead to smoothing the paths that the responsible leaders of the state must travel.”191 However, in the following years the Pan-Germans, and foremost among them Claß himself, became increasingly impatient with the Chancellor’s gradualist, moderate approach to politics, rejecting his desire for inner liberal reform, and condemning his cautious preference for external engagement primarily through the peaceable channels of culture and trade. By 1912, articles regularly appeared in the Alldeutsche Blätter excoriating the “weakness of the government, its lack of a goal or a will.”192 For his part, Bethmann Hollweg had become exasperated by the constant agitation and rigid insistence of the Pan-Germans on unrealistic demands. Privately, he complained: “you can’t do politics with these muttonheads. On the contrary. Together with other factors they ultimately make any sensible politics impossible for us.”193 “Muttonheads” they may have been, but they were powerful enough, or were considered to be, that the Chancellor refrained from publicly rebuking them. When the war broke out, members of the Pan-German League immediately saw it as a providential opportunity for realizing their most ambitious goals, which the first, early German successes in August seemed to bring ever more tantalizingly within reach. Buoyed by these prospects, the members of the Exec190  Claß

443.

191 

to Bethmann Hollweg, August 19, 1909; cited in Jarausch, “Die Alldeutschen,”

Bethmann Hollweg to Claß, August 26, 1909; ibid. “Nach der Wahl,” Alldeutsche Blätter, 20 January, 1912; ibid., 444. 193  Bethmann Hollweg to Pourtalès, 30 July, 1912; ibid. 192 

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utive Committee of the Pan-German League met on August 28, 1914 to conduct a formal discussion of its desired war aims. The conference focused on a policy draft based on an outline prepared in advance by Claß in consultation with the businessman and politician Alfred Hugenberg, as well as with Leopold von Vietinghoff-Scheel, the Chief Executive Officer of the League.194 After seven hours of deliberations, a memorandum containing specific policy recommendations was unanimously approved by the committee, which then authorized Claß to draw up a comprehensive formal document representing the official stance of the organization. By early September, Claß’s Position Paper on German War Aims was completed and ready for distribution. But the uncertainty caused by the disappointing outcome of the Battle of the Marne made it seem an unpropitious moment to issue a statement defining expansive goals and demands that presupposed a complete German victory. Too, the Pan-German League wanted to appear at least to be complying with the government’s Burgfrieden policy. The decision was thus made to withhold the document from public circulation until further notice. But behind the scenes it continued to smolder. In the meantime, Hans Delbrück, professor of history at the university of Berlin and long-standing editor of the authoritative Preußische Jahrbücher, had become embroiled in a controversy that would inadvertently help to push the war aims debate further into the open. In the decade before the war, Delbrück, his voice amplified by the influential journal he edited, had emerged as one of the most visible opponents of the Pan-German League and its growing ambitions. In December 1913, he had issued his most direct criticism to date, publishing a commentary that delivered a scathing denunciation of the Pan-Germans and their activities. Using unusually direct language, Delbrück condemned their “constant threats and provocations, often downright sedition,” which were producing an incessant drumbeat of intimidation and belligerence that, he worried, “threatened to involve us in martial adventures.”195 The only truly great danger for the future of the German Empire lies in foreign affairs. We could allow ourselves to be misled into a war that would not only be, because it would be needless, 194 

See Kruck, 71–72. See also Claß’s account in his autobiography, on which Kruck relies heavily; Heinrich Claß, Wider den Strom. Vom Werden und Wachsen der nationalen Opposition im alten Reich (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1932), 320–27. See as well Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961), 114–15. 195  Hans Delbrück, “Die Alldeutschen,” in Vor und nach dem Weltkrieg. Politische und historische Aufsätze 1902–1925 (Berlin: Otto Stollberg, 1926), 397–403, here 399. On Delbrück, see Wilhelm Deist, “Hans Delbrück, Militärhistoriker und Publizist,” Militärgeschichtli­ che Mitteilungen 57/2 (1998), 371–83; see also Christian Lüdtke, Hans Delbrück und Weimar: für eine konservative Republik – gegen Kriegsschuldlüge und Dolchstosslegende (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018)..

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an unspeakable catastrophe for us and the entire civilized world, but whose outcome, given how things lie in Europe, is in no way certain. One may press for such a war only if forced by necessity or honor, or if the future of the nation is at risk. That is not the case.196

Delbrück warned that “formerly one had comforted oneself that the Pan-Germans were a small, slightly humorous sect without influence. One cannot say that today. The Pan-German press has a wide distribution and a very zealous following.”197 Indeed, Delbrück feared that the “Pan-German demagogy” posed the danger of turning “national idealism” into “national fanaticism,” and that was, among all the many challenges facing the German nation, “the greatest danger to the health of the people’s soul there is.”198 Soon after the war broke out, Delbrück published his own thoughts about how the war should conclude. His essay, optimistically titled “The Future Peace,” appeared in the October 1914 issue of the Preußische Jahrbücher. He was guaranteed at the very least an attentive audience among the Pan-Germans (who, like everyone else, assumed that, given Delbrücks’ station and connections, “when he speaks, you hear the voice of the ruling classes”199). Admitting that “news about the events of the war” was, as Delbrück euphemistically put it, “fragmentary,” he nevertheless reasoned that one could already draw certain conclusions from what was reliably known. Writing that some believed that “only a peace can come into consideration that would give us complete security against a repetition of such attacks as these,” 200 Delbrück cautioned that such absolute security was possible only if the victors “permanently subjugated” their enemy, which was what the Romans had done in creating their “world empire.”201 It was not a model Delbrück thought Germany could or should adopt. “For the good of humanity, such a world empire today is out of the question,” he ruled. As proof of its impossibility, Delbrück pointed out that, in the modern period, Napoleon had tried a modified approach of such total conquest, which had ended with dire and well-known results: Following the victory that we expect, may God preserve us and the German Empire from setting down the path of Napoleonic politics. An unforeseeable series of wars would be the consequence. For how ever many fetters we may place on other peoples, they would not make them entirely motionless, and Europe is united on one point and that is that it will never tolerate being ruled by a single state. The security we want to win can thus consist only in combining our own supreme military strength with political moderation […] Put differently: Our goal must be 196 

Ibid., 398. Ibid., 401. 198  Ibid., 403. 199 Wile, Men around the Kaiser, 117. 200  Hans Delbrück, “Die Kriegsereignisse von Ende August bis gegen Ende September. Der zukünftige Friede,” Preußische Jahrbücher 158 (1914), 182 and 191. 201  Ibid., 191. 197 

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the preservation of the existing political equilibrium and the conquest of the equilibrium at sea.202

In the fall of 1914, these words, as measured and sensible as they might seem, were widely considered to be dangerously defeatist, and not only by right-wing agitators. In response to Delbrück’s essay on the necessity of reestablishing an “equilibrium” of the great powers as a means of preserving the peace to come, he received a torrent of indignant letters from colleagues and even a formal reprimand from the military censor.203 When he appealed to the Imperial Chancellor for support, whose positions Delbrück had thought he was merely reiterating and promoting, he received the disappointing answer through an intermediary that the Chancellor considered it “misguided” to formulate any such “theory of equilibrium,” adding that it “corresponded neither to the view of the Foreign Office” nor to the Chancellor’s own “personal view.”204 Unsurprisingly, Delbrück’s essay particularly incensed Heinrich Claß, who felt that it proved Delbrück was disgracefully advocating “that we should make peace as quickly as possible, and indeed that we should make it easy for our enemies to conclude peace.”205 Claß decided that he could no longer hold back the Position Paper on German War Aims that he had written for the Pan-German League and he ordered nearly two thousand copies from the printer. On December 22, Claß sent the brochure to members of the Imperial family and to other royal houses throughout Germany, as well as to ministers and state secretaries, high-ranking military figures, parliamentarians, and to assorted distinguished citizens and scholars.206 Claß also made sure to dispatch a copy to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, “for reasons of loyalty,” as he curiously put it, explaining that his intention “was to help counteract the not undangerous actions of the defeatists.”207 Although the text represented a flagrant act of insubordination, Bethmann Hollweg showed remarkable restraint in response. He sent a diplomatic answer to Claß that pointed out that since victory had not yet been won, much less secured, it seemed premature “to enter into a discussion of the possibilities that present themselves to us” at its conclusion. Bethmann Hollweg – after all, the head of government in a nation at war – concluded his letter by issuing a com202 Ibid.

203 Klaus Schwabe, “Ursprung und Verbreitung des alldeutschen Annexionismus in der deutschen Professorenschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 14 (1966), 118. 204  Schwabe, “Ursprung und Verbreitung,” 118. 205 Claß, Wider den Strom, 341. 206  See Kruck, 73, and Leicht, 190. 207 Claß, Wider den Strom, 344.

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mand to Claß that was only thinly veiled as a request: “I also believe that you will better serve the common cause if you postpone your propaganda until such a time as it can be assessed with certainty what we can achieve.”208 It soon emerged that, despite the explicit if courteous instructions from the Chancellor, Claß had defiantly sent out the pamphlet anyway. Furious, Bethmann instructed the Undersecretary of the Foreign Office, Arthur Zimmermann, to order the military authorities of Mainz, where it had been published, to confiscate any remaining copies, search the premises of the author for the same, identify the names and addresses of all the recipients, and place a postal embargo on Claß to prevent any further dissemination of his work. Claß was also forbidden the use of the telegraph and telephone, and the Alldeutsche Blätter were placed under preventive censorship.209 It is unclear whether Bethmann Hollweg actually read Claß’s Position Paper. The Chancellor’s actions to suppress it could have been a purely formal enforcement of the official decree against public discussions of such matters, no matter what their content. But had he taken the trouble to peruse the document, he likely would have been appalled. In stark and brutal terms – or, as Claß himself expressed it, “cold-bloodedly and calmly” – the Position Paper laid out a program of wide-ranging measures to seize and occupy vast amounts of territory within Europe to the immediate east, west, and south of the existing German Empire.210 It called for what would have been one of the most extensive geopolitical reorderings in history, eradicating centuries, even millennia, of tradition and custom, uprooting peoples and cultures from their ancestral homelands and consigning them to an uncertain fate in places unknown. Claß knew that his radical proposals would probably encounter resistance even among those sympathetic to the Pan-German cause, so he urged his readers to suppress any scruples or moral inhibitions they might have had regarding the treatment of other – which is to say, non-Germanic – peoples. “In measuring and determining the conditions of peace,” Claß advised, “the first law for us must be: to dispense with all cosmopolitan sympathies, that unpolitical tendency of Germans to put themselves in the place of foreigners, that dangerous ‘objectivity’ in favor of others.”211 Ethical considerations, Claß argued, did not just impede the aspirations of Germany, they also provided an active helpmate to its enemies: 208 Ibid.

209 Claß,

Wider den Strom, 349; Leicht, 191. Claß, Zum deutschen Kriegsziel. Eine Flugschrift (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1917), 14. The original version of the text could not be officially published until 1917 because of censorship rules, but that text is nearly identical to the version Claß sent out in December 1914. 211  Ibid., 13. 210 Heinrich

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“We no longer want to hear them, those tired phrases about the ‘considerations of humanity’ and the ‘requirements of culture’.”212 On that score, Claß then spelled out in graphic and unambiguous terms what ignoring the dictates of “humanity” and “culture” his plan would concretely entail: Let us train ourselves to acquire the severity that the end of the battle demands of us if the prize of victory is not to stand in misproportion to the danger that has been overcome and the blood sacrifices that have been offered. Our opponents must be weakened; this occurs when we take land away from them in order to diminish their political power, and by imposing corresponding war reparations on them in order to deprive them of economic strength.213

In practice, this merciless approach meant, first of all, that “Belgium must cease to exist.”214 The Belgian state would be formally dissolved and split into two separate entities, one containing the Germanic Flemish majority, and the other the French-speaking Walloons. “Both departments will be administered ‘dictatorially’,” Claß declared, adding that each would “receive approximately the status of ‘provinces’ as in the Roman Empire.”215 The desires or opinions of the resident population were immaterial: “Whoever does not want that has the right to emigrate within a short time after the conclusion of the war – whoever remains must acquiesce.”216 For the French and Russians, the stipulations would be far more harsh. Of the two, Claß warned ominously, “the Western neighbor will have to be hard hit by retribution.”217 Those living on the lands rich in coal and iron-ore on France’s Eastern and Northern border with Germany would not even be given the option of remaining there. With chilling matter-of-factness, Claß judged that French soil could be made useable for German purposes only if “we acquire the land without inhabitants.” In his memoirs, Claß phrased the measure he envisioned far more drastically: his intention was that the Eastern French regions would be rendered entirely “free of people” (“frei von Menschen”), completely cleared of their native inhabitants, who would then be forcibly resettled elsewhere in the territories remaining to France at its expense.218 Similarly, though even more brutally, in Russia there would be what he called a massive “ethnic land clearing” – völkische Feldbereinigung – especially in the agriculturally fertile areas of Ukraine and Georgia that would provide the incom-

212 

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. 214  Ibid., 29. 215  Ibid., 32. 216 Ibid. 217  Ibid., 35. 218  Ibid., 37; see also Claß, Wider den Strom, 361–62. 213 

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ing German population with the space and resources it would need to thrive.219 That Claß did not even entertain the idea of what would be done with the Russian natives made the plan sound even more sinister. Finally, Claß turned to the matter of the Jews, who were much more numerous in the East. Claß acknowledged that “the Jewish question in the new lands of the East raised very particular difficulties,” but he felt confident that “the entire Jewish question could be solved” by placing Palestine at the disposal of a “national Jewish state.”220 That raised of course a host of other issues that Claß was even less interested in entertaining. Either way, it was clear that Jews, individually and as a whole, would not be tolerated, much less welcome, in the new order. It is an abhorrent, monstrous document, and one that obviously contained the seeds of future crimes. Apart from the subversion represented by Claß’s obstinate, if admittedly only semi-public breach of the Burgfrieden, his Position Pa­ per itself was even more dangerous precisely because it reflected, although in extreme form, viewpoints shared by increasing numbers of Germans who also felt that in order to guarantee the country’s security in the future, as well as to compensate for the enormous loss of life and treasure it had already endured, large-scale annexations in Europe and elsewhere were indispensable.221 The absurdity of the situation, however, was that such wholesale confiscations obviously depended on a complete German military victory, which official reporting had led people to believe was, if not imminent, then certainly attainable, when of course after the defeat at the Marne just the opposite was increasingly probable. In this way, Bethmann Hollweg yet again found himself the unwitting victim of his own policies: at first unwilling and now unable to enlighten his people about the true state of affairs they faced, and thus incapable of guiding their expectations, Bethmann now had to manage ever more strident demands that his own government’s campaign of misinformation had partially engendered. Early in 1915, he expressed his frustrated bafflement to Rudolf von Valentini, the chief of the Emperor’s privy council and one of the Chancellor’s closest advisers: Here [in Berlin] the mood is actually inexplicable. Even most politicians are not just confident of victory, they are positively cocky. We need the former, but the latter seems to me to be detrimental. But I can do nothing against it. The psyche of our people has become so poisoned during the last 25 years by boastfulness that they would become timid if one were to forbid them from bragging.222

219 Claß,

Zum deutschen Kriegsziel, 47. Ibid., 50–51. 221  See Schwabe, “Ursprung und Verbreitung,” 113–16. 222  Cited in Mommsen, “Bethmann Hollweg und die öffentliche Meinung,” 135. 220 

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To the Prussian Secretary of the Interior, Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell, Bethmann Hollweg further expanded on the dilemma he faced: The people demand much from the peace, probably too much, and they desire for the achievable to be presented to them as set in stone. It seems presumptuous to me to wish to guide the hand of Providence. A German Empire that would appoint itself the master of the continent and the world by dispossessing England, annexing Belgium, the North and East of France, the Baltic states and Poland, would be a dream – perhaps, because unreal, not even a nice one. But even if one trims its contours, it still remains a dream. The border lines will be able to be drawn only by our military strength. And, despite all confidence, that still hovers in the dark. Between the mood at home and the view of the soldiers there is a peculiar discrepancy – perhaps you will denounce me for defeatism. But serious, combat-ready, and purposeful soldiers – I am not speaking of civilian strategists like us – say today that the victorious defense against the overwhelming coalition would already be a great achievement. If God grants something greater, then we will thankfully accept it. But we cannot count on it. To prepare the people at the right time for that will be difficult. Premature intimations could cripple the confidence we need, come what may. But, it seems to me, the seriousness and difficulty of the time are beginning to assert themselves. Thus we probably can and must only wait and see.223

But simply waiting and watching was something that Claß and those who agreed with him were no longer prepared to do. Instead of passively accepting the official strictures placed on him, Claß mounted a vigorous legal defense against what he called the “persecutions” against him. The matter quickly made its way through the courts and even went all the way to the Reichstag, where the case was publicly debated. In early March 1915, Claß succeeded in having the sanctions against him lifted and the publication ban and confiscation of his Position Paper rescinded.224 Naturally, Claß’s triumph was Bethmann’s debacle: beyond Claß’s galling legal victory, these highly publicized proceedings and their outcome not only served to bestow a greater legitimacy on Claß and on the Pan-German League itself, they also delivered a humiliating political defeat to the Chancellor. And the whole affair accomplished precisely what Bethmann Hollweg most wanted to prevent: it moved the issue of what Germany could and should achieve in the war, or not, into the forefront of public debate.225 Claß himself both fully understood and seemed to take pride in his catalytic role in this process. As he boasted: One thing is certain: with my position paper I had set the conversation about war aims into motion and, because of the sensation that the official measures against me had caused, it received much greater attention that would have probably been the case without that foolish prosecution. In addition, I gained scores of new personal connections and heard everywhere 223  Ibid. See also Zechlin, “Deutschland zwischen Kabinettskrieg und Wirtschaftskrieg,” 443–44. 224 Claß, Wider den Strom, 351; Leicht, 192–93; Kluck, 73–74. 225  See Fischer, Griff, 192.

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that my position paper, but also no less my petitions to both houses of the Prussian state parliament and to the Reichstag, had, owing to their broad dissemination, energized the war aims movement that had begun to stir throughout the land.226

Besides exonerating Claß, the end of the embarrassing fiasco obviously weakened the Chancellor by eroding the Burgfrieden, one of his signature policies. Too, Claß had gained stature, and would cause even greater lasting damage, by demonstrating that one could get away with bald defiance of the state authorities without significant penalty. And all too predictably, he and other committed Pan-German activists soon set their sights on an even bigger prize than creating public space for airing their views: namely, toppling the Imperial Chancellor himself. In a confidential memo to Georg von Hertling, the Minister President of Bavaria, Matthias Erzberger reported as early as February 1915 that “currently there are also powerful movements underway to remove the Imperial Chancellor, who is accused of weakness and irresolution.”227 For Hans Delbrück, who seems to have become aware of Claß’s Position Paper soon after it was distributed, the lines of battle were no less clearly demarcated. In a private letter from the end of December 1914, Delbrück had already declared that the Pan-Germans were now and would remain “the domestic enemy that must be combatted.”228

Imperialism It was against the complex and shifting backdrop of this extraordinary confrontation between the highest representatives of the German government and increasingly provocative, even subversive elements of the civilian population over the prosecution of the war and its goals that Ernst ­Troeltsch published his essay, simply titled “Imperialism,” in the January 1915 issue of Die neue Rundschau. It is possible, even quite likely, that ­Troeltsch, like Delbrück, learned of the contents of Claß’s Position Paper soon after it was surreptitiously but widely distributed the previous month. However, ­Troeltsch’s text conspicuously contains no overt reference to Claß or to the controversy he ignited. ­Troeltsch seems to have consciously avoided making the same mistake Bethmann Hollweg had committed of 226 Claß,

Wider den Strom, 394; also cited in Kluck, 77. Matthias Erzberger to Graf Hertling, February 4, 1915, cited in Mommsen, “Bethmann Hollweg,” 137n49. See also Otto Bonhard, Geschichte des Alldeutschen Verbandes (Leipzig: Theodor Weicher, 1920), 36, who argued at the time that since achieving the goals of the Pan-German League “could never, ever be expected under the current Chancellor,” the highest task facing it was “the battle to remove this disastrous man.” 228  Hans Delbrück to G. Müller, 29 December, 1914; cited in Schwabe, “Ursprung und Verbreitung,” 119n66. 227 

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lending Heinrich Claß and his cause even greater legitimacy, as well as invaluable publicity, by identifying and attacking him directly. Instead, ­Troeltsch never mentioned Claß’s name or even alluded to the war aims “movement,” as Claß grandiosely called it, that his Position Paper had launched. Although it would have been obvious to informed readers that ­Troeltsch’s text was a rearguard action against the Pan-German insurgency, ­Troeltsch managed to provide a vigorous counter-argument to it without letting his adversaries even have a word. Instead, and even more powerfully, ­Troeltsch focused his essay on exploring the intellectual and political implications of the broader phenomenon of imperialism itself. This more expansive treatment was necessary, he explained in the opening words of his text, because imperialism was both a relatively “new political concept” and because “this concept is closely associated with the entire question about the possible results and goals of our great war.”229 And, with that, ­Troeltsch had, even if at a fairly distant analytical remove, not only waded into the highly charged and volatile debate about war aims, he would also in the course of addressing it stake out a stance that would have profound consequences not just for him personally, but for the political development of the entire nation. For, in laying out the full meaning and implications of imperialism, ­Troeltsch presented a compelling case for categorically rejecting it. ­Troeltsch began his analysis by stating that, in both its origins and modern manifestation, “the imperialistic idea comes, in reality, from England.”230 Citing with approval a recent critical book by the liberal political economist Gerhard Schulze-Gaevernitz, British Imperialism and English Free Trade, ­Troeltsch drew on it to outline some of the features he saw as essential to contemporary imperialism based on the British model.231 An empire, he explained, which is ruled from a central nation, seeks to unify all of the settled areas under its control by imposing its own economic, legal, political, cultural, and even linguistic traditions and norms within the spheres of its influence. The subjugation of these external possessions and their inhabitants under the imperial nation’s rule is meant to satisfy the collective desire for “greatness and power” that historically grew out of the wish on the part of individual actors within that nation to amass personal wealth. ­Troeltsch noted that this very development, stemming as it did 229 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Imperialismus,” Die neue Rundschau 26 (1915), 1. Ibid., 5. Although ­Troeltsch does not refer to the book in his essay, many readers would have also been familiar with the work by Arthur Dix, Deutscher Imperialismus (Leipzig: Die­ terich, 1914). Dix was an unabashed advocate of German imperialism, and unsurprisingly viewed the war as a “world trade war” specifically against German imperial ambitions; see Arthur Dix, Der Weltwirtschaftskrieg, seine Waffen und seine Ziele (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1914). 231  Gerhard von Schulze-Gaevernitz, Britischer Imperialismus und englischer Freihandel zu Beginn des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1906). 230 

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from materialistic, economic interests, occurred, not a little ironically, “in decided opposition to the former liberal, individualistic traditions” that had been instrumental in creating Britain in the first place.232 Taking a glance around the globe, ­Troeltsch noted that these same tendencies, while of course most fully formed and expressed in the British Empire, were reflected in the nascent Russian, Italian, and American empires as well – with the latter, so ­Troeltsch, “despite all of the Puritan, democratic traditions,” being inexorably drawn “into world politics and adopting the imperialistic idea and imperialistic ethics” through its growing involvement throughout the Pacific and in South America.233 Summing up, ­Troeltsch found that for imperialism to occur anywhere, the following elements all had to be present: Geographical requirements; the possibility of incorporating nearby settlement areas, or the necessity of expanding one’s own insular existence onto mainlands; increasing population numbers; the impossibility of sustaining the population or increasing wealth solely from domestic sources; the capacity to create from the home base stable lines of communication to areas with raw materials and markets; the martial ideals of the power state and the thirst for glory; the historical-philosophical belief in the world mission of own’s own spirit and one’s own strength.234

This was by no means an exhaustive list, but it was in ­Troeltsch’s view a necessary set of conditions for any empire to exist. More recently, additional factors had entered the mix, as the nineteenth century had progressed, which amplified but did not substantially change the basic components of imperialism he listed. These refinements included new means of transportation that vastly increased the speed and range of movement and communication, which enabled the greater reach of empires, abetted by the “national sense of self-esteem that followed the general democratization,” as well as by a peculiar “logic of power” that was fed and supported by “Darwinian or Nietzschean ideas.”235 All of these elements, for ­Troeltsch, further amplified and expanded the effects of imperialism but did not affect its essential character. Turning finally to Germany itself – as one of the newest self-proclaimed promoters and practitioners of imperialism – ­Troeltsch unsentimentally came to the conclusion that, on the basis of all the factors that he had considered, “the pragmatic – realpolitisch – prerequisites for a German imperialism do not exist”: From its location within middle-European continental territories and with its narrow North Sea coast, an incorporation of great settler colonies, that is, an imperialistic preservation and integration of the population surplus, is unthinkable. Neither in the manner of England, which rules 232 ­Troeltsch, 233 Ibid. 234 

Ibid., 7

235 Ibid.

“Imperialismus,” 6.

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from the sea, nor in the manner of Italy and Japan, which secured for themselves adjacent mainlands, is an expansion of the territorial basis here possible. Any colonies that may come into consideration can provide raw materials and other uses under colonial administration, but no significant settlements. And a substantial expansion of the territorial basis in Europe itself is impossible.236

Colonialism, the blunt leading edge of imperialism, presented its own set of complications. It was not obvious to everyone at the time that colonialism, in itself, was always and everywhere an expression of unalloyed evil and injustice that must be repudiated. Eduard Bernstein, the great Marxist theorist and politician, had written in 1902 in his book The Prerequisites of Socialism and Tasks of So­ cial Democracy that “when we consider that at the moment Germany annually imports very considerable quantities of colonial wares, then we also have to tell ourselves that the time may one day come when it may be desirable to be able to obtain at least part of those products from our own colonies.”237 For Bernstein, in other words, in terms of colonial policy, “what is decisive here is not the Whether, but the How.”238 ­Troeltsch himself had briefly mentioned colonialism in passing in his 1904 Breslau address before the Protestant Social Congress, distinguishing there between “exploitative colonial politics” and a more ethical approach that preserved “the human rights of the foreign races in peaceful colonialization.”239 Now, in the middle of the war, he seemed even more ambivalent, rejecting the idea that Germany could or should expand its colonial possessions, but unwilling to suggest that they be unilaterally relinquished entirely given their material and strategic significance. Yet the whole question of colonialism of course soon became unanswerable and then irrelevant. Only three months later, on May 14, 1915, the German government formally stipulated that “the press – and individuals – were forbidden to discuss possible gains or losses of colonies.” One specific order read: “Lectures discussing this subject in public are not desirable. Such lectures must not be reported on, nor should the papers express their own attitudes.”240 Left unmentioned was that by the time this decree was issued, almost all of Germany’s foreign dependencies had already been ceded.241 236 ­Troeltsch,

“Imperialismus,” 8. Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozial­ demokratie (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1902), 177. 238  Ibid. See on the extensive debates with Germany about colonialism before the war, Erik Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire. Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019), especially Chapters 8 and 9, 340–445. 239 ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum, 15. 240  Marquis, 492. 241  Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism. A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 36. 237  Eduard

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Regarding the larger issue of imperialism itself and as such, however, ­Troeltsch went on to insist that, whatever its final outcome, the war would do little to alter the general scenario for Germany, saying that even “the most fantastic notions of the possible size of our victory and the most brazen expectations of peace negotiations” would founder on the unalterable geopolitical facts he had underscored – quite apart from the inescapable reality, he added, that “a victory of such crushing force was hardly to be expected in the first place.”242 No, after the cessation of hostilities, he cautioned that “France will have to be treated with care,” “immense Russia will at all events remain the great power of Europe and exert a pressure on us that we can never eliminate,” and “England will do its utmost to prevent a German imperialism, that is, a German dominance of the seas.”243 Faced with this array of long established and determined imperial competitors, the most that Germany could hope to achieve, ­Troeltsch concluded, was “to maintain and stabilize” what it had already achieved before the war, “but we cannot consider an essentially changed overall status.”244 It was a forceful and sobering argument, made even stronger by resting on what appeared to be unassailable geopolitical truths. ­Troeltsch had essentially reasoned that Germany should not seek to acquire a world-spanning empire according to the classic definition he had just laid out because it literally could not achieve it. There was simply no way, he felt, that Germany could be an empire in any meaningful sense, and failing to observe that basic fact would inevitably bring further conflict and loss. But, if only by implication, ­Troeltsch’s essay also struck an unusually principled and courageous posture. While it was largely compatible with Delbrück’s own controversial essay in the Preußische Jahr­ bücher, it was even more explicit in its unequivocal repudiation of any German annexationist ambitions anywhere in Europe.245 Territorial gains won by force, and particularly on the continent, were accordingly to ­Troeltsch categorically, and that meant also morally, impossible. Significantly, at this point in the essay ­Troeltsch then shifted emphasis somewhat and approached the question of imperialism from a slightly different perspective. Over the previous decade and a half in Germany, ­Troeltsch wrote, the idea of a so-called “liberal imperialism” had gained ever greater prominence, understood as a more attractive, even more ethically defensible, alternative to the 242 ­Troeltsch, 243 Ibid. 244 

“Imperialismus,” 8.

Ibid., 8–9. Only in passing, Christian Jansen mentions in reference to this essay that ­Troeltsch was “the first” in Germany to recognize both that the preconditions required for German expansion did not exist, but also that a decisive German victory was unlikely; cf. Jansen, Professoren und Politik, 141. 245 

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hegemonic imperialism he had just both summarized and soundly rejected. The aim of such a “liberal” or “cultural” imperialism was to seek to cultivate economic cooperation and trade with peoples around the world, but also to transmit, not impose, German culture and values as a principled alternative to military conquest and political subjugation. The patron saint of this movement was Friedrich Naumann, who from the 1890s had inspired an entire generation of young, idealistic thinkers to imagine ways of implementing his vision of making “social liberalism” the content of “German world politics.”246 But the person who gave the notion its greatest reach was Paul Rohrbach, a Baltic German who was a theologian and publicist active in colonial politics.247 Rohrbach articulated his vision of German liberal imperialism in The German Idea in the World, originally published in 1912 and one of the most successful political bestsellers of the period, reaching an edition of 150,000 copies by the end of the war.248 It would not be surpassed in sheer numbers by any other book at the time apart from Naumann’s own Mitteleuropa of 1915, to which we will return later. The quintessence of Rohrbach’s conception (which he openly acknowledged was also formulated “in extensive agreement with a man like Delbrück,”249 with whom Rohrbach was closely associated) is expressed in the following passage: The politics of the German idea in the world should thus, according to our wish and will, not be aimed at any conquest or other violence. If it would do so, it could perhaps be made easier for 246  See Peter Theiner, Sozialer Liberalismus und deutsche Weltpolitik. Friedrich Naumann im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (1860–1919) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1983). See also the perceptive comments by Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War, 150–51. See also the excellent account of this entire development by Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire. 247  Flasch erroneously asserted, in referring to the “Pan-Germans under the leadership of Heinrich Claß,” that “his most important writers were Ernst von Reventlow and Paul Rohrbach;” Flasch, 231. Rohrbach was instead one the movement’s most prominent critics, as evidenced by a collection of essays attacking the Pan-German League and its “danger” originally published between November 1915 and September 1918; cf. Paul Rohrbach, Die Alldeutsche Gefahr (Berlin: Robert Engelmann, 1918). 248  Walter Mogk, Paul Rohrbach und das “Größere Deutschland.” Ethischer Imperialis­ mus im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kutlurprotestantismus (Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann, 1972), 170. 249  Paul Rohrbach, Um des Teufels Handschrift. Zwei Menchenalter erlebter Weltgeschichte (Hamburg: Hans Dulk, 1953), 187. Delbrück concurred with this identification. As he wrote in a review of Der deutsche Gedanke: “The ideas are the same ones that have long been and still are advocated in this journal, in part by Dr. Rohrbach himself. But the author has succeeded in expressing them in this book with a clarity and systematic exposition that cannot be matched by an individual article and has thus created a book that promises to have an uncommon effectiveness;” Hans Delbrück, Preußische Jahrbücher 148 (1912), 331. See also Friedrich Meinecke, “National und ‘Altliberal’,” in Politische Schriften und Reden, 63; and Mogk, 144 f.

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the masses to understand. But because this path is not feasible for ideal as well as practical reasons it is our task to realize the idea of national expansion, on which our viability as a world people absolutely depends, by creating first on land and then on sea a military force of such impressive strength that no one would dare to attack us and then, under its protection, by working to achieve this peaceful goal: to imbue the regions available to us with the intellectual content of the idea of our people while eschewing the martial subjection of foreign lands and peoples.250

Basically, Rohrbach conceived of cultural politics as a kind of secular but muscular missionary work to spread German culture around the world in the name and to the benefit of the entire nation, and it is no accident that he, like Naumann, was also a Lutheran minister who managed to conflate these disparate spheres within a single, if not entirely coherent, conception.251 What Rohrbach promoted was, in other words, and as a pithy phrase puts it, a German “world politics as a cultural mission.”252 ­Troeltsch, with his own theological credentials, was able to find much that was attractive about the idea, and he specifically acknowledged Paul Rohrbach as “one of the most knowledgeable and effective political enlighteners and pioneers” of his day, someone who advocated “explicitly the idea of a world domination merely of the German spirit,” promoting a “universal assertion of German culture, which should replace the English one just as it replaced the French.”253 Nevertheless, and despite acknowledging the relative merits and attractions of Rohrbach’s view, ­Troeltsch also emphatically rejected even this conception of a merely “liberal” or “cultural” imperialism, insisting that “absolutely nothing like a second England should be desired” in whatever form. To begin with, ­Troeltsch argued, there were so many insurmountable practical obstacles that even the notion of such a “soft” imperialism was purely chimerical. For, as “all political experience and theory” had demonstrated, “a world domination of the spirit and labor was possible only on the basis of a political world domination, or stated differently, of an overwhelming political world influence that is possible for small West-European states only through an absolute sea supremacy.”254 As he had already argued, the idea that Germany could establish itself as a modern 250  Paul Rohrbach, Der deutsche Gedanke in der Welt (Düsseldorf: K. R. Langewiesche, 1912), 206. 251  See on this topic Gangolf Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik. Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994). 252  See Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission. Auswärtige Kulturpolitik und Bildungsbürgertum in Deutschland am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1982). 253 ­Troeltsch, “Imperialismus,” 9. 254 Ibid.

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imperial power foundered on the simple reality that, to do so, it would need to displace England as the sovereign of the seas, which any informed and objective observer knew would be impossible. But for ­Troeltsch there was an even more important reason, beyond the sheer impracticability of the notion, to renounce the desire even for a merely “cultural” or abstract imperialism, indeed to dispense with the language and concept of imperialism altogether, and more importantly to disavow entirely the intellectual assumptions underpinning it. His objection had to do with the very principles underlying imperialism itself. By definition and thus necessarily, the notion and even the very language of imperialism entailed categories that established a fixed hierarchy of cultural and political preeminence on the part of the imperialist power and forced the subordination of all others under its sway. “By retaining the imperialistic terminology” ­Troeltsch argued, one maintains the idea of world domination at least as an ideal and a goad to the imagination, whereas, conversely, abandoning it entirely means that, not merely out of need or necessity but on principle and according to our ethos, we do not want any world domination of any sort. Our ethical ideas and our whole idealistic world view, which we owe to our most genuine German minds, the thinkers from Kant to Ranke and Hegel, repudiate it.255

To conceive of the world in imperialistic terms, even to employ the vocabulary associated with it – for instance, “world power,” “world politics,” and so on – meant that one created an intellectual context, and awakened expectations, that, according to ­Troeltsch, were not just ethically abhorrent, they also stood at odds with the deepest strains of German culture itself. And, more generally, he seemed to be saying that although language does not create reality, it can make imaginative room for a reality that did not previously exist, thereby opening up a mental space that had only to be subsequently filled with facts. To refuse the language of imperialism, then, also meant refusing imperialism itself as a linguistic, intellectual, and, ultimately, as an actual possibility. That stunning conclusion, which explicitly rejected the central tenets informing semi-official German foreign policy during the previous two decades, manifestly put Ernst ­Troeltsch at odds with some of the most powerful and influential interests in the country. Although the political and economic ramifications of forfeiting all imperialist ambitions were far-reaching, ­Troeltsch had presented his proposition as being both logically and ethically necessary. Once the very idea of any sort of imperialism, be it real or ideal, economic or cultural, had been relinquished, ­Troeltsch concluded, “there is only the one possibility: to acknowledge the right to life of all great ethnic and national individualities – Völkerindivi­ dualitäten – that possess their own spiritual depth and to demand from every one 255 

Ibid., 11.

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the self-limitation that enables the others to exist alongside of it.”256 Or, as he had put it slightly differently at the beginning of the essay: Different national and ethnic individualities – Volksindividualitäten – next to one another, each developing as it is able its intellectual and moral substance, and each limiting itself out of consideration of the genuine necessities of life of others: that appears here as the ideal of the European society of peoples.257

­ roeltsch thought that guiding every state, including Germany, there needed to T be, besides the calculations of national interest demanded by hard-headed Real­ politik, also, as it were, an Idealpolitik that rested on the mutual consideration and respect of universal human values. As he put it, “not merely realpolitische, but also idealpolitische principles must keep us away from that deceptive ideal of imperialism, whether it is the imperialism of violence, which we cannot consider, or that of the spirit, which we should not.”258 It should not be national im­ perialism, the overt or indirect political, economic, or even cultural subjugation of other peoples by a single dominating power, but rather something like international or cosmopolitan liberalism guaranteeing and protecting the independence of others. That, ­Troeltsch argued, should be the goal or “aim” of German efforts beyond its borders during and especially after the war. ­Troeltsch brought his essay on imperialism to a close by making a final remarkable assertion. He claimed that in his essay, in which he had just repudiated some of the most ardently held principles of contemporary German political thinking, he was doing no more than articulating the view held by the responsible authorities in Germany, saying that “to all appearances, the Imperial government thinks the same way” as he did.259 Going so far as to mention Bethmann Hollweg by name, ­Troeltsch said that he was convinced that “the entire character and the entire political mindset of this statesman, which is completely rooted in German idealism,” ensured that the Imperial Chancellor would follow “the path of morality on the way to greatness amidst enormous responsibilities and difficulties.”260 And, at the end of that journey, ­Troeltsch predicted, the benefit to Germany would be, besides a rather diffuse “inner purification and strengthening, intellectual and ethical self-improvement, deepening and clarifying the still very unfinished German culture,” in addition, and a bit more specifically, a “social and political reorganization or progress in the inner unification and freedom that would include all classes.”261 256 Ibid. 257 

Ibid. 2. Ibid., 13. 259  Ibid., 14. 260 Ibid. 261  Ibid., 13–14. 258 

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It was a brazen move: had ­Troeltsch publicly declared that the German government under the leadership of Bethmann Hollweg agreed with his argument that imperialism was incompatible with the cultural and moral traditions of the country. But even more, ­Troeltsch had also dared to propose, in somewhat diffuse but still unambiguous language, that the genuine aim of the war ought to be focused inwardly, on domestic political affairs, and particularly on ensuring that all members of society enjoy an expansion of their individual and collective freedom. Admitting in a final gesture of modesty that his proposals did not answer “all questions of an international political ethics,” ­Troeltsch had nevertheless delivered a sweeping, and in many respects radical, effort to address some of the most profound issues raised by the subject of imperialism. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was pleased with his recommendations. Gottfried Traub, an erstwhile liberal theologian and politician who, among other things, had been active in the Protestant Social Congress in the years before the war, had been persuaded by recent events to reconsider his earlier political convictions. After reading the essay by his old colleague and friend effectively renouncing imperialism, Traub sent a letter to ­Troeltsch expressing his sharp disagreement over its conclusions. For his part, ­Troeltsch, previously unaware of the inner transformations that Traub had clearly undergone in the meantime, responded by saying “I have to admit to you that I had actually counted on full approval coming from you especially.”262 ­Troeltsch tried to explain to Traub the several purposes his essay was intended to fulfill. One was purely tactical: My article was written in such a way so that it could also be read abroad and was then sent to relevant recipients. If you are aware of the opinions abroad then you will know that we are constantly accused of napoleonism, imperialism, world domination, and even before the war. The Pan-German press, which I consider to be a disaster in general, is to be blamed for that.263

But concerning the substance of his essay, ­Troeltsch reiterated, in more plain and less cautious words than would have been advisable in a public statement, that imperialism for Germany was simply not possible: “I consider it almost unimaginable that we can truly overpower our opponents.” “We have to want the freedom of the seas, no more and no less. But freedom of the seas means a development of the powers alongside each other, where each one goes as far as its natural

262  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Gottfried Traub, 24 February, 1915; KGA 20, 742. On this correspondence, see Shinichi Sato, “Die Polarisierung der Geister im Ersten Weltkrieg am Beispiel eines Vergleichs von Ernst ­Troeltsch und Gottfried Traub,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 2 (2001), 185–214. 263  KGA 20, 742.

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forces permit and where they all acknowledge each other in principle next to each other.”264 As this last objection had already revealed, the final reason was fundamentally an ethical one: “I have absolutely no need to force the German spirit on the entire world. It is for the Germans and not for the world.” Germany would and should have its place among the world powers. “But we will not and should not take the place of England. After all, all politics has to have an ethical idea; ours is that of the freedom of a system of states that mutually acknowledge each other.”265 That was a clear formulation of a bedrock belief – basically it expressed an affirmation of the right of all peoples to self-determination – that would form one of the foundations of ­Troeltsch’s political thinking from then on. The reasoned, dispassionate tone of ­Troeltsch’s essay on “Imperialism,” quite apart from its actual prescriptions – in which he not only abjured any annexationist hopes, but more broadly and audaciously repudiated imperialist thinking itself – could have stood at no greater contrast to the rapacious, chauvinistic tract by Heinrich Claß, who in his Position Paper had chosen to match in kind the virulent hatred being aimed at Germany by its enemies and even to redouble it. But although Claß was undoubtedly the main, if covert, object of his arguments, ­Troeltsch was animated by more than the desire to neutralize the effects of the Pan-German agitators. ­Troeltsch also wanted to articulate and encourage positive political action that was motivated not by passions but by universally acknowledged ethical principles. To be sure, and introducing another theme that would continue to preoccupy him, he allowed that political morality is something other than private morality, because it confronts infinitely more complex networks of effects with each other. Certainly. But there must be a political ethics all the same if the present hell is not to be the natural state and if the inner certainties of the mind, for the sake of which alone one can speak of mind and culture, are not to be meaningless dreams.266

It will be especially important for us to keep in mind going forward, as ­Troeltsch would craft ever more intricately argued descriptions of certain aspects of “the German essence” or of a specifically “German freedom” over the next year or so, that he never lost sight of, much less respect for, European culture as a whole, whether considered in terms of its contemporary richness and variety or with regard to its venerable historical development and, not least, its hoped-for future. Goaded into action by the current paroxysms of blind, ignorant hatred on all sides, ­Troeltsch felt he had been forced to rise to the vindication of his own coun264 

Ibid., 743. Ibid., 744. 266 ­Troeltsch, “Imperialismus,” 12. 265 

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try, whose political and cultural integrity he thought were not just being subjected to gross and even deliberate misunderstanding, but which also, and for that reason, faced an acute existential threat. That did not mean, however, that he wanted to defend Germany at the expense, and certainly not to the degradation, of the other great cultures of Europe. Even now, as the entire continent entered its second half-year of total war and was being consumed by worsening savagery and violence, ­Troeltsch remained committed to the ultimate and he thought still attainable goal of achieving the peaceful coexistence of, as he put it at the end of his essay rejecting any sort of German imperialism, “the great European peoples and their cultural substances, which have grown over a millennium and are embodied in many millions” of people.267 Unfortunately, in the six months that had elapsed since August 1914, it was becoming more and more difficult to tell whether the greatest danger threatening the future of ­Troeltsch’s vision for Germany stemmed from its external enemies or from its increasingly determined and radicalized foes within.

267 

Ibid., 13.

Chapter Three

Battleground Berlin Although not comparable to the convulsive turmoil upending the country and the world at large, another major change occurred in 1914 that dramatically altered Ernst ­Troeltsch’s life forever. After having lived and worked in Heidelberg for two decades, he decided that summer to accept an offer to join the University of Berlin. The move had actually been some time in the making. In 1908, two of the most renowned faculty members at the university, the theologian Otto Pfleiderer and the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen, had died, making their replacements necessary. Berlin was widely considered the best university in Germany, and probably in the world, and no effort was spared to identify and attract exceptional talent to fill the two vacancies. Remarkably, and providing further testimony to his already extraordinary stature, ­Troeltsch emerged as the top candidate for both chairs.1 As it happened, and owing primarily to unyielding resistance from conservative factions within the faculty who opposed appointing even a moderately liberal colleague, ­Troeltsch was not chosen in the first round, despite enjoying the support of such luminaries at the university as Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Planck, Hans Delbrück, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.2 Another opportunity to install ­Troeltsch in Berlin presented itself a few years later, when Dilthey himself died in 1911, depriving the university of its most important philosopher. Adolf von Harnack, then serving as dean of the faculty, had already met ­Troeltsch in 1899, and Harnack had remained his admirer ever since. This time, Harnack was determined to do whatever he could to bring ­Troeltsch to Berlin. Harnack was an experienced bureaucratic tactician and, in order to prevent a repeat of the previous debacle, he preemptively sought to strengthen ­Troeltsch’s standing in the capital and bolster his academic ties there by nominating ­Troeltsch in 1912 as a corresponding member to the philosophical faculty in the Prussian Academy of Sciences. It was a canny stratagem. This incontestably prestigious recognition of ­Troeltsch’s accomplishments made it more 1 See the exhaustive account of the entire process and internal deliberations in Günter Wirth, “Zwischen den Stühlen. Ernst ­Troeltsch und die Berliner Universität,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 2 (2001), 118–84. 2  Ibid., 120.

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difficult, even embarrassing, to argue against his fitness for a position at the university, and by June of 1914 the matter was official. Yet, in a diplomatic concession to some of the recalcitrant faculty in theology, ­Troeltsch agreed to go to Berlin not in the formal capacity of a theologian but as a philosopher. That disciplinary change marked a shift that was nearly as momentous for ­Troeltsch and for the development of his thought as the physical transfer from Heidelberg to Berlin. “I don’t need to tell you,” Harnack wrote to him at the time, “that I would rather see you in the theological faculty; but I have always been of the opinion that you belong in Berlin, and compared with that the question of which ‘regiment’ you will serve, while not entirely irrelevant, is entirely secondary.”3 Even though ­Troeltsch was forced to shed at least formally a significant part of his professional identity in moving to Berlin, his new position provided him with an unusually broad intellectual mandate in compensation. As Martin Rade, a liberal professor of Protestant theology at the University of Marburg (and married to a sister of Friedrich Naumann), publicly announced in the journal he edited, The Christian World: Ernst ­Troeltsch in Heidelberg has accepted an offer from Berlin. He will teach there in the philosophical faculty: cultural philosophy, philosophy of history, social philosophy, the philosophy of religion and Christian religious history. This professorship is splendidly tailored to his genius […] We reluctantly see him leaving the association of the theological faculty, but we do not believe that theology and the church are losing him. Perhaps he will be able to serve them even more effectively in the philosophical faculty than in the theological one. Still, we regret that it is an arrangement that was not owing to the merits of the case but is to be understood on the basis of cultural-political considerations […] That is no reason to withhold from the Prussian Minister of Education the deserved recognition of having appointed the man who belongs there.4

For ­Troeltsch himself, the choice to leave Heidelberg was not without its ambivalences. He felt at home in the liberal atmosphere of Baden and he relished the architectural and natural beauty of the city and its local surroundings. Even more significantly, the University of Heidelberg then stood at the zenith of its fame, with perhaps the highest concentration of original and influential minds of any other institution in Germany – apart from Berlin – and many of them had become not just valued colleagues and collaborators of ­Troeltsch, but also close personal friends. Not the least of them was Max Weber. Ever since 1910, ­Troeltsch and his wife, Marta, whom he married in 1901, had occupied the top floor of the same house in which Weber and his wife, Marianne, lived, which involved nearly daily interaction between the two men.5 But there was no overlooking the fact that 3 

See Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1951), 340. Cited from Wirth, 160. 5  Cf. on their relationship Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Fachmenschenfreundschaft. Bemerkun4 

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Heidelberg was a small town and, apart from the university, a sleepy regional outpost. And material considerations may have also played some part in the decision. In 1913, Marta ­Troeltsch had given birth to their son, Ernst Eberhard. Reportedly, ­Troeltsch was the “worst-paid professor of theology in Heidelberg” and salaries in Berlin were the highest in the country.6 Even before the appointment had been finalized, rumors about ­Troeltsch’s defection had begun to spread in Heidelberg and many people expressed dismay over the possible loss of the famous and popular professor. His former student and subsequent friend Gertrud von le Fort recalled: I experienced the most vehement protests by students in his lecture course who wanted to keep him in the theological faculty in Heidelberg. He thanked them without communicating a decision; but as he accompanied me home after the lecture, he told me that he had decided to accept the Berlin offer and to exchange the theological faculty with the philosophical one. Looking at the future of the former, he thought that he would have more possibilities in the philosophical faculty to address the intellectual and religious consciousness of people than in theology.7

Naturally, having spent two decades in the intimate community of Heidelberg, ­Troeltsch had become familiar with the usual frustrations and dissatisfactions that accompany academic life anywhere. But overall his time there had been a contented and productive one. In his resignation letter to the Rector of the University, Eberhard Gothein, ­Troeltsch emphasized that his years in Heidelberg had provided him “the proudest and most exalted experiences of my life,” leaving him with memories that would “tie me forever through deep gratitude to this magnificent Heidelberg and its glorious working group.”8 However, as he also admitted, Berlin would provide him with an incomparably bigger arena, offering him a platform from which he could address and be heard by the entire nation and even the wider world. I cannot deny that presenting my ideas in the center of German life, thanks to a professorship that was tailor-made for me, was the decisive factor in enticing me both inwardly and objectively despite all my concerns. In the end, that is what drew me away from the provincial idyll in Heidelberg onto the battleground of Berlin.9

Little could ­Troeltsch have known that those last words, written on July 4, 1914, would soon take on a far more literal meaning than he would have ever imagined. Berlin would indeed be come a battleground, and not only in the sense that the gen zu ‘Max Weber und Ernst ­Troeltsch’,” in Max Weber und seine Zeitgenossen, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 313–36. 6  Martin Riesebrodt, “Profaner Alltag. Ernst ­Troeltsch als akademischer Lehrer und seine Heidelberger Hörer,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 2 (2001), 231. 7  Gertrud von le Fort, Hälfte des Lebens. Erinnerungen (Munich: Ehrenwirth, 1965), 122. 8  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Eberhard Gothein, 4 July 1914; KGA 20, 674. 9 Ibid.

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city served as the central staging area for the planning and execution of the war that erupted only a month later. Berlin also became the site of some of the most consequential political struggles that would reshape Germany and the world at large over the next four years and beyond. Through the fortuitously timed advancement of his professional career, ­Troeltsch was elevated into the “center of German life” at a critical moment, putting him in the place where his work and ideas would acquire a much wider resonance and have the greatest impact. With a population of over three million people, Berlin itself – through its sheer size, and energy, and particularly the density of its intellectual, cultural, and political networks – obviously offered many attractions to someone of ­Troeltsch’s appetites. But the self-assured Bavarian was not entirely uncritical of the Prussian capital, either. As a student, he had spent the academic year 1885–86 there, and not long after he had arrived, the twenty-year-old ­Troeltsch sent his friend Wilhelm Bousset this mixed assessment: The great cosmopolitan metropolis, with its peculiar architecture and people, continually occupies the attentive observer, while a no less powerful force of intellectual activities and enjoyments strain one’s receptive ability. In my opinion Berlin is not a beautiful city, but a city with beautiful structures, a playground of every imaginable type of transportation with an astonishing development of all means of communication. From among the rows of buildings, some ugly or at least very ordinary, there occasionally arise grand palaces of every style, the streets and squares are decorated with a myriad of often exquisite statues and monuments, which the frenetic traffic of the metropolis mainly rushes past indifferently. One charming corner is the square occupied by the museums, ennobled by the marvelously graceful seriousness of art. Otherwise, even the most magnificent squares are disfigured by some curlicued regal façade, a smelly cheesemonger’s shed, an austere rental flat, a ramshackle art dealership or the ruins of demolished or unfinished buildings. Berlin had the misfortune of developing during the period of the worst taste and now has great difficulty keeping its changement de toilette at the same pace as its growth. But what is uplifting and inspiring is the connection to history that emerges everywhere. The days of the Great Elector, the age of Frederick II with its heroic deeds of war and peace, the humiliation of Prussia and the wars of 1813 and 1815, the beginning of spring in 1866 and the apotheosis in the year 1870, all of that appears before my patriotic mind with almost overpowering force and stirring vivacity. I had never before felt the grandeur of Prussia, its significance for Germany, as I have here, and especially the Hohenzollern royal dynasty that, with its steely consistency, its truly royal majesty, and its brilliant understanding of history, moves me to ever greater admiration.10

After the war, in 1920, ­Troeltsch would speak more disparagingly of the city, writing for example to Friedrich von Hügel that the transfer to Berlin separated me from my beloved Heidelberg and threw me into this huge city I detest. Moreover, I am inwardly extremely un-Prussian. But it gave me a great effective-

10  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Wilhelm Bousset, 6 November, 1885; KGA 18, 127–28; cited also in Drescher, 39–40.

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ness that satisfies my urge to be active and absorbs my energy, provides me with an endless amount of information and, hopefully, is of some greater use.11

In those final words, ­Troeltsch was being modest and but also misleadingly vague. For in Berlin, not only did he rise to unprecedented prominence as one of the most celebrated professors at the most acclaimed university in Germany, he also became acquainted with, and respected by, many of the most powerful men in the country, including leading politicians, influential businessmen, industrialists, and bankers. “I already have all kinds of contacts with political and literary personalities,” he wrote in a letter toward the end of 1915, “and perceive that as an enrichment.” In addition, “the entire air here is filled with a certain inner unrest and inward motion, which constantly provides one with new information and facts.”12 In particular, he became a prominent fixture in several private “circles,” semi-formal clubs and social organizations, that would play a central role in the often fierce political debates that increasingly dominated internal discussions of the war.13 All of these activities, and his proximity to the levers of actual power, made those discussions more than merely intellectual or symbolic exercises, providing him with the kind of access that only his presence in Berlin could supply. From then on, as we will see, ­Troeltsch would take full advantage of the opportunities his new station offered him to exert real influence on the larger fortunes of his country. Besides the normal travails of moving an entire household over such a distance and the necessity of finding a suitable apartment in the new city, there were also numerous obligations related to his work at the University of Heidelberg and in the Baden Parliament that needed to be wrapped up before he could leave. And the war itself of course made everything even more difficult than usual. It was not until Easter of 1915, which fell on April 4, that ­Troeltsch and his family were finally able to take up residence in the their new home on the large, newly constructed Reichskanzlerplatz (today Theodor-Heuss-Platz) in Charlottenburg, which then was still an independent municipality just west of the city limits.14

Germany and the World War Even before he had arrived in Berlin, ­Troeltsch had already begun to be included in a number of high-level cultural and political initiatives being spearheaded in 11  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, 31 January, 1920, ­Troeltsch, Briefe an Friedrich von Hügel, 103–04. 12  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Heinrich Rickert, December 19, 1915; KGA 21, 168. 13  See Sösemann, “Das ‘erneuerte Deutschland’,” 128–29. 14  See Drescher, 169–71 and 419–21.

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the capital. The most important of those endeavors was the publication of a substantial volume of essays written by a number of the most distinguished members of the German intellectual class. The book, called simply Germany and the World War, was primarily intended to address neutral countries, and in particular the United States, as a means of blunting the devastating propaganda campaign being waged against Germany by its enemies. As one of the contributors, Friedrich Meinecke, put it, the effort was conceived as the best way to present “the real Germany in its character and current intentions.”15 The idea for the project had originated with Professor Hermann Schumacher, who taught political economy in Bonn and thanks to extensive travels and study in the United States, augmented by a guest professorship at Columbia University in New York in 1906–07, possessed a deeply informed understanding of America.16 In December, 1914, Schumacher had discussed his idea for such a work with Otto Hintze in the presence of Meinecke, who, like ­Troeltsch, was also a newcomer to the University of Berlin, having just left his position in Freiburg in early 1914.17 They soon won ­Troeltsch’s Heidelberg colleague, Hermann On­ cken, to the effort as well, creating a formidable editorial quadriga comprising some of the most prominent academic historians of the time. When they presented their formal proposal for the book to the Prussian Assistant Minister of Education, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, he “eagerly seized on the suggestion” and personally assumed the coordination of the enterprise, thereby making it an official governmental undertaking.18 Schmidt-Ott also wisely made sure to seek the approval of the former Chief of the German General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, who lent his support by agreeing that “an objective and comprehensive enlightenment of public opinion was urgently needed.”19 With such powerful advocates, funded by generous subsidies from state coffers, there seemed every reason to hope the effort would yield the desired positive effect on public opinion abroad. Time was of the essence, and in early January 1915, Schmidt-Ott had already begun recruiting appropriate experts to participate in the high-level and highstakes endeavor. In his solicitation letter to the prospective contributors, he explained that the main purpose of the volume was to serve as a “counterweight from the German side” to the “extensive scholarly and pseudo-scholarly” works being produced by their enemies.20 Schmidt-Ott stressed that for it to achieve its desired aim, 15 Meinecke,

Autobiographische Schriften, 262. On Hermann Schumacher, see Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire, 60–71, and 368–74. 17  See Neugebauer, Otto Hintze, 437–40. 18 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 262. 19  See Schmidt-Ott, Erlebtes und Erstrebtes,143. 20  See the generic letter Schmidt-Ott used reproduced in KGA 20, 717–18. 16 

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the planned publication should rise above the opposing literature by an elevated, academic tone. It thus seems advisable to suppress polemics as much as possible in the text; they may, however, be included in the footnotes, especially when German efforts and circumstances are falsely portrayed. For it to be as effective as possible, it is furthermore essential for the presentation to have a persuasive clarity and not to appeal to emotional values, which are different in other nations from ours.21

Acknowledging that obtaining current and accurate information from abroad, which the military censorship had made so difficult to come by, was critical to the success of the enterprise, Schmidt-Ott assured potential authors that they would have unrestricted access to whatever materials they needed. “The Foreign Office has promised to provide support to the greatest extent possible,” he pledged, adding that “the library of the Foreign Office, under the direction of Head Librarian Dr. Sass, has acquired an extensive collection of literature by our adversaries and, to the extent possible, is still seeking to fill any remaining gaps.” The overall goal for the projected volume, Schmidt-Ott stressed, was to produce “a work that no one who is writing about the war concerned about his scientific reputation can afford to ignore and pass by.”22 The book was supposed to represent, in another words, the best qualities of German Wissenschaft: it was to be sober, factual, impartial – and authoritative. Unspoken but unmistakable was the determination that the book would be the very antithesis, and if possible the antidote, to the calamitous Appeal to the Civilized World! that had stunned and infuriated the world only three months earlier. Divided into five sections – under the headings of “Germany’s Place in the World,” “Germany’s Alliance Partners,” “The Power Politics of our Opponents,” “The Prologue and the Outbreak of the World War,” and “The Spirit of the War” – Germany and the World War came to include, as Schmidt-Ott had stipulated, dispassionate and thoughtful essays by some of the most talented members of the German academic and political elite. A predominant role was occupied by two of the editors. Otto Hintze provided two lengthy and astute articles, “Germany and the System of World States” and “The Meaning of the War.” Hermann Oncken also contributed two essays that elucidated both the “Prologue” to the war and its “Outbreak.” Friedrich Meinecke elaborated his views in a single but extensive essay on “Culture, Power Politics, and Militarism.” Hans Delbrück, a specialist in military history, furnished an overview of “The German Military System,” and Wilhelm Solf, the Secretary of the Imperial Colonial Office, expertly described “German Colonial Politics” from an official perspective.23 There were further 21 

Ibid., 719. Ibid., 718–19. 23  On Solf see Bernhard von Vietsch, Wilhelm Solf. Botschafter zwischen den Zeiten (Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich, 1961). 22 

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contributions about Austria-Hungary and Turkey, as well as incisive but balanced discussions of the international politics of England, France, and Russia, in addition to considerations of Belgium, Serbia and the larger powers of Asia. Italy and other neutral countries that were potentially still susceptible to persuasion were intentionally left out of the discussion in order to facilitate their hoped-for future cooperation. One of the most sensitive topics, however, concerned the nature and meaning of “German culture” more broadly. Since Kultur, or rather the grotesque caricature of it that was being endlessly flogged within Allied propaganda, had become an overriding motif in the war of words, it was a subject that needed to be treated with the utmost tact and skill. The person Schmidt-Ott first approached with that delicate assignment was Adolf von Harnack, at the time perhaps the most famous German professor alive, whose standing and reputation – and closeness to the Emperor – would have guaranteed that what he had to say would at least be given a hearing. Harnack dutifully took a stab at it, but he soon realized that he was simply not up to the task. As he confessed to Schmidt-Ott: However I tried to tackle it, it amounted either to an apology of Germany, which is the last thing we need in the field of science and culture, or to a pile of catalogued trivialities about our achievements that I can not put my name to. But as soon as I entered more deeply into the material and tried to shine a real light on the character of our culture and scientific achievements for our opponents and the neutrals, I was immediately forced to realize that to do that would require a book, at least a number of penetrating essays that would demand extensive work and exceed the scope of the anthology.24

In his letter to Schmidt-Ott, Harnack elaborated what he thought would be necessary to do the topic justice, but in the end he admitted: “I myself cannot write that essential book, for more than one reason. Perhaps ­Troeltsch will write it.”25 Prompted by this helpful suggestion, Schmidt-Ott asked Hermann Oncken to act as intermediary, and by the end of January ­Troeltsch had agreed to take on the task. Astonishingly, less than a month later, despite the immense inherent complexities and sensitivities of the subject that had so daunted Harnack, and notwithstanding all of the other personal and professional obligations weighing on him, ­Troeltsch had already sent the finished manuscript of his long and meticulously composed essay to Schmidt-Ott less than a month later, on February 23.26

24  Adolf

von Harnack to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, 11 January, 1915; KGA 20, 759. Ibid., 762. 26  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, 23 February, 1915; ibid., 736. 25 

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The Spirit of German Culture Even though ­Troeltsch’s contribution to Germany and the World War was written before he had actually arrived in Berlin, the essay already announced the newly elevated status his appointment conferred on him, signaling even by its very inclusion in the volume his formal entry into the privileged centers of power and personal relationships concentrated in the capital. The outstanding significance of the essay itself, was further underscored by its prominent placement in the collection. “The Spirit of German Culture” stands at the head of the entire volume, preceded only by the introductory text by Otto Hintze. In writing it, ­Troeltsch had also made avid use of Schmidt-Ott’s offer to supply the contributors with any needed materials. ­Troeltsch sent long lists of publications he wanted to borrow from the library of the Foreign Office, somewhat needlessly pointing out that, because of censorship restrictions, “it is after all not possible now for a scholar to monitor and receive foreign journals, books etc.”27 And merely by agreeing to appear in the publication, ­Troeltsch was also tacitly acknowledging that he was no longer speaking merely as a private person, as a university professor or even as a public intellectual, but that he was acting in effect as an official, government-sanctioned voice of all of “German culture.” ­Troeltsch’s participation in Germany and the World War thus both formally announced and publicly confirmed his admission into the select company of men who spoke for the entire nation, giving him the means, if not always the ability, to help guide its fortunes. Reflecting ­Troeltsch’s new circumstances and the high importance of the whole enterprise, the thoughts he presented on “The Spirit of German Culture” constitute the most polished and sophisticated meditation on the war that he had thus far produced. Naturally, it revisited several themes he had already been publicly exploring over the previous few months, and it repeated, sometimes verbatim, some of the same arguments he had already made elsewhere as well. But it contains no trace of the rancor or impatience that occasionally rose to the surface in some of those earlier speeches and pamphlets. When ­Troeltsch does cite some of the more incendiary claims made by Allied authors, he does not even attempt to refute them. Instead, he presents them neutrally, without commentary, as if to allow their own hyperbolic excesses to collapse onto themselves under their own exaggerated weight. Overall, “The Spirit of German Culture” exudes a detached, even somewhat aloof equanimity. ­Troeltsch is magnanimous in his contrastive descriptions of the cultures of Britain, France, and Russia, and slightly self-dep27  Ernst ­ Troeltsch to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, 27 January, 1915, ibid., 731. Friedrich Meinecke also mentioned his own extensive use of the “library of the Foreign Office” while writing his essay for the volume; see Friedrich Meinecke to Alfred Dove, 7 February, 1915, in Meinecke, Ausgewählter Briefwechsel, 56.

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recating, but firmly unapologetic, in delineating what constituted in his eyes the peculiar nature of German culture and life. Throughout, the tone is professorial and scholarly – the essay boasts no fewer than twenty-five footnotes, some of them lengthy, with several containing extended quotations in English and French, followed by helpful recommendations for further reading, including some of ­Troeltsch’s own specialized scholarly works – and he calmly laid everything forth as if he were simply presenting self-evident, incontrovertible truths. It is, even rhetorically, a masterpiece of both overt argument and subtle suggestion, leaving no obvious openings for objection or dissent. Structurally, the essay is divided into four main sections: the first introduces the broader issue of the “culture war” and the propaganda campaign against Germany that made the entire effort ­Troeltsch was embarking on necessary in the first place. But at the outset ­Troeltsch already drew a useful and deescalating distinction. On the one hand, he wrote, there was the unruly din of the “daily press and minor literature” in which “national hatred” was intentionally fomented in order to make Allied “readers shudder with fear before huns, barbarians, child murderers, and cannibals.”28 Adopting a clinical stance, ­Troeltsch wrote that such language, while certainly deplorable and ultimately counterproductive, was also probably unavoidable, acknowledging that “the masses require such coarse means” to be motivated to action. Of much greater consequence, on the other hand, was the more “lofty literature by academics and famous authors” who exploited their prestige and influence in the attempt to prove the “inferiority” and “dangerousness” of the German mind.29 To make their provocative arguments, these writers tended to portray German culture in its entirety and solely as “the cause of the war” and to claim that Germany and everything it embodied stood “in opposition” to, especially, the Western “democratic” states.30 And it was at this point, ­Troeltsch wrote, namely the moment when the focus shifted from overt “polemic” to ostensible “analysis,” where crude animosity and prejudice began to cloak themselves in the pretense of objectivity, that such literature became truly insidious and dangerous. And it was at this juncture as well that his own positive examination commences. Putting the phrase in quotation marks himself, ­Troeltsch began by making the general assertion that one lesson the war had taught was that “so-called ‘European culture,’ or rather, the culture of the white and Christian peoples, is not as homogeneous as external appearance would pretend.”31 Building on conclu28 ­Troeltsch,

54.

29 Ibid. 30 

Ibid., 56.

31 Ibid.

“Der Geist der deutschen Kultur,” in Deutschland und der Weltkrieg (1915),

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sions he had drawn in both German Faith and German Custom and The German Essence, he now argued that the belief in a largely uniform common culture in Europe that had prevailed before the war had been in reality a superficial veneer that had effectively masked the true and profound differences that had long existed among all the major European states and, most importantly, had taken shape as an inevitable result of the historical process itself. ­Troeltsch insisted that the independent nations of Europe had all developed in their own discrete ways, gradually evolving over time and in response to an endless variety of internal and external forces to form their present-day complex social and political realities. This process had naturally produced “extraordinarily great cultural differences” among all the national cultures, which were then compounded by differences in “sentiment, mentality and disposition.” All of those elements taken together expressed what, in his essay on imperialism that he had written almost simultaneously with this one, he had memorably called the various, and distinct, “ethnic and national individualities” – Völkerindividualitäten – of Europe.32 Therefore, in order to show what was specifically unique to the “German spirit” in particular, ­Troeltsch logically first had to demonstrate what made all those other “individualities” individual. Following this framing overview, ­Troeltsch thus devoted the second principal section of his essay on “The Spirit of German Culture” to describing in more detail the essential characteristics of the principal European cultures with an eye toward identifying what respectively set them apart. In reality, though, he focused primarily on those of Britain and France. Russia, for ­Troeltsch, fell out of the equation since he thought that, as a people and a state, Russia still remained too underdeveloped and so far represented only “possibilities and probabilities of a significant new and specifically Russian culture.”33 As it turned out, however, all of the particular attributes ­Troeltsch enumerated as belonging to English and French culture were in themselves less important than the fact that, in the aggregate, both Britain and France were taken, by the Allies themselves, to represent “Western culture as the democratic idea of freedom, progress and humanity.” It was these qualities above all that supposedly stood in contrast to the allegedly “reactionary” nature of German political life, which was ostensibly divided, its critics claimed, by “class rule” and fatally enthralled to a “philosophy of violence.”34 And it was here that ­Troeltsch turned to the heart of his treatise, the elaboration of the essential constituents of German culture itself.

32 

Ibid., 57. Ibid., 64. 34  Ibid., 65. 33 

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In this, the third and principal part of the essay, ­Troeltsch made his case by delivering a virtuoso survey of the political, social, economic, scientific, and cultural developments that had taken place in Germany over the previous two centuries. Along the way, he provided finely grained, nuanced discussions, for example, of the German state and military, the nature and growth of the Prussian state bureaucracy, the peculiarities of the German educational system, the nature and growth of German literature, art, and music, and of the specifically German contributions to both religious life – i.e. Protestantism – and to philosophy, which meant primarily German idealism. Interestingly, ­Troeltsch asserted that “the leaders of thought” in most European countries were also “moving in the direction of a similar idealism,” and he specifically named Henri Bergson as an example of that agreement, despite, or perhaps because of, Bergson’s well-known imprecations against German philosophy. “But in the main,” ­Troeltsch observed, “the leading European thinkers are converging in a very remarkable way,” adding only slightly pointedly: “We would not have needed to wage a war for the sake of our different philosophies.”35 It was a refined, deeply learned, and richly detailed exposé of the essential strands of German culture that accomplished the minor miracle of condensing its character and modern historical development into only twenty compact but lucid pages. Finally, it was in the concluding, fourth section that ­Troeltsch addressed what he identified as “the last and most important, and most controversial subject: the German idea of freedom.”36 Here, as well, ­Troeltsch borrowed heavily from his earlier essay on the The German Essence. “The French idea of freedom,” he wrote here in similar terms, although now explicitly tracing the idea to its Rousseauian origins, “rests on the notion of the equality of all citizens in their contribution to the construction of the general will.” By contrast, “the English idea of freedom” emphasized “the independence of the individual from the state, self-control and self-rule, the securing of this independence through a natural right of individuals and the formation of the state by individuals.”37 As opposed to the British and French conceptions, however, “the German idea of freedom,” ­Troeltsch claimed, had very “different roots.”38 Specifically, and notably, it was the negative historical experience of external political “subordination” and even “subjugation” that Germans had long endured, and certainly more recently experienced than either the French or the English, which had led the Germans to seek and find their freedom not in the external sphere of politics and the state, but 35 

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 87. 37 Ibid. 38  Ibid., 88. 36 

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rather in the inner realm of “education and cultivation” – Bildung – and in the “intellectual content of individuality.”39 The central point was that in all three instances – in Britain, France, and, ­Troeltsch insisted, in Germany as well – there existed an idea of freedom, but it was an idea that in each case was the product of particular historical and cultural developments, which then unsurprisingly resulted in different expressions and understandings of that common abstract idea. And in the German context, ­Troeltsch somewhat obliquely suggested, the belated consolidation into a single nation state had been a major factor in causing the German people to compensate for the lack of robust formal political freedom normally guaranteed by the state by turning toward the unconstrainable, but inherently apolitical, private freedom of the mind. Even more remarkably, ­Troeltsch admitted that a related tendency toward a stubborn individual “idiosyncrasy” still largely characterized the Germans, a deep-seated desire for independence and autonomy that often manifested itself as social disharmony. That disunity, he found, remained evident not just in relatively trivial regional and dialectal disparities, but also, even more significantly, in the political and economic “divisions between classes and estates” that continued to afflict the entire empire. ­Troeltsch went so far as to admit that solving this problem was “still the most essential and most difficult task for German freedom today.” Perhaps because he was writing for a publication meant to be distributed abroad, ­Troeltsch acknowledged that in this respect Germany also still had had much to learn from its European neighbors and rivals: From here, to be sure, it is still a long way to truly political freedom. The English model of parliament and self-government has, as we know, been of extraordinary benefit to us on this path, and a powerful current of French democratic thought, still mighty to this day, has flowed into German party politics. We are now working on processing and forming these impulses in a way that is appropriate for us, and we still have a lot of work to do. It is evident nowhere more than here that we are still a young and unfinished state […] The natural process of democratization, which began with the universal people’s army, public schools, and the gaining of independence by industrial workers, will develop further in Germany as well and be balanced with military and political necessities. As everywhere else, in Germany, too, that follows from the situation of modern peoples.40

There are several things that are obviously striking about this remarkable passage. The first is how equitable, even generous ­Troeltsch’s assessments of the English and French conceptions of freedom are – leaving aside momentarily the question of the accuracy of his specific analyses and conclusions – especially

39 Ibid. 40 

Ibid., 88–89.

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given the fiercely antagonistic context in which they were delivered.41 And it is equally important to recognize that he viewed those conceptions, and the social and cultural reality they both reflected and described, not just, or only, as the accidental results of blind historical development. Rather, as he had just explicitly argued, he saw that each of these different ideas of freedom were inextricable from, in fact intrinsic to, the same impetus toward increasing what he had called a process of “democratization” that was naturally and inexorably taking place in all of the modern European states, including, as he said, “in Germany, too.” Increased freedom, legitimated and secured by democratic institutions, was in ­Troeltsch’s view the goal toward which all modern civilized societies inherently and indisputably tended. But he still insisted that there were and would always remain substantial differences in how that general goal would be articulated and realized. The German conception of freedom was likewise the outgrowth of discrete historical forces, which would continue to affect how it expressed itself in the body politic: Our freedom will always be a different one from that of the Western nations. Parliaments are necessary, but in our eyes not the essence of freedom. Voting rights and the participation of peoples in government provide instruction in political maturity; but that, too, is not the freedom we mean. German freedom will never be purely political, it will always be bound up with the idealistic notion of duty and the Romantic notion of individuality. Even as political freedom, it will bear the attributes of its essentially intellectual and cultural origin within it.42

But, and to conclude his essay, ­Troeltsch saved for last what he thought was the most decisive and consequential difference of all setting the German idea of freedom apart from the English and French ones. While allowing that “the great national cultures all have their merits and their drawbacks, and the earth has room for them all,” and even granting the relative degree of democratic advancement that he thought they all exhibited, ­Troeltsch did want to propose that at least in one not negligible respect the German conception of freedom could offer a beneficial, and perhaps even better, alternative than the other two: It has, unlike the French one, none of the rationalistic coercion of being forced on all people as the only scientifically possible one, and also unlike the English conception, it has none of the ostensibly moral coercion of binding all civilization to the dominion of English institutions. It has no urge for world domination, in neither the material nor the intellectual sense. It means the freedom of ethnic and national individualities next to one another who do not destroy their mutual opportunities for development and may not force them to conform to a particular pattern in the name of some law, whatever it might be. In this sense we believe that it is we who are

41 

By way of contrast, we may remind ourselves that­Troeltsch wrote his essay in February 1915, the same month Werner Sombart’s anti-British pamphlet appeared, Händler und Helden. 42 ­Troeltsch, “Der Geist der deutschen Kultur,” 89.

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fighting for the true and genuine progress of humanity, which violates no one and grants everyone freedom.43

“The Spirit of German Culture” thus culminated in a plaidoyer for greater freedom and democracy in Germany, but also, and arguably even more important, for preserving the peaceful coexistence of what ­Troeltsch had called the various Völkerindividualitäten and their freedoms throughout Europe and beyond. That was a conclusion that Otto Hintze independently came to as well in his own essay “The Meaning of the War” that brought Germany and the World War to a close. There Hintze objected to a work by the British historian J. A. Cramb, who taught at Queen’s College, London, which had appeared in 1914 and in which Cramb had declared that “if I were asked how one could describe in a sentence the general aim of British Imperialism during the last two centuries and a half, I should answer in the spirit of Dionysius: To give all men within its bounds an English mind.”44 That was precisely the problem, Hintze wrote, and it illustrated the most significant difference between Germany and England, as Cramb’s book was titled. Speaking on behalf of Germany, Hintze explained: We do not want any dreary world domination by a single people but rather a lively coexistence of free peoples and states, as has been up until now the foundation of modern culture. The culture of more recent peoples would suffocate in the octopus arms of a world-dominating England or Russia, as those of the Ancient world once were by the embrace of the world-dominating Rome. British imperialism strives, as Professor Cramb has expressed it, to give the peoples it dominates an English soul. That is characteristic for a people that has never understood to empathize and project themselves into the unique character of other races and nations. The British colonial civil servant is well able to govern the inhabitants of India, but he does not understand their inner life. […] We have always had a stronger understanding and a greater respect for foreign peculiarity. Before our eyes stands as an ideal of the future a system of world powers that mutually recognize and respect each other in their autonomy and equality, as was earlier the case with the great powers in the European state system; and among these world powers we want to make sure that the smaller or less powerful and developed states also have a secure and independent existence. […] We do not want any sort of world domination but rather the principle of freedom and equality for all the peoples of the earth. […] That is meaning of German world politics, and that is also the meaning of this war.45

When Germany and the World War appeared in July 1915, the volume was greeted, at least at home, with considerable enthusiasm, receiving extensive laudatory 43 

Ibid., 90. J. A. Cramb, Germany and England (London: John Murray, 1914), 125, 45 Otto Hintze, “Der Sinn des Krieges,” in Deutschland und der Weltkrieg, 685–86. ­Troeltsch later pointed out the agreement between his own views and those of Hintze and, as he put it “almost all of the authors” in the work that occurred “without any consultation, purely through the dictates of the matter;” see Ernst ­Troeltsch, Der Kulturkrieg (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1915), 27. 44 

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reviews in the serious German press. Friedrich Thimme, writing for the Interna­ tionale Monatsschrift, hailed it as a work “that introduces a new epoch in Germany’s intellectual battle.”46 While assuring readers that the book contained “without exception substantial, largely outstanding, and brilliantly written essays,” Thimme nevertheless also gave special mention to ­Troeltsch’s contribution as being simply “wonderful.”47 Hans Delbrück, since he himself was one of the volume’s contributors, was obliged to employ a bit more restraint in the notice he wrote for the Preußische Jahrbücher. But any real or perceived conflict of interest did not prevent him from making the claim that “this work represents an encyclopedia, so to speak, of everything that is necessary to know and learn concerning the political understanding of the origin and nature of the world war.”48 (Conspicuously, the first essay Delbrück singled out for praise was also ­Troeltsch’s “Spirit of German Culture”). Even conservative commentators admired the volume, such as the historian Georg von Below, who nevertheless protested against some of the critical comments Hintze had made in his essay about the Pan-German League. “Regarding numerous questions,” Below countered, “the Pan-Germans saw more clearly than other authorities.”49 But Below still regarded the entire publication as “outstanding,” adding that “none of the countries with which we are at war will be able to offer something that demonstrates the same seriousness and the same thoroughness.”50 And when SchmidtOtt presented the work at Imperial Headquarters, it was met, he said, with “spirited acclaim.”51 Even after the war as well, the volume maintained its positive reputation, setting it apart from almost all other contributions to the culture war. In 1920, it was called “the most important work of all for the justification of the standpoint of Germany and the Central Powers.”52 And in the first major history of the conflict to be completed after the Second World War, Gerhard Ritter said that it “still seems to me today to be the most dignified and intellectually the most serious work of German war journalism.”53 46  Friedrich Thimme, “Deutschland und der Weltkrieg,” Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 10 (1916), col.  47. 47  Ibid., col.  49. 48  Hans Delbrück, “Deutschland und der Kulturkrieg,” Preußische Jahrbücher 161 (1915), 530. 49  Georg von Below, “Deutschland und der Weltkrieg,” Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft 6 (1916), 679. 50  Ibid., 677. 51 Schmidt-Ott, Erlebtes und Erstrebtes, 147 52  Josef L. Kunz, Bibliographie der Kriegsliteratur (Berlin: H. R. Engelmann, 1920), 49. 53 Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 3, 593n34. Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission, 117, more broadly referred to it “an important new station in the history of

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Yet, for all of the deserved admiration, and no doubt grateful relief, prompted by the impressive intellectual niveau and sober restraint of Germany and the World War, it utterly failed to achieve its declared aim of changing, or even reaching, the minds of foreign observers. Outside of Germany, the book fell stillborn from the press, generating no significant public response whatsoever in any of the Allied or neutral countries. Although a first edition of 8,000 copies sold well domestically, necessitating a second and expanded two-volume edition a year later, the devastating silence that met the book abroad caused the original plan of having it translated into several languages – including English, French, Spanish, Italian, and possibly Swedish – to be scrapped, with only an English and Spanish version ever completed.54 More damningly, in the judgment of Undersecretary Arthur Zimmermann, the work possessed “very little topical value despite its other distinctions.”55 Despite the unusually swift production time of six months from conception to publication, when the book appeared it had already been overtaken by actual events, which further reduced its relevancy and potential usefulness. For one thing, Italy, which had been deliberately excluded from consideration in the first edition since it was still a neutral country, had declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, 1915, just after the manuscript had gone to the printer, rendering hopes the Italians might be won over redundant. Another, seemingly more trivial reason for the government’s decision to refuse further official support from the project was expressed by the commercial attaché in the German embassy in Washington, D.C., Heinrich Albert. He confidently anticipated that the book would fail on the grounds that “the language of German professors was simply extraordinarily difficult to translate into an equivalent English.”56 Whether objectively true or not, that observation points to an even deeper problem. It began to dawn on people that it was doubtful that the entire enterprise could have ever achieved its intended aim. One of the German reviewers had mordantly called it “A Professors’ Book” – Ein Professorenbuch – which could be taken in two ways. It was, obviously a work created by professors, but it was also, and fatally, a work for professors and never intended for the average reader.57 It was designed to influence the opinions of opinion-makers; the common German foreign cultural policy by the educated middle class.” See also Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 50–52 and 213n42. 54 See KGA 20, 718; see also Christoph Cornelißen, “Politische Historiker und deutsche Kultur. Die Schriften und Reden von Georg v. Below, Hermann Oncken und Gerhard Ritter im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ed., Kultur und Krieg, 128–29, and Bruendel, 47. 55  Cornelißen, 129. 56  Heinrich F. Albert to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, 16 January, 1915; KGA 20, 718, n5. 57  See E. Pernerstorfer, “Ein Professorenbuch,” März 9 (1915), 170–74.

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man was blithely ignored. It began to appear that Germany and the World War was yet another well-intended miscalculation, reflecting a fundamental misunderstanding of the new realities underlying mass public opinion. By the time the book came out, even the educated world, neutral or otherwise, was not in any mood to read attentively, much less be swayed by, a 700-page book written by eminent scholars in their most discriminating prose and who calmly sought to demonstrate why their cause was eminently reasonable and just. And, as ill fortune would have it, on May 7, two weeks before Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies and a full two months before Germany and the World War appeared, a German submarine had sunk the British ocean liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, sending 1,198 passengers to their deaths, 128 of whom had been American citizens, including many women and children.58 After the shock waves of what immediately became known as the “Lusitania Murders”59 had reverberated across the world, neither Americans nor anyone else had any more patience for lectures from German professors, no matter how well composed and cogent their disquisitions might have been. Significantly, albeit for different reasons, some of those same professors were also beginning to wonder whether their efforts might not be futile after all. Although Hermann Oncken later recalled his participation in Germany and the World War as the “highpoint of my journalistic activity” during the war, other contributors were already viewing the endeavor more skeptically.60 Friedrich Meinecke, in a letter to his former colleague Alfred Dove in Freiburg, revealed in early February that “I do not expect very much from the collection of essays, but Schumacher, who suggested it and who knows America, thinks it is badly needed to counter the masses of English literature about us. So we will go ahead and fire our shot in the dark.”61 Ernst ­Troeltsch had also begun to adopt a similarly disenchanted view around the same time. In February, the day before he sent off his manuscript of “The Spirit of German Culture” to Schmidt-Ott, ­Troeltsch responded to an invitation he had received from a Swiss colleague asking him to join an independent, nonpartisan publishing venture called the In­ ternational Review with the aim of reestablishing contact among the “intellectu58  See Willi Jasper, Lusitania. The Cultural History of a Catastrophe, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven: Yale UP, 2016); see also Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers. Die Geschichte des deutschen U-Boot-Krieges gegen Großbritannien im Ersten Weltkrieg (Lauf a. d. Pegnitz: Europaforum, 2001), 126–45. 59  Charles Stewart Davison, The Lusitania Murders and the Responsibilities of Presidents. A Third Letter to Hiram Freeborn, U.S.A., May 10, 1915 (New York: 1915). 60  See Felix Hirsch, “Hermann Oncken und Heidelberg,” Ruperto Carola 47 (1969), 58. 61  Friedrich Meinecke to Alfred Dove, 7 February 1915, in Meinecke, Ausgewählter Brief­ wechsel, 57.

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al leaders of the warring nations.” In his reply, ­Troeltsch already sounded resigned about the value of such undertakings in general given the current climate: I have now read a lot of controversial literature and have to say that I am gradually beginning to consider communication and understanding to be hopeless. We Germans would have to defend ourselves again and again against the phraseology of democratic theories and would need to engage in continuous apologetics, which we have no need of and which is beneath our dignity, and which is also hardly interesting to readers. The paper war, alongside the military one and the hunger war, seems hardly promising and even less desirable to me, and in this situation we can talk about only our own affairs with restraint. No one is going to practice self-criticism in foreign organs.62

By June 1915, a full month before Germany and the World War appeared, ­Troeltsch wrote Hermann Oncken that “I don’t expect too much from the foreign effect of the book. It is too ponderous.”63 Much later, at the end of March 1917, ­Troeltsch sent a letter to Schmidt-Ott in which he looked back to the time when the volume was being planned, writing: “then one could still nurture the opinion (or illusion) that influencing foreign countries was possible by such means. Today that is in my view out of the question. In the tremendous agitation of the moment these things don’t matter.”64 In the event, “The Spirit of German Culture” would be the last time ­Troeltsch wrote with the explicit intention of trying to convince foreign readers that the ferocious condemnations of Germany being churned out by the Allied presses were fundamentally mistaken, brazenly hypocritical, or merely partial and one-sided. It would take some time, but ­Troeltsch eventually came to comprehend, and seemed to accept, the inherently unwinnable situation the “culture war” forced on Germany. Basically, it involved an absurd and inescapable contradiction: while German soldiers were engaged in combat at the front it was impossible to convince the world of their pacific intentions. Or, as Wilhelm Solf, the Secretary for Colonial Affairs and one of the contributors to the volume later put it in a letter to his brother: “If one holds out an olive branch with one hand and fires off a pistol with the other, then one can also not expect very much trust.”65 That was the logical flaw in the conception of the German fight in the culture war as a whole. No amount of reasoned discourse would have ever been able to negate or even diminish the physical and psychic trauma being meted out by the grinding war. As long as the young men of Europe continued to be killed and wounded by the tens and hundreds of thousands, as long as villages and towns along the front were being ruthlessly shelled, burned, and razed, and as long as 62 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Paul Häberlin, 24 February, 1915; KGA 20, 746. Ernst ­Troeltsch to Hermann Oncken, June 22, 1915; KGA 21, 111. 64  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, March 30, 1917; KGA 21, 272. 65 Vietsch, Wilhelm Solf, 371. 63 

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innocent civilians on passenger ships had to fear being torpedoed into a watery grave, the expectation that there could be a dispassionate consideration of German cultural attainments on the part of their enemies was not just delusional; it was ludicrous. Yet German professors, who had grown accustomed over the previous decades to seeing themselves, and being seen by others, as the admired and trusted preceptors of the world, had particular difficulty coming to terms with their sudden loss of professional authority and prestige. Worse, they had to confront the realization that conclusions produced by rational arguments and buttressed by valid evidence did not automatically result in the ready acceptance of their judgments. It was yet another lesson the war taught with brutal clarity: in the lethal clash of physical arms, reason and logic proved no match against fire and blood.

The Turn Inward All of this did not mean, however, that ­Troeltsch abandoned his own efforts to make sense of the war for himself and to communicate his thinking to others. But henceforth he significantly shifted and reshaped the focus of those efforts. Instead of pursuing the provenly futile attempt to sway an audience that was unwilling and perhaps unable to listen, he now trained his attention on those people who he knew already shared many of his own perspectives, his values, and, most crucially, his language. But, as frustrating as it had become to try to engage in any constructive dialogue with the outside world, there was obviously a danger in shunning the world altogether. That July, Adolf von Harnack, exasperated over the apparently complete inability or unwillingness on the part of anyone in or outside of Germany to communicate with each other any more, said during a meeting: “In other countries, the war neurosis is expressed in cursing and swearing. Here in Germany it is expressed by people wanting to shut themselves off from the entire world and convincing themselves that we don’t need the world at all anymore.”66 Harnack’s words point to one of the least appreciated and most dismal products of the culture war and of the widespread distrust, fear, and hatred it fomented. Even for the remaining people of good will on both sides, it was beginning to appear as if neither the means nor even the desire to reestablish contact and to promote understanding between them existed any longer. All that mattered to everyone was to win the war, and to secure that ultimate goal no cost seemed too great. 66 

Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 252.

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Explaining The Culture War Such considerations stood at the forefront of ­Troeltsch’s mind when he confronted these and related issues in his next major public statement. That occurred in a speech he gave in Berlin on July 1, 1915 designed for a general but now very specifically German audience, and held under the auspices of the so-called Central Office for Public Welfare and the Association for Popular Courses sponsored by various faculty members of the Berlin universities. Called simply The Culture War, ­Troeltsch’s address is, despite its title, not a further heated contribution to the “mobilization of minds,” but rather a cool, detached analysis of the entire phenomenon as something to be studied and interpreted in and for itself. That is, the lecture shows ­Troeltsch already treating the “culture war” as an historical artifact like any other, as a discrete episode that had arisen at a particular moment in time in response to specific circumstances that now required disinterested scrutiny in order to understand its origins and development. Noting in his opening words that almost an entire year had elapsed since the tumultuous days and weeks of August – the “most tension-filled and agitated” month, he said, “that we all have ever experienced” – he also remarked how the “war writings and newspapers from that August, with their feverish excitement and their political calculations, already seem to us today in many respects as something foreign.”67 The same was true, ­Troeltsch calmly continued, of the infamous “intellectual war, the culture war” that had sprung into life at almost exactly the same time.68 “We only very slowly found our footing and orientation in the face of this culture war,” he explained; “at first – speaking generally – it surprised and disconcerted us. Here we vacillated the most, gained understanding most slowly, learned the most and, we can probably say today, its essence and meaning have in many ways still not been completely grasped.”69 The war of words had come as a shock and, like all such unexpected blows, had taken some time to absorb and comprehend. Now it was time to explain it. In order to illuminate how people began to come to terms with the Kulturkrieg, ­Troeltsch recounted the various stages that he and many others had inwardly traversed over the past year while trying to grapple with its meaning. At first, in the effort to counter what he called the “false reports” and the “deception” of “isolated press groups,” “a portion of our most brilliant scholars” had attempted to appeal to the conscience of “the leaders of the foreign intelligentsia” and to 67  Ernst ­Troeltsch, Der Kulturkrieg. Rede am 1. Juli 1915. Herausgegeben von der Zentral­ stelle für Volkswohlfahrt und dem Verein für volkstümliche Kurse von Berliner Hochschul­ lehrern (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1915), 3–4. 68  Ibid., 4. 69  Ibid., 5.

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portray “matters in their true light.” Unfortunately, he admitted, “all of this had little effect or even added fuel to the flames.”70 Then, there soon arose the painful specter of the “unpopularity of the Germans in the world,” as ­Troeltsch rather delicately put it, the surprising and unpleasant realization that other peoples regarded the Germans not just with fear, but with revulsion and hatred, which had prompted him and his fellow compatriots to explore “all possible reasons to explain it.”71 This self-examination, however, also did not immediately yield any definitive, or at any rate any satisfying, answers. As a result, he said, “we dug deeper.”72 And here, emerging out of this intensified national soul-searching, it began to appear that in reality there did exist “unquestionably great inner dichotomies between the national cultures within the Western world” of which he and other Germans had previously been only dimly aware or had nonchalantly ignored.73 This dawning realization of fundamental differences among the peoples of Europe was confirmed, ­Troeltsch continued, when “we were gradually able to lay eyes on the enemy literature.”74 It was only then that the full scope, depth, and nature of the Allied offensive against German culture became completely clear. Real differences, he and many others now realized, actually did exist among the major powers. But – and this was ­Troeltsch’s decisive revelation – the Allies had weaponized those differences in order to conduct a formidable campaign against them that, although dissimilar in kind, was comparable in its potency and effect to physical battle, with one important difference. “The culture war is a political campaign against us.” I­ t was “a political battle that was a long time in preparation, cannily calculated, and that finally spread with elemental force, and for the great masses it has become quite sincere.”75 That was an astute and important insight. It was the first time that anyone had identified the specifically political character of the culture war instead of simply seeing it in purely emotional or psychological terms, and ­Troeltsch was surely correct in doing so. For the Allies as well, the “culture war” was not, or not only, the immediate, unfiltered expression of irrational hatred and strong emotion in response to the war. Rather, it was at least in part the product of a deliberate, calculated effort, the result of the conscious attempt to shape and direct the opinions of their own peoples toward the enemy with the intention of motivating them to action. The culture war, with its distortions, exaggerations, and outright 70 Ibid. 71 

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. 73 Ibid. 74  Ibid., 8. 75  Ibid., 11. 72 

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lies, was intentionally organized and deployed by the elites, ­Troeltsch argued, who knew better, or should have. But the insidious content of the culture war was then internalized and naturalized as common knowledge by the masses for whose consumption those elites had designed it. Yet, as ­Troeltsch immediately added, simply pointing out that fact did not mean that the culture war “has been completely understood,” for it did not answer the crucial question: “how is something like that possible?”76 How was it possible in the modern, enlightened world to wage so effectively such a political war of words based largely on ignorance and fear? What did that mean, and more important, how, by what means, could it be combatted? It was to the attempt to provide an answer to those questions that the bulk of The Culture War is devoted. Given what he had identified as the essentially political nature of the “culture war,” ­Troeltsch suggested that the deeper reason for its success and for its peculiar nature, and also the explanation for both its “intensity” and its “monotony,” was to be found in nothing less than the fundamental “condition of modern cultural states itself.” And that condition, or what he also termed “the characteristic situation of modern cultural states,” was, he explained, precisely the “extraordinarily progressed democratization” exhibited by them all, albeit – and this is a crucial point – a democratization that was manifested in each nation state in varying degrees and through differing national qualities.77 The startling conclusion was that the Kulturkrieg, was a quintessentially democratic phenomenon. That was a bold assertion and deserves to be considered carefully. In ­Troeltsch’s view, the forces of modernity, and hence centrally for him the process of democratization itself – namely, rapid and accelerating economic development, the mobility of mass populations, universal education, and especially “the dogma of all modern political morality, the principle of nationality”78 – had together contributed to the creation of a consciousness among all the leading peoples of Europe that they, as national collectives, formed independent “volitional units” who wanted to see “all great political actions as their actions and as their destiny, in which they were participating and which they did not want taken from them by the arbitrary decisions of princes, presidents or diplomats.”79 The steady increase of democratization itself, in other words, which ­Troeltsch identified as the universal, shared experience of all Western societies, had itself produced the social and psychological conditions that allowed, even necessitated viewing a war between nations as a conflict between the totality of entire peoples, who had 76 Ibid. 77 

Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 12. 79  Ibid. Emphasis added. 78 

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come to identify completely both individually and as a whole with their respective states. In normal, peaceful times, ­Troeltsch went on, this “democratization” typically had a disaggregating function, leading, on the one hand, to the increased “fragmentation and atomization” of the entire society as ever more people identified with ever smaller groups defined by shared but specific interests, desires, and goals. But in times of national emergency, it transformed, on the other hand, entire peoples into gigantic and “almost incomprehensible volitional units” composed by everyone belonging to the whole because the danger threatening the state is necessarily perceived as affecting every individual citizen. As a consequence, “such democratized nations conduct wars only as ‘people’s wars’” – Volkskriege. For democracies, ­Troeltsch wrote, war was possible only as a national affair, meaning that the entire people and its way of life were inextricably tied to the struggle, making military victory indispensable for their very continuance as a cultural entity. Further complicating matters was the fact that a “political-moral pacifism” naturally corresponded to “the modern democratic ideal of nationality,”80 resulting in the otherwise welcome situation that “such nations want to wage wars in general only as defensive wars to maintain or save the nation itself in its political existence or in its intellectual-moral substance.”81 Wars of aggression against other sovereign nations, under these premises, obviously violated the intrinsic democratic ideals of liberty, independence, and self-determination and were therefore tolerated by the people required to wage them only in specific circumstances – when they represented a national effort to reclaim irredentist offshoots, for instance, or to liberate other weaker nations from foreign oppression or subjugation. Absent such circumstances, modern democratized polities regarded wars as justifiable and acceptable only when they were defensive actions undertaken as a last resort to ensure the survival of the state as a whole and to protect its continued integrity. The overall sense of cohesion and unity of purpose among a people, then, as well as the continuing threat of their dissolution, were both manifest expressions of the advancing state of democratization in the leading nations of the world, and those same psychological factors had a direct influence on even the most important decisions a state undertakes, above all when and how to engage in war. Or so, ­Troeltsch objected, we liked to imagine. It turned out that even this self-conception of democratic states and how they were governed rested on a deeper misapprehension. “In reality,” ­Troeltsch asserted, “political decisions lie

80  81 

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 12–13.

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in the hands of a few, regardless of whether it is a monarchy or a republic.”82 As much as the nations of Europe were progressively becoming more democratic, and as much as the peoples in each state were increasingly demanding and actually receiving a greater voice and role in public affairs, the hard fact remained that governance still remained the province of a small minority who actually made the decisions that determined the course of the state. And this was true, ­Troeltsch insisted, regardless of the larger political form taken by any given state. Effective power in large, complex modern nation states cannot be wielded by the masses, he pointed out, but only by designated individuals, and “they cannot act solely according to the nationalistic, democratic, moral credo,” but must instead seize opportunities as they occur and avoid dangers they can foresee in the constantly shifting interplay of large political forces.83 For responsible statesmen, in other words, “the motives of their actions must essentially remain those of power politics, however much they may want to accommodate that democratic-nationalistic morality in their personal convictions.”84 Politicians, who necessarily form part of a small power elite, must therefore act in practice according to the autarchic principles of Realpolitik even as they display, or merely feign, obeisance to democratic values. All politicians must be, and indeed are, guided by a kind of pragmatic opportunism in augmenting power on behalf of the state in a way that may or may not accord with their private convictions.85 But when it came to the conduct of war, ­Troeltsch thought that the publicly professed if not always practically observed “democratic-moral dogma” did have at least one significant actual effect: Those leaders may act out of whatever motives they wish, they cannot admit to them when those motives are dictated by power politics and Realpolitik. They must be able to stage-manage and justify the war they want, or have to wage morally, as a defensive war, as a concern of the entire people. If the war is not actually and obviously a defensive war, then it must be artificially made into one by shaping public opinion and as such be planned for as long as possible so that, should it occur, one has public opinion on one’s side.86

It is tempting to think that ­Troeltsch’s delineation of Realpolitik here arose as a direct result of his own accelerated political maturation now that he had been living in Berlin for several months and was able to interact personally with the kinds of people he was theoretically describing. In his remarks here, there is a new hard-headed realism, even a stark pragmatism informing his account of the inner workings of political calculation that had not been present in any of his 82 

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. 84 Ibid. 85  See John Bew, Realpolitik. A History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016). 86 ­Troeltsch, Der Kulturkrieg, 14–15. 83 

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previous descriptions of political thought and action. They reveal a new, less idealistic view of how public opinion was formed – and manipulated – that surely resulted from the closer inspection of such machinations that his new environment in Berlin would have afforded him. For he had never before spoken so bluntly, even cynically, about the duplicity, or at any rate the necessary disingenuousness, that he now described as inevitably informing power politics – particularly, and most consequentially, when it came to war. Whatever its intellectual or personal origins, after delivering this general analysis of how wars must be presented to the populace in modern states that profess adherence to democratic ideals, ­Troeltsch then turned to the real-world example of the “present world war.” As ­Troeltsch saw it, England had long considered, and had long been prepared for, the question of how it would respond to any serious challenge to its absolute hegemony of the seas. Once Germany had arisen as a plausible threat to that dominance, ­Troeltsch argued, England had to decide whether it would seek to maintain its naval supremacy by any means necessary or to accept a relative diminishment of its authority through some power-sharing agreement, which would entail a fundamental change of both its own general place in the world and of the overall balance of power. The alliance with France and Russia, according to ­Troeltsch, had presented England with an opportunity to maintain its dominant position not by accommodating, but rather by forcing a relative “weakening” of Germany. And “under these circumstances,” ­Troeltsch concluded, “it risked the war.”87 For ­Troeltsch, then, the war was the immediate result of just the kind of calculated political reasoning that he had abstractly outlined. It was the direct product of international power politics guided by the amoral exigencies of Realpolitik, and it was England that, as the globe’s dominant power, had accordingly possessed the lead as the primary actor in shaping world events in the years leading up to 1914. In ­Troeltsch’s eyes, Germany’s role was equally clear: “Germany manifestly wanted to secure its world-political future by diplomatic and economic means and not to go beyond the measure of what was necessary for us.”88 Given this scenario, going to war was not positively desired by any one of the participants, but was the result of a geopolitical structure that had gradually arisen, leaving few alternatives if, or when, the respective interests of the involved states encountered a fundamental challenge. Once the war did break out, however, creating an ex post facto rationale for it presented a new set of difficulties. “It was not possible to construct a natural defensive war for the Entente,” ­Troeltsch argued, convinced as he was that they had been the primary drivers of events. 87  88 

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16.

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“Thus,” he concluded, “they created an artificial defensive war, the moral culture war.”89 In ­Troeltsch’s view, the entire “culture war,” the massive, concerted verbal assault on German history, customs, and values, thus represented no more, but also no less, than the post hoc Allied rationale for waging war in the first place, constituting the attempt to make it ideologically palatable to the democratically-minded peoples who were required to fight it. But the crucial point is that, in ­Troeltsch’s mind, the Allies consciously and deliberately fabricated the conflict retrospectively as a defensive war only after it broken out and then presented it as such to their peoples in order to secure the legitimacy required to motivate them to action. This, finally, was in ­Troeltsch’s view the true purpose and the actual content of the intellectual campaign against Germany. “The culture war,” he argued, is the artificial defensive war without which the modern democracies would not have been able to be brought into a martial mood, the cloak of virtue in which the genuine and real power-­ political instincts, which of course still exist today and that are in truth the ultimate grounds for the war, must wrap themselves if they want to achieve anything.90

Whatever one may make of ­Troeltsch’s conclusions – and multiple objections are certainly possible – he presented them without rancor, even evincing a certain kind of analytical admiration for Germany’s foes and for the efficiency of their propaganda campaigns. For, as he matter-of-factly admitted, the stratagem had undeniably worked: “the mass world suggestion was successful.” Even more, it had worked on both the political and the ethical planes. The Allies, and above all the British, had managed to convince the world that Germany, and Germany alone, represented the apotheosis of evil, that it embodied a malignant force that must be crushed for the sake of the survival and continuation of the world order. And “ever since,” ­Troeltsch sardonically concluded, “all of the big and small children of the world know that the German is the enemy of humanity and for the sake of humanity must be annihilated.”91 In ideological terms, the self-avowedly democratic antagonists of Germany also naturally sought to portray the German state as the very antithesis to their own political self-understanding: And if that is the meaning and origin of the culture war, then its content can be understood from there as well. If democracies everywhere are supposed to be inspired by it to rise up in defense, then the basic danger to the world posed by Germany must be precisely that it is itself a menace to democracy, to the political-moral basic principle of the modern world of peoples.92 89 Ibid. 90 

Ibid., 18.

92 

Ibid., 19.

91 Ibid.

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Nothing else rouses democracies more readily, ­Troeltsch argued, than a perceived threat to the principles that define them. To show that he was open-minded and fair, he conceded that there were in fact many aspects of Germany’s political culture and history that provided an easy target for criticism and that some of it was valid. But nothing, he felt, justified the wholesale condemnation of Germany as an essentially “anti-democratic” state. On the contrary, ­ Troeltsch claimed, “we are also substantially democratized, at least intellectually, socially, and economically.”93 Thus, ­Troeltsch agreed that Germany was different, but not in the way the Entente was portraying it. Unlike the nations of the Entente, ­Troeltsch argued, Germany “needed no culture war against our enemies, no artificial defensive war because we all immediately recognized how this war is entirely a natural defensive war.” The Germans did not need to be motivated by a manufactured deception to rise up in their collective defense, he said: “the unity was there on its own as the natural result of the immensity of the danger.”94 “Here in Germany, the absence of a culture war; there, its central significance: that illuminates the entire state of affairs.”95 But, such was the perverse logic of the whole situation, the absence of an intellectual counter-attack in kind from Germany did not mean that the Allied-led “culture war” could go uncontested, which forced German intellectuals to engage in a rearguard action with no effective offensive weapons at their disposal. Nevertheless, there still existed, to ­Troeltsch’s mind, the possibility for a positive meaning of the war for Germany after all, the chance that it could provide a constructive “idea” that would be able to stand as the affirmative goal for which the Germans could see themselves fighting. It was the same idea he had first articulated in his essay renouncing imperialism six months earlier and had then reiterated in “The Spirit of German Culture” published in Germany and the World War, and with which Otto Hintze and others agreed. If the war was to have any greater significance for the foreign policy aims of Germany, it would have to be that Germany contributed to maintaining the independence of other autonomous peoples and states: Only slowly did the idea of this war arise within us, one that went beyond mere salvation and self-assertion, and this idea is also characteristically different from that of our opponents: not the moral police of the world through the supremacy of sea power and the guardian of all democracies, but rather the free development of national and ethnic individualities in their unique spiritual and intellectual natures – Sonderarten – and their political-economic requirements, that is, freedom of the oceans as the precondition of the free peculiarity of the individual living 93 

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. 95  Ibid., 27. 94 

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peoples who may communicate with one another with due respect beyond their spheres of influence.96

Obviously this goal stood in direct conflict with the presumed British aims, as ­Troeltsch and many of his colleagues understood them, not just of preserving their own undiminished control of the seas, but also of protecting and expanding their political, cultural, and economic influence around the world by means of direct administration, through institutions inspired or actually led by British models, and through trade and other economic agreements. In this way, the “culture war” against Germany was also and necessarily “an essential component of the larger political and military struggle” that Britain had been engaged in around the world for the better part of a century. In other words, and returning to the central theme of his lecture, “its real meaning is political, and, more precisely, power-political,” and the war was not primarily a conflict over “cultural” values in some more restricted sense at all.97 In that way, too, the Kulturkrieg was not really, or merely, a “culture war” only, but rather an extension of the traditional power politics Britain had been engaged in for well over a century. Repeatedly, however, ­Troeltsch emphasized that this polemical campaign and its long-term effects must not be underestimated, for “it is directed against the political element of German identity, just as it is in truth a purely political battle.”98 In the same vein, ­Troeltsch recognized the inherent difficulties in combatting such a disembodied foe. “The excitation of the public opinion of the entire world is no trifling matter,” he cautioned. “It is a political force whose effect we can feel all too clearly and cannot be overcome with a drawn sword.”99 ­Troeltsch admitted that, “to be sure, now, during the war, there is little to be done” to correct the image of Germany that its opponents had constructed. For that task one would have to wait until “after the war.’100 In the meantime, however, ­Troeltsch felt that there were two principal endeavors that German “scholars and historians” could profitably undertake: one was to continue to study their foreign adversaries, “and in particular to seek to understand the puritan, Anglo-Saxon democracy better that has thus far been the case.”101 ­Troeltsch called it a “complacent illusion” that Germans were somehow naturally or innately better equipped to understand “the inner being of foreign peoples,” insisting that such comprehension could come about only through diligent study and honest (self-) examination. To that end, he even criticized otherwise unnamed “German writers” for promulgating “equally 96 

Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. 98  Ibid., 29. 99  Ibid., 30. 100  Ibid., 31. 101  Ibid., 32. 97 

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grotesque and insulting misconceptions” about their enemies as those they accused the Allies of spreading about them. “Characterizing England as nothing more than the land of shopkeepers – Krämer – is just as accurate as depicting Germany as the land of strongmen – Gewaltmenschen – and militarism.”102 Although veiled, the allusion was almost certainly to the notorious book by Werner Sombart, Merchants and Heroes – Händler und Helden – that had only recently been published.103 Sombart’s offensive caricature of the English as no better than money-grubbing merchants who loved sports because they were incapable of philosophy was unusual in its vehemence, but by no means unique, which made ­Troeltsch’s deft but emphatic rejection of it all the more noteworthy.104 No, ­Troeltsch insisted, while the war still raged on, the most urgent task facing Germans was not to denigrate their neighbors, but rather to try to understand them, accompanied by the need to pursue the other, more positive goal of attempting to understand themselves, and on that basis to identify and clearly articulate their own values: We have to unfold before the entire world the notion of German freedom, which strongly differs from the Anglo-Saxon and French ones and which in many respects renders us much freer than they are, while in other respects it binds us more closely to the state and to the culture it supports. The world must escape from the exclusive rule of Western formulas of freedom in order to see in our great and valiant, stalwart and industrious, intellectually vibrant and future-oriented people the active and effective will to the freedom of the citizen and the freedom of the mind.105

­ roeltsch thought that the outcome of the culture war, approached correctly, T could in this way provide a double benefit to Germans: it could increase and deepen their understanding of other peoples, and it could promote a broader appreciation for their own specific conception and practice of freedom as an alternative to – but not necessarily as a replacement for – the other major realizations of liberty in the West.

102 Ibid. 103 

Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden. Patriotische Besinnungen (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1915), vi. Sombart indicated in the preface that he had completed his book during the “seventh month of the war,” meaning some time in February. On Sombart, see Friedrich Len­ ger, “Werner Sombart als Propagandist eines deutschen Krieges,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ed., Kultur und Krieg, 65–76; and also by Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863–1941. Eine Bio­graphie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994). 104 See Dieter Krüger, Nationalökonomen im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 199 and 322n100. See also my essay, “Werner Sombarts ‘Händler und Helden’,” in Krieg in der Literatur, Literatur im Krieg, eds. Karsten Dahlmanns, Matthias Freise and Grzegorz Kowal (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 475–82. 105 ­Troeltsch, Der Kulturkrieg, 33.

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At the conclusion of his lecture on The Culture War, ­Troeltsch made several comments about the domestic political situation in Germany that deserve attention, especially in light of statements he had made on related concerns over the previous several months, and specifically in the essay on imperialism he had published in January. In an oblique reference to what would soon be ever more insistently evoked as the “spirit of 1914,” ­Troeltsch announced that it would be unwise to take for granted the sense of unified purpose and common resolve that had been brought about by the outbreak of the war and by the shared awareness of the immediate threat to the entire country that it had aroused. “It would be a great error,” he warned, “to assume that the unification of the August Days represents a fundamental and permanent change in our people, a complete rebirth of unity.”106 Presciently, ­Troeltsch predicted that the time would soon return when “we will experience the resurgence of our own inner cultural problems”, and he urged his listeners to be prepared when the inevitable resurgence of political discord occurred, which would bring back many of the old, unanswered questions as well as raise new ones that had formed in the meantime. In a kind of veiled gesture toward maintaining the already fraying Burgfrieden, he said that “it is not yet the time, today, when the new circumstances have not yet been created, to explore in public what these questions will be,” just as it was also “not yet the time” to discuss what lessons might be learned about their enemies.107 What ­Troeltsch advised in the meantime was instead the “mutual respect of all national comrades, refraining from demagogic outraged agitation, the will to objectivity, the seriousness of responsibility.”108 In closing, he said: “In August we were all a unified people of brothers; may we remain brothers, even if the unity of August cannot last when confronted by new existential questions.”109 ­It would turn out that Troeltsch’s lecture on The Culture War on July 1, 1915 formally brought yet another stage of his war-time activity to a close. Just as his work on “The Spirit of German Culture” in Germany and the World War six months before had led to the realization that it was pointless to try to persuade foreign readers of Ger­many’s benevolent intentions, his thinking through the political and even the psychological implications of the Kulturkrieg convinced him that there was not much more he could or wanted to say about it, and that there was still less that could be done to stop it. From now on he would occasionally mention the “culture war” waged against Germany as a particularly insidious aspect of the conflict, but he would move on to other, more pressing issues over 106 

Ibid., 34.

108 

Ibid., 35.

107 Ibid. 109 Ibid.

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which he still had some measure of control. As he had already written in a letter in mid-April, 1915: The culture war, which was aimed at us in addition to the war of weapons and the war of starvation, at first completely surprised us and then filled us with indignation. But in the meantime we have gotten used to it, we have, as is our manner, learned to understand this foreign way of thinking, to the extent that is not transparent political power, as arising from the different presuppositions there. Thus, today we view the matter very calmly. Of course we note the people whose attacks we have to view as serious misjudgments and at worst as slander. But for the rest we will esteem and use foreign scholarship in the coming peace as we did before, wherever and however it appears. We will read their books and eventually meet the authors, and exchange and contact will certainly be reestablished, more or less as it was before, when after all not everything that glittered was gold, either, and not every embrace was truly heartfelt.110

At the end of The Culture War, ­Troeltsch’s rather subdued comments about preserving “the unity of August” in the face of new challenges at home hinted at some of the concerns that had arisen in the interim and had displaced the more abstract worries over how Germany was being portrayed in the international arena. With any prospect of ending the war and thus stopping the horrific slaughter of men at the front remote at best, he was privately becoming increasingly concerned about the continuing support of the working classes, who formed the bulk of the fighting forces, not just for the ongoing war, but also for the continuation of the very political structures that were responsible for upholding the state itself. But he did not yet publicly address these worries. ­Troeltsch’s reluctance to address openly such potentially explosive internal strains is striking, given how readily he had been willing to challenge or at least to test the Burgfrieden in several of his previous public statements. This newfound reticence may have been another effect of being in the capital, particularly now that he was becoming drawn into the inner circles of power and responsibility and gaining a greater appreciation of the complex sensitivities involved and of the major challenges to the status quo being mounted, among others, by the Pan-German League and its adherents. It is also possible that he received some sort of official or private admonition to exercise greater circumspection when addressing matters of national importance. Whatever the reasons, over the next year or so ­Troeltsch showed a greater reluctance to engage in public speculation about the specific political goals, either internal or external, that Germany should strive to attain in the war – until, that is, the situation demanded that such reticence be cast aside.

110 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Helmer Key, April 15, 1915; KGA 21, 81.

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Blazing New Trails While the move to the capital had brought about an expansion and deepening of ­Troeltsch’s political thinking – as well as, one has the sense, a greater practical shrewdness and a reduction of sentimentality in judging social and cultural phenomena – he did not involve himself in political activities only. After all, he had come to Berlin not as a politician but as a professor, and he approached his new academic duties with the same energy and commitment that everyone in Heidelberg knew and admired. Over the course of 1915, in addition to all of his other activities, he would publish ten substantial reviews of scholarly books, on religion, law, sociology, philosophy, and even one on Dante’s relationship to scholasticism.111 He also managed to write an original monograph of his own on ­Augustine, Christian Antiquity and the Middle Ages, which includes an extended exegetical commentary on St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei.112 The highlight of academic year in Berlin was ­Troeltsch’s inaugural address, or Antrittsrede, the requisite ritual that every German professor is expected to observe on assuming a new chair. The lecture took place on May 1, 1915, in the main hall of the university, which was filled with people eager to see and hear the newest addition to its acclaimed faculty. The event was widely reported in the city’s newspapers, including the Berliner Tageblatt, which printed this somewhat breathless account: The packed “auditorium maximum” greeted the new professor and let him know with what delight he is seen here. Privy Councilor ­Troeltsch gave his thanks and then spoke about his appointment to the chair that Schleiermacher once held. He said that it was a great pleasure for him to occupy this post at such a time, a position he said he could expand at his discretion. He emphasized the strong intellectual affinity that linked him with the cultural philosopher Dilthey, but that his aspiration was finally to master that “anarchy of values” which that thinker had not been able to overcome – all the more so since it was the burning question of this momentous time. He wanted to hold his lecture on “Ethics and Cultural Philosophy” in the spirit of Hegel, Fichte, and Schleiermacher and have it understood in that sense as well. He then began treating the extraordinarily vast subject with captivating verve by tracing the development of “ethics” in Greek culture.113 111 

See Ernst ­Troeltsch, Rezensionen und Kritiken (1915–1923), KGA 13, 31–87. Ernst ­Troeltsch, Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter. Im Anschluß an die Schrift “De Civitate Dei” (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1915). The manuscript was completed, however, on July 27, 1914; see Ernst ­Troeltsch Bibliographie, ed. and intro. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Hartmut Ruddies (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1982), 134. 113 Anonymous, “Antrittsvorlesung von Professor Ernst ­ Troeltsch, Berliner Tageblatt, 2 May, 1915; cited in the editor’s introduction to KGA 16.1, 22. On ­Troeltsch’s conception of the “anarchy of values” and the problem of relativism, see his monograph on Das Historische in Kants Religionsphilosophie. Zugleich ein Beitrag zu den Untersuchungen über Kants Phi­ losophie der Geschichte (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1904), esp.  118–19; and also ­Troeltsch, 112 

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The richness of Berlin’s intellectual and cultural life allowed ­Troeltsch to pursue his interests outside of the formal confines of the university as well. The reference to Greek culture in his inaugural address, for example, was not merely a pedantic ornament expected of a German professor, but the expression of an abiding personal interest. That summer, within months of settling into his new home, ­Troeltsch had already become a member of the venerable “Graeca” association, an informal club for lovers of Ancient Greek literature that traced its roots back to Friedrich Schleiermacher, who had produced celebrated translations of Plato’s dialogues and whose chair at the university, as ­Troeltsch himself had pointed out in his inaugural address, he now occupied.114 ­Troeltsch appreciated the opportunity it afforded him to exercise his Greek and he clearly enjoyed the conviviality of the club. As he described the organization to his new colleague, Friedrich Meinecke, whom he was trying to persuade to join the Graeca as well: The meetings take place once a month (during the semester), we’re reading Aeschylus at the moment, whose Oresteia will preoccupy us this winter. After the reading is over there is a simple supper. The day of the meetings is Friday […] I can only say that I personally find the Graeca very pleasant. Various occupations are represented, the tone is very congenial and informal, so that I already feel extremely comfortable. There are no obligations regarding performance since one of the philologists usually interprets. The likes of us just ask questions.115

Apparently, Meinecke’s linguistic skills were not quite on par with those of his colleague and he seemed to derive less pleasure from the sessions. “We read only in Greek and nothing was translated,” Meinecke later recalled, “only every once and a while would one of the expert philologists explain something; that was too difficult for me, especially since we were reading Aeschylus, Pindar and Plotinus.”116 More to Meinecke’s liking were the regular extended walks he organized every other Sunday afternoon in the Grunewald, the large forested area on the western border of Berlin where many prominent professors built their stately villas. After assembling at the Dahlem-Dorf subway station (which had just been completed two years before, in 1913), the participants would set out on an excur“Moderne Geschichtsphilosophie,” Parts I-III, Theologische Rundschau 6 (1903), 3–28, 57– 72, and 103–17. 114  In his memoirs, Friedrich Meinecke indicated that there were actually two so-named organizations that both claimed Schleiermacher as their founder, one dominated by the most eminent classical scholars of the day, foremost among them Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Diels, the other by “somewhat less illustrious” graecophiles such as ­Troeltsch and Meinecke himself. See Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 240. 115  Ernst ­ Troeltsch to Friedrich Meinecke, 22 September 1915, cited in Horst Bögeholz, “Berliner Zeitgenossenschaft. Erläuterungen zu Briefen von Ernst ­Troeltsch an Friedrich Meinecke,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 1 (1982), 155–56. 116 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 240.

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sion through the woods. The core group of these Sunday outings was formed by Meinecke’s old friend Otto Hintze, whom he had known since their student days and who was now his colleague at the university; Heinrich Herkner, an economist and former student of Lujo Brentano (Herkner had spent many years teaching in Switzerland, which, according to Meinecke, had usefully acquainted him with what a “healthy democracy” looked like); and almost always by the indefatigable Ernst ­Troeltsch.117 They were frequently joined on these outings by other well-regarded figures who either lived in Berlin or were visiting from elsewhere, including the sociologist Alfred Vierkandt, the historian of the workers’ movement Gustav Mayer, the art historian Werner Weisbach, and the industrialist and polymath Walther Rathenau, who sometimes showed up, as Meinecke rather sour­ly noted, “without being asked.” “To me,” Meinecke offered by way of explaining his aversion to Rathenau, “he was slightly too witty and artificial, as a cultivated Jew sometimes is.”118 These long walks, usually lasting two or three hours, were most often devoted to discussing current political and social questions, but one can easily imagine that the exchanges were free-ranging and animated.119 And, as usual, ­Troeltsch stood out even in this select company. As ­Meinecke modestly put it: In the many conversations we both had with one another, I do not believe that I remained without influence on him. But I probably learned more from him than he did from me, for he was from the outset the more universal one, who rushed tempestuously upward on a broad path, whereas I only attempted slowly to climb into the heights on a more narrow lane. ­Troeltsch possessed an enormous vitality. He was effervescent with life and pushed himself to tackle every intellectual or political position of modern reality he encountered, that is, to comprehend and criticize it, to integrate it, so to speak, into his universal conception of human energies, whether they be distant from or close to God. He said a great deal about how one may not simply remain in mere contemplation, but that one had to translate that into creative and constructive cultural work – but his most genuine abilities did not reside in practical areas but rather in shaking up minds, blazing new trails.120

Delbrück’s “Wednesday Evening” There was yet another, far more important semi-private association that ­Troeltsch soon joined after arriving in Berlin, one that would put him into contact with some of the most influential people in the capital and thus in the entire German Empire. 117 

Ibid., 235. Ibid., 236. 119  See Herbert Doering, Der Weimarer Kreis, 70–73. 120 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 234. 118 

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Almost immediately after the war had broken out, Hans Delbrück had begun to preside over what became a weekly discussion group, originally convening every Wednesday evening in a back room reserved in a restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm, and then moved to more permanent quarters as it grew in size and importance.121 Designed to be broadly inclusive so as to incorporate as wide a spectrum of opinion as possible, the meetings brought together representatives from every part of the German political, intellectual, economic, and social elite, including members of parliament, university professors, bankers, diplomats, jurists, journalists, military figures, industrialists, and manufacturers. Everyone was encouraged, in fact expected, to speak openly about any aspect of the war or related matters they thought worthy of debate.122 Delbrück’s “Wednesday Evening” – Mittwochabend –, as the informal institution became known, was famous for its serious but undogmatic atmosphere, which Delbrück maintained by his diplomatic but firm management of the proceedings.123 One of the regular participants and a friend of ­Troeltsch, Werner Weisbach, wrote that I esteemed Delbrück as a proud, upright, open, steadfast, resolute character who energetically fought for what he thought was right and necessary even when he came into conflict with the higher authorities. Conservative in his political stance but of a thoroughly liberal disposition, championing reason, decency, and chivalry, he had already taken a position against the Pan-­ Germans and nationalistic excesses before the war.”124

And it was in that same spirit that Delbrück conducted the weekly meetings, which ­Troeltsch attended as often as he could. Given the social and political standing of the participants, it was not surprising that many of the ideas expressed during the Mittwochabend sessions would be taken up or at least seriously considered in policy discussions within the German government. Indeed, the Wednesday Evening group soon emerged as “one of the most important political circles in the Imperial capital,” and Prince Max von Baden, the man who would become the last Imperial Chancellor, was himself an 121  Anneliese Thimme, Hans Delbrück als Kritiker der Wilhelminischen Epoche (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1955), 140, mentions that the group was actually founded by Eugen Schiffer, a member of the National Liberal Party and a representative to the Reichstag, but that Delbrück was unanimously elected as its president and gave it its name. 122  See Paul Rühlmann, “Delbrücks ‘Mittwochabend’,” in Am Webstuhl der Zeit. Eine Er­ innerungsgabe, Hans Delbrück dem Achtzigjährigen von Freunden und Schülern dargebracht, eds. Emil Daniels and Paul Rühlmann (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1928), 75–81. See also the brief account in Ernst Jäckh, Der goldene Pflug. Lebensernte eines Weltbürgers (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1954), 188–89. 123  See Bruno Baier, “Delbrück der Führer der Mittwochsgemeinschaft,” Preußische Jahr­ bücher 218 (1929), 299–303. 124 Weisbach, Geist und Gewalt, 176.

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occasional guest.125 And central to Delbrück’s concerns, his “main political aim,” and a mainstay of the Wednesday Evening deliberations, was to find the way to achieve as quickly as possible a negotiated peace – Verständigungsfrieden – that would bring about an acceptable end to the war.126 As Max von Baden himself later put it, Delbrück, who “has rightly been called the father of this idea,”127 used his unofficial institution with unwavering determination to pursue all available means of achieving peace – not a peace that sold Germany short, but also not a peace bought at such expense that it would unavoidably mortgage the future. It was this same willingness to negotiate and compromise in the search for a tolerable peace that had, we remember, provoked the fury of Heinrich Claß and those sympathetic to the Pan-German “war aims movement” he had breathed into life with his Position Paper. On March 10, 1915, prompted by Claß’s public exoneration a few days earlier, a petition inspired by his pamphlet and signed by six of the largest economic associations in Germany was submitted to Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg for his formal consideration. After receiving no answer, it was resubmitted verbatim ten days later, on May 20. Citing unspecified “rumors” circulating regarding the desire on the part of unnamed figures in the country to reach a “separate peace” with England, the “Industrialists’ Petition,” as it came to be known, argued in strident terms that Germany must refrain from pursuing any such “premature peace agreement with any of its enemies.” Such an agreement would, the petitioners insisted, disastrously fail to achieve what they saw as the most crucial goal of the war, namely the acquisition of new territories that could be obtained only by complete military victory. It continued: For this goal can be obtained only by winning through battle a peace that will bring us a better security of our borders in the west and east, an expansion of the foundations of our naval standing, and the possibility of an unimpeded and robust development of our economic strength, in short, that will provide in political, military-maritime, and economic terms such expansions of power that will guarantee our greater external strength.128

Concretely, the provisions demanded in the Industrialists’ Petition involved placing all of Belgium under German administration, annexing strategically and eco-

125  Christian Nottmeier, “Adolf von Harnack und die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg 1914– 1917,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 7 (2000), 71. 126  Baier, 300. 127  Prinz Max von Baden, Erinnerungen und Dokumente (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1927), 76. 128  See “Petition der sechs Wirtschaftsverbände an den Reichskanzler,” in Salomon Grumbach, Das annexionistische Deutschland. Eine Sammlung von Dokumenten, die seit August 1914 in Deutschland öffentlich oder geheim verbreitet wurden (Lausanne: Payot & Co., 1917), 123–24.

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nomically important parts of France, and performing massive land confiscations and resettlements throughout Central and Eastern Europe. When the second submission of the petition also received no response from the Chancellor, the agitation among its supporters only increased. In order to enhance the prestige of their cause and thereby increase the chances of being heard and listened to, they concluded that they needed the endorsement of recognized and respected authorities, and that inevitably meant recruiting academics sympathetic to their effort.129 Claß originally approached Professor Dietrich Schäfer, a conservative historian at the University of Berlin who was largely favorable to the Pan-German League, to solicit his cooperation. But Schäfer had taken exception to the proposals in Claß’s original Position Paper specifically regarding territorial seizures in the west, and he objected particularly to the demand that the expropriated lands be depopulated of their native inhabitants. Such a plan, Schäfer told Claß in a letter, ran contrary “to all principles of humanity and culture” and would, if enacted, do Germany irreparable harm.130 Undeterred, Claß soon found a more amenable replacement in the person of Schäfer’s colleague, professor of theology Reinhold Seeberg – who had been, as it happened, one of the most ardent opponents of ­Troeltsch’s appointment to the university. (Among other things, and tellingly, Seeberg had objected that ­Troeltsch was “too one-sidedly oriented toward the ideas of the Enlightenment.”131) Professor Seeberg obligingly assumed the chairmanship of a committee to draft yet another petition aimed at winning over as many of his colleagues as possible. By June 8, the so-called “Seeberg Address,” also sometimes referred to as the “Intellectuals’ Petition” to distinguish it from the earlier one spearheaded by the industrialists, had already been drawn up and sent to Bethmann Hollweg. On June 20, 1915, it was formally presented to a large assembly of academics, diplomats, and active senior government officials in a private ceremony held in the Artists’ House – Künstlerhaus – in Berlin.132 Although the text of the Seeberg Address diplomatically toned down the harshly aggressive language of Claß’s original document, the actual measures it

129 

On this entire episode, see Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 69–74. Wider den Strom, 362; see also Schwabe, “Ursprung und Verbreitung,” 123. 131  See Wirth, 139. 132  For more details on the meeting, see Schwabe, “Ursprung und Verbreitung,” 126–28; see also the text of Seeberg’s remarks at the event, “Deutsche Zukunft,” in Geschichte, Krieg & Seele. Reden und Aufsätze aus den Tagen des Weltkrieges (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1916), 41–55. 130 Claß,

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laid out were in practical terms virtually identical.133 Claiming that all Germans, “from the highest to the lowest” classes, had arisen in their determination “to defend not just our physical existence, but also and above all our inward, intellectual and moral life,” the Seeberg Address asserted that the nation remained unified and confident of final victory. It proclaimed that the Germans knew “only one fear,” namely: that, on the basis of false illusions of reconciliation or even out of nervous impatience, a premature peace, and thus a partial and by no means permanent peace, could be made; that, as happened one hundred years ago, the diplomats’ pen could once again ruin what had the sword had victoriously won.134

To prevent such an outcome, and to create the necessary conditions for ensuring a lasting security for Germany, “the military results of this war, which have been obtained through such great sacrifices, should be exploited to achieve the greatest possible gain.”135 Again, the measures to be used in securing that outcome specifically meant that “we must conquer part of the Northern French Channel coast” in order to provide “access to the world’s oceans,” and that all property in the seized territories be transferred “into German hands.” Likewise, Belgium, “which has been obtained with so much noble German blood, must remain, no matter what other reasons may speak against it, politically, militarily, and economically in our hands.”136 And, finally, “the degree to which our eastern border will be moved forward will depend on the military situation.”137 Even apart from its concrete demands, the very existence of the Seeberg Address, like Claß’s Position Paper that had inspired it, obviously represented a flagrant defiance of the Imperial Chancellor and his authority. While technically observing the letter of the Burgfrieden (the text was widely distributed, but accompanied by the duplicitous proviso that it was a “strictly confidential manuscript”), the Seeberg Address clearly, even contemptuously, violated its spirit.138 And behind the scenes, someone supplied a copy of it to an agent of the Associated Press who first tried unsuccessfully to cable it to New York from Germany, but then managed to have it sent it to Copenhagen, and from there it was broadcast to the world.139

133 Schwabe,

Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 70, calls the text a “paraphrase” of the earlier document. 134  See “Petition der Professoren an den Reichskanzler,” in Grumbach, 133. 135 Ibid. 136  Ibid., 134. 137  Ibid., 135. 138  Ibid., 140. 139  See Dietrich Schäfer, Mein Leben (Berlin: K. F. Koehler, 1926), 171.

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In a further escalation, Seeberg also published a polemical article in the Täg­ liche Rundschau aimed at harming Hans Delbrück and his promotion of a negotiated peace. There Seeberg referred in general terms to “a petition,” meaning his own address, that had been submitted to the Chancellor urging him to accept nothing less than a peace won by total German military victory over its adversaries. In his article, Seeberg also announced that the unidentified “petition” he had mentioned had been signed by 1,341 prominent individuals, including 352 university professors, 252 artists, writers, and publishers, 145 administrative officials, mayors, and city councilors, 148 judges and lawyers, 18 active admirals and generals, and 182 men in industry, trade, and finance.140 In private communications among the principal backers of the war aims petitions, however, all pretense of either observing the Burgfrieden or showing any respect for the Chancellor himself was dropped. In a letter on July 11, 1915, Claß characteristically wrote that “Bethmann is nothing, and nothing can come from nothing. An absolutely unpolitical man will not become political. […] We just have to fight until a chancellor appears whom our people, especially in such a time, has the right to demand.”141 In his memoirs, Claß openly, even proudly acknowledged that “we and our collaborators made every effort to bring down the disastrous man.”142 For his part, Bethmann Hollweg said he was “disgusted by the ignorance and stupidity of the annexationists,” but admitted that his options for responding to them were severely limited.143 Unsurprisingly, he forbade the further dissemination of the Seeberg Address, ordered all available copies to be confiscated, and prohibited the collection of any more signatures for it.144 He attempted to reason in personal correspondence with some of the ringleaders, including in a letter from mid-May to the current chairman of the Pan-German League, Konstantin von Gebsattel. Bethmann Hollweg tactfully praised the Pan-German League for “raising the national will to power,” but he criticized its lack of “political judiciousness,” adding that even in peacetime it had “often made political dealings more difficult and had forced every government into opposition against it that did not want its own windows to be smashed in.”145 Publicly, Bethmann Hollweg necessarily remained silent. To take a public stance toward the petition would only have played into the hands of his foes, who 140 

Grumbach, 140. Heinrich Claß to Konstantin von Gebsattel, 11 July, 1915; cited in Leicht, 193. 142 Claß, Wider den Strom, 414. 143  From a diary entry on July 24, 1915, recording a conversation with his advisor and secretary Kurt Riezler, Tagebücher, 287. 144  See Schäfer, Mein Leben, 171. 145  Hagenlücke, 56. 141 

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wanted nothing more than an unrestricted airing of their views, which would have only gained even greater prominence by being rebutted by the Chancellor himself. And, perversely, to argue against them in an open forum would have also exposed to the full view of friends and enemies alike precisely the lack of unwavering unity among the entire people that the Burgfrieden was intended to embody and ensure. Simultaneously, it would also reveal that there existed hostile and aggressive sentiments shared by a significant segment of the German ruling classes that would only confirm the darkest suspicions of the Allies. In effect, then, and once more, Bethmann Hollweg found himself trapped by a situation he had done much himself to create. His aversion to “open and public discussions of great political problems” had not been caused by the war but his reluctance was exacerbated by it. As a result, “a genuine discussion of the necessity or futility of a war never took place”146 – just as an honest public debate about what the war was supposed to achieve overall also never occurred once it had broken out. Fortunately for Bethmann and his government, some measure of temporary relief came in the form of a counter-petition organized by Hans Delbrück and a group of like-minded members from his Mittwochabend. In his memoirs, Theodor Wolff, a stalwart of Delbrück’s Wednesday gatherings, cast a lurid light on the motives of the annexationists, underscoring the moral imperative for upstanding German citizens to do something, and almost anything, to oppose them: Since the beginning of 1915, the annexationist propaganda had been at a fever pitch and had inexorably increased. Fed by the rich resources of heavy industry, which fished so much profit out of the oceans of blood on the killing fields and were now also stretching out their hands for the possession of the mineral regions of Langwy and Briey and for the Belgian coal mines, this movement had enthralled the armchair generals, six “national associations” took the lead in the march, and a thousand naïve, clueless university professors allowed themselves to be yoked to the masters’ cart. Something had to be done to resist against this immoral speculation, which brushed aside all international law, made any peace settlement impossible, and did not shy away from the sacrifice of an unconscionable number of human lives.147

On July 7, 1915 some fifty people, inspired by similar revulsion and outrage, met in a room of the Prussian House of Representatives to debate the growing question of annexation and its implications. Among those present were several senior members of the university, including Gerhard Anschütz, Adolf von Harnack, the economist Max Sering, and, not least of all, Ernst ­Troeltsch. But it was also attended by influential figures in and around the government, such as Prince Hermann von Hatzfeldt, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, the Vice President of 146 Vietsch, 147 

268.

Bethmann Hollweg, 211. Theodor Wolff, Der Marsch durch zwei Jahrzehnte (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1936),

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the Reichstag Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, and the politician and banker Bernhard Dernburg.148 The only official topic of discussion for the meeting was “the Belgian question.” Wilhelm Kahl, a professor of law at the university and a politician in the National Liberal Party, spoke first. Theodor Wolff, who recorded the event in his diary, noted that Kahl spoke “generally very reasonably: decisively against annexation and just as decisively against incorporation, as ‘veiled’ annexation.”149 While others also expressed their principled opposition to annexation, many wanted to preserve some kind of buffer zone or protectorate along the western border, and some even wanted to retain Belgium temporarily as “collateral” – Faustpfand – to use as leverage during post-war negotiations.150 When his turn came to speak, ­Troeltsch, typically, discussed the matter on the basis of cultural-historical considerations, arguing that the incompatible ways of viewing the state “among the Western Europeans and us Central Europeans” made appropriation and occupation of foreign territory, which would entail the forceful imposition of an antithetical mentality on other peoples, not just ethically questionable, but also in practical political terms inherently impossible. ­Troeltsch summed up the principal differences in outlook among the European states this way: “Here” – meaning in Germany – ”the state says to the citizen: what do you do for me? – in Western Europe the citizen asks the state: what do you give to me? From this there already emerges a gulf in thinking that excludes any annexation.”151 Nevertheless, ­Troeltsch did say that he agreed that Belgian territory up the the Meuse river, which runs through Naumur and Liège, ought to remain under German jurisdiction “for the foreseeable future,” without specifying when or how the land would be restored to the Belgians. Another speaker, Felix Gentzmer, assertively suggested that, as opposed to concerns voiced by others about how any German actions would affect foreign opinion, “we should be indifferent to the mood in other countries.” Dernburg

148 

See Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 247–48. For another account, though based heavily on his diary, see Wolff, Der Marsch durch zwei Jahrzehnte, 269–72. This book was republished as Die Wilhelminische Epoche. Fürst Bülow am Fenster und andere Begegnungen, ed. and intro. Bernd Sösemann (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1989). 149  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 248. 150 Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 208, shows that the Imperial Chancellor also deliberately used the word Pfaustpfand in the Autumn of 1914 with similar intentions in reference both to territories in the west and in the east, particularly Poland. 151  Ibid., 248–49. Bernd Sösemann, the editor of the diary, cautiously speculates in a footnote that the unnamed professor Wolff mentions is “possibly” ­Troeltsch, but the nature of the argument made by “Professor …” quoted here leaves little doubt about his identity.

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vigorously objected, pointing in particular to the opinion in America, where he had just spent the previous nine months as an official emissary152, saying: Today the American people are on a direct war footing with us, they are delivering weapons to our enemies and could hardly do more if there were a real war between us and America. And they are doing all of that because it is the view there quite simply that we started the war, invaded Belgium, etc.153

Dernburg also advised that, apart from the practical difficulties of administering occupied areas in Belgium and France, “of much greater consequence would be the hatred that it would leave behind.” “In the future,” Dernburg pointedly reminded everyone present, “we are going to have to win friends somewhere.”154 Finally, Delbrück rose to deliver what Wolff called a “magnificent, warmhearted, often impassioned speech.” While acknowledging the arguments put forward by the previous speakers regarding various “security measures,” Delbrück stated categorically that “none of them would do much good.” Reminding everyone of the actual reason for organizing the meeting, he said such narrow considerations were irrelevant to their own purposes. They had come together not to debate the relative merits or disadvantages of specific war aims, but rather specifically to respond to and repudiate the “outrageous” Industrialists’ Petition. Delbrück also revealed that the petition had already found its way into foreign countries, where it was, predictably, further eroding the international perception of Germany. To underscore what effect the document would have abroad, he read aloud, “in an agitated voice, individual sentences from the petition that he called scandalous.”155 In conclusion, Prince Hatzfeldt offered a summary of their discussion thus far and proposed that, seeing as all those present were “unanimously against annexation,” a “counter-petition” should be composed and immediately submitted to the Chancellor.156 It was soon agreed that Delbrück, Kahl, Wolff, and August Stein, who was the Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, would co-author the declaration. Two days later, on July 9, the text had already been finished and sent to Bethmann Hollweg. Although much shorter than the two appeals it opposed, the “Delbrück-Dernburg Petition,” as the emergent document came to be known, made up for its brevity by a bracing clarity: 152  See “Die Amerika-Mission 1914–15,” in Werner Schiefel, Bernhard Dernburg 1865– 1937. Kolonialpolitiker und Banker im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Zurich: Atlantis, 1974), 149–55. 153  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 249. 154 Ibid. 155  Ibid., 249–50. 156 Ibid.

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Germany did not enter the war with the intention of conquest, but to maintain its existence being threatened by the enemy coalition, to preserve its national unity and its advancing development. Even in a peace agreement, Germany may pursue only that which serves these goals. Petitions that have been sent to Your Excellency infringe on these goals. We thus consider it our duty to adamantly oppose those efforts and to say openly that we would see in their realization a political error of gravest consequence and not a strengthening but rather a fateful weakening of the German Empire.157

Therefore – and for added emphasis the authors placed their central statement in italics – “the annexation or incorporation of peoples who are politically inde­ pendent and accustomed to independence is to be rejected.” To do otherwise, the declaration continued, would be to “relinquish and change the leading principles guiding the creation of the Empire and destroy the character of the national state.”158 Reflecting Delbrück’s narrowly focused intentions, the address is a mere four paragraphs long. The concision of the text is matched by the comparatively, and for the organizers no doubt disappointingly, short list of names that followed. With only 141 signatures, it amounted to roughly a tenth of the number that had endorsed the Seeberg Address.159 But many of those names adorning the shorter petition were not insignificant: in addition to those present at the planning discussion, including ­Troeltsch, other notable signatories were, among others, Albert Einstein, Max Planck and – marking his first public stance on the question of war aims – Max Weber.160 No less important, although the petition itself could not be published or publicly disseminated (it would not be published until August 1917, after the Burgfrieden was formally lifted, when it appeared in the Preußische Jahrbücher), everyone connected with it knew that its contents would inevitably come to light within Germany and then abroad, probably sooner rather than later.161 Theodor Wolff, who had shown in the wake of the affair surrounding the “Manifesto of the 93” that his political instincts often surpassed those of professional politicians, recognized that the mere existence of their petition would in itself go a long way toward achieving its creators’ larger goals. “In my opinion,” Wolff told his co-authors during the drafting of the document, they would have 157 

“Die Delbrück-Dernburg Petition,” in Grumbach, 409. Ibid., 410. 159 Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 419 thus calls it “quantitatively a failure.” Döring, Der Weimarer Kreis, 25, cites a draft of a letter from Delbrück to his colleague Gustav Roloff in Gießen in which Delbrück indicates he originally intended to circulate the petition for “mass signatures,” but for whatever reason never realized that plan. 160  See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1890–1920. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1959), 213. 161 See Preußische Jahrbücher 169 (1917), 302–19. 158 

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already accomplished a great deal just “by the fact of the declaration, by the fact that an elite in Germany spoke out in this form against any annexation of independent peoples.”162 What is more, Wolff said a few days later, such an “announcement is a moral act, which for the organization of later situations and international relations can acquire more significance than all propaganda aimed at foreign countries.”163 As predicted, the “Delbrück-Dernburg Petition” became known almost immediately within Germany itself. On hearing about it, Lujo Brentano wrote an encouraging letter to Delbrück, saying: “I was extremely happy to learn of your position against the downright criminal annexation ambitions of our united protectionists, just as I was horrified by the petition on May 20 to the Imperial Chancellor. It amounts to the justification of all the accusations that our enemies abroad have directed at us.”164 And the importance of the counter-petition for Ernst ­Troeltsch himself can measured by the fact that it was the first overtly political public statement he had put his name to during the war. As estimable, and for Bethmann Hollweg as welcome, as the actions of Delbrück and his Wednesday Evening associates undoubtedly were, they could not conceal the fact that the government, if not the Empire itself, was now being threatened by the most serious domestic political crisis since the outbreak of the war. The actors themselves were fully aware of the stakes involved and of the dangers they were confronting. Delbrück freely admitted in a letter to Hermann Oncken that one of the main purposes of their petition had been “to back up” the Imperial Chancellor against the “agitation of the modern Assyrians” – a caustic if recondite reference to the Pan-Germans, comparing them to the ancient empire notorious for its expansionist tendencies, as well as for its ruthlessness and cruelty.165 But Delbrück remained worried that, because of Bethmann’s “disposition” – meaning, most likely, his apparently congenital unwillingness or inability to take an unambiguous stand on issues and then resolutely stick to his decision – the Chancellor might yet yield to the aggressive tactics being employed by the annexationists. They were certainly applying as much pressure as possible on him by portraying the consequences of settling for anything less than total fulfillment their demands as being nothing short of catastrophic, including the possible toppling of the monarchy itself. That threat had been made explicit in the original draft of the Seeberg Address, which contained an incendiary concluding passage: 162 

Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 252, Ibid., 258. 164  Anneliese Thimme, Hans Delbrück als Kritiker, 121. 165  Hans Delbrück to Hermann Oncken, August 9, 1915, cited in Nottmeier, “Adolf von Harnack,” 82. 163 

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A statesman who returns home without Belgium, which has been fertilized by rivers of German blood, without major border adjustments toward the west and east, without heavy war reparations, and above all without a ruthless humiliation of England, would have to expect not just the most extreme dissatisfaction of the lower and middle classes owing to the imposition of taxes; he would also encounter a bitterness up into the highest leading circles that would endanger the inner peace, that could indeed shake the foundations of the monarchy.166

Although these alarming, even implicitly subversive lines were removed from the final version sent to the Chancellor, the smoldering sentiment they expressed obviously lingered and would only intensify. In a private letter to Bethmann in May 1915, the Chairman of the Pan-German League, Konstantin von Gebsattel, had baldly warned the Chancellor that “the mood today among the broadest circles of our people is embittered, in fact close to despair.” The reason, Gebsattel offered, was that “the political war aim the imperial government has set is too narrow and that precisely the most loyal and politically reliable circles are obliged to see therein a refusal to utilize our certain victory.” If it turned out that such willful negligence caused Germany to forgo its rightful reward, Gebsattel predicted, there would be only one result: “revolution.”167 Given the traditional suspicions about the patriotism of the left, it is notable that the first real prospect of revolution in wartime Germany was thus raised, overtly and ominously, by the right. Equally remarkable for similar reasons were simultaneous efforts not just to uphold the existing order, but also to press for internal reforms – not, to be sure, as a means of eventually undermining, much less toppling, the state, but instead as a way of strengthening it by making it more inclusive and just. Almost immediately after the behind-the-scenes struggle over war aims had stalled in the temporary stand-off between the two clashing petitions sponsored by Reinhold Seeberg and Hans Delbrück, an ambitious volume appeared that had been designed to promote that very cause of progressive reform. Called The Labor Force in the New Germany, the title of the book was boldly programmatic. By announcing that there would be a “new” Germany after the war, it more than implicitly defined the current system as an “old” regime that, one way or the other, would have to make way for something different, and presumably better. And by foregrounding the role of the working class in that new order to come, the title of The Labor Force in the New Germany made the political orientation of the volume even more evident. But it was intended to be a serious work of Wissenschaft as well as a statement on pragmatic politics. It was meant, in other words, to provide a useful synthesis of theory and practice. That duality of purpose was embodied in the persons of the two editors of the volume: Friedrich Thimme, a historian, publicist, and the Director of the library 166  167 

Cited in Schwabe, “Ursprung und Verbreitung,” 126–27n96. See Hagenlücke, 55.

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in the Prussian House of Lords, and Carl Legien, a delegate of Social Democratic Party to the Reichstag and the Chairman of the General Commission of German Trade Unions.168 The collaboration of these two men from conspicuously different backgrounds – one representing more conservative, intellectual, “bourgeois” values, and the other those of the working-class, proletarian, socialist masses – was meant to symbolize the cooperation required to transcend partisan disagreements for the good of the entire nation. Carrying out that task in the volume itself was an illustrious group of figures: among the contributors representing the “labor force” were the leading Social Democratic politician Philipp ­Scheidemann and his fellow party members Gustav Noske and Robert Schmidt, who were also both elected representatives in the Reichstag (Schmidt was also an experienced journalist, having served as Editor of the party newspaper, Vorwärts, for a decade, between 1893 and 1903). They were joined by August Winning, Vice Chairman of the German Construction Worker Union, and Paul Hirsch, one of the first members of the Social Democratic Party to be elected to the Prussian House of Representatives. And speaking on behalf of the academic bourgeois liberal center were the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, the economist Edgar Jaffé, the historians Hermann Oncken and Friedrich Meinecke, the professor of law Gerhard Anschütz, the philosopher Paul Natorp, and Ernst ­Troeltsch. As the two editors expressly stated in their preface of The Labor Force in the New Germany, the publication was conceived out of their shared concern over how to preserve the “unity and consensus of the entire German people” that had emerged during the “world storm” in order to ensure that that solidarity would be carried over into the “time of the future peace.”169 For there remained, they said, serious doubts – given the continuing “economic and social disparities, the differences among classes and parties, above all the deep chasm between the bourgeois classes and Social Democracy” – whether the unanimity forged by the emergency of the war would, or even could, survive its end.170 As one way of exploring “the possibility and conditions of an intellectual working partnership between the bourgeois and socialist intellectual worlds,” the editors had asked 168 See

Wolfram Wette, Gustav Noske. Eine politische Biographie (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987), 150. See also Klaus Schönhoven, Expansion und Konzentration. Studien zur Entwick­ lung der Freien Gewerkschaften im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890 bis 1914 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980). 169  Friedrich Thimme and Carl Legien, Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1915), iii. The German word Arbeiterschaft in the title has no precise equivalent in English. Unlike “workers,” which refers to actual human beings, or “working class,” which has specifically Marxist connotations, it is more abstract and general. “Labor” refers of course more to the activity than to the people who engage in it. “Workership,” if that word existed, would be the nearest equivalent, but “labor force,” as the most common term, will have to do. 170 Ibid.

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ten “bourgeois scholars” and an equal number of “social democratic writers” to provide essays that would create a forum in which they and the entire country could “discuss together the problems of the future place of the working class in the new Germany.”171 And the most pressing problem facing them, the central question around which all the others revolved concerned what the editors called “the reorientation of our constitutional life and domestic politics.”172

Reorientation “Reorientation” – Neuorientierung – was the euphemism commonly used since the previous autumn to signify the political restructuring in Germany that Bethmann Hollweg and his supporters felt would be necessary, and in any case unavoidable, after the war had concluded. Even though the Social Democrats had been winning ever greater numbers of seats in the Reichstag before 1914, they had never entirely shed the old stigma of being “enemies of the state,” which gave conservatives the rhetorical cover they needed to exclude them from full participation in governmental affairs, particularly with regard to foreign policy. Such suspicions lingered on into 1914, and upon mobilization there had been plans to arrest the leaders of the party and declare it illegal.173 However, the fact that a large majority of the Social Democrats had voted to approve war credits on August 4, thus demonstrating their patriotic loyalty, had led to a lifting of some of the most draconian restrictions against them. In a reciprocal sign of good will, the government had almost immediately allowed Vorwärts to be sold in railway stations, and by the end of August soldiers were permitted to read Social Democratic literature in military barracks and posts, something that had been forbidden since 1894.174 It would be hard to overstate the effect these measures had on morale. “Vorwärts can be sold on Prussian train stations!” one excited reader exclaimed in his diary. “That is the most unbelievable event of this era, which will overturn all that exists.”175 In an article published at the end of the year, a liberal journalist drew far-reaching conclusions from this new liberality, writing: “the most incredible experience of the war was that there no longer existed first 171 Ibid. 172 

Ibid., iv. Hartmut Pogge-v. Strandmann, “Staatsstreichpläne, Alldeutsche und Bethmann Hollweg,” in Die Erforderlichkeit des Unmöglichen. Deutschland am Vorabend des ersten Weltkrieges, eds. Hartmut Pogge-v. Strandmann and Imanuel Geiss (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1965), 2, 40, n6. 174  Cf. Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, 177. 175  Cited in Verhey, 147. 173 See

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and second class citizens, no longer friends and enemies of the empire, no longer national and anti-national elements. For the state there exists only Germans with the same duties and the same rights.”176 The German High Command adopted a rather more restrained stance, warning the editors of Vorwärts that the lifting of its suspension “occurs in the expectation that it will not publish articles that would be suited to compromise the unified spirit of the army. If that should be the case, then any corps headquarters is authorized to reinstitute the ban.”177 As encouraging as such developments were, they remained largely symbolic. Real progress would require real political power, which meant granting the Social Democrats a greater role in actual governing. As early as mid-September 1914, Bethmann Hollweg had recognized that, to fulfill his own agenda of preserving the political unity of the entire country that was vital to fighting and winning the war, he would have to govern “not with the right and not without the social democrats, in any case only with a liberal majority.”178 In early 1915, he again declared that “after the peace, we will have to govern liberally.”179 And around the same time, his secretary Kurt Riezler noted in his diary, not without some displeasure, that the Chancellor was saying “things like: the only ones who have idealism are the Social Democrats.”180 Obviously, it could not be just the government that extended its hand in cooperation; concessions would be necessary from both sides. Bethmann Hollweg demanded that, in exchange for their inclusion and greater participation in the affairs of state, the Social Democrats had to agree that the common objective was the “transformation of the international social democracy into a national democracy,” and that it specifically committed to upholding the monarchy.181 If this understanding could be arranged, Bethmann had written in a private memorandum on September 13, 1914, then it would “have to lead to a reorientation of our entire domestic politics.”182 There was just one stipulation: in order to maintain the sacrosanct Burgfrieden and everything it entailed, Bethmann and his government insisted that implementing any such “reorientation” would have wait until the war was over. Symptomatically, when Philipp Scheidemann tried to press 176  Hellmut

von Gerlach, “Das Jahr des Umsturzes,” Die Welt am Montag, December 28, 1914, 1–2, cited in ibid., 148. 177  Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, 177. 178  See Willibald Gutsche, “Bethmann Hollweg und die Politik der ‘Neuorientierung’. Zur innenpolitischen Strategie und Taktik der deutschen Reichsregierung während des erste Weltkrieges,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 13/2 (1965), 214. 179  As reported by Friedrich Meinecke to Alfred Dove, February 7, 1915; Meinecke, Aus­ gewählter Briefwechsel, 56. 180  Entry from February 17, 1915; see Riezler, Tagebücher, 248. 181  Gutsche, “Bethmann Hollweg und die Politik der ‘Neuorientierung’,” 215. 182  Ibid., 216.

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Vice Chancellor Clemens von Delbrück in February, 1915 about already advancing concrete reforms, Delbrück balked: “It is entirely impossible to introduce that during the war: first of all we lack the capacity to elaborate drafts, and second it is very questionable to introduce highly controversial matters in wartime; where would the Burgfrieden be?”183 Reluctantly but judiciously acquiescing in the spirit of solidarity and cooperation to pursue the larger interest of securing the military victory upon which everything else depended, the Social Democrats agreed to wait. But while they may have chafed at being compelled to postpone the realization of their program until an uncertain future date, their opponents on the right seemed even more committed to making sure that day never arrived. As early as the previous October 23, 1914, the Chief of Staff to the Imperial Chancellery, Arnold Wahnschaffe, alerted Bethmann Hollweg that “I have the impression that people in circles in heavy industry and among extreme conservatives are working against Your Excellency. These circles fear that too many concessions will be made to democratic wishes at the conclusion of peace.”184 Wahnschaffe was alluding to the activities surrounding the resolution on war aims that had emerged from the meeting of the Pan-German League in late August and had given rise to Heinrich Claß’s original Position Paper. But, in addition to the material and strategic benefits that the advocates of annexation thought foreign acquisitions would bring, they also saw the annexation question as providing a potentially potent wedge issue domestically. The prospect of gaining greater national strength and glory abroad would stir hopes in at least part of the German population, which could usefully serve to bolster the existing power structure championing that effort. And focusing on such external adventures would, they calculated, simultaneously draw energy away from any attempts to demand an increase of rights and privileges at home, creating a conflict of competing and, in practice, incompatible desires. “It would thus be good,” a member of the association of industrialists in the Rhineland surmised, “in order to forestall inner difficulties, to distract the attention of the people and to give free play to their imagination with regard to the expansion of German territory.”185 The conservative war aims movement, then, with its central emphasis on exorbitant territorial expansion outside of German borders, also represented, and not least of all, something like a clandestine operation in the intensifying ideological and class warfare against any expansion of political power within. 183 Philipp Scheidemann, Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten (Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1928), 1, 312. 184  Gutsche, “Bethmann Hollweg und die Politik der ‘Neuorientierung’,” 218. 185  Ibid., 219.

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The New Germany Paradoxically, these very actions by the right also created an opening for the war aims movement’s adversaries in the center and on the left. If the annexationists themselves could all but flout the Burgfrieden in pursuit of their political goals, then there was little reason, in fact it seemed suicidal, for their opponents to observe it unilaterally themselves. The right was convinced, not unreasonably, that should the politics of “reorientation” eventually succeed, even if it was temporarily delayed, it would sooner or later spell the end of their own prerogatives and power. Conversely, if the annexationists prevailed, the promised reorientation toward greater democracy would almost certainly never come to pass at all. It was against the background of all these considerations, then, that The Labor Force in the New Germany had been conceived and published on August 14, 1915.186 To a degree that would have been unthinkable even half a year before, and probably impossible without the prior defiance and recalcitrance of the right, many of the contributors explicitly called for concrete political changes that would provide a larger segment of the German population with increased rights and responsibilities. Or, as Hermann Oncken put it in the very title of his essay that opens the volume, the contributors to the volume were demanding steps that would place “The Germans on the Path toward a United and Free Nation.”187 Actually, Oncken’s own prescriptions, while conforming in tone to the editors’ overarching plan, are relatively unspecific and anodyne. Oncken proposed, for example, it would be only fair and just if “those who had their share in the victory, in the field and in the factory, in their attitude and in their organization, should also have a greater share in the tasks of the national community.” That was an idea – that active participation in the war by “the people” ought to be indemnified by their increased political representation – that Ernst ­Troeltsch had been among the first to express in his speech in Heidelberg on August 2, and it had been gaining ground ever since. But that still did not automatically translate into any specific political rights, and Oncken’s language, while broadly supportive, did little to clarify what those rights might involve. Even less helpful, Oncken seemed to think that all that was needed was good will on both sides and the problems would somehow solve themselves: The leaders of the state, as well as the classes that have until now viewed themselves as underprivileged citizens in economic dependence, should voluntarily seek each other out. Both sides 186  Thimme and Legien, Die Arbeiterschaft, ii. The editors do, however, point out that the essays contained in the volume were all completed “in May;” ibid., iv. 187  Hermann Oncken, “Die Deutschen auf dem Wege zur einigen und freien Nation,” in Die Arbeiterschaft, 1–11.

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have learned, both sides have to cast off prejudices (which have accumulated on the one side just as much as on the other), gain understanding, and collaboratively get to work.188

Professor Oncken obviously meant well, but describing the working class as people who merely needed to change their attitude if they wanted to improve their circumstances indicated that the broader dialogue the editors hoped would take place was only just beginning. Disappointingly, Friedrich Meinecke, who contributed considered reflections on “Social Democracy and Power Politics” to the volume, was more circumspect still, cautiously asserting that “the great question is whether what we all desire is compatible: the confident and trusting cooperation of all parties on commonly acknowledged necessities of the state, among them the maintenance of the national Burgfrieden after the conclusion of the war.”189 With such words, Meinecke made it seem that the most urgent task confronting German society was to remain calm. He even sounded a skeptical note about the ability of democracy in particular, especially if it spread unchecked, to preserve that paramount good: “Democratic control of contracts and agreements through popular representation does not protect against a politics that disturbs the peace if the inclination to do so has permeated the majority of the people.”190 But Meinecke balanced his wariness toward an unbridled democracy with an equally prudent distrust of an unchecked military power that was answerable only to itself: The demands of our generals and admirals at the conclusion of peace must be heard and considered most seriously, but the decisions may be made only by the judgment of the responsible statesman who is able to weigh the military and peaceful possibilities of the future against one another most carefully.191

The German constitution put authority over the military solely in the hands of the Emperor, but the many years of experience with the reigning monarch, not to speak of his role in the current war, added an understated emphasis to Meinecke’s insistence that the Kaiser be “responsible.” And, in a similarly carefully calibrated proposition, Meinecke addressed the contentious issue of Belgium by asserting that “one does not have to annex Belgium – we also have the greatest reservations against it – but one can render it harmless through, shall we say, a certain Luxembourgization.”192 By that, Meinecke seems to have meant that it should be incorporated into a customs union. (In a letter from the same time he composed 188 

Ibid., 10.

189  Friedrich

23.

190 

Meinecke, “Sozialdemokratie und Machtpolitik,” in Die Arbeiterschaft, 22–

Ibid., 23–24. Ibid., 28. 192  Ibid., 29. 191 

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his essay – which he said he did with “joy” – Meinecke more candidly admitted that “even if we may not annex Belgium, we also may not simply restore it and thereby turn it into an English and French bulwark against us.”).193 And even though he did not address the issue directly here, Meinecke had recently acknowledged in another publication that “Social Democrats leave no doubt that they expect a different franchise in Prussia after the war.” While it was not certain what such a new voting right would practically entail, Meinecke agreed that it had to occur on “the basis of the national polity for which now the blood of all representatives of the people, classes, and parties flows.”194 As opposed to the somewhat hesitant proposals advanced by his two professorial colleagues, the arguments Gerhard Anschütz put forth in The Labor Force in the New Germany were unabashedly forceful, even militant. The most progressively minded among the “bourgeois” representatives in the volume, Anschütz dispensed with the cautious equivocations of both Oncken and Meinecke in delivering his own “Thoughts on Future Reforms of the State.” As the title implies, it presents a straightforward and unapologetic case for substantial political reform. Anschütz was blunt in his assessment of the current situation in Germany that made that reform necessary: “Apart from the admittedly magnificent accomplishment of social security, the last decades in the Empire have brought no more substantial progress in domestic policy, and in Prussia none at all.”195 Prussia was by far the largest state in Germany, encompassing nearly twothirds of its total population, and it wielded a correspondingly outsized influence in national affairs. This influence took tangible political shape through the Prussian Landtag, or parliament, a bicameral institution consisting of an upper House of Lords and a lower House of Representatives. While the former was composed of members, or “peers,” who either inherited their positions, were appointed by the king, or were formally admitted as delegates of universities, cities, and other organizations, the lower chamber contained members elected by the people themselves to that body. When the Prussian electoral system for choosing representatives for the Landtag was introduced on May 30, 1849, the mechanism put in place, the so-called “three-class franchise,” was widely considered to be admirably progressive because in principle it granted the right to vote to every male citizen of Prussia over the age of 24. Further, the franchise was based not on property ownership, as in England, but rather on taxes, which everyone contrib193  Friedrich Meinecke to Walter Goetz, May 6, 1915; Meinecke, Ausgewählter Briefwech­ sel, 57–58. 194  Friedrich Meinecke, “Die deutschen Erhebungen von 1813, 1848, 1870 und 1914,” in Die deutsche Erhebung von 1914. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1914), 29. 195  Gerhard Anschütz, “Gedanken über künftige Staatsreformen,” in Die Arbeiterschaft, 43.

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uted, but which were divided into three large “classes” according to the relative amounts paid. But what seemed fair-minded in the mid-1800s had gradually come to be viewed as outmoded and needful of revision by the beginning of the twentieth century. The disparities of the arrangement were evident: in 1898, a mere 3.26 percent were in the top or “first” class, 12.6 percent in the second and the remaining 84.14 percent in the bottom tier, which meant in practice that first class votes possessed twenty-six times more weight than those in the lowest, third class.196 In addition, the voting was conducted not by secret ballot, but orally in public, and it was indirect: voters selected only Wahlmänner, or “electors,” who then chose the actual representatives.197 In the words of Otto Hammann, “the threeclass franchise for the Prussian House of Representatives degenerated over time into a monster of irrationality and absurdity, especially in the major cities.”198 Over the years, there had been several abortive attempts to change or “reform” the franchise structure in Prussia, most recently in 1910, which had been spearheaded by none other than Bethmann Hollweg, who as early as 1906 had already decided the current system was “untenable.”199 But the status quo so heavily favored the wealthy, who invariably voted for conservative candidates, that none of those previous efforts had produced any significant results apart from further hardening the existing positions and deepening the rancor on both sides. In his essay, Anschütz minced no words in condemning what he called “the failure of Prussian electoral law reform” – Wahlrechtsreform200 – over the course of the six and a half decades of the German Empire’s existence. “The three-class franchise in Prussia,” Anschütz stridently declared, making an acerbic play on words, “is an unjust right” – ein ungerechtes Recht.201 Because it was based on what Anschütz pointedly called “the crudely plutocratic conception whereby one’s fortune or income provides the measure for the extent of one’s political rights,”202 what at first sight appeared to be “formally a universal right to vote” – Wahlrecht – was in reality, he said, while employing another caustic coinage, “a mere pseudo-right” – a Scheinrecht. For that reason, Anschütz concluded: “The Prussian House of Representatives is in truth not a reflection of the Prussian 196 Reinhard Patemann, Der Kampf um die preußische Wahlreform im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1964), 11. 197 Cf. Thomas Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen 1867–1914. Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994). 198 Hammann, Bilder, 66. 199 Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 71. 200  Anschütz, “Gedanken über künftige Staatsreformen,” in Die Arbeiterschaft, 43. 201  Ibid., 53. 202 Ibid.

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people in its entirety, but is rather only the proxy of a thin upper stratum, of the propertied classes.”203 To underscore his point, Anschütz pointed out that it was “unfair and dishonest if the Social Democratic Party occupies only 10 of 443 seats in the Prussian House of Representatives,”204 or less than 2 percent of the total, whereas they represented over a third of all the delegates to the Reichstag. To make the Prussian body more genuinely representative, Anschütz proposed, or rather demanded, “the abolition of the indirect system and of public polling, that is, the introduction of direct and secret balloting.”205 Fully aware of the resistance, and probably the outrage, his propositions would encounter from those who benefited from the current arrangement, Anschütz insisted that the goal of creating an “equality of the franchise” was a “requirement not only of justice, but also of statesmanship,” arguing that it constituted “a task for a politics that would be truly conducive to the maintenance and well-being of the state.”206 Were such a change to occur, he said, Germany “would become something that it had not previously been: a state that is one with its people, a true and just people’s state” – an actual Volksstaat.207 Indulging in a final rhetorical flourish, Anschütz urged his fellow Germans to see to it that the Prussian state is placed on broader foundations, anchored more deeply in the masses of the people. That would be acting in a manner that would be not only just, but also politically shrewd. For only what is deeply rooted weathers the storm, only what stands broadly, stands firmly.208 Even more dramatically, Anschütz closed his text by placing his arguments under the greater banner of the democratic ideal itself: These are truths that apply not only to Prussia and Germany, but to every modern cultivated state as well. What is unveiled here is the eternal value of what one tends to encapsulate in the words freedom and equality – namely, the democratic idea. All of the dignity, all of the prestige, and thus in the end also all of the power of the state rests on the trust that its people place in it. This trust, which a state such as ours requires to a particular degree and all the more so because it demands trust for its part through the imposition of the most extreme duties and burdens – this trust cannot be gained from a politically mature people solely through good services from the state, through provident legislation and administration, in short, it cannot be won merely by having anything and everything happen for the people, but rather only by having what is done for the people also happen to a great extent by the people. Institutions securing the welfare and

203 

Ibid., 54. Ibid., 55 205  Ibid., 54. 206 Ibid. 207  Ibid., 56. 208  Ibid., 57. 204 

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sustenance of the people are good; general participation of the people in the state, political equality, the unity of people and state – in short, democracy in this sense – is better.209

With those extraordinary words, published in the summer of 1915, Gerhard Anschütz delivered one of the earliest and most cogent justifications for what he had called “the democratic idea” to be expressed at any time, by anyone or anywhere, during the war. It was an unusually courageous and principled act and it deserves to be recognized as one of the first major milestones on the path to German democracy. But, as we know, that path would prove to be longer and more arduous than even Anschütz feared. In a brief but largely sympathetic review of The Labor Force in the New Ger­ many that Hans Delbrück wrote for the Preußische Jahrbücher, he singled out the essay by “the Berlin legal scholar Professor Anschütz” as the “most radical article in the entire collection.”210 The censorship board in Leipzig agreed, prompting it to object to the overall tendency of Anschütz’s contribution and even to question whether the volume should be permitted to appear at all.211 In the end, the book was allowed to be published, and it promptly attracted unusually widespread attention. Apart from everything else, it was considered noteworthy, even sensational that some of the most respected representatives of the academic establishment and thus of the state – German professors were, and still are, Beamte, or official state employees – had collaborated with Social Democratic politicians and union leaders in a joint public effort. “Two years ago,” a spokesman for the central organ of the Construction Workers Union said about The Labor Force in the New Germany, “no one would have thought that possible.”212 Similarly impressed, Hans Hermann von Berlepsch, the President of the Society for Social Reform and former Prussian Minister of Trade, sent a letter to the editors of the book in which he also underlined its symbolic importance for promoting larger political goals. “Apart from the significant content of several essays,” Berlepsch wrote, “the fact that bourgeois and social democratic authors, outstanding people in their party movement, joined forces will have considerable influence on future relations of various classes of our people with one another.”213 Naturally, the conservative press professed to being underwhelmed by the entire effort, with some scoffing at the “naïve optimism” and deficient “sense of 209 Ibid.

210  Hans Delbrück, Review of Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland, Preußische Jahr­ bücher 162 (1915), 164. 211 See Ursula Ratz, “’Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland.’ Eine bürgerlich-sozialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft aus dem Jahre 1915,” IWK: Internationale wissen­ schaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 13 (1971), 9. 212  Ibid., 1. 213  Ibid., 12.

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reality” on the part of the professors.214 The circle around the Imperial Chancellor greeted the endeavor, a bit too self-servingly, as a sign of the growing desire on the part of the workers “for practical engagement on the basis of the existing political order.”215 That was itself no doubt partly wishful thinking, for what Professor Anschütz had actually delivered was a forceful challenge to the existing order, one that eloquently made the ethical and political case for nothing less than a real expansion of representative democracy in Germany. Yet, as “radical” as his contemporaries may have deemed Anschütz’s proposals, it is important to emphasize that he did not advocate abolishing the monarchy itself. In his essay, Anschütz deliberately stressed that the vision he laid forth was not only compatible with a strong monarchy, but undesirable without it: A German Empire, as truly monarchical as it is honestly constitutional – that is the goal of the future. It was the dream of our fathers, of those who blazed the first path of German unity and freedom in the years 1848 and 1849, the plan of the Frankfurt National Assembly: imperial rule on a democratic foundation and with democratic institutions.216

Nor was Anschütz alone in his thinking. This was also, we recall, the view of Friedrich Naumann, who had codified his thoughts in his widely read book of 1900, Democracy and Emperorship, in which Naumann argued for the compatibility of the two apparently irreconcilable principles.217 And when Anschütz later mentioned his participation in The Labor Force in the New Germany in his memoirs, he said that “when the bourgeois-social democratic compilation appeared (1915), no one in Germany yet thought of abolishing the monarchy, including the ‘majority socialists’ (the overwhelming majority of the social democratic party) – as opposed, to be sure, to the then still small radical socialist group of ‘independents’ that deviated to the left of them.”218 Even more generally, Anschütz was convinced that nationalist sentiment and democracy were eminently compatible. In a speech he later gave, in 1923, but reflective of his long-standing views, he said that the democratic and the national idea are not opposites, but rather siblings, children of a single spirit: this spirit is the right to self-determination of peoples demanded by their self-consciousness. Nationalism and democracy belong together, they announce the great notion of a unified people that governs itself. Nationalism wishes to create this unity and cement it in the consciousness of the people, democracy wants to confirm it through the will of the people.219 214 Ibid. 215 

Ibid., 13.

216 Anschütz,

“Gedanken über künftige Staatsreformen,” in Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland, 51. 217  Friedrich Naumann, Demokratie und Kaisertum. Ein Handbuch für innere Politik (Berlin-Schöneberg: Buchverlag der “Hilfe,” 1900). 218 Anschütz, Aus meinem Leben, 162. 219  Ibid., 164.

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Anschütz labeled his stance – using a formulation that, he conceded, he employed only in private conversations but not publicly or in print – “democratic idealism.”220 Yet it was not very far in either substance or tone from the position taken by Philipp Scheidemann, whose essay immediately follows Anschütz’s own in The Labor Force in the New Germany. Scheidemann was already one of the outstanding figures of the Social Democratic Party and, with Hugo Haase, the current Co-First Chairman of the Social Democratic Parliamentary Caucus in the Reichstag. Scheidemann’s participation in the volume thus lent considerable heft to its political significance. He also made his intentions clear by the very title of his essay, “On the Reorientation of Domestic Politics.” Scheidemann underscored the fact that Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg himself had repeatedly spoken of the Germans as a “free people” and had praised the “spirit of freedom in which the inner organization of the Empire must be continued after the war.”221 In accord with those sentiments, Scheidemann argued that, to promote an even greater consolidation of that freedom, a “reform of the Prussian franchise” would be required. But he accepted that the potentially destabilizing changes such a reform could cause made it necessary to postpone any concrete action while the nation was still fighting for its survival. “It goes without saying,” Scheidemann acknowledged, “that the reorientation of domestic politics must take place after the war.” But he also warned that whenever the proposed change might be able to proceed, its scope was by no means guaranteed: “how far it will go in the direction of freedom, that is, of democracy, will depend on the determination of all those members of our people who are truly liberally minded.”222 For Scheidemann and his Social Democratic allies, the argument for greater democracy in Germany was self-evident, and it was validated not just by the experience of the war but also by political and social tendencies that were well established even before it began: A state that even before the war possessed a strong democratic movement with strongly developed institutions; a state that owes its preservation to a vigorous, democratically oriented consciousness of the people; a state, finally, in which several million combatants live, men who have unlearned fear in the trenches, who demand that their civic rights are respected and are justified in wanting a decent existence for the rest of their lives; such a state, whatever the external forms may be, cannot be governed in any other way but democratically.223

Scheidemann’s colleague, Gustav Noske, noted in his essay titled “The War and Social Democracy” that “after the Burgfrieden had been proclaimed, Social 220 Ibid.

221  Philipp Scheidemann, “Zur Neuorientierung der inneren Politik,” in Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland, 58. 222 Ibid. 223  Ibid., 64.

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Democratic associations had cooperated by almost completely abstaining from public activities.”224 However, Noske warned, mirroring Scheidemann’s pointed reminder that the troops’ experience in the trenches had rid them of fear, “after the conclusion of the war, the Social Democrats will assert their claims with all available force.”225 And, referring generally to all the “reforms and reorientations that unconditionally must take place,” Noske underscored that the people – and by that he meant the broad mass of ordinary people who had previously been all but disenfranchised – had earned the right to expect and demand greater responsiveness to their needs in recognition of their efforts during the war both at the front and at home. “The German people” as a whole, Noske reasoned, “who have shown an unsurpassable degree of bravery, competence, self-discipline, and supreme political restraint, ought to be able to count on the rapid fulfillment of their wishes.”226 Although Noske did not elaborate on what precise ways he thought those wishes should be fulfilled, it was clear that returning to the status quo before the war would not be an acceptable option. Given these categorical declarations by representatives of both of the two major groups of contributors to The Labor Force in the New Germany in support of measures that would strengthen and broaden democracy in Germany, it may come as something of a surprise that Ernst ­Troeltsch, for his part, contributed a rather more attenuated meditation on the necessity for compromise and mutual restraint in order to further the larger interests of national unity. Devoted to the specific matter of the “Church and Religious Politics in Relation to Social Democracy,”227 ­Troeltsch’s fairly muted essay focuses on some of the disagreements that Social Democrats continued to have with organized religion, which the party officially rejected, and with the state itself, which the international orientation of the party had made a vexed issue from the start.228 True, the very fact that ­Troeltsch is present in the book made a significant political statement in itself and it served to identify him even more closely with the general tendencies and sympathies – specifically, the willing readiness to cooperate and to compromise – expressed in the volume. But ­Troeltsch obviously felt that it was necessary to articulate the differences that distinguished the “bourgeois” upholders of the state 224  Gustav Noske, “Der Krieg und die Sozialdemokratie,” in Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland, 17. 225  Ibid., 19. 226  Ibid., 20. 227  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Die Kirchen- und Religionspolitik im Verhältnis zur Sozialdemokratie,” in Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland, 167–83. 228  On the religious issue in Social Democracy, see Sebastian Prüfer, Sozialismus statt Reli­ gion. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor der religiösen Frage 1863–1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).

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and its institutions from their newfound Social Democratic bedfellows, whose loyalties had previously often lain elsewhere, as the best way of identifying a path on which both, along with everyone else, could move forward together. ­Troeltsch began his essay, as he often did on such occasions, by drawing a broader cultural-historical picture of the overall condition of German society during the previous half-century, noting that “the German Empire is a young state” that had only just begun to overcome its considerable internal divisions since its formal unification in 1871. That had initiated a process, he explained, that had been materially aided by the subsequent tremendous “growth” and “progress” experienced by the new nation, forging a strengthening social cohesion that had been accelerated at the outbreak of the war. Then Germany had experienced, “in a kind of second act,” a further “extraordinary increase” of its internal consolidation. What effect this heightened national unanimity caused by the war may ultimately mean for foreign policy once it ended, ­Troeltsch mused, “we cannot yet say today. But it is certain that domestically it will entail great strides forward in the organic unification and inner equilibrium of the state, and with that the provision of increased energies for the political, economic, and intellectual work of the nation.”229 Like many of the other contributors, ­Troeltsch also cautioned that such a favorable outcome was neither preordained nor would it endure without vigilance and effort. In particular, to maintain the national unity that was required to perform the work he described – and, not incidentally, to win the war – would demand that all involved acknowledge “real-political” exigencies and be prepared to sacrifice some ideological purity for the sake of promoting the common good. “The parties,” he advised, meaning all political organizations of whatever affiliation, cannot count on unconditionally realizing the theoretically grounded political and social ideals of their own group, but must rather agree among themselves to achieve, if not the ultimate goal, then for the time being the practical and most necessary ideal of the solidarity and cooperation of the nation.230

What was essential, that is, was a preparedness on all sides to compromise, a genuine willingness to engage in the “realm of political art.” And politics, ­Troeltsch stressed, was no more, but also no less, that “the art of the possible” – “and not that of rational or moral theory.”231 More concretely, ­Troeltsch argued that certain practical imperatives followed from these general considerations. With regard to the Social Democratic leaders, he said that “their most serious task will be to bring the enormous group of indus229 ­Troeltsch,

“Die Kirchen- und Religionspolitik,” 167. Ibid., 167–68. 231  Ibid., 168. 230 

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trial workers, who are organized politically and ideologically within the Social Democratic Party and occupationally and socio-politically within unions and professional associations, into a more positive relationship with the German state.”232 Conversely, even “the most principled opponents” of the Social Democrats could no longer afford to view them “simply as enemies of the Empire.” For one thing, and most significantly, their participation in the war had incontrovertibly demonstrated their “patriotic sense and their political insight,” which allowed the Social Democrats to stake a legitimate claim to a “substantial share of the people in arms and its successes.”233 In addition, and more pragmatically – or, as ­Troeltsch would say, “real-politically” – he said of the Social Democrats that one cannot eliminate them, but rather one must reckon with them, and not reckon with them as with an unavoidable evil, but rather as a considerable force for the moral formation of the masses, who otherwise, once they have left their native soil and customs, all too easily succumb to brutalization and pauperism.234

Concessions, or at any rate provisional suspensions of principle, would thus be necessary on both sides in order to advance the common cause. Progress could be achieved only, in other words, [by] the accommodation of the people in its entirety, in its attitude and political labor, to the given situation created by circumstances. Only a completely cool, real-political sense, in which everyone reserves their general political, social, and ethical views and goals for themselves, will be able to move us forward.235

It was, for ­Troeltsch, a familiar theme: in the world of practical affairs, it was not always possible to reconcile private morality with political ethics, and sometimes one had to be suspended, or at least suppressed, for the sake of the other. Adhering to ideological purity, which often enough was itself a cover for less than idealistic interests, might seem preferable, even honorable, but in certain circumstances it could lead to the total defeat of the very cause one upheld. In the body of his essay, ­Troeltsch went on to explore the realpolitisch necessity for all sides to make certain compromises on principle for the sake of attaining practical common ends. Although he focused on the specific question of religious belief and practice, his prescriptions also appear to possess, and seem designed to convey, a more general political relevance. ­Troeltsch – who, we remember, had only just recently given up his professional identity as a professor of dogmatic theology – admonished those on both sides of the issue that strict “doctrinism” would merely get in the way of the important work to be done, and 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. 235 

Ibid., 169.

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that “only a very calm and real-political view” would allow everyone to advance at least part of both their individual and collective programs. In particular, the atheist Social Democrats would have to accept that “the separation of church and state would never be what it is in America.”236 On the other hand, religious conservatives had to face the reality that “our people is in fact no longer unconditionally Christian.”237 These were perhaps difficult lessons that both sides had to learn and reconcile themselves to. “One absolutely need not acquiesce to Social Democratic intolerance” with regard to either the national state or established religion, he insisted, “but conversely one may also not treat Social Democrats as illegitimate trouble makers, or fundamentally as targets for conversion. The language of consideration and calm judgment must be, or become, reciprocal.”238 As with the rest of society, changes in the religious life of Germany were not only inevitable, they were already and always occurring, and it was up to the leaders of the various constituencies to try to steer those on-going changes in productive directions. Still writing about the demands some Social Democrats were making of the Church and the resistance the Church was putting up to bowing to those demands, ­Troeltsch said: In this domain things will be different from before, even if they happen slowly, and the necessary reforms will come about all the more easily the less they are demanded in the spirit of a vehement hostility toward Christianity, the more carefully they take into account the real religious needs of broad circles of the people. What is required now is the recognition of a problematic situation more generally, the renunciation of a violent and unconditional refusal of all demands for reform. The reforms themselves will grow slowly and, in accordance with the nature of the matter, represent compromises.”239

On the surface, ­Troeltsch was principally addressing the religious question in these last lines, but he was obviously making a broader political point as well. Couched within his deliberately veiled comments he was offering his own perspective on the contentious proposals for a reform, or “reorientation,” of German political life and everything it entailed. And the closing words of his essay only reinforced the impression that ­Troeltsch was using the more narrow struggle over the present and future place of religion within the German state as a kind of surrogate for the larger question about the fate of Germany, indeed of Europe and the world at large. He concluded: In great historical moments, and in the case of individual, powerful geniuses, scrupulously adhering to one’s principles unto death can be something heroic; in the hands of ordinary, average people, and in connection with everyday matters, it is merely dangerous, thoughtless, and 236 

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 179. 238 Ibid. 239  Ibid., 182. 237 

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obstinate, preventing all calm reason, even becoming a means of agitation, whipping up passions in order to use them for purposes that often have nothing to do with strength of character itself, nor with the common good. In normal circumstances, actual strength of character consists in looking for a practicable path through all of the contradictions of the day, remaining true to one’s own ideals, realizing what is possible, and showing justice to one’s opponents.240

It would be difficult not to discern something like the outlines of a political credo in this statement. But it was simultaneously, and perhaps necessarily, an expression of ­Troeltsch’s fundamental intellectual and ethical inclinations as well. It adumbrated, a kind of practical idealism, a principled determination to act according to one’s values, but to do so in a way that also respected the validity of those held by others. That meant that one did not shrink from conflict when it inevitably arose, retreating into a passivity reinforced by fear or sanctimoniousness. But it also required confronting beliefs or ideals that differed from one’s own with empathy, moderation, and restraint. Not incidentally, those virtues were all qualities that were in critically short supply almost everywhere in the summer of 1915. And even between the two large social and political camps that The Labor Force in the New Germany was supposed to display in symbolic solidarity as an exemplar to the entire nation, the unanimity that had at least notionally united them had begun to fray even before the volume appeared that August. The cause of the renewed dissension was, unsurprisingly, the same one that had led them to join forces in the first place. On June 19, one month after the aggressive Industrialists’ Petition had been sent to the Imperial Chancellor and one day before the kindred Seeberg Address was unveiled to invited guests in the Künstlerhaus in Berlin, the Co-First Chairman of the Social Democratic Party, Hugo Haase, together with his Marxist colleagues Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, published a joint proclamation titled “The Imperative of the Hour” in the Leipziger Volkszeitung. The “Manifesto of the Three,” as it came to be called, did not represent the official stance of the party itself, nor had the text been approved or even seen by anyone else in the party leadership, but only those on the inside would have known that.241 Not only did the Manifesto of the Three openly and vigorously denounce the aims of the annexationists, it also explosively called into question the continued cooperation of all Social Democrats in prosecuting the war should those war aims be officially adopted. Alluding to otherwise unspecified “programs being proposed that press the stamp of a war of conquest on the present conflict,” the three authors gravely announced that “the hour of decision has come”: 240 Ibid.

241  Susanne Miller, Burgfrieden und Klassenkampf. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie im Ers­ ten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1974), 111.

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German Social Democracy must ask itself whether it can reconcile its principles and the responsibilities it has as the guardian of the material and moral interests of the working classes of Germany with a continuation of the war at the side of those whose intentions stand in the starkest contrast to the words declared by our parliamentary party on August 4, 1914, in which it was expressed that, in accord with the International, it condemned any war of conquest.242

It would be difficult to say what produced the greater shock: the threat that the German working classes as a whole would cease fighting on behalf of the nation, which would have surely led to Germany’s immediate defeat and collapse, or the brazen flouting of the Burgfrieden by making public such a dire threat, thereby risking serious internal unrest and destabilization that could conceivably lead to the same result. The authors were certainly aware that they were flagrantly violating the Burgfrieden, but they did so defiantly, asserting that it had already been rendered practically meaningless by the duplicitous actions of the annexationists themselves as expressed by the Seeberg Address, and that for them to remain silent was no longer an option. “Now that the plans for conquest have become ev­ ident to the entire world,” their notice concluded, “Social Democrats have full freedom to argue their opposing standpoint in the most emphatic terms, and the given situation turns that freedom into a duty.”243 After the appeal had appeared in the Leipzig newspaper, which immediately generated an enormous uproar, it was secretly reprinted as a leaflet and widely distributed among German workers. Where the police were able to lay their hands on the pamphlet they confiscated it, but the effect it had already produced could not be undone.244 In the eyes of their opponents, the action by the three party leaders seemed to confirm their darkest suspicions about the Social Democrats as being “journeymen without a fatherland” – vaterlandslose Gesellen – the phrase long used to disparage their cosmopolitan commitments at the expense of their national loyalty. And the joint pronunciamento by Haase, Bernstein, and Kautsky, along with the dramatic reverberations that followed, further exacerbated growing tensions inside the Social Democratic Party itself, demonstrating a potential to tear itself apart from within, with unforeseeable and possibly devastating consequences for the entire country. “The mood became more heated from session to session,” Philipp Scheidemann later wrote about internal party debates at the time. “In the summer of 1915 it was already extremely bad.”245 On June 22, a few days after the Manifesto of the Three was published, Ernst ­Troeltsch wrote a concerned letter to Friedrich Thimme, the “bourgeois” editor of The Labor Force in the New Germany. ­Troeltsch admitted to Thimme that “the 242 Grumbach,

Das annexionistische Deutschland, 444–45. Ibid., 445. 244 Ibid. 245 Scheidemann, Memoiren, 1, 306. 243 

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Social Democratic development at the moment makes me apprehensive about our publication. I fear that it doesn’t quite fit with the circumstances anymore and that we are exposing ourselves needlessly and senselessly by it. The preconditions no longer apply. To tell the truth, I would now consider it preferable to suppress it. I personally have lost my appetite somewhat.”246 In the end, of course, the volume did go forward, including ­Troeltsch’s essay, and it became, at least in publishing terms, a “spectacular” success.247 By the following year, 20,000 copies had already been sold and over 200 reviews of it would eventually appear.248 But the turmoil within the Social Democratic Party marked a dispiriting conclusion to what had originally been such an optimistic undertaking represented by the book, one meant to demonstrate to its contributors and to the world at large that Germans of vastly different backgrounds and conflicting persuasions truly could come together under a single banner to advance their common interests. It was a unanimity that the Burgfrieden policy was supposed to embody and that the book was intended to demonstrate in practice. As it turned out, the disparity between those aspirations and actual political reality only served as further evidence of the painful lack of precisely the sort of cool-headed “real-political” sense that ­Troeltsch had advised as being necessary for preserving the domestic calm. And the accompanying dissension among all the participants themselves was a mere portent of things to come. When The Labor Force in the New Germany appeared in mid-August, 1915, the war had already been raging for a full year, lasting far longer than anyone had expected and proving far more destructive than anyone could have feared. Although there had been encouraging progress for Germany on the Eastern Front, significant movement in the west had virtually come to a halt since the previous autumn. Trench warfare, the iconic experience of the Great War, had already become an intractable reality. Over the winter and spring of 1914–15 and then into the summer, there had been numerous attempts to break the stalemate and move the line in either direction. But both sides were still learning how to fight a new kind of war and had as yet no idea how to end it.249 To make matters worse, as the casualty lists continued to grow ever longer, and as starvation on the continent became a frightening new prospect, the unwavering unity and resolve the Germans had displayed at the outset of the war had begun to falter as well, or at least to show troubling signs of strain. It is perhaps an indirect reflection of the escalating challenges to his own resolve that in the second half of 1915, Ernst ­Troeltsch took an extended respite 246 

Cited in Ratz, 23. Krüger, 216. 248  Bruendel, 70 249  See Keegan, Chapter 6 “Stalemate,” in The First World War, 175–203. 247 

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from commenting on events of the day. Throughout the previous twelve months, ever since August 2, 1914, and even more after he had moved to the “battleground of Berlin,” he had been a tireless, forceful public presence, attempting to lend solace and support to his fellow Germans through speeches he held before enormous audiences and in a steady stream of carefully calibrated essays meant to inform and encourage an even broader readership. During the fall and winter of 1915, however, ­Troeltsch would confine himself for the most part to reading, writing reviews of specialized scholarly works, teaching his university courses, and thinking.

Chapter Four

The Ideas of 1914 Some time during the second week of August 1914, Bernhard von Bülow, the former Imperial Chancellor, had gone to the royal palace in Berlin to pay his respects to the Kaiser, now the commander in chief of a nation at war. It was the first time Bülow had seen the monarch since he had left office in 1909, and he was shocked by what he saw: I was profoundly struck when I saw his pale, frightened, I would even say distraught face. He looked agitated and yet drawn. His eyes flickered restlessly. … He … began with the comment that the dreadful events of the last fourteen days had also put him under a severe physical strain. He said that after he had arrived in Berlin, he had to stay in bed for twenty-four hours. “A little nerves rest cure,” he added with a somber smile.1

Around the same time, two of Wilhelm’s closest advisers, Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, Chief of the Imperial Naval Cabinet, and General Moriz von Lyncker, Chief of the Military Cabinet, witnessed a similar scene. As Admiral Müller noted in his diary: His Majesty in a very gloomy mood. Went for a long walk with Lyncker in the garden, probably an hour and a half. Finally he sat on a bench and said to us both: “Sit down.” The bench was quite short, so we pulled another one over and sat on it. The Kaiser then said: “Do you already hold me in such contempt that no one wants to sit next to me anymore?” That wasn’t just a phrase. He already viewed himself as being disregarded because his policies had led to large areas of his country being overrun by the enemy. The memorial ceremony held that evening for Baron von Esebeck (who had shot himself two days before) also did not help raise his spirits, seeing in the man as he did a fellow sufferer who had succumbed to his nervous disorder and despaired of life.2

A few months later, in October, the current Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg spoke with his private secretary and confidant, Kurt Riezler, about the Kai1  Bernhard von Bülow, Denkwürdigkeiten, ed. Franz von Stockhammern (Berlin: Ullstein, 1931–33), 3, 146. The words in quotation marks are in English in the original. Cited, with omissions, in Kaiser Wilhelm II. als Oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg. Quellen aus der militärischen Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1918, ed. and intro. Holger Afflerbach (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2005), 14–15. 2  Georg Alexander von Müller, Regierte der Kaiser? (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1959), 50; cited in slightly different form in Kaiser Wilhelm II. als Oberster Kriegsherr, 15.

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ser, saying he found Wilhelm “inwardly broken,” and Riezler himself noticed not long afterward that the Emperor had “become entirely white, very grave.”3

Caesar Absconditus It would be impossible to say what, precisely, the mental state of the Kaiser may have been as the war proceeded, and no doubt his outlook and mood frequently fluctuated as the fortunes of the Empire seemed to rise or fall during its course. One imagines that anyone in his position would have been deeply affected, even shaken, by the unfolding events, all the more someone who so closely identified his own person with the fate of the nation at large. What is certain is that the central place he had occupied in the life of his country, the unique and uniquely important role he had played in Germany over the preceding quarter-century, had immediately and, as it turned out, permanently changed once the hostilities commenced. Almost overnight, Wilhelm had been transformed from the prime mover of his realm to being in many essential respects merely a passive bystander. “There is no controversy,” his biographer John Röhl has written, “that during the First World War, Wilhelm II became little more than a ‘shadow Kaiser’.”4 That statement, while holistically accurate, does need to be qualified. The Emperor did not formally retire from his official duties: he oversaw and finalized major military appointments, consulted with his generals on strategy and battle operations, and he remained of course the head of state. But what is indisputably true is that the irrepressible Reisekaiser, who for a quarter century had travelled tirelessly across the continent and the globe as the German Empire’s public face, the Friedenskaiser, who had preached world peace while simultaneously pursuing an unsettlingly aggressive Weltpolitik, the flamboyant monarch whom millions of ordinary Germans possessively, even familiarly called unser Kaiser, virtually vanished from view after August 1914. The man who had famously wanted his country, and himself, to occupy a prominent place in the sun had suddenly, and disconcertingly, retreated into the shadows. The abrupt disappearance of the Kaiser from the public eye stemmed superficially but no less consequentially from the fact that throughout most of the conflict he was physically absent from the capital. “Business dealings with Kaiser Wilhelm were made very difficult for his political advisers during the war,” the

3 Riezler, 4 

Tagebücher, 217, 283. John Röhl, Kaiser, Hof und Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 126.

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Austrian diplomat Ottokar Czernin wrote, “because he was almost never in Berlin, but rather always at General Headquarters.”5 The Großes Hauptquartier, the seat of the German High Command, did not remain fixed at one location, but was a roving base, moved when and wherever needed to stay relatively close to battle operations. As early as August 16, 1914 Wilhelm had already decamped from Berlin to take up residence at the temporary headquarters set up in Koblenz, which was then transferred at the end of the month to Luxembourg. Over the following years, the General Headquarters was successively relocated to the French town of Charleville-Mézières northeast of Reims, to the Eastern Front at Pleß (now Pszczyna) in Upper Silesia near Katowice, then moved back west to the resort town of Bad Kreuznach on the left bank of the Rhine, to finally end up in the more famous Belgian equivalent, Spa. And once installed in each of these outposts, the Kaiser rarely ventured far from his provisional residence.6 That the Emperor would formally preside over the military headquarters of the German High Command was in itself hardly surprising. Article 63 of the Imperial constitution stipulated that, in the event of war, the Emperor automatically became the supreme leader of the armed forces. In practice, however, the authority to command lay with the Chief of the General Staff, a position first held by General Helmuth von Moltke and, after the fiasco at the Marne in September, by Erich von Falkenhayn.7 And while Falkenhayn enjoyed, initially, the confidence and the respect of the Kaiser, those sentiments, at least when it came to the actual conduct of the war, were clearly not reciprocated. At the end of November 1914, General Hans von Plessen noted that “His Majesty in a very foul humor! He was pushed completely to one side by the Chief of the General Staff, saying he is told nothing. He was only supposed to say ‘yes’ to everything, he could do that just as well from Berlin!”8 A few weeks earlier, after Prince Max von Baden had regaled him over dinner with tales of military exploits, the Kaiser had said: “Look here, I learn of such things only occasionally. The General Staff tells me nothing and also doesn’t ask me. If people in Germany imagine that I am leading the army, then they are very mistaken. I drink tea and cut wood and go for walks, and then every once in a while I hear that this or that has 5 Czernin,

Im Weltkriege, 79. See also Holger Afflerbach, “Wilhelm II as supreme warlord in the First World War,” in The Kaiser. New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germa­ ny, Annika Mombauer, and Wilhelm Deist, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 195–216. 6  John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II. Der Weg in den Abgrund 1900–1941 (Munich: Beck, 2009), 1180, 1184. 7  Cf. Afflerbach, “Wilhelm II,” 201; and Röhl, Wilhelm II., 1184. 8  Afflerbach, Kaiser Wilhelm II. als Oberster Kriegsherr, P 108, 700; also cited in Röhl, Wilhelm II., 1185.

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been done, just as the gentlemen please.” Admiral von Müller, who was also on hand to hear this outburst and record it in his diary, noted that the complaint “was said facetiously, and yet [is] the tragic truth.”9 Someone else heard the Emperor say of himself: “if people have so little use for him, then he could also live in Germany.”10 It was an altogether remarkable development. As Wilhelm himself obviously recognized, the reality of his greatly reduced role, both in terms of practical governance and of his representative function, resulted in an image that stood in striking contrast to how his own people had previously viewed him and, naturally, how he had always seen himself – not to speak of those abroad, where, ironically, he continued to be regarded as the supreme warlord of Germany and vilified as the calculating and bloodthirsty “Beast of Berlin”11 lusting after total control of the continent and perhaps of the world. Yet as early as December 1914, Conrad Haußmann, a liberal member of the Reichstag, noted that in Germany itself people generally “do not speak of the Kaiser”12 at all, and by January 1918, Alfred Weber, the brother of Max, went so far as to say that “the Kaiser doesn’t even exist anymore.”13 It did not help that almost all of the many national festivals and holidays that had been such a prominent part of the prewar German Empire had been tactfully toned down to more discreet, even somber affairs.14 The gravity of the war and everything it entailed – primarily the steadily growing numbers of men wounded and killed, the worsening shortages of vital supplies afflicting the home front as the English blockade tightened its hold, and the lack of any clear sense of when, or how, it would all end – made observing the public holidays honoring various members of the Hohenzollern dynasty a more complicated affair, and few were in the mood to celebrate anyway. Even the commemoration of the Kaiser’s birthday, formerly the highpoint of the season at court and the occasion for extravagant, day-long pageantry, appropriately reflected the more subdued tenor of the time and was further muted by being marked without the Emperor himself in attendance. 9 Müller,

Regierte der Kaiser?, 68; also cited in Röhl, Wilhelm II., 1185. Wilhelm II., 1185. 11  Afflerbach, “Wilhelm II,” 195. 12 Haußmann, Schlaglichter, 22. 13 Obst, “Einer nur ist Herr im Reiche,” 359–60. 14  See Bernd Sösemann, “Hollow-sounding Jubilees: Forms and Effects of Public Self-Display in Wilhelmine Germany,” in The Kaiser. New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, eds. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 37– 62; see also Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Bürgertum, Staatssymbolik und Staatsbewußtsein im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990), 269–95 10 Röhl,

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On January 27, 1916, Wilhelm II turned fifty-seven. It was already the second anniversary of his birth to occur since the war had begun, and he quietly observed the occasion with an intimate dinner held in his headquarters in the provincial palace of Pleß, over five hundred kilometers southeast of Berlin. Although Wilhelm could not be in residence at the capital to receive the congratulations of his people in person, those back home did not neglect to congratulate their Kaiser in absentia. And even if the ceremonies lacked the usual ostentation that had formerly surrounded the Emperor’s birthday, there was one impressive event of note that took place that day, held in the recently completed Neue Aula, or main auditorium, of the Berlin University, newly installed in the renovated old library building across the street Unter den Linden and boasting a capacity of 1,400.15 It was the annual Kaisergeburtstagsrede, a formal address typically held by one of the most distinguished members of the faculty. That year one of the newest members of the faculty had been given the honor of representing the entire institution on that solemn occasion, and the person chosen to speak was Professor Ernst ­Troeltsch.16 “Long before the appointed hour, the new auditorium was overcrowded; it had put on its festive garments,” read the extensive report published the same day in the Berliner Abend-Zeitung. “The Minister of Culture [August von] Trott zu Solz appeared with his directors and counsellors, and even his predecessor, His Excellency [Conrad von] Studt, insisted on attending the festive occasion. At the stroke of 12, the rector magnificus and the deans of all the divisions, as well as the entire faculty of the university, appeared in their red and black robes.”17 The article in the Neue Preußische Zeitung commented on the still novel sight that “next to male students, female students also participated in today’s festivities. A brilliant group of guests of honor from the Prussian department of education and other agencies had also accepted the invitation.”18 The ceremony commenced with the Academic Music Director Professor Max Friedländer conducting the Prelude for Wind Instruments by Max Bruch performed by members of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, after which the Academic Choir provided a rendition of the cantata “Herr, der König freuet sich

15 

See Max Dessoir, Buch der Erinnerung, 2nd. ed. (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1947), 212. See Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Philosophisch reflektierte Kriegserfahrung. Einige Überlegungen zu Ernst ­Troeltschs ‘Kaisergeburtstagsrede’,” ­Troeltsch-Studien. Neue Folge 1 (2006), 232–33. 17 Anon., “Der Festakt in der Universität,” Berliner Abend-Zeitung, Sonder-Ausgabe des Berliner Lokal-Anzeigers, No.  22, 27 January, 1916, 2; cited in KGA 16.1, 89. 18  Anon., “Die Feier der Universität,” Neue Preußische Zeitung, No.  48, Abend-Ausgabe, 27 January, 1916; cited in KGA 16.1, 91. 16 

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in deiner Kraft” by the Baroque composer Christoph Graupner.19 Finally, following these two musical overtures, Professor ­Troeltsch took his place at the rostrum before the gathered representatives of Berlin’s academic and political elite and began to speak.

A General Theory of Cultural Relativism What followed was far from a typical ceremonial oration, usually designed to be easily consumed and immediately forgotten. Instead, ­Troeltsch delivered one of the most acute and far-reaching reflections produced by anyone on any subject during the war, and its deeper implications continued to reverberate for many years thereafter. To be sure, the title of ­Troeltsch’s talk, “On the Criteria for Judging Historical Matters,” hardly seems to promise much excitement, and the text itself is densely argued, uncompromisingly scholarly, and devoted to a rigorous examination of a – perhaps the – central problem in the philosophy of history. At the heart of ­Troeltsch’s speech was the question of how to account for the concrete particularity, the discrete individuality and unrepeatability, of real, lived experience – of the actual stuff of history – within a coherent conception of historical processes that could account for all the known phenomena of human experience, yielding a theory of history that could identify and articulate general laws and norms that had the universal validity we demand of scientific knowledge. In other words, ­Troeltsch set out to explore how or if it might be possible to embrace the varied and irreducible multiplicity of values, traditions, and beliefs evident across all cultures and throughout all time within a comprehensive understanding of history that neither ignored nor diminished those differences nor succumbed to a pessimistic skepticism that denied the possibility of any positive knowledge at all and even threatened to dead-end in a debilitating epistemological nihilism. As ­Troeltsch himself put the dilemma in his address: the historian is confronted by an endless flood of particular relativities, all of which must be genetically explained, all of which are singled out by abstraction from that flow. How can one derive therefrom an ideal or general goal of the totality of history or of a single historical moment; or, if such a goal should appear on its own from some other quarter, how can this rising and falling abundance of relativity in general be measured at all by such means and directed toward such goals?20

19 Ibid.

20 ­Troeltsch,

“Über Maßstäbe zur Beurteilung historischer Dinge,” 11.

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And the deeper issue raised by that question went to the heart of the historical enterprise more generally, which ­Troeltsch described as being in a “crisis”: “the relativism that is essential to the nature of genetic-historical thought seems to stand in hopeless and ineradicable opposition to every thought of a universally valid, absolute goal of history and seems to make it completely impossible to resolve an historical crisis in the direction of such goals.”21 It was to nothing less than this, then – the attempt to reconcile the tension, not to say the contradiction, between the radical variability of all human affairs and the requirement of stable, immutable laws demanded by scientific reason – that ­Troeltsch devoted the bulk of his remarks on the Kaiser’s birthday. It was a problem – the problem of the irreducible relativity of all cultural values – that ­Troeltsch had first publicly confronted a decade and a half earlier in his book on The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religion, originally published in 1902 and reissued in a second, slightly revised edition in 1912.22 There ­Troeltsch had argued, provocatively enough, that the claims of dogmatic orthodoxy concerning the universal truths said to be embodied in the tenets of the Christian faith could not withstand the strict application of comparative historical examination. In ­Troeltsch’s own condensed phrase that meant that “the construction of Christianity as the absolute religion, from a historical perspective and with historical methods, is impossible.”23 But ­Troeltsch derived a more general principle from this limited conclusion. For to him the relative value of Christianity, as opposed to its own profession of absolute, unchanging truth, reflected the larger, inescapable fact that all human values are subject to the same historical forces, and that all normative interpretations of reality, and not just those of theology, necessarily and inevitably broke down when approached from a rigorously historical point of view. This insight had fundamentally informed ­Troeltsch’s thinking ever since – as he later put it, his work on The Absoluteness of Christianity caused him “to realize the problem for the first time, and since then it has grown ever greater and become more central”24 – and it likewise constituted the core of the lecture he delivered on January 27, 1916. But as the even greater, violent “historical crisis” surrounding that celebration made painfully clear, there was another, even more urgent challenge to some of the basic values his contemporaries shared, or thought they did, than the logical 21 

Ibid., 12. Ernst ­Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte. Vortrag gehalten auf der Versammlung der Freunde der Christlichen Welt zu Mühlacker am 3. Oktober 1901, 2nd. exp. ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1912). Now in KGA 5; see also the excellent editor’s introduction, 1–40. 23 ­Troeltsch, Die Absolutheit des Christentums; KGA 5, 137. 24 ­Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, KGA 16.1, 305. 22 

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pressures exerted by comparative historical research. ­Troeltsch broached the subject of the war and its broader impact on the intellectual problem he was considering by comparing it to what he called “the world-historical crisis of the Napoleonic Age” that had occurred a century before, a crisis that had been finally overcome, he argued, (and once Napoleon had actually been defeated, of course) by the concerted formulation of a philosophy of history and an ethical theory that “signaled the idea of the national European states upon the foundation of a humanitarian and liberal world culture, which was the product of the eighteenth century and the achievement of the nineteenth.”25 However, the current war, in which many of those same European states were once again engaged one hundred years later, signaled no less unmistakably that “today we are in a similar crisis, which ends a century of ideas and energies and entails a new and to us still unfamiliar world for the West and perhaps for the planet that had only just become integrated.”26 It was this “catastrophe of the present” which not only threw all previous convictions into doubt but also marked “in many respects an end to the liberal, humanitarian, rationalistic philosophy of history of the century” as a whole, which constituted the true, full crisis of the present.27 And the task ­Troeltsch accordingly set for himself in his speech was to see if he could identify what path might lead out of the intellectual ruins of the even greater disaster represented by the current war. What was ultimately at stake for ­Troeltsch, then, was to find a way to resolve the disintegration of the vast, complex system of thought and belief that had developed in Europe following the last, great continental conflict in the early 1800s and to locate another way that might lead them once more out of the current crisis toward a new and better resolution. Much of the body of ­Troeltsch’s speech consists in a survey of existing contemporary attempts to grapple with the underlying philosophical-historical problems he had set forth, all of which he predictably found fell short to varying degrees.28 After traversing the contributions of Heinrich Rickert, Georg Simmel, Rudolf Eucken, and others – ­Troeltsch even mustered some magnanimous words for Henri Bergson, despite his French colleague’s recent denunciations of German philosophy and culture, declaring simply that Bergsons’s “political speeches do not come into consideration in the evaluation of his theories”29 – ­Troeltsch noted that while all those thinkers had identified the inherent “contradiction between the individuality of all historical formations with the rational universality 25 ­Troeltsch,

“Über Maßstäbe,” 3–4. Ibid., 4. 27 Ibid. 28  See Hans Michael Baumgartner, Kontinuität und Geschichte. Zur Kritik und Metakritik der historischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972). 29 ­Troeltsch, “Über Maßstäbe,” 6. 26 

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of such criteria of judgment,” none had been able to provide a satisfactory solution to that admitted dilemma.30 The disturbing question thus raised itself: “Given the character of empirical, historical research, must the entire notion of philosophical-historical and ethical criteria be given up?”31 Not surprisingly, ­Troeltsch himself answered with “an emphatic No.”32 The reason was that, in his view, the constant creation of new norms and ideals, or the continuous production of such “criteria of judgement,” was actually synonymous with culture itself, indeed such incessant creation was “an indisputable basic fact of the mind.”33 To try to dispense with those criteria would be to do away with what makes us human. But we also had to understand the cultural values that we naturally generate as historically determined constructions precisely because they are our own inventions, which does not make them any less vital or true – at least for those who create them – but does mean that they will not necessarily be as compelling or plausible for others. Our standards for judging historical matters are therefore strictly speaking ours: we see the world, both the present and the past, from our particular vantage point, just as others view the world, albeit necessarily differently, from theirs. Every cultural entity within every historical epoch thus inevitably develops its own sense of itself in relation to and through its own singularity, and it is through the lens of that self-understanding that it likewise views the rest of the world, including the historical antecedents leading up to itself. Speaking of his own era and its sphere of values, ­Troeltsch said: “our criteria result, in truth, through a critical selection from among the cultural heritage of an entire, immense causal network, in our case, for instance, the totality of Western culture.”34 And the combined expression of those criteria, the positive articulation of the judgments they guide and inform, is what ­Troeltsch called a “synthesis,” the amalgamation of the sum total of cultural values within a certain place and specific time that is realized in the conscious knowledge of itself as such and constitutes its individual distinctiveness. And, for each national cultural entity – for example, for England or for France, or for that matter for Germany – it is in the productive formation of its own “criteria” in and through constant dialogue with a shared past that ­Troeltsch labled the “totality of Western culture,” whereby the specific identity of each constituent took shape while still partaking in and being shaped by a common cultural inheritance. 30 

Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 26. 32  Ibid., 27. 33 Ibid. 34  Ibid., 28. 31 

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Whether ­Troeltsch’s sophisticated conception of a “cultural synthesis” actually solved the thorny problem of relativism is debatable. But its attractions were undeniable. For one thing, it allowed for a generous pluralism that granted disparate cultures equal dignity and worth, making comparisons among them all certainly possible, but assertions of superiority for any one of them practically meaningless. It also made ample room for the dynamism and mutability intrinsic to all historical activity, acknowledging a vital creativity in the historical process that could account for the occurrence of spontaneity and genuine novelty across time. In every instance, within each larger cultural entity, the unceasing activity of such an on-going “cultural synthesis” produces something uniquely original out of preexisting elements, bringing forth “not only a new synthesis of what already exists, but in the new synthesis itself there is simultaneously something that had previously never existed at all that emerges from the old and yet also represents a new depth of life.”35 No less important, for the individual historian, whose task it is to comprehend this complex, continuous activity, this constantly changing fusion and reconfiguration of values, there is an indisputably creative moment in making interpretive sense of a given constellation of cultural criteria. In producing a coherent historical narrative, the historian, ­Troeltsch thought, as much “makes” as “uncovers” the meanings of the past. Understanding and describing the formation of such a synthesis, he insisted, is not possible without an artistic creative power, but is not itself the product of such a power, but rather the product of scientifically schooled, intuitive thinking that perceives the thousand interconnections and reciprocal effects of historical life and detects with an eye trained by comparison the particular, individual developmental relationships.36

Seen this way, he said, “every act of comprehension is an act of generation” – Jedes Ergreifen ist ein Hervorbringen – but it is also an act that, as historical understanding, consciously knows it must be “obedient to the genius of history.”37 Genuine historical understanding itself, then, is also an eminently creative endeavor, one that is grounded in the specificity of the real world it seeks to comprehend, but which as such produces a new interpretive constellation, mirroring through this activity the very processes the historian seeks to explain. For ­Troeltsch, there were several important philosophical consequences that flowed from this general perspective. The first was that the traditional notion of a unitary human nature was reduced, at best, to a regulative idea. “We become free from tailoring all cultural philosophical criteria to the concept of humanity,” 35 Ibid. 36  37 

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 36.

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he said. For: “What do we know about humanity? How long has it been present on this planet, how long will it remain habitable or humanity’s life force last?”38 Just as there was no definitive, normative cultural value – no religious, ethical, social, or aesthetic universal constant – that could claim validity for all people and for all time, there could also be no single “essence” of humanity that could serve as the standard or measure of any particular expression of it. “All genuine universality,” ­Troeltsch concluded, is not applicable to all humanity, the promotion of the idea of humanity, or the universally identical production of autonomous, rational, liberated or enlightened reason, but rather the advancing, vital force of the totality of life proceeding from individual special formations – Sonderbildungen.39

There are, of course, innumerable specific expressions of humanity, concrete realizations of its almost infinitely rich and diverse character. But the notion of “humanity” as such, for ­Troeltsch, counted only as an abstract fiction. Similarly, by adopting this relative perspective, “we will further be freed from the illusions of the usual concept of progress and development.” Just as there is no one “humanity,” there is likewise no single goal toward which “it” supposedly tends. “In truth, no one has even the faintest idea of the overall development of humanity and thus no notion of any law of this development, either.”40 Here, too, he felt, all we can have is particular knowledge: knowledge of phenomena that are very much the result of general forces, but which we can know only by their particular effects. “We know only the development, the flourishing, and withering within great individual contexts,” he elaborated, all of which form specific manifestations of abstract historical processes that perhaps, one day, may “merge into a unified human culture: all of that we do not know. It is enough that every great context has its own life and its own ideals.”41 The resonances of Neo-Kantian thought are evident in many of these passages – not coincidentally, at one point in his speech ­Troeltsch referred in passing to Kant as “the master of German thought”42 – and the epistemological modesty is only one of those legacies.43 The radical uncertainty about ultimate questions, though transposed out of the purely epistemological and into the historical realm, 38 

Ibid., 40. Ibid., 41. 40 Ibid. 41  Ibid., 42. 42  Ibid., 13. 43  Arthur Liebert put it nicely: “This belief in the reality and the power of norms was the Kantian trait in ­Troeltsch’s character; it forms the foundation of his partial affiliation with the intellectual particularity of Idealist philosophy.” See Arthur Liebert, “Der Historismus und seine Überwindung,” Kant-Studien 29 (1924), 360. 39 

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is another obvious inheritance. But it is equally uncertain how much of ­Troeltsch’s subtle, nuanced meditation on the aporias of historical understanding his audience in the university Aula was able to appreciate, much less comprehend. Journalists in attendance writing for various newspapers struggled with what one respectfully called Professor ­Troeltsch’s “profound lecture” while admitting, or capitulating, that “only a few ideas can be reproduced here.”44 Another reporter agreed that it was a “very detailed and captivating speech, which incidentally placed no small demands on the auditors.”45 One seemingly helpful analogy, which is actually less apt than it first appears, for understanding the import of ­Troeltsch’s speech immediately sprang to many people’s minds. Only two months earlier, in early November 1915, Albert Einstein had astonished the world when he published his paper On the General The­ ory of Relativity, which synthesized his own groundbreaking work from a decade before and would pave the way to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics six years later. Now Ernst ­Troeltsch had identified an apparently similar phenomenon as central to the understanding of history as well. To many people in the winter of 1915–16, it seemed that the problem of relativism had become, paradoxically, universal. In mid-January 1915, for example, Kurt Riezler, the Imperial Chancellor’s intellectually ambitious private secretary, complained in his diary that he “cannot sleep, terrible toothaches. My head a complete muddle. For that reason thinking in a half-dream-like state about the principle of relativity.” Riezler was confounded by the new, baffling theory because, as he put it, a “unified measure is required because the unity of the world is required.”46 It was this apparent convergence of thought – the remarkable historical coincidence that two of the leading figures in both the natural sciences and the humanities had identified relativism as a central problem in their respective fields – which proved durable, long influencing how ­Troeltsch’s speech, and its overall significance, would be remembered. “At the same time as Albert Einstein,” someone wrote a number of years after ­Troeltsch’s death, “who in his general theory of relativity had explained an extremely unsettling situation, ­Troeltsch managed to delineate the crisis of criteria in the historical and humanistic sciences.”47 And as it happened, the “problem” that ­Troeltsch had identified would 44  Anon.,

“Zur Beurteilung historischer Dinge. Aus der Kaiser-Geburtstagsrede von Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Vossische Zeitung, No.  49, Abend-Ausgabe, 27 January, 1916; cited in KGA 16.1, 90. 45  Anon., “Die Feier der Universität,” Neue Preußische Zeitung; cited in KGA 16.1, 91. 46 Riezler, Tagebuch, 241. 47  Albert Dietrich, “­Troeltsch, Ernst Peter Wilhelm,” Deutsches Biographisches Jahrbuch, Das Jahr 1923 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1930), 5, 349–68; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen, 683.

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continue to preoccupy him until the end of his life, and his attempt to resolve it in his essay “On the Criteria for Judging Historical Matters” became the first articulation of what would be more fully explored in his final book, Historicism and its Problems, which appeared in 1922. But what no one among his listeners needed help in grasping was the immediate crisis of the war and its more than obvious effects on culture and on everything else. The article in the Vossische Zeitung accordingly stressed the relevance of Professor ­Troeltsch’s speech, as recondite as it was, to “the present moment of the most terrible crisis of European culture.”48 And the notice in the Preußische Zeitung also underlined (while citing ­Troeltsch’s own words) the relation between his reflections and the “immense worries and hopes that the fateful struggle among the peoples of the world, which was long dreaded and today exceeds our apprehensions, has brought over us and all of European culture.”49 The emphasis on the European scope and not just on the narrowly German dimension of the catastrophe is notable in both accounts, and not incidentally that broader perspective forms an essential aspect of ­Troeltsch’s own message. For it is only within that larger context of a crisis of European culture as a whole, and from the historical philosophical standpoint he had elaborated in his lecture, that ­Troeltsch’s concluding prescriptions in his speech can be fully appreciated. Descending somewhat from the heights of theoretical abstraction, ­Troeltsch brought his remarks to a close with the following observation: The present crisis has revealed deeper inner differences of character among the European peoples than we had previously assumed with our all too harmonizing notions of the Western world. That only corresponds to the entire mentality of historiography, with its fundamentally individualized scientific focus, and for that very reason should not be at all surprising to us. But it follows that the restructurings of the future will be very strongly influenced by this particular character – Sondercharakter – as urgently as we must always also be reminded by world political interests, as well as by religious and cultural fellowship, to reconnect the community of peoples. We will thus have to view and shape the German future above all as a German one. We must immerse ourselves in our history even more deeply than before, and in a more productive and optimistic way than before forge the path on which the new German state will take shape as a unified entity that is vital and strong for the future.50

That was, as a political statement, still quite general, not to say vague, and perhaps necessarily so given the ongoing domestic sensitivities. But against the background of ­Troeltsch’s most recent thinking about the role the war had played in revealing previously ignored or unsuspected differences among the cultures of 48 Anon., “Aus der Kaiser-Geburtstagsrede von Ernst ­ Troeltsch,” Vossische Zeitung, No.  49, Abend-Ausgabe, 27 January, 1916; cited in KGA 16.1, 90. 49  Anon., “Die Feier der Universität,” Neue Preußische Zeitung; cited in KGA 16.1, 91. 50 ­Troeltsch, “Über Maßstäbe zur Beurteilung,” 46.

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the principal combatants, it seems clear and consistent enough. Henceforth, he was saying, and in particular after the war, Germans should, indeed must, seek to understand themselves better in terms of their cultural, historical, and political specificity in order to be able to confront and surmount the many challenges they would face in the wider world. That would be especially important once the war ended as they embarked on the necessary task of reengaging with other peoples who were often radically dissimilar from themselves. The first step in this deliberate process of self-reflection, ­Troeltsch acknowledged, was largely a solipsistic one, and it had in fact already commenced: “Today, many thousands are thinking and pondering over the essence of Germanness.”51 But such self-understanding alone would not suffice, he warned, and would have to be coupled with an equally honest as well as generous examination of all those other peoples who likewise recognized and valued their own particularity with respect to the rest of the world – and perhaps particularly with regard to the Germans. Only then, on the basis of such a comprehensive outlook based on mutual, informed recognition – and also self-recognition – would it be possible to create a stable foundation of genuine understanding that would both support meaningful interaction with the various peoples of Europe in the future (and, for that matter, with the world as a whole) and also enable Germany itself to enjoy a flourishing, autonomous political and cultural existence. That was a lot to offer as a birthday gift, but with characteristic élan ­Troeltsch had managed to present it all in a single if densely compact package. In closing, he rounded off his remarks on a more conventional note by extending the requisite wishes to “our Imperial and Royal Lord” Wilhelm II, who, ­Troeltsch graciously noted, bore the heavy responsibility of “making decisions concerning crucial matters of our domestic and international political life.”52 In the printed version of the text that appeared a few months later, the last page also contained a final lengthy footnote that asked for the reader’s indulgence regarding the unavoidably general tenor of his speech, as well as for its ceremonial trappings. By way of compensation, ­Troeltsch invited readers who wished for a more in-depth discussion of the matters to which he could only briefly allude in his public address to consult several of his latest publications in which he had made, as he put it, “a modest attempt to capture our current historical reality.”53 These included the essay on “The Spirit of German Culture” that he had written the previous year for Germany and the World War, as well as two new pieces that had just appeared early in 1916 and were subsequently issued together in a single volume called 51 Ibid. 52 

Ibid., 47.

53 Ibid.

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German Future: “The German Idea of Freedom” and “Private Morality and State Morality.”54 Finally, he recommended one more essay based on a speech he had given earlier that March with the evocative title: “The Ideas of 1914.”

The Importance of Ideas As we know, during the difficult months in the autumn and winter of 1914–15, the war stagnated to the west and the English blockade tightened its grip, producing critical shortages of raw materials and foodstuffs. Internal tensions in Germany also continued to grow over the explosive questions of war aims abroad and political reform at home. At the same time, it had become increasingly obvious that the Burgfrieden policy, which had been intended to bridge or at least to mask such internal political conflicts, was by itself insufficient to sustain the cohesion and unity of purpose that everyone realized was indispensable to fighting and even more crucially winning the war. Without openly contravening the strictures imposed by that policy, numerous individuals and groups pursuing their own separate agendas were barely observing the letter of the Burgfrieden even as they were disdainfully defying its spirit. The danger, which was becoming more acute as well, was that the very disposition toward unanimity, the will to joint national determination to work and fight as one, would itself be weakened, if not fatally compromised, by the intensification of political divisions over an ever expanding set of contentious issues. Here, once more, the shortsightedness of the German leadership, in the attempt to solve one problem, had inadvertently created another. The Burgfrieden, which codified the Kaiser’s pronouncement on August 4 that party loyalties would no longer play a role in German domestic life, had left no viable provision for managing partisan friction if, or more realistically when, it arose again, for the simple reason that, by royal decree, such discord officially did not exist. But partisan politics of course did not cease or vanish entirely simply because the Emperor had said they did, and dissension was all the more able to smolder behind the scenes and spread unchecked because no one could confront or even acknowledge it openly. But beyond and above all of these spiraling concerns, the unrelenting pressures of the war itself inexorably grew. Most of all, the Germans needed an identifiable cause, an idea, one that would make sense of the fighting and mounting 54 Ernst

­Troeltsch, “Die Deutsche Idee von der Freiheit” and “Privatmoral und Staatsmoral,” in Deutsche Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1916). Both essays had originally appeared in Die neue Rundschau in January and February, respectively.

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sacrifices and explain why the war continued to be necessary. For without such an idea, it was feared that many might understandably come to the conclusion that all the suffering and death were not in fact worth it.

The Free Patriotic Association All of these troubling developments produced an almost impossible quandary, one that Eugen Schiffer, a lawyer in the National Liberal Party and a deputy to the Reichstag, had found himself forced to face during the first winter of the war: how to contain an incipient crisis of popular confidence that was not even supposed to exist. To help address that daunting predicament, Schiffer enlisted the aid of Wilhelm Kahl, professor of law at the University of Berlin and likewise a National Liberal politician. A regular participant in Hans Delbrück’s Mittwoch­ abend and one of the co-authors of the Delbrück-Dernburg Petition, Kahl shared the group’s commitment to a negotiated peace and its general opposition to annexation on the Western European continent. But Kahl shared as well their growing alarm that not just widespread support for those principles, but also potentially the broader social consensus on which national perseverance and any continuing cohesion depended, were being endangered by the intensifying antagonisms beginning to emerge within Germany from under the increasingly fraying mantel of the Burgfrieden. Eugen Schiffer thus asked Kahl to lead a strictly nonpartisan organization devoted to “securing the inner gains of the war for our domestic political and popular life”55 by focusing on the one thing it could be supposed that everyone had in common: their unquestioned devotion to their country, to their Vaterland. The fruit of that understanding, the so-called “Free Patriotic Association” – Freie Vaterländische Vereinigung – formally came into being on February 28, 1915 during a confidential meeting in the Reichstag in which a petition was circulated to gather the signatures of willing supporters.56 Although well-intentioned – and endorsed by a respectable number of serious and influential people from the broad center, including Delbrück himself, Adolf von Harnack, who helped draft the founding charter, the industrialist Ernst Borsig, who served as its first Vice Chairman, the banker Arthur von Gwinner, the entrepreneur Carl Friedrich von Siemens, and others of similar stature – it quickly and inevitably 55 

Wilhelm Kahl, An die Deutschen im Reiche! (Berlin: Paß & Garleb, 1915), 2. Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 407. Cf. also Willibald Gutsche, “Freie Vaterländi­ sche Vereinigung (FVV) 1915–1916,” Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte. Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland (1789–1945), ed. Dieter Fricke et al. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1984), 2, 663–65. 56  See

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emerged that the Free Patriotic Association reflected the almost schizophrenic context out of which it arose. It was supposed to perform the impossible trick of being an unaffiliated, nonpartisan organization designed to bolster the morale and to stiffen the resolve of the country that, officially at least, had no need of such encouragement. Even more fantastically, the proposed entity was expected to perform this essentially political work as if it were apolitical. In a published pamphlet describing the circumstances leading to the establishment of the Free Patriotic Association, Kahl explained that the organization had arisen precisely in response to the perceived need to lend institutional form to, and thereby preserve, the unanimity that Germans had felt at the outbreak of the war and to sustain it through the more difficult times that surely still lay ahead. To that end, Kahl contrasted the “experiences of the days at the end of July and in August” with the prior “party hatred and suspicion, the embitterment and complaining” that had existed for years and even for decades before the war. He wrote that not even the heady “spirit of 1913” during the previous jubilee year had materially made things better, saying that “optimists had hoped for some improvement from the centennial celebrations, from the reminder of the great deeds by our fathers for freedom and unity.”57 Initially, it had seemed that the war itself and everything that immediately followed from it had somehow miraculously achieved what nothing else had been able to do in overcoming those disabling internal divisions. But, Kahl explained, as the war went on, and as was only to be realistically expected, it had become evident that the “heightened mood of those days could itself not persist,” and the fact that those feelings soon dissipated was merely “human nature” and “psychologically self-evident.”58 Indeed, “no sensible person could believe the concord of that great time would conquer and eradicate the separate existence of the political parties.”59 There still remained the need to organize and channel, and to revivify if possible, that natural but unfocused “concord” experienced immediately after August 1914, to give it external shape and to carry it forward now that the original feelings of solidarity had waned or become diffuse. “We must keep true,” he wrote, “what we in our greatest moments of inner and outer experience silently pledged or publicly professed.”60 And Kahl and his allies thought that the Free Patriotic Association they had created was the best vehicle for attaining that larger goal. What is notable about all of this, apart from the tortured logic involved in claiming to establish a patently political entity that repudiated political activity, 57 Kahl, 58 Ibid. 59  60 

An die Deutschen, 3.

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5.

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is that the very need to form the Free Patriotic Association in the first place reflected the undeniable fact that the high tide of emotions many Germans had experienced at the outset of the war, which had indeed both expressed and upheld their unity, had in the meantime dramatically receded and was even threatening to disappear altogether under the grinding, everyday realities of the ongoing conflict. In addition, Kahl recognized that those very emotions themselves, as inherently transitory sentiments, were simply not sustainable and had to be translated into some more stable and durable form. The powerful but ephemeral emotions of August had to be converted into the more reliable and robust categories of reason: “The matter had to be shifted from the sphere of feeling into that of ­rational awareness,” Kahl wrote; “only then is accountability and responsibility possible.”61 But, in making that argument, Wilhelm Kahl had thus more or less openly acknowledged that by early 1915 the confidence and consensus among Germans had already largely and, he implied, necessarily diminished. Moreover, that unformed, intangible “spirit” had to be replaced by a deliberate, reflective strategy in order to endure and remain effective. And the Free Patriotic Association that Kahl was asked to lead had been constituted to do just that: “it intends to conserve itself and become active in great political questions of fundamental importance in which the welfare of the whole depends on overcoming partisan factionalism and bringing about a decision in the spirit of unity.”62 The “spirit of unity” – Geist der Einheit: if Kahl did not explicitly invoke the year 1914 here, it was because he did not have to. It was understood that the “spirit of unity” that the Association was meant to sustain had been an immediate result of the war, just as it was equally obvious if unspoken that “spirit” and therefore the entire country, were ominously endangered by its flagging. And that is the true meaning of what subsequently became known as the “spirit of 1914”: that it was summoned, as a slogan and as a program, not in the waning summer days of 1914 when it was not needed, but at a much later and darker moment when it was – at precisely the time when that spirit was showing alarming signs of faltering and in urgent need of being revitalized. Far from being the spontaneous expression of some irrational and prolonged “enthusiasm” that had suddenly sprung into life in August 1914, the fully articulated notion of the “spirit of 1914” arose instead in the winter of 1915 out of a broadening sense of unease that the German people were forgetting to leave aside their political differences in the name of common national values. And, even more paradoxically, it was felt that the best way to refocus German energies was to appeal to a rational recognition 61  62 

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 9–10.

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of their shared interests – vividly embodied in a phrase that reminded them of what was at stake for them all if they failed to unite as one. That all of this had to be done without violating the Burgfrieden was difficult enough. But the potential efficacy of the actual program put forth by the Free Patriotic Association was diminished further by being formulated in frustratingly vague, not to say impenetrably cryptic terms.63 “No one in the world may stand closer to a German than his imperial comrade” – Reichsgenosse – the first article of the Association puzzlingly proclaimed. “Whoever commits to that may lay claim to the unreserved recognition of his national disposition,”64 it went on, not much more helpfully. Another of the articles constituting the Association asserted that “the relationship between the government and the people’s representatives in foreign and domestic politics is to be based to a greater degree than before on openness and trust.”65 What all of that concretely meant, particularly in practical political terms, was anyone’s guess. Hans Delbrück gamely tried to support the efforts of his colleagues by publishing a short, supportive notice in the Preußische Jahrbücher on March 26, 1915 outlining the self-described purpose of the Association and countering some of the objections that had already been raised against it. Delbrück candidly admitted that the undertaking faced a number of serious obstacles. First, given the on-going legal force of the Burgfrieden itself, “one should actually not talk about domestic politics at the moment,”66 which imposed an awkward double bind on the whole endeavor from the outset. Then there was the stated desire not to allow the “spirit of unity, which the war created,” to be lost again amid partisan antagonisms, which the Association was meant to transcend. On that score, Delbrück was frank. By itself, he wrote, the Association could not, and should not, entirely eliminate partisan disagreement from German political life. “It is obvious that that is not possible in an absolute sense and not even desirable; parties, and thus partisan conflict, are indispensable for a vibrant political life.”67 Delbrück also recognized that, more narrowly, “it is not difficult to level criticism at individual sentences in the program of the ‘Free Patriotic Association’” and he acknowledged, as he tactfully put it, the “abstract sentences” it contains.68 But if one read it in the spirit in which it was intended, Delbrück continued, its fundamental meaning was perfectly plain. The Association was created precisely in order to provide a political home to everyone in the German 63 

See Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 408. An die Deutschen, 15. 65  Ibid., 16. 66  Hans Delbrück, “Politische Korrespondenz,” Preußische Jahrbücher 160 (1915), 177. 67 Ibid. 68  Ibid., 178. 64 Kahl,

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Empire regardless of any other affiliation, and especially to those who had placed their lives in the service of their country. “Social Democrats, Poles, and Jews have fought and bled for the German Empire,” Delbrück pointedly reminded his readers; “thanks for that should not be withheld from them, and the Empire should also offer them a friendly abode, not one enclosed in suspicion.”69 But as honorable as the motives may have been behind the Free Patriotic Association, the contradictions of its conception and the related lack of any explicit and thus actionable political content informing it doomed it virtually from the outset. Most of all, it was never clear what the Association was positively supposed to do, which made its precise sphere of action or its actual relevance more than a little mysterious. And its quick demise was all but guaranteed after it failed to respond meaningfully, or even at all, to the first serious test to the domestic harmony it had been tasked to preserve. As we recall, in June and July, 1915, only a few months after the Free Patriotic Association was founded, the two competing petitions bearing the names of Reinhold Seeberg and Hans Delbrück over the incendiary question of annexations were submitted to the Imperial Chancellor, quickly becoming known within informed circles and creating the most acute internal crisis in Germany since the war had begun. In addition, the turmoil within the Social Democratic Party over the same issue, sparked by the publication of the “Manifesto of the Three” in late June 1915, also threatened to undermine national unity. Even more disturbingly, because it raised the possibility that the Social Democrats might withdraw their support of the war entirely, the anti-annexationist revolt potentially endangered the ability of Germany to continue fighting at all. Yet the Free Patriotic Association conspicuously took no public stance on these explosive issues, and its continued silence in the face of the mounting domestic discord was deafening. At the beginning of August 1915, a provincial newspaper called the Westphalian Political News published a report on the escalating “feud” among the annexationists and their opponents and expressly noted that, as the controversy intensified over the summer, “we waited in vain for the voice of the Free Patriotic Association.” Perhaps, the author of the article speculated, the leaders of the Association felt bound by prudence to speak out only when they thought it was absolutely necessary. If so, “can a more significant moment for our national life be imagined than the present one?”70 The journalist concluded that the continuing reticence of the Association and its refusal to speak out on the matter – which actually reflected the impartiality that, bizarrely, was

69 Ibid.

70 Anon.,

Westfälische Politische Nachrichten, in Grumbach, 88.

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the one thing the Association was actively committed to maintaining – only underscored its inherent political weakness. The final verdict was harsh: There were doubters who saw in a movement supported by unclear words of emotion, without a common objective foundation and without any concrete, explicitly described goals, more of a danger than an advantage for our future political life. […] The question will thus be permitted: has the Free Patriotic Association been founded for the purpose of spreading unmanly sentimentalities among the German people to an even greater degree than was to be lamented even before the war?71

The Berlin-based leading conservative newspaper Preußische Zeitung picked up and reprinted the article from the Westphalian Political News, thereby lending it much greater visibility and introducing the Free Patriotic Association to a national readership by way of calling attention to its most humiliating failure. Predictably, the affair dealt a devastating blow to the Association from which it would never recover. Not a little ironically, at the same time, and even worse, such open criticism further revealed that the vaunted “spirit of unity” that the organization was supposed to uphold was itself in even greater danger of disintegrating than had been previously imagined.

German Society 1914 Clearly, something else was needed to fortify German resolve and to provide a forum for the serious discussion of the many pressing issues that had arisen over the previous twelve months that the war had already lasted. Partly in response to the vacuum left by the hopes that were first raised and then almost immediately dashed by the Free Patriotic Association, a new organization was founded at the end of November 1915 that was similarly intended to rise above party and confessional ties and to provide an inclusive context for exploring ways to foster cooperation in addressing the common challenges facing the nation. Conceived as a private “club” along the lines of the venerable British model, the “German Society 1914” – Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914 – exhibited its ambition and consequence even in its physical setting.72 It was housed in the so-called Palais Pringsheim, an opulent edifice originally built as a private residence in the 71 Ibid. 72 See

the excellent, if brief, account by Johanna Schellenberg, “Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914 (DG) 1915–1934,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte, ed. Dieter Fricke, (Berlin: das europäische Buch, 1968), 1, 378–80. Bernd Sösemann, Theodor Wolff. Ein Leben mit der Zeitung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012), 125, correctly points out that the Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914 has not yet been “systematically researched.” A monograph about it apparently exists, but I have been unable to obtain a copy of it; cf. Frederik D. Tunnat, Die Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914

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early 1870s, with a lavishly decorated interior featuring wall paintings by Anton von Werner, the most famous academic artist of the time, and located in the middle of Berlin on the prestigious Wilhelmstrasse, where many of the official buildings of the German government stood, including the Imperial Chancellery just a few doors down.73 The wealthy Stuttgart industrialist Robert Bosch had bought the stately building and provided rooms rent-free to the Society for its meetings, and Bosch also reserved a private apartment for himself in the Palais Pringsheim to accommodate him during his frequent sojourns in the capital.74 But the idea for the German Society 1914 was the brainchild of Wilhelm Solf, Secretary of the Imperial Colonial Office and one of the most respected and well-connected members of the government. Solf had made his name as the Governor of the German possession of Samoa, where he had served from 1900 to 1911 as a liberal, tolerant, and highly competent administrator, becoming widely recognized for his responsiveness to the needs and perspectives of the indigenous people.75 Back in Berlin at the beginning of the war as the Staatssekretär for all colonial affairs, Solf belonged to the moderate circle around Hans Delbrück supporting Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, and Solf otherwise maintained extensive contacts among the leading intellectual and artistic figures of the day. That the regard was mutual is evidenced by his participation in the authoritative volume Germany and the World War, to which Solf contributed a finely crafted essay on German colonial politics, even though he was not strictly speaking an academic.76 (He did possess a doctorate in Indology, however, and he translated a Sanskrit grammar into German that was long used as a standard reference work.77) During the summer of 1915, as the domestic political situation in Germany became more volatile and substantive progress on the Western Front appeared increasingly remote, thereby reducing any prospect of peace won through victory, Wilhelm Solf had soberly assessed the overall state of the war. On June 10, he concluded in a private letter to his friend, the ambassador Paul Graf Wolff Metternich, that if there were still any realistic chance of prevailing militarily against und ihr Gründer. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Berlin: Edition Vendramin, 2014). 73  For a description of the building and its immediate surroundings, and a photograph of its facade, see Berlin und seine Bauten (Berlin: Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn, 1896), 3, 114 and 116. 74  Theodor Heuß, Robert Bosch. Leben und Leistung (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Rainer Wunderlich, 1946), 305–07. 75  See Vietsch, Wilhelm Solf, 59–101. See also Conrad, German Colonialism, 121. 76  Wilhelm Solf, “Die deutsche Kolonialpolitik,” in Deutschland und der Weltkrieg (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1915), 142–70. 77 Vietsch, Wilhelm Solf, 23. The book is by Franz Kielhorn, Grammatik der SanskritSprache, trans. Wilhelm Solf (Berlin: Dümmler, 1888).

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England, “then the war should be continued.”78 If, however, and as was seeming ever more likely, a positive military outcome for Germany was not in fact feasible, “then reason, which even amidst the thunder of weapons should never be condemned to silence, should draw the consequences that are necessary for the welfare of the fatherland.”79 Thinking that he was perhaps not being explicit enough with those words, Solf spelled out to Metternich precisely what he meant: “I am arguing for negotiating and for a formula that is diplomatically phrased and doesn’t look like retreat.”80 As for Belgium, which Solf had visited several times and had studied carefully in his ministerial capacity, he categorically declared: “Belgium is unsuitable for German expansion.”81 But at an even deeper, more fundamental level, apart from the troublesome questions of military strategy and foreign policy, Solf thought the war was having a devastating and potentially enduring impact on the moral and cultural life of all the people it was affecting – and not just the Germans. As he wrote to Metternich again, on July 15, 1915: I fear that the longer the war lasts, the more our ethical concepts, our artistic views and scientific convictions, our faith and belief, all the many thousands of imponderables that lift the interactions of people with one another and their relations to things onto a higher plane, are being shattered by hammer blows.82

A few months later in Berlin, on November 28, 1915, Wilhelm Solf stood before a large group of dignitaries gathered in the Palais Pringsheim to announce the official founding of the Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914 (at its inauguration it already boasted nine hundred members, with over four hundred in attendance that evening.)83 Framing the event was the somber backdrop of deep concern and anxiety about the future of the country, and even about the fate of the entire ­European continent, that had been steadily growing over the previous months. Worries that the nation might fracture and break apart from within, unthinkable only a year ago, now seemed all too plausible and thus all the more frightening. As if to underscore that very real danger, the assembly was formally opened by a brief address by retired Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, one of the charter members of the new Society, who stressed that the war had demonstrated the importance of “subordinating particular wishes and particular interests to a 78 

Solf to Metternich, June 10, 1915; in Gegen die Unvernunft. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Paul Graf Wolff Metternich und Wilhelm Solf, ed. Eberhard von Vietsch (Bremen: Carl Schünemann, 1964), 29. 79 Ibid. 80  Ibid., 30. 81  Ibid., 33. 82  Solf to Metternich, July 15, 1915; ibid., 34. 83  On these numbers, cf. KGA 21, 11.

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great, common goal.”84 Moltke reminded those present that, while they were able to assemble “in secure tranquility” at home in Berlin, outside at the front “the war rages on, our brothers and sons stand in battle against a world of enemies, ready, daily and hourly, to give their life in order to preserve the life of the whole, of the nation, through the sacrifice of their individual life.”85 “In 1871,” Moltke somberly added, “we became an Empire, now it is necessary for us to become a people.”86 The fact that Moltke more than implied that Germans did not yet form “a people” was dismaying enough. But it also provided one more sign that the fulfillment of the urgently promoted “spirit of 1914,” more than a year on, was still more of an aspiration than a reality. When his own time came to speak, Solf expanded on the theme of national unity and its relative fragility, setting forth his rationale for creating the “new society or club,” as he expressly called it, by purposely harking back to one of the few remaining experiences that all Germans could seemingly still agree on, namely “the great events of the year 1914.”87 “In the first days of August, 1914,” Solf said, “we entered into a new era.”88 That moment represented, he emphasized, a “great change of fortune” or “fate” – a Schicksalswende. It formed “the threshold perhaps of a new epoch,” one so unprecedented and enormous in its implications that “a feeling of trepidation may momentarily befall even the most courageous.”89 But, with these solemn words, Solf also underscored the national “readiness to make sacrifices” and the universal recognition that the war affected everyone in that it raised the question of whether the nation as such and in its entirety was “to be or not to be.”90 And it was here, in this elemental, existential realization that Solf said “a unity of thought and feeling revealed itself in the entire German people.”91 “The unity of a people is rooted in the oldest and most wonderful virtue: love of the fatherland.” As heartening as this collective patriotic sense was, Solf also stressed how vital that sense remained for the functioning of the state and how much it needed to be integrated throughout all of its parts. “The modern political system,” he explained, forms in fact a whole of incredible diversity in which, as in a textile factory, a thousand strands weave in and out, one motion creates a thousand connections, a whole that can properly fulfill 84 Moltke,

Erinnerungen Briefe Dokumente, 444. Ibid., 443. 86  Ibid., 444. 87  Wilhelm Solf, Rede zur Gründung der Deutschen Gesellschaft 1914 (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1915), 7. 88  Ibid., 11. 89  Ibid., 12. 90  Ibid., 12–13. 91  Ibid., 14. 85 

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its functions when all of its members work harmoniously and purposefully with and for each other. Only then, within an organization, does the state become a nation, a people, and a fatherland.92

It was the same for the military forces, Solf continued, using a term that Ernst ­Troeltsch had helped to popularize and to imbue with a particular political meaning, calling it a genuine “people’s army” – a Volksheer – “in which all classes and occupations are represented and in which every single member is filled with one and the same great and strong spiritual impulse, to defend and preserve the homeland, the fatherland, the people.”93 In sum, Solf concluded, and recapitulating the main motive for bringing the German Society 1914 into existence: “we want to preserve the spirit of 1914! That is: the spirit that animated our people when it set out into this war filled with the resolute will to defend the fatherland, to protect and secure the work, the heritage of our fathers.”94 From a certain perspective, it may seem somewhat ironic, even slightly disingenuous, that Wilhelm Solf, whose cosmopolitan proclivities and intellectual fastidiousness were beyond doubt, should have placed the “spirit of 1914” and its blatant appeal to nationalist or at least patriotic sentiment at the heart of his new enterprise. But he was after all a politician, and the nation, if not yet quite desperate, was clearly in need of drastic political measures if it was going to persevere, much less succeed, in overcoming the serious challenges facing it. That is presumably why the name originally suggested for the organization, “Political Society of 1915,” which had been proposed by Theodor Wolff and in fact more accurately reflected the immediate circumstances that had given rise to it, was ultimately rejected in favor of the one Solf chose highlighting its national relevance.95 For even though the more narrow political purpose of the German Society 1914 was to support the Imperial Chancellor and his plan of “reorientation,” in order for that plan to have any chance of succeeding it was necessary to win the cooperation of a broad coalition of otherwise disparate, and in some cases mutually hostile, factions within German society willing to rally behind that cause as well. And, for better or worse, the one experience that everyone could identify with, or that no one could reasonably object to, was the one that forcibly reminded them of their communal fate in the face of a common threat. The “spirit of 1914” evoked by Solf and the organization he created to nurture it was not the irrational expression of collective “enthusiasm,” nor did it signify a sense of complacent optimism. Instead, it signaled the determined will to stave off the debilitating 92 

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21. 94  Ibid., 24–25. 95  See Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 246. See generally on the German Society 1914, Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 59, Bruendel, 79 and Miller, 269–70. 93 

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effects of apprehension, ignorance, and fear. In this sense, the “spirit of 1914” stood as an earnest reminder of collective resolve made necessary by a collectively experienced calamity. In practical and more positive terms, the German Society 1914 was devoted to the open exchange of opinion among its members about all matters of importance and from any serious point of view. Or, as Solf put it during his inaugural address, it was intended to give “men from all occupations without discrimination of any party now and in the future the possibility of an unprejudiced and unconstrained social intercourse.” It was designed to be the place, he went on, where “the Germany of action and of thought, of today and tomorrow, can come together.”96 Owing perhaps to the standing of its founder, or its success in maintaining an easy but stimulating conviviality, or simply because of the attractions exerted by its rarified membership, the “Club,” as everyone took to calling it, became one of the most important venues for knowledgeable political discussion in the capital. Its membership grew rapidly, reaching 1,200 by the spring of 1916 and almost two thousand a year later, or twice the number Solf had initially envisioned as the upper limit.97 And it notably continued to exist long after the war ended and remained a vital center of intellectual and political life in Germany until 1934, when another national emergency snuffed it out. Like its British inspiration, the Club offered sustenance for both body and soul: members and their guests could have a meal in the dining room, or merely stop by for a drink and enjoy a cigar, and then listen to the formal lectures that were usually held once a week featuring some of the best minds of the time representing a wide spectrum of professional or political viewpoints. Although Solf laid great emphasis on including people with divergent allegiances, he was not always successful in his recruiting efforts. He had for instance made a point of personally urging the staunchly conservative political leader Count von Westarp to join, who just as staunchly demurred, tartly explaining that “my requirement for club life was never great,” even though he did later admit, perhaps grudgingly, that the Society “did become a well-run political club.”98 The fact that, as Westarp also tersely noted, “Social Democrats were invited” to join the association no doubt further dampened his eagerness to add his name to its membership list.99 96 Solf,

Rede zur Gründung, 8. See Bern Sösemann, “Politische Kommunikation im ‘Reichsbelagerungszustand’ – Programm, Struktur und Wirkungen des Klubs ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft 1914’,” in Wege zur Kom­ munikationsgeschichte, eds. Manfred Bobrowsky and Wolfgang R. Langenbucher (Munich: Ölschläger, 1987), 636. 98 Westarp, Konservative Politik, 2, 12. 99 Ibid. 97 

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And as indirect confirmation of its perceived significance at the highest levels, on November 30, 1915, only two days after the founding meeting of the German Society 1914, the topic of its establishment already came up at the Großes Hauptquartier in Pleß. Over dinner, during what was described as an “unedifying conversation,” the Kaiser irritably mentioned the “new ‘Club 1914’,” deploring to his tablemates the participation of such men as Moltke and Solf in the undertaking. The Kaiser also took exception to the involvement of other high-ranking officials in the venture, specifically mentioning by name the Bavarian emissary in Berlin, Hugo Count von Lerchenfeld, the retired General of the Infantry, August Count zu Eulenberg, and the Admirals Wilhelm von Büchsel and Eduard von Capelle.100 The very existence of the Club clearly continued to annoy the Emperor, who as late as April, 1918 was still complaining that “a State Secretary (Solf) ought not to be the chairman of such a society, to which Social Democrats also belong.”101 Such liberality in the composition of its membership was precisely the attraction for many of its patrons, as it was for Friedrich Meinecke, who celebrated the German Society 1914 in his memoirs for having offered the leading echelons of Berlin an entirely unique and never really repeated opportunity to bring people from the most varied occupations, world views, and political affiliations together. The ‘spirit of 1914’ was intended to be fostered there, Social Democrats spoke with agrarians, scholars with businessmen and civil servants.102

As would be expected, Meinecke’s friend and colleague Ernst ­Troeltsch not only became a member, he also, in Meinecke’s recollection, held “one of the first lectures” in its featured weekly series of talks, speaking “with captivating brilliance on the intellectual situation of the war.”103 Solf had written to ­Troeltsch as early as November 29, the day after the opening ceremony for his club, inviting him to speak before its membership. ­Troeltsch politely declined a few days later, saying he would gladly do so, but did not yet have a topic he thought appropriate. As soon as he did, he promised, he would be more than happy “to make myself available.”104 It was not long before he had settled on a subject he considered suitable for a lecture. That talk, which ­Troeltsch gave before the German Society 1914 on March 20, 1916, not quite four months after its founding and addressed to a presumably sizeable audience that would have included some of the most

100 Müller,

Regierte der Kaiser?, 142. Ibid., 371. 102 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 234–5. 103  Ibid., 235. 104  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Wilhelm Solf, December 5, 1915; KGA 21, 159–60. 101 

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eminent and influential representatives of the German intellectual, political, and even military classes, was called “The Ideas of 1914.”

Die Ideen von 1914 The phrase that gave the address its title was not ­Troeltsch’s invention. It was coined by Johnann Plenge, a little-known but ambitious professor of economics and sociology at the University of Münster in Westphalia and the author, most recently, of a book titled The War and the National Economy, which had first appeared in January 1915, with a second, expanded edition published in late November of the same year.105 Plenge was an unorthodox, “conservative” socialist who admired Karl Marx and largely agreed with his technical economic analyses. But he found Marx’s thought in general inferior to that of his own great teacher, Hegel, who Plenge thought could and should provide the system-building framework that he found wanting in Marx. That had been the crux of Plenge’s previous book, Marx and Hegel from 1911, in which he had argued for the necessity of viewing both thinkers as complementary and equally necessary to the task of constructing a “highly rational, specialized, and structured society that masters its organization.”106 The last word was key: Plenge felt that the war by itself, through the rationalization and coordination of all sectors of society it demanded, had already greatly promoted the development toward the greater economic and political integration – i.e. “organization” in the fullest sense – that he advocated. “Through the war,” he subsequently claimed in The War and the National Economy, “we have become a more socialist society than before.”107 However, Plenge felt that what had thus occurred naturally or “unconsciously,” so to speak, in response to external events had to be subsequently translated into deliberate, planned action for the sake of continued internal cohesion: Socialism as social organization is merely the completely conscious formation of society toward its highest energy and health; socialism as disposition is merely the liberation of the in­ dividual toward the conscious integration into the fully grasped life totality of state and soci­ ety.108 105 

Johann Plenge, Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft, 2nd. exp. ed. (Münster: Borgmeyer & Co., 1915). See the comments by Bruendel, 111–13. 106  Johann Plenge, Hegel und Marx (Tübingen: H. Laupp, 1911), 41. On Plenge see Axel Schildt, “Ein konservativer Prophet moderner nationaler Integration. Biographische Skizze des streitbaren Soziologen Johann Plenge (1874–1963),” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987), 523–70. 107 Plenge, Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft, 171. 108  Ibid., 171–72.

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What had been unleashed in August 1914 represented, in Plenge’s eyes, a fundamental social transformation of truly epochal proportions. Germany, he thought, had experienced something that was in every sense a “revolution.” Indeed, he wrote, “since 1789, there had not been such a revolution in the world as the German revolution of 1914.”109 But, Plenge further argued, by way of channeling Hegel through Marx, this “German revolution” had not yet achieved self-consciousness, it had not yet crystalized into rational “ideas.” It still had to find expression, in other words, in what he called “the ideas of 1914, the ideas of organization.”110 It was that task, to assist the “ideas of 1914” in emerging fully and assuming definite conceptual form so that they could acquire their full effective force and permanence, which Plenge set for himself with his wartime work. For, he explained, “the German future will not be born out of mere feeling. Its imperatives will be developed by the understanding, which plans in advance and is finally fulfilled through the uncompromising application of all of our energies at home and abroad.”111 One might say that Plenge essentially saw himself acting as midwife in helping to deliver the ideas conceived by the war so that they could grow and mature into Germany’s new social reality. But, as he put it in perhaps the most well-known passage in his book: Germany has already achieved victory within because it has experienced its spiritual rebirth. The war, which was born out of the great contradictions of the world economy – and thus according to the familiar formula: out of the contradictions in the material base of our culture – has become a war for the highest cultural goods. When we will commemorate this war one day in a memorial celebration it will be the celebration of the mobilization. The festival of August 2! The festival of the inner victory! – That is when our new spirit was born: the spirit of the strongest consolidation of all economic and all national energies into a new whole, in which everyone lives in equal proportion. The new German state! The ideas of 1914!112

As it turned out, Plenge’s rather breathless declarations also marked the birth of the soon-to-be famous phrase itself. But as these few excerpts from his book should sufficiently demonstrate, for all of his complaints about the woolliness of Marx, and despite his own claims to adhere scrupulously to reason, Plenge himself was hardly a model of lucidity or analytical rigor. Still, his book obviously struck a nerve, and in the process it gave rise to an expression that would live on 109 

Ibid., 173. Ibid., 174. 111  Ibid., 189. 112  Ibid., 189–90. Unfortunately, the short book by Joachim Müller, Die “Ideen von 1914” bei Johann Plenge und in der zeitgenössischen Diskussion. Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges (Neuried: ars una, 2001), is less helpful than its promising title suggests. 110 

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much longer than the work that introduced it, even taking on meanings that were at odds with the intentions it was created to convey. The transformative effects of this process are evident in the very first response to, or rather the misappropriation of, Plenge’s resonant phrase. Rudolf Kjellén, a conservative Swedish political scientist and politician who was sympathetic to the German cause, wrote a short book consisting of two lectures Kjellén had held in November 1914 and May 1915, preceded by a brief introduction, which was quickly translated into German and published in December 1915 by a reputable press. Titled The Ideas of 1914, Kjellén’s book thus won the distinction of giving the slogan its first prominent articulation.113 However, Kjellén most emphatically did not share Plenge’s socialist standpoint, idiosyncratic though it may have been.114 Indicative of that difference, Kjellén also mentioned that the second most important influence on his views was Werner Sombart, specifically his dyspeptic anti-English screed, Merchants and Heroes.115 Adopting a similarly Manichean stance as Sombart, Kjellén asserted that the “great conflict was not merely between peoples, but rather between ideologies,” or that it represented a clash of Weltanschauungen.116 As he even more succinctly put it, and sharpening the contrast that Plenge had also drawn, the war was at bottom “a battle between 1789 and 1914.”117 But for Kjellén, the ideological battle signified by the “ideas of 1914” was precisely a repudiation of the values embodied by Social Democracy, the natural offspring of the “ideas of 1789” encapsulated in the three words liberté, égalité and fraternité. “The world war,” Kjellén proclaimed, “means a reaction against the cosmopolitan ideal by emphasizing the national one.”118 The pendant to the “cosmopolitanism” of 1789, Kjellén continued, was an “exaggerated individualism” that contained the destructive seeds of “anarchy” within it and likewise needed to be stamped out.119 By contrast, the “ideas of 1914” were seen by Kjellén as the remedy for the “bankruptcy of Christian civilization that emerged from the year

113  Rudolf Kjellén, Die Ideen von 1914. Eine weltgeschichtliche Perspektive, German trans. by Carl Koch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1915), 5–6. Some scholars have mistakenly assumed that Kjellén actually coined the phrase, even though he explicitly mentioned his indebtedness to Plenge in the introduction to his book. 114  It is thus misleading to say, as Herfried Münkler does, that Kjellén stood “in intellectual proximity” to Plenge; see Herfried Münkler, Der Große Krieg. Die Welt 1914 bis 1918 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2013), 264. 115  Kjellén, 5. 116  Ibid., 6. 117 Ibid. 118  Ibid., 11. 119  Ibid., 14.

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1789.”120 The balance of his book is devoted to identifying the “new words that can possess the power to annihilate what was transitory in the ideas of 1789.”121 Instead of “liberty” or “freedom,” which Kjellén took to be the expression of an individualism run amok, he proposed “order”: “order is thus the great word, the first idea of 1914 that should annihilate the freedom of 1789 that has degenerated into self-indulgence.”122 Similarly, “equality,” which Kjellén dismissed as “principally a concentration of humanity on an average”123 and even as a “decapita­ tion of humanity,”124 would be replaced by a restored recognition of “hierarchy” and “real value,” or what Kjellén called the exercise of “justice”: “justice is the new word that should annihilate superficial equality after it has served its purpose by raising the niveau for the new edifice.”125 As for “brotherhood,” Kjellén contemptuously rejected the validity of any such notion as a political category, and he suggested that a more appropriate way of portraying the proper relationship of the mass of humanity to each other and to their natural superiors would be to liken it to “childhood in a paternal home.”126 Apart from the relative opacity the two works have in common, what is most striking about both Plenge’s and Kjellén’s ruminations is how far removed they were from the actual issues that were preoccupying those who had real authority, or at least real stature, in Berlin. Plenge was an academic outsider working at a provincial university on the western border of the Empire, while the Swedish Kjellén sat in the even more remote outpost of Gothenburg. As we know, current and reliable information was not easy to come by anywhere at the time, and the accounts by both authors betray their lack of privileged access to the personal and institutional networks that existed uniquely in Berlin. Of the two books, Kjellén’s brief tract, whisked along by his casual disdain for the ideals of the European Enlightenment and nourished by a half-digested Nietzscheanism, is in every way the less substantial one.127 But Plenge’s work, almost four times as long, does not match its greater length with a correspondingly deeper insight. It is repetitive, 120 

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 29. 122  Ibid., 34. 123  Ibid., 35. 124  Ibid., 36. 125  Ibid., 37. 126  Ibid., 38. 127  Meinecke included a trenchant but tactful review of the book in his essay, “Probleme des Weltkriegs,” Die neue Rundschau 27 (1916), 723, where he referred to Kjellén’s style as ­“dithyrambic.” Meinecke also rather diplomatically wrote: “This friend of our people, whose notions about the greatness and future of Germany cannot be surpassed, is not yet familiar, it seems to us, with the full severity of the antagonisms that affect us today in our domestic life;” 729. 121 

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disorganized, unfocused, and filled with technical economic details whose relevance to the main topic is not always evident. Most glaringly, it fails to address adequately or even at all the burning political questions of the day. About annexation, Plenge writes vaguely only of establishing “desirable borders” to the east and west after the war had ended and of the necessity of the other major powers “giving us colonies.”128 (How that would happen, or why it would be seen as desirable by anyone but Germany, remained unclear.) And about political reform Plenge is completely mute. In the second, expanded reedition of his book published in November 1915, he did dimly allude to the “reawakening of our domestic political antagonisms” that had arisen since the first version had appeared in January, but even here he did not go into any detail and contented himself with a few noncommittal and fairly nebulous asides. “How awful the Burgfrieden is for those minds who want only to live in conflict,” Plenge somewhat obliquely observed. “They are thus already rattling the chain of silence, and some pretext is always easily found to do so: that someone else has violated the Burgfrieden, or that one encounters some comment or other that infringes on the equal status of one’s own party.”129 While perhaps welcome to the governing powers who wanted to maintain internal concord by suppressing partisan strife, such gauzy pronouncements were obviously all too easy to make and shirked the more difficult and risky step of actually taking a stand. And, in particular, they allowed Plenge to avoid stating as clearly and unambiguously as possible what the “ideas of 1914” themselves were concretely supposed to mean. That burden fell to Ernst ­Troeltsch. He had read Plenge’s book when it first came out, and ­Troeltsch had graciously conveyed his compliments to the author, telling Plenge in a letter that he had been held entirely under its spell for “several days.”130 Plenge also learned in advance that ­Troeltsch was scheduled to speak at the German Society 1914 about the “ideas of 1914,” and Plenge fawningly wrote to his famous colleague that “your word counts a great deal and I would be pleased if I were to have you to thank if broader circles are also made aware of my work.”131 On one level, Plenge’s hopes were certainly fulfilled: more than any other person, and precisely because of his preeminence, Ernst ­Troeltsch would become responsible for bringing the phrase “the ideas of 1914” into general awareness and lending it an enduring cachet.132 That ­Troeltsch first did so 128 Plenge,

Die Volkswirtschaft, 176 and 179. Ibid., 248–49. 130  See ­Troeltsch, KGA 13, 268. See also the letter by Ernst ­ Troeltsch to Johann Plenge, March 21, 1916; KGA 21, 188–90. 131 ­Troeltsch, KGA 13, 269–70. 132  See Krüger, 203, who claims, correctly, that ­Troeltsch “popularized the ideas of 1914.” However, Krüger mystifyingly misreads the essay itself and imagines that it represents an 129 

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before the select company of the German Society 1914 in the imposing Palais Pringsheim, where his speech reportedly met with “enthusiastic approbation,”133 and then subsequently through the published version of his lecture in the no less distinguished and widely-read pages of the Die neue Rundschau, obviously did not hurt its fortunes, either. But in terms of how ­Troeltsch actually understood and portrayed those ideas, matters were more complicated. For, despite borrowing an already existing phrase, for which ­Troeltsch generously credited its originator while stressing that he had adopted “only the title,”134 his conception of the “ideas of 1914” had little to do with Plenge’s hazy reflections, and even less with Kjellén’s miasmic, reactionary musings.135 To be sure, there were some things on which both Plenge and ­Troeltsch could agree – to an extent. At one point in his book, Plenge had referred to the conflict engulfing the continent in passing as a “world economic war” – Weltwirtschafts­ krieg – but he did so, typically, without further elaborating what he understood by that word.136 As if to provide the explanation Plenge had failed to supply himself, ­Troeltsch began his own examination of the “intellectual situation of the war,” as Meinecke had put it, by insisting that its origins had, in fact, nothing to do with various intellectual or cultural phenomena – or, in short, that it did not emanate from what we normally call “ideas” – at all. Rather, ­Troeltsch made it clear that he saw the real underlying causes of the war solely, but significantly enough, in the clash of fundamental economic and political interests on the part of all the participants. “One should not allow oneself to be deceived here,” ­Troeltsch said with unusual concision in his opening remarks on “The Ideas of 1914”: “this war is, in the first place, anything but a war of the spirit and of cultural differences, as impassioned hyper-idealists often like to think. It is the result of imperialistic

abandonment of ­Troeltsch’s previously “realistically liberal position,” which Krüger mistakenly thinks ­Troeltsch returned to “only after the world war;” ibid. 133 ­Troeltsch, KGA 13, 269. 134  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Die Ideen von 1914,” Die neue Rundschau 27 (1916), 607. 135  It is thus misleading to speak of ­Troeltsch’s “initially enthusiastic reception of the ideas of Johann Plenge,” as it is stated by Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 117. And in the letter ­Troeltsch sent to Plenge on March 21, 1916, ­Troeltsch mentioned that “the work by the otherwise so commendable Kjellén disappointed me;” KGA 21, 189. See also the later description of Kjellén as a “conservative” in ­Troeltsch, Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik; KGA 15, 494. 136 Plenge, Der Krieg, 190. See on this entire issue the superb book by Georges-Henri Soutou, L’or et le sang. Les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989). In the first sentence concisely Soutou states his thesis: “The First World War was also an economic confrontation.”

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world tensions, which emerged from the partition of the planet among a few great powers and from the need to hold down German competition.”137 As we recall, just over a year previously, ­Troeltsch had firmly rejected any form of imperialism for Germany, and he explicitly repeated that repudiation here, even calling attention to his earlier essay in a footnote stating that he had not since changed his mind.138 “A German imperialism after the English, Russian, American and Japanese model,” he now said again with as much directness as he could muster, “which a declining France is striving to emulate by summoning all of its strength, is for many reasons, above all for geographic and demographic ones, not possible for us.”139 And as for the more specifically economic mainsprings of the conflict, ­Troeltsch was no less plain, if differentiated, in his assessment. Capitalism, he argued, may be at the root of all imperialist rapaciousness, but the urge for profit alone did not itself provide the true motive for the war. Rather, the more basic, elemental desire for raw power, which motivated all of the major states, had essentially driven the imperialist race and ultimately provided the combustible fuel that had ignited the war: Economically speaking, the war was obviously madness, even if individual circles could hope to profit from it. If one calls this the war of capitalism that divides up the earth amongst itself, then in so doing capitalism is both the means and the effective form of the drive for expansion and the need for enlargement by peoples and states. In this way, it is today being driven everywhere by political and moral pathos and not by mercantile calculation, and with us in particular by the vital will of the nation and not by the hope for profit. It was caused by ambition and the need for power on the part of the great empires, and we took it up because our future and honor stood higher than any material gains.140

Yet what in early 1915 had been perhaps a bold but primarily personal expression of political convictions – namely, the principled rejection of imperialism in all of its forms – had in the meantime taken on a much broader public relevance with regard to some of the most divisive issues threatening to disturb, if not destroy, the domestic peace at home. Of course, on that earlier occasion it could have been ­Troeltsch’s conscious strategy to veil his opposition to the earliest stirrings of annexationist agitation – Claß had, after all, sent out his Position Paper on December 22, 1914, and it is certainly possible that ­Troeltsch had seen or at least heard about it soon thereafter – by embedding them in more general reflections on imperialism as such, allowing him to articulate his views at a level of abstraction that would allow them to be reliably understood by the initiated while rendering them theoretically general enough as to be unobjectionable to the vigilant 137 ­Troeltsch, 138 

Ibid., 622. 139  Ibid., 620. 140  Ibid., 610.

“Die Ideen von 1914,” 605.

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upholders of the Burgfrieden policy. But now his principled anti-imperialism, as relatively narrowly targeted as it may have been a year before, had acquired in the meantime no less specific, but also much greater explosive political power. That makes it all the more remarkable that, speaking on that day in March 1916, while standing in what had already become a major institution among the rows of government agencies on Wilhelmstrasse, and only a few short steps away from the Imperial Chancellery itself, Ernst ­Troeltsch, knowing full well how he would be received and by whom, delivered a lecture in which he openly and forcefully rejected any German imperial aspirations of any kind. Instead, he advocated for national restraint and moderation, for curtailing German ambitions abroad and, in so doing, for securing the vulnerable, but no less vital, moral and spiritual foundations that, he had always argued, had to undergird any tenable notion of Germany. And, as we will see, these as much as anything else were the central “ideas of 1914” that, according to ­Troeltsch, should guide his nation. It was only consistent with those greater aims that, in his analysis of the factors that had led up to the war, ­Troeltsch did not exclude his own country from blunt criticism. Taking, as was his wont, a longer historical view over the previous century to explain the rise of imperialist thought and behavior among all the major powers, ­Troeltsch exempted neither the members of the Entente nor his own compatriots from open censure – including, if only implicitly, Kjellén’s principal intellectual hero, Nietzsche, as well as ­Troeltsch’s former colleague and friend, Max Weber. For it was above all Weber’s notorious inaugural address of 1895 urging his nation to pursue Weltpolitik and therefore Weltmacht under the rubric of a social-Darwinian “struggle for existence” that had been so eagerly, and fatefully, embraced by his compatriots: In this situation there arose with us as well that hard rationality and cool calculation of the pure businessman, specialist, and professional, that financial and industrial instinct for power and remorseless competition, which we call Americanism and which in America is at least counterbalanced by a widespread robust religiosity. With us, too, there arose the doctrine of the egotism of the state, of the unprincipled assertion of the political will to power, of the imperialistic struggle for existence, as the English and French empires had in fact long practiced it, but cloaked with the humanitarian and benevolent façade of official policy.141

141  Ibid., 612. On the effect of Weber’s Antrittsrede, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918. Zweiter Band: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: Beck, 1995), 629, and Mommsen, Max Weber, 78–79. See also Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen. Die deutsche Politik von 1911 bis 1914 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1969), 69. Of limited insight, despite its title, is the book by Andreas Peschel, Friedrich Naumanns und Max Webers “Mitteleuropa.” Eine Betrachtung ihrer Konzeptionen im Kontext mit den “Ideen von 1914” und dem All­ deutschen Verband (Dresden: TUDpress, 2005).

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The point of this searing indictment was not, however, to lay blame on any one person or nation for setting the world on the path to war, as widely shared as ­Troeltsch felt the blame for that was. Rather, he intended to expose as matter-of-factly as possible what he thought had been the deeper material forces responsible for driving the entire process. And in that regard, he was uncharacteristically succinct. The war, he repeated, did not arise out of ideological or cultural differences. “It was about power and life,” he said, “and about nothing else.”142 Still, as enlightening as this focus on the material causes of the war may have been, the title of his lecture more than implied that ­Troeltsch would talk about ideas, and not just the ideas that led up to the war, but also and more relevantly those which might lead out of it again. Here ­Troeltsch offered up once more an unanticipated twist: just as he had insisted that the war had not, contrary to the imaginings of many other “hyper-idealistic” observers, resulted primarily from a clash of cultural or intellectual differences among the major powers but rather from raw economic and political struggles, so, too, and conversely, the “culture war” that did then emerge in its wake arose only subsequently as a product of that primary confrontation. “What had been an imperialistic war of power,” he emphatically stated, “thus became a war of the spirit and of character.”143 The war was not originally about ideas, nor did it initially arise from them. Instead, ­Troeltsch repeatedly stressed, it was about what all wars are about: brute power and the effort to achieve dominance by force over one’s adversaries. The ideas came later: “The war is not about them and was not ignited by them. Rather, they follow it and only proceed from it.”144 This was clearly a crucial point for ­Troeltsch, and he reiterated it again – and again: “great ideas are only the products of great political and social events.” “Ideas do not grow out of theory and doctrine, but rather out of enormous experiences.”145 Or, employing a more graphic image, he said the ideas produced by the war constituted “interpretations and transformations of the previous spirit within the crucible – Schmelztiegel – of the great catastrophe.”146 In English, the word “crucible” lacks the immediacy of the German equivalent, which by incorporating the root of the verb schmelzen, or “to melt,” retains the sense of the extreme forces, the intense, fiery heat required to turn solid metal into molten liquid, to render something inflexible and unyielding into a fluid, malleable form. Unlike “crucible,” Schmelztiegel thus literally means “melting 142 

Ibid., 606. Ibid. ­Troeltsch was not alone in this view. Similar comments were made at the same time by Friedrich Meinecke as well; see Meineke, Friedrich Meinecke, 271. 144  Ibid., 607. 145  Ibid., 608. 146 Ibid. 143 

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pot,” a vessel in which dissimilar elements are blended and fused together to produce a new, more durable and resilient amalgam. It was a metaphor ­Troeltsch clearly liked, for he returned to it once more at the end of his lecture. What the war had produced, he said in his closing words, “was nothing less than a new image and ideal of ourselves, one that had long been prepared, but had been joined together and revealed in such strong traits only in the dissolving and recombining melting heat – Schmelzhitze – of the war.”147 The figure of the “melting pot” remains one of the most often used images in popular discourse in the United States to describe the assimilative process of creating a homogeneous society out of heterogeneous elements, often considered one of the pillars upholding American democracy. Intriguingly, the term had entered the language in this precise figural sense only a few years earlier, when a play called The Melting Pot by a Russian-Jewish émigré from England named Israel Zangwill became a hit in 1908 in theaters in Washington, D.C. and New York.148 It is doubtful that even the insatiable ­Troeltsch would have heard of Zangwill’s popular drama, and ­Troeltsch meant something else by Schmelztiegel anyway. But it is perhaps nonetheless indicative of a confluence of even deeper currents, and of ­Troeltsch’s own developing thoughts about some of the most fundamental political questions of his time, that he chose that particular metaphor to characterize the violent transformations the German people had already undergone and were continuing to experience in the fires of war or, as he had just called it, the conflagration of the “great catastrophe.” Although ­Troeltsch had repeatedly emphasized that any specific “ideas of 1914” there might have been did not antedate the war but had only later bubbled up out of the inferno it had ignited, as of yet he had not yet said exactly what he thought those subsequently formed ideas actually were. “Our question is,” ­Troeltsch admitted, now to turning to the heart of his address: “how much do we already know today about these ideas of 1914?”149 First of all, and in order to begin providing a more detailed genesis of those ideas, ­Troeltsch remarked that the war had caused a two-fold re-examination among the Germans regarding both their recent past and what they took to be their own essential but historically determined character. Once more, he harked back to the shock that many of them had experienced when they were first confronted by the ferocious accusations leveled against Germany by the Entente 147 

Ibid., 624. See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity. Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 66. Sollors claims that “more than any social or political theory, the rhetoric of Zangwill’s play shaped American discourse on immigration and ethnicity, including most notably the language of self-declared opponents of the melting-pot concept.” 149 ­Troeltsch, “Die Ideen von 1914,” 607. 148 

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countries and by their seemingly systematic denigration of German values and habits. “We were prepared for the imperialist contest,” ­Troeltsch conceded, “but not for its entwinement with such a culture war.”150 As we have seen, one effect of this unexpected and thus even more deeply upsetting “culture war” had been to send the Germans to school with themselves – as ­Troeltsch put it, “we deciphered and puzzled over our own being”151 – and in the process they had discovered some things about themselves that they had not known, or perhaps had tried to suppress, before. And, for ­Troeltsch, the first significant revelation to the Germans was nothing less than the discovery, or rather the rediscovery, of the realm of ideas, of the mind, that is to say, of spirit – Geist – itself. Here ­Troeltsch again revealed himself to be, as he always had been and would remain, an idealist in both the popular as well as the more narrowly philosophical sense of the word. “The first and most powerful experience,” he asserted, “is nothing other than just this discovery of the spirit itself that resides in experiencing, the return of the nation to a belief in the idea and the spirit.”152 And, perhaps surprisingly, it had been one idea in particular that ­Troeltsch thought had stood at the center of that initial experience of rediscovering the spiritual or intellectual realm: namely, the idea of freedom: Freedom, as the belief, undaunted by death, in the self-determination of the mind through thought and conviction instead of being pushed around by coincidence, environment, and inheritance, took the lead within the sacred ranks, whether it led to the trenches or to the bread rationing station.153

The consciousness of the necessity, but even more of the ability, to take their fate in their own hands – with the men defending their nation at the front and the women caring for their families at home – had, ­Troeltsch argued, in and of itself led the German people to a higher awareness of the abstract principle that enabled them to do so in the first place. The practical act of exercising freedom, that is, had occasioned an awareness of the abstract idea of freedom itself, which echoed ­Troeltsch’s insistence that the “ideas of 1914” had emerged out of the experience of the war and not the other way around. Becoming aware of their conscious decision to act on their own behalf in their common defense had thereby awakened the Germans as a whole to the great power and scope of freedom as a lived reality: 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 

Ibid., 610. Ibid. Bread ration cards had first been issued in Germany on January 25, 1915, resulting in long lines at bakeries, followed by the introduction of milk ration cards in November with similar results. 153 

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The spirit of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, which with its transformation of the occidental Christian religion into the idealism of freedom had sought and found the way out of our religious and philosophical confusions and is today again unfurling its flag, is leading the nation to a victory over the mere passive submission to the laws of nature, over the vulgarity of mindless hedonism and the fetishistic idolatry of money, over hesitant skepticism and facetious wittiness.154

There was no doubt more wishful thinking than sound sociological analysis contained in this last diagnosis – as soon as they had the chance, “hedonism” and avariciousness would pick up right where they had left off, with skepticism and wit not lagging far behind – but it expressed a larger and implicitly political truth. The experience of the war and the realization on the part of the German people that it was up to themselves, both individually and collectively, to respond to its demands, had further served to arouse in them, ­Troeltsch thought, an awareness of other possibilities of self-determination, giving rise to the even greater liberating potential of freedom in the fullest sense itself. That, then, was according to ­Troeltsch the first significant “idea” yielded by a particular experience supplied by the events of 1914. But it was only the first one. “In addition there came, still combined with this first experience, the second one,” he continued: to wit, the much heralded experience of unanimity at the outbreak of the war. But on this familiar topic, too, ­Troeltsch had an original take. “The immense importance of August,” he explained, was “that under the pressure of danger it compressed the entire people into an inner unity as it had never existed before.”155 That much everyone more or less agreed on. But ­Troeltsch typically drew his own conclusions from the legendary “August experience.” He began by noting, as Wilhelm Kahl, Wilhelm Solf, and others had also done, that the initial, emotionally-fed sense of unanimity that had spontaneously sprung up during those first weeks in August 1914, precisely because it was something that consisted almost entirely in an inchoate “feeling” or in a fleeting “mood,” “could not last, and today, given the reducing pressure, has already slackened again.”156 And in any event, ­Troeltsch continued, such an evanescent “feeling” of unity itself, was not, and could not be, the only lasting lesson of August. “It was more than that; here too there lay an idea in the experience. It is the idea of the dependence of all national effort and greatness on the capacities, dutifulness, training, and political insight of the masses.”157 The eventually conscious realization that the work of the whole determined the destiny of its individual parts, and even more that the many in their cooperative efforts provided 154 

Ibid., 611–12.

156 

Ibid., 614.

155 Ibid. 157 Ibid.

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the essential means for the whole to be able to survive: that was the second, and now explicitly political, “idea” to have become manifest through a specific experience in the war. ­Troeltsch underlined that he thought of this new appreciation by the people of the mutual interdependence of the people not in a figurative, or a subjective, or even in an “idealistic,” sense. Rather, he considered it very much as an act of practical self-recognition that as such entailed practical political consequences. “It is not romantic admiration of the people,” he insisted, “or benevolent humanitarianism being expressed therein, but rather respect for objective achievement.”158 And what he intended by that he immediately made clear in words that recalled his speech before the Protestant Social Congress in 1904, in which he had outlined something like his own political credo, but now updated and outfitted with categories borrowed from the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’s groundbreaking work of 1887, Community and Society, which had recently been reissued in a substantially revised and expanded second edition in 1912. ­Troeltsch explained: Aristocratic and democratic elements are combining anew. Everyone has a right to the whole, for which they are working and dying, and yet every share is based on the degree of objective achievement. The necessity of equal respect of all members of the people for one another and the necessity for strong leadership are simultaneously evident, and for that very reason the rhetoric of authority disappears simultaneously with the rhetoric of equality. It is the healthy elements of the corporative and organic idea of community – Gemeinschaft – that thereby take the place of an artificial and theoretical construction of society – Gesellschaft –, and which will from then on continue to live at least as an attitude. But such an attitude will also have to have an effect on political life and the practical behavior of the classes and estates toward each other, which is an old defect of German life inherited from scattered regionalism, even if we cannot really say today how that is supposed to occur. The decrease of what was abstract, artificial and divided in the organic unity of life in the individual as well as in the entirety of the people will be the effect August will have for a long time in the future.159

Despite his stated desire that the scenario he was describing be understood in concrete political terms, ­Troeltsch’s own language here – apart from it displaying his habitual tendency to want to combine and reconcile, or to synthesize, opposing principles within a single, unifying conception – becomes noticeably diffuse. Certainly, he had not concealed his conviction that, whatever the nature of the future German state would ultimately be, it would not and must not resemble what had come before. And he had no less openly declared his belief in the principle of the full participation in the affairs of the state by all members of society who equally contributed to it. But he still declined, or merely hesitated, to say what he thought the actual form that state would eventually take. Most likely he 158 Ibid.

159  Ibid., 614–15. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie, 2nd. rev. and exp. ed. (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1912).

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was still unsure himself. That it should somehow integrate both “aristocratic” and “democratic” principles, something that by then he had believed for over a decade, obviously stood as a core expectation, and he probably envisioned at this point some sort of social democracy blended with the traditional constitutional monarchy emerging at the end. However, those were not the main “ideas” ­Troeltsch was interested in at this point. And in general his attention remained trained not so much on matters related to the “reorientation” of domestic politics – even the Social Democratic leadership still concurred that the time for such considerations would come only after the war had concluded – as on those ideas which he saw as having been directly spawned by the war itself and were being realized, he thought, in and through Germany’s confrontation with its external enemies. Turning then back to the main themes of his talk, ­Troeltsch picked up the thread again by saying that the third and “much more sober and gradual” experience to be occasioned by the war was an essentially economic one. As the full effect of the British “war of blockade and starvation” began to take hold, he said, “Germany became a closed commercial state.”160 To overcome the obstacles of the embargo and to be able to provide for the urgent material needs of the people both fighting at the front and working at home, the entire economy had been “organized,” he said, now using a vocabulary that brought him closer to Plenge, resulting in “an almost state socialistic whole of self-production, self-sufficiency, and the rational distribution of goods.”161 Interestingly, ­Troeltsch suggested that the pressure of this enforced economic “organization” had itself brought about positive and unifying political outcomes: “the social struggles ceased, numerous demands for social reform that had been previously opposed became a matter of course.”162 This, too, according to ­Troeltsch, provided a valuable learning experience, one in which people could see in their everyday working lives how intangible principles from the “realm of theory and abstraction had descended into that of the concrete and practical, the economic and social.”163 This was not some clever flight of fancy, it was an expression and consolidation of our historical spirit, which in the development of the German economy and workers movement had learned the art of the technical division of labor and had been inwardly permeated by it.164

­ roeltsch said he was also confident that the transformations brought about in T and by the wartime economy would not wane after the war but, like the realiza160 ­Troeltsch, 161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. 163 

Ibid., 616.

164 Ibid.

“Die Ideen von 1914,” 615.

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tion of the idea of freedom, would prove to be durable. “We will retain a good part of the social reforms, of the comprehensive organizations, of the rational common economy,” he predicted, even if, he quickly added, the specific ideology and goals driving the economy may, and almost certainly would, eventually change.165 Yet it was the final, “fourth great experience,”166 that ­Troeltsch saw as having engendered the most momentous and potentially the most abiding “idea of 1914” of all. Returning once again to the issue of the ruinous “culture war” against Germany, he recalled how the “voices and judgments of foreigners gradually infiltrated” the country, and he revisited the painful impact those foreign opinions had initially had.167 “At first we perceived the moral and cultural war slogans as outrageous lies, which they also were.”168 When German protests and counter-arguments against the “culture war” turned out to be futile, another realization began to sink in: “we were intellectually isolated, and to a degree that even those who knew other countries well had not expected.”169 Out of this deeply alienating experience, there emerged the dawning awareness that at the root of this isolation lay, in fact, real differences setting the various combating nations and their individual cultures apart. The culture war and its effects did not just demonstrate the “power of lies;” it also brought home the awareness that “the lies were gladly believed” by Germany’s enemies. And for those “lies” to be so convincing, ­Troeltsch coolly reasoned, there had to be some truth to them, some genuinely different social and psychological criteria responsible for making those “lies” seem plausible to their audiences.170 “That revealed to us a contrariety that, although vastly exaggerated, nevertheless rested on truth and that today not everyone among us has completely understood in its importance.”171 And here ­Troeltsch entered into an argumentative arena that would itself be subject to much misunderstanding and lead to unintended consequences. All along, and most recently only two months earlier in his address for the Kaiser’s birthday on January 27, ­Troeltsch had insisted that the essence of all culture and history not only consisted in the individuality, even heterogeneity – in short, in the radical relativity – of all values, but also that such variability itself was a kind 165 Ibid. 166 

Ibid., 617.

167 Ibid. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid.

170  Hugo Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 23, makes a similar point: “people could believe these things only because they wanted to believe something of the sort from the outset.” Preuß concluded that an inadequate German political leadership and a failure to appreciate and manage the power of public opinion, at home and abroad, had contributed to this situation. 171 ­Troeltsch, “Die Ideen von 1914,” 617.

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of universal constant, that such diversity constituted the common and indeed inevitable feature of all organized human activity. And that was the “idea” which ­Troeltsch said the experience of the culture war had forced on the Germans: that they really were at a basic level different from other people. The unspoken but necessary corollary to that idea was, however: other people are all different, too. But the true difficulty, in each case, was identifying in what exactly those differences consisted. For it was not just that delineating what made, say, the Germans German presented an inherently formidable task; the relative value of the qualities attributed to them would also vary from one observer to the next. Making matters worse, that differing perception, and how it was assessed, would diverge even more across cultures. ­Troeltsch illustrated this unavoidable slippage and its often pernicious effects by describing how, once the war had broken out, an initially more or less neutral characterization of German culture quickly metamorphosed, not to say metastasized, into the rationale put forward by its enemies for the total elimination of Germany itself. Seen from the perspective of the Entente powers, ­Troeltsch said, the problem had become, or had been reduced to, basically this: Above all, it was the contrast between West European democratic civilization and the authoritarian, reactionary Germany with its military monarchy and its bureaucracy, its staff sergeant tone and its self-assertiveness, its separation of castes and its restrained style of life. People called it militarism, even though the Western powers were and are much more ruthless powers of conquest than we have ever been.172

Leaving aside the editorializing barb in the last line, the picture he paints of the Entente view of Germany seems accurate enough, even if the view he described is slanted in itself. However, ­Troeltsch went on, it was but a small step from this skewed portrait of Germany to a full-blown denunciation of it, leading to the familiar Entente portrayal of Germany that had arisen in the “culture war,” wherein the entire conflict was essentially portrayed as a struggle of “Western European democracy against German unfreedom.”173 Citing the words of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, ­Troeltsch claimed that the Entente had justified the war against the Germans on ideological grounds that were themselves based on a distorted and one-sided interpretation of the Germans’ ostensible national, cultural, and political character (whether the Western European nations were truly or fully “democracies” themselves was another question that would be addressed later). Lloyd George had said, according to ­Troeltsch, by way of vindicating the war, that “‘it is a matter of the future of democracy in the world’” in opposing Germany. “‘It is,” the Prime Minister had stated, “a matter of the pro172 Ibid. 173 Ibid.

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gress of culture and humanity.’”174 Insidiously, once the interrelated mixture of judgments expressed in that statement had been embraced and internalized by the peoples of the Entente as the principles for which they thought or said they were positively fighting against Germany, the logical conclusion was inescapable. ­Troeltsch clearly showed how this line of thinking unfolded – and where it ended: The whole idea of turning Germany into a major power in the middle of the continent had been, they said, a source of eternal unrest and possible only through a surge of militarism. Thus, in the interest of morality and peace, it was incumbent on them to eliminate this danger to the world and to put an end to this threat to the progress of democracy and civilization, which is associated with the existence of this necessarily authoritarian and militaristic state formation, forever.175

The Entente powers, in ­Troeltsch’s account, were pursuing nothing less than the wholesale eradication of the German conception of the state and of the principles on which it rested. But the lethal irony involved was that their actions were fu­ eled by fundamental misconceptions of that state and of those principles themselves, and by one decisive misapprehension in particular. Notwithstanding the allegations by the Entente, ­Troeltsch maintained that Germans were not inherently “unfree;” they were not, individually or as a people, submissive drones who unquestioningly obeyed the commands of their overlords or were held hostage against their will in a repressive regime. On the contrary, they were free, certainly as free as any people can be in a modern, complex, highly regulated, and specialized society – and, most important, they were free in their own way, in accordance with their own history, their own traditions and beliefs. Indeed, he insisted, the Germans were just as free as the English or the French were, but they all experienced and understood their freedom differently and did so for different reasons. For the Germans, then, in ­Troeltsch’s view, the “idea” that had grown out of the first great experience of the war was, precisely, that they were in fact free, as a people, to determine their own fate. The further “idea” brought about by another major experience during the conflict, namely the confrontation with the culture war, had subsequently brougt them the additional insight that they were not only free, but that they were also free in their own unique manner: In this self-reflection, the idea of a freedom occurred to us that is indeed different from that of the Western peoples […] It is the freedom of a self-reliant and conscious affirmation of the super-individual common spirit connected with the vital participation in it, the freedom of a voluntary obligation to the whole and a personal, vital creativity of the individual within the whole, the freedom of public spirit and of discipline, both together resting on self-sacrifice and devotion to ideas and thus closely connected with our entire ethical and religious being, which 174 Ibid. 175 

Ibid., 606.

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is so deeply unlike the English and French one. […] That this is a different idea from that of the West Europeans is something we have long known. But how very different it is, is something we have known only since this war began. It is precisely here that the ideas of 1914 stand in such sharp and clear, but also promising and creative, opposition to those of 1789, not as their abrogation and annihilation, but rather as a completely different form of the aspirations they also contain for freedom and dignity, for substance and existential depth of the person.176

This is a finely calibrated statement, drawing, as we have seen, on a diverse array of prior arguments made by various actors, including by ­Troeltsch himself, and proposed against an intricate, and always shifting, background of political calculations, and not least for those reasons his words here can easily be, and often have been, misconstrued. Above all, its reactive – as opposed to reactionary – origins must always be kept in mind. ­Troeltsch conceived of his work, among other things but also centrally, as the intellectual equivalent of what he and his fellow countrymen almost universally understood as an essentially defensive war. Just as the soldiers at the front understood themselves to be defending the physical viability of their homeland, ­Troeltsch likewise saw himself as defending, as it were, its metaphysical integrity. And the metaphysical value most imperiled by the withering Entente assault on German culture was the idea, and for ­Troeltsch the incontrovertible political and ethical reality, of a specifically German form of freedom. But even here, ­Troeltsch did not seek to promote or elevate the German idea of freedom (or rather, to be precise, his particular notion of it) by attacking those upheld by his country’s adversaries, as Kjellén and, in part, Plenge had done – not to mention Werner Sombart and his crude pamphlet, Merchants and Heroes. Instead, ­Troeltsch expressly said that the “ideas of 1914,” as he had just elaborated them, did stand in contrast to the ideas of 1789 – that shorthand formula symbolizing the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment – not, however, as their absolute negation, but rather as a positive, though necessarily alternative, development of the same spirit. For ­Troeltsch, the “ideas of 1914” were explicitly rooted in the same seedbed as the “ideas of 1789,” but to him they were independent mutations of the same strain, not different in their essential components but different in their unique combination and expression. The striving to attain freedom and human dignity: those were also the two principal values that ­Troeltsch had said that Germany was fighting for and he had done so from the very beginning, having already identified them explicitly in his speech in the civic auditorium in Heidelberg.177 In the meantime, he had come to view many things in a far more nuanced light, and he had learned a great deal that he had not known, or even suspected, before. But at the core of his thinking remained the stable, unwavering 176  177 

Ibid., 618. See ­Troeltsch, Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung, 3.

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conviction, repeated in various ways in various forms in his many speeches and essays, that human freedom, in all of its diversity, across all cultures and times, should be allowed to flourish – freely. This last consideration led ­Troeltsch to the final major theme of his lecture. Early on in his address, he had complained in passing that “it is not easy for us to formulate new ideas, and our political leadership grants us little assistance in doing so.”178 That was not in itself a serious criticism – although it was clearly a criticism and one courageously aimed at his own government – but it did highlight a serious deficiency. It was all well and good to conceive of the war as a defensive struggle against a hostile world (although the annexationists very much wanted it to assume a far more aggressively offensive character). Yet it still remained frustratingly opaque to everyone what Germany was positively fighting for. ­Troeltsch’s belief that the war was, or should be, about preserving a distinctive way of life based on the guaranteed freedom to pursue it provided, certainly, an appealing ideational content. But even that “idea” still lacked any more definite contours or a concrete plan for action. Most people – though not, to be sure, everyone – agreed that freedom was desirable. Yet the question still asserted itself: freedom to do what, precisely? ­Troeltsch recognized that there had to be “a political idea that can give our actions clarity, a goal, momentum, and confidence.”179 And, as it happened, ­Troeltsch felt that such a “political idea,” like the other “ideas of 1914” that he had already discussed, had risen up almost naturally out of the conflagration. As he put it: “Only the eruption of the tensions leading into the world war set us free to conceive of a political idea for the future.”180 That practical political idea, which he now thought provided a positive content and a worthy goal for the war, was, he said, the “formation of a Central European block with which we can hope to affiliate all those who are threatened and appropriated and which would stand under the essential influence of German political, military, scientific, technical and ethical-spiritual culture.”181 In the early spring of 1916, Ernst ­Troeltsch thought that the one concrete “war aim,” the unifying “idea” Germany could and should fight to realize, was the establishment of a formally integrated Mit­ teleuropa.

178 ­Troeltsch,

“Die Ideen von 1914,” 609. Ibid., 621. 180 Ibid. 181  Ibid., 620–21. 179 

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The Idea of Mitteleuropa With that, ­Troeltsch had touched on one of the thorniest issues to arise during the war.182 In truth, however, the idea of such a cooperative “block” of states in the center of Europe was not as new as he appeared to have thought or wanted to suggest. The notion of an economically and even politically integrated Mittel­ europa had already been considered a number of times and in various contexts throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, including briefly by Bismarck, but it had repeatedly been abandoned as either politically undesirable or practically unworkable.183 Most recently and consequentially, the idea had been resuscitated two years before the war had broken out. In a private conversation on February 13, 1912 between Wilhelm II and Walther Rathenau, then the effective head of AEG, or Germany’s General Electric, the Kaiser, concerned about the growing economic power of America and perhaps merely thinking out loud, had proposed forming a “United States of Europe against America,” adding, somewhat mysteriously, that he thought “the English were not unsympathetic” to such an idea.184 It was obviously not a fully formed program, but the ambitious Rathenau saw an opportunity.185 Several months later, in July 1912, he spoke with Bethmann Holl­weg about the suggestion while visiting the Imperial Chancellor at his estate in Hohenfinow. There, after dinner, Rathenau unfolded his thoughts to the Chancellor 182  The debate about Mitteleuropa and its role in shaping the “September Program” stand at the center of the arguments by Fritz Fischer in Griff nach der Weltmacht. 183  See Helmut Rumpf, “Mitteleuropa. Zur Geschichte und Deutung eines politischen Begriffs,” Historische Zeitschrift 165 (1942), 510–27. See also Jörg Brechtfeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). The older study by Henry Cord Meyer, a student of Hajo Holborn, is also still informative: Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1955). 184  Walther Rathenau, Tagebuch 1907–1922, ed. Harmut Pogge-von Strandmann (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1967), 157. The idea of forming such a confederation to counter the United States specifically was also not new; cf. Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbände in der Spätphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands. Sammlungspolitik 1897–1918 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970), 73; see also Willibald Gutsche, “Mitteleuropaplanungen in der Außenpolitik des deutschen Imperialismus vor 1918,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 20/5 (1972), 533–49, esp.  537. 185  See Wolfgang Michalka, “‘Mitteleuropa geeinigt unter deutscher Führung.’ Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft als Friedens- und Kriegsziel,” in Walther Rathenau 1867–1922, ed. Hans Wilderotter (Berlin: Argon, 1993), 179–88. Still valuable is the account by Egmont Zechlin, “Deutschland zwischen Kabinetts- und Wirtschaftskrieg,” 397–405. See also Chapters One and Three, “Le Mitteleuropa ou la sécurité par le contrôle économique de l’Europe” and “Mit­ teleuropa ou économie mondiale: de l’automne 1915 à l’été 1916,” in Soutou, L’or et le sang, 17–50 and 86–107.

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in greater detail, later noting in his diary that he thought “Bethmann generally agreed” with him on the matter.186 In somewhat telegraphic form, Rathenau summarized the points he had presented to Bethmann Hollweg as follows: 1. Economy. Customs union with Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Holland, etc., simultaneously with closer association. 2. Foreign policy. Its key: the conflict Germany-France, which enriches all nations. Key: England. Today disarmament impossible. Increase tensions of the situation further – although dangerous – and in addition spoil England’s position in the Mediterranean. Then alliance. Goal: Central Africa, Asia Minor. 3. Domestic affairs. Improvement of the parliaments. Prussian electoral law. Electoral districts. Empire. Proportionality. All paths to parliamentarianism.187

Given the abbreviated nature of Rathenau’s notes, it is not entirely unambiguous what each item entailed, but the overall gist seems apparent enough. The rationale and point of departure for the European “customs union” he envisioned was to bolster and expand Germany’s economic power. But Rathenau obviously further intended it to provide the material basis for vigorously advancing concrete political aims as well, particularly with respect to Britain. There, too, however, although Rathenau, unlike the Kaiser, recognized the risks involved in challenging British interests in such overt brinkmanship, the focus was not on military confrontation per se, much less on (what would have in any case been a purely chimerical) attempt to dislodge British supremacy of the seas tout court. Rather, Rathenau’s (perhaps equally fanciful) goal was to force Britain into a strategic economic alliance with a newly formed United States of Europe. Rathenau seems to have assumed that a more favorable reconfiguration of colonial settlements would then somehow flow from such a realignment. That, he thought, would then be followed, not incidentally but even more enigmatically, by a domestic political reorganization – or “reorientation” – in Germany itself, involving some sort of change to the Prussian three-class franchise, which Bethmann himself, as we know, had thought indefensible since 1906,188 and finally accompanied by other means of strengthening democratic structures in the Empire more broadly. Whatever its other flaws may have been – and a perilously naive belief that Britain would cede its economic advantages without a fight was not the least of them – the draft plan Rathenau formulated did not imply that armed conflict was necessary, much less desirable, in order to achieve the aims he had sketched out. As late as July 27, 1914, at the height of the “July Crisis,” Rathenau confidently wrote to his father that “neither England nor France nor Germany want a war. […] All in all, I do not believe that we need to prepare ourselves for a German 186 Rathenau,

Tagebuch, 169. Ibid. The editor helpfully indicates in several footnotes to this passage how one might, or might not, understand the individual proposals it contains. 188 Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 71. 187 

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war.”189 Yet when the war did come, Rathenau, who reportedly burst into tears in distress at its outbreak,190 nevertheless felt that it could providentially create conditions that might help promote his plans for a Central European customs union as a bulwark against the Entente powers coalesced against Germany, and he sent a formal memorandum to that effect to the Imperial Chancellor immediately after the conflict began. “I offered my services to the Chancellor,” Rathenau confided to his diary following his submission.191 On receiving Rathenau’s unsolicited advice, Bethmann Hollweg had his Vice Chancellor and the Minister of the Interior, Clemens von Delbrück, prepare an assessment of the plan.192 Delbrück, who unlike Rathenau was a professional politician, was signally underwhelmed by it, coolly noting in his internal response to the Chancellor that “Dr. Rathenau,” as he pointedly referred to the enterprising industrialist, “probably would not have expressed this idea at all if he had been in the position to think it through in its economic, technical, and constitutional aspects.”193 Since the entire scheme depended on a peace that had yet to be won, the matter was quietly tabled. Undeterred by the lack of any official response, Rathenau submitted another memorandum on August 28 outlining a variety of other proposals. But he also returned to his favorite project, adding that he hoped the Chancellor would “not construe it as immodesty if I again allude to the Central European customs union as the greatest civilizational achievement that the war can bestow on our history.”194 Just over a week later, on September 7, Rathenau wrote to Bethmann yet again, saying: “the final goal would be the situation that alone can bring a future equilibrium of Europe: Central Europe united under German leadership, politically and economically consolidated against England and America on the one hand, against Russia on the other.”195 Despite the discouraging reception given to Rathenau’s repeated initiative, the idea of bringing the Central European states into some sort of formal alliance had obvious appeal and even potential merit, especially given the initially advantageous military situation, and the plan for a unified Mitteleuropa was seriously discussed internally within the German government throughout August and early 189  Christian Schölzel, Walther Rathenau. Eine Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schö­ ningh, 2006), 182. 190  Ibid., 158. 191 Rathenau, Tagebuch, 185. 192  See Clemens von Delbrück, Die wirtschaftliche Mobilmachung in Deutschland, 124–25. 193  Clemens von Delbrück to Bethmann Hollweg, September 3, 1914; cited in Richard W. Kapp, “Bethmann-Hollweg, Austria-Hungary and Mitteleuropa, 1914–1915,” Austrian History Yearbook 19/20, 1 (1983–84), 217. 194 Rathenau, Tagebuch, 185. 195  Rathenau to Bethmann Hollweg, 7 September, 1914; cited in Schölzel, 186.

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September 1914. Already by August 19, Kurt Riezler registered in his diary a “long conversation about Poland and the possibility of a looser affiliation of other states with the Empire – Central European system of differential tariffs.”196 Two weeks later, on September 1, and more emphatically, Riezler wrote that “a great Central European economic system has to crystallize around us, likewise a loose association of alliances for protection and defense. That is the main thing.”197 Others in and around the government during that time weighed in with similar and sometimes even more far-reaching suggestions as well, including by Matthias Erzberger, the Center Party member of the Reichstag and newly installed head of the Central Office for Foreign Service within the Ministry of Foreign affairs. On September 2, Erzberger submitted an extensive list of related recommendations, including the absorption of Belgium and parts of France, the creation of a German Mittelafrika, and the liberation of non-Russian peoples from the Tsarist regime. He also favored a customs union with the freed peoples of the East as a way to insure German control over them.198

August Thyssen, the steel and coal magnate, had offered his own thoughts about the matter to Bethmann Hollweg a few days earlier. Thyssen, too, felt that Germany now had the unique chance to establish its own “world power posture” – Weltmachtstellung – but that it would be difficult to achieve and would require extreme measures to maintain. “In my view,” Thyssen wrote, this enormous task can be solved with success only by forming a great Central European customs union that would contain Germany with its new territories, as well as Holland, France, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary and the Balkan states. This goal will, it is true, not be achievable with the application of force, but the political situation that will result in the case of a victorious war for Germany will be the most favorable one imaginable, which, once it has been appreciated, will not recur perhaps for centuries.199

Thyssen’s communication to the Chancellor was dated August 29, 1914, one day after the Executive Committee of the Pan-German League, in consultation with leading representatives of German heavy industry and trade, had met to discuss war aims, resulting in Heinrich Claß’s Position Paper that eventually propelled the confrontational annexationist movement into existence. That same August 29, in what was probably no coincidence, Riezler had another conversation with Bethmann about how “to counteract the hydra of the Pan-German rage for an196 Riezler,

Tagebuch, 198; cf. also the long footnote to this comment by the editor, 198–99. Ibid., 204. 198  Kapp, ““Bethmann-Hollweg, Austria-Hungary and Mitteleuropa,” 220. See also Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 3, 36–37. Fritz Fischer places great emphasis on Erzberger’s memorandum in Griff nach der Weltmacht. 199  Cited from Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, 743–44. 197 

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nexation.”200 “The purpose of the war,” the Chancellor said to Riezler in that exchange, is to secure for the foreseeable future our east and west borders by weakening our opponents. This weakening does not necessarily have to occur through annexation. Annexations can become the source of our own weakness. The weakening of our opponents can be economic and financial – through trade agreements, etc.201

Although the boundaries of the debate would shift over the coming months and years, Bethmann Hollweg himself appeared to have already decided by the end of August 1914 that some sort of trade alliance as opposed to wholesale land confiscations would best promote the Empire’s long-range interests. But, as with everything else, what mattered were the details, and there was always the danger that things could quickly get out of hand or otherwise become unmanageable. Within the first four weeks of the war, then, the question of forming a trade block in Central Europe had became entangled with what would turn into some of the most highly charged and divisive political issues of the next four years. Yet what such an arrangement would actually have looked like, what it would do, and precisely how it would function were never in any way made clear and differed from one person’s program to the next. What is certain is that all of the proposals being discussed and circulated in the capital at the end of August and in the first days of September were reflections of the heightening confidence, even arrogance, over the apparently unstoppable German advance through Belgium toward Paris on the way to imminent German victory. The most egregious expression of that misplaced optimism was the infamous September Program prepared by Bethmann Hollweg and his advisers and conveyed to Clemens von Delbrück for implementation. The draft document contained six points outlining German objectives on the continent and in Central Africa.202 The fourth point of the program dealt directly with the matter of Mitteleuropa, though it, too, left important questions frustratingly vague: The foundation of a Central European economic association will be achieved through mutual customs agreements, incorporating France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Poland and perhaps Italy, Sweden and Norway. This association, probably without a common constitutional head, under the formal equal status of its members, but in fact under German leadership, must stabilize the economic predominance of Germany over Central Europe.203

200 

Riezler to Hammann, 29 August, 1914; cited in Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, 762. 763. See also Kapp, “Bethmann-Hollweg, Austria-Hungary and Mitteleuropa,”

201  Ibid.,

221.

202 

The document is reproduced in full in Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, 111–12. Ibid., 112. Kapp, “Bethmann-Hollweg, Austria-Hungary and Mitteleuropa,” 222, leaves out the important phrase “under the formal equal status of its members.” Kapp also translates 203 

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In a quirk of historical irony, the September Program was dated the 9th. That same day, General Helmuth von Moltke realized that Germany would lose the battle at the Marne and, because of the implications of that defeat, most likely lose the war. At a stroke, the already precipitate plan to establish a customs union under “German leadership” suddenly seemed embarrassingly untimely, even grotesque in its hubristic presumption. Once again, however, the official German policy, backed by Bethmann himself, of refusing to disclose publicly the reality of the military situation, and not even to close members of his own staff, would have significant and lasting political consequences. For, by keeping the people uninformed about the actual state of the military campaign, it helped to keep hopes alive for a German continental bastion in the form of a Central European union far longer than those aspirations had any realistic chance of being fulfilled, raising expectations where none were warranted or were at best premature. This illusory desire even stimulated and prolonged developments that would work counter to the Chancellor’s own intentions. For the conservative annexationists, the prospect of a unified Mitteleuropa gave them convenient cover for their more assertive expansionist designs, allowing them to portray their objectives as being compatible with plans apparently being considered at the highest levels of the government and to continue to press their own claims with an air of impunity. For the moderates, the vision of a customs union, precisely because it did not rely on the forcible surrender of either the land or the sovereignty of its prospective members, provided an acceptable, even attractive, alternative to the predatory schemes of the Pan-Germans and their bedfellows. But in both cases, the one indispensable cornerstone of either scenario was a complete German military victory, which by the fall of 1914 the few people who knew the truth realized had already become all but impossible. Even more perversely, once the practical feasibility of a formal Central European customs union began to be assessed dispassionately, it soon emerged that, even apart from the military impasse that stood in the way of the sine qua non of German conquest on the battlefield, there were such serious internal obstacles to the entire concept that it appeared more and more untenable. As Vice Chancellor Delbrück, under instructions from Bethmann Hollweg, continued to explore the idea, he also learned that most German ministers viewed it with skepticism bordering on open hostility, objecting to it primarily on structural and strategic economic grounds. The main reason for their opposition was connected to its projected negative impact on trade with the rest of the world. As Delbrück wrote to the Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow in October, even a “loose commercial “Spitze,” or “head”, as “supreme authority,” which is not incorrect but perhaps a bit too pointed, as it were.

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association with Austria-Hungary would endanger Germany’s system of most-­ favored-nation treaties with other lands.”204 Additionally, once someone actually bothered to ask the Austrians and Hungarians themselves if they were interested in such an arrangement, it turned out that they had no fewer reservations. Austrian industrialists saw nothing but competitive disadvantages for themselves and unequivocally rejected the idea. German manufacturers and farmers, too, after they had begun looking more closely at what would be their most important collaborator and ally in the union, developed significant misgivings. German agrarians expressed qualms over the possible loss of their protections, and German nationalists voiced their outrage at the idea of having to treat so many non-Germans, and particularly Slavs, as collaborative partners rather than as subjugated inferiors. Almost as bad, among most Germans, Austria itself was widely regarded as decrepit, hopelessly hidebound, and probably headed for complete collapse. The Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, contemptuously referred to Austria as a “cadaver” and he considered its army ineffectual and weak, which, moreover, should it somehow one day strengthen again, he saw as a potential rival on the continent and especially within Central Europe itself.205 In view of such universal opposition, Delbrück had no choice but to convey the bad news to the Chancellor on October 20, 1914, that everyone had told him Austria-Hungary is economically and politically so little consolidated, so unreliable and unclear in its developmental possibilities, that it would mean endangering our economic and political future if we were to affiliate ourselves in any way more closely with this rotten state heading toward dissolution.206

Just over a week later, on October 30, a ministerial meeting took place in which the topic was formally deliberated. In it, as Walther Rathenau subsequently learned and wrote in his diary, “the customs union was rejected.”207 Rejected, but not forgotten. All through 1915, there were repeated attempts on the part of various pressure groups and interested individuals to revive the idea of some sort of Central European alliance. All of those promoting it were emboldened in their efforts by the tacit encouragement of the Chancellor himself, who for his part preferred to keep his options open by reserving judgment. Delbrück, undeterred by the Chancellor’s vacillation and refusal to let the aborted idea be buried, kept repeating what Bethmann evidently did not want to accept. 204 

Kapp, “Bethmann-Hollweg, Austria-Hungary and Mitteleuropa,” 223. Falkenhayn, 251. 206  Draft of a letter by Delbück to Bethmann Hollweg, 20 October, 1914; cited in Zechlin, “Deutschland zwischen Kabinetts- und Wirtschaftskrieg,” 434–35. 207 Rathenau, Tagebuch, 188. 205  Afflerbach,

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In April, Delbrück once more informed him that a customs union would not work “primarily because of considerations of a general political nature.”208 The following month, the Vice Chancellor also confided to Jagow that, in the event of a less than favorable outcome of the war for Germany, its former enemies would never accede to a trade agreement that would put them at such a disadvantage in the continental market. Specifically, Delbrück foresaw at the very least a trade war in which Britain would respond to higher tariffs placed on its goods within the Central European trade union by retaliating against the German shipping trade, thus inhibiting the “revitalization of our overseas exports after the war.” What Germany needed, he argued, was not a single closed market but rather access to the world market. For that reason, and yet again, Delbrück said he considered the notion “not advisable.”209 Nevertheless, despite all of these setbacks and doubts, Bethmann Hollweg still did not bring the matter to a definitive conclusion by either openly endorsing the plan or decisively shutting it down. The most probable reason he remained so stubbornly unmoved by arguments about the negative economic fallout the Mit­ teleuropa plan would inevitably entail was that, at bottom, he saw it as an instrument for facilitating his own war aims, which were essentially political, not economic. “Bethmann wanted the customs union,” Georges-Henri Soutou has persuasively argued, “but for uniquely political reasons.”210 That is, the Imperial Chancellor essentially saw the conception of Mitteleuropa as providing something that Germany critically lacked: a positive purpose in fighting the war, a justifiable and achievable goal, in short, a unifying idea. As early as September 1914, his private secretary Kurt Riezler had lamented that “people today do not have a single idea that corresponds to the grandeur of the time. It will be the decline of Europe if Europe does not find at this opportunity a feasible form of permanence and commonality.”211 With the idea of a consolidated Mitteleuropa such a solution seemed to be at hand. As Hermann Oncken, a reliable and resourceful supporter of the Chancellor, put it in a speech he gave on May 10, 1915 commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of Bismarck’s birth, a future of economic organization and an economic division of labor in Central Europe will be a reward of the war that is worth the sweat of the noble. In this war aim – next to all the other aims that we must achieve for the sake of our security in the west and the east – we see a return

208 

Kapp, “Bethmann-Hollweg, Austria-Hungary and Mitteleuropa,” 224. Zechlin, “Deutschland zwischen Kabinettskrieg und Wirtschaftskrieg,” 447. 210 Soutou, L’or et le sang, 46. 211 Riezler, Tagebücher, 205. 209 

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for this superhuman struggle that is worthy of being placed next to the achievements of 1866 and 1870/71.212

In the shorter run, the idea of Mitteleuropa brought other advantages as well. Tactically, Bethmann viewed the notion as giving him a way of hewing a middle course between the opposite extremes of expansionist aggression and popular appeasement. Strategically, it allowed him to appear to offer something constructive everyone could work toward that had the ability to stir the imagination and to provide a concrete, comprehensible aim. In a revealing letter to the historian Erich Marcks in early 1916, Bethmann said this about his actions: “I have done everything to hold down the agitation of the Right” but “it refused to die, although … it called up opposition of the masses for whom the war was and is self-defense.” Thus, in order to satisfy the need on both sides for a tangible goal, “I have thrown into the ring the idea of Mitteleuropa which will determine our future.”213 What Bethmann Hollweg did not reveal to Professor Marcks was that no one with any real knowledge of the issues involved, including most significantly the Chancellor himself, thought that actually implementing the idea was inherently desirable or even possible. Playing both ends against the middle in this way could, and did, produce some unpleasantly surprising results. Over the summer of 1915, General Falkenhayn appeared to have abruptly changed his mind about his Austrian brethren, or at any rate about their potential usefulness to the German cause. At the end of August he sent a handwritten analysis of the status of the war to Bethmann Hollweg for review. Falkenhayn had become convinced that the only viable path remaining to Germany in what had become a grinding war of attrition was to hold out long enough so that their enemies would have no choice but to concede.214 In particular, Falkenhayn was persuaded that Britain intended to enfeeble Germany both economically and militarily through its strangling naval blockade and was prepared to wait until Germany became completely incapacitated and surrendered in exhaustion. To aid in warding off this outcome, Falkenhayn now proposed forming what he called “a Central European federation.” “I am thinking,” Falkenhayn explained to Bethmann, 212  Hermann Oncken, Bismarck und die Zukunft Mitteleuropas (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1915), 15. 213  Bethmann Hollweg to Erich Marcks, 16 March, 1916; cited in Konrad H. Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor. Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), 214–15. See also Kapp, “Bethmann-Hollweg, Austria-Hungary and Mittel­ europa,” 234. 214  Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, 321. I rely heavily on Afflerbach’s meticulous account of this episode in the following. See also Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, 247, and Paul Kluke, “Deutschland und seine Mitteleuropapolitik,” Bohemia 6 (1965), 379.

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of a coalition initially of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey in a longterm alliance for protection and defense, but would like to add immediately that the alliance must not be restricted to that. Rather, it would be imperative to set economic and cultural goals for it as well.215

Depending on need and opportunity, the “coalition” Falkenhayn envisioned foresaw the participation of the neutral countries of Sweden, Switzerland, and possibly even Greece as well. Falkenhayn was a gifted general, but he was not an experienced politician, and the Chancellor, when presented with this scenario, felt compelled to enlighten him about some of the practical complications involved. In early September 1915, Bethmann responded by urging General Falkenhayn to focus on his own sphere of expertise, saying “that our military situation cannot currently be improved by a policy of expanded alliances.”216 Neither, the Chancellor argued, would the military strength of the Central European countries be increased by such an alliance, nor would it alter the intentions of their enemies to exhaust them. Bethmann also poured cold water on the hopes Falkenhayn seemed to harbor that neutral states would even want to cooperate in such a confederation.217 Although stung by this rebuff, Falkenhayn did not retreat but instead pressed the attack, forcefully presenting his case again, only in more detail, three days later. Once more, Bethmann patiently explained that existing trade agreements made a closer economic union with other European countries at present “inadvisable,” adding that neutral countries would also fear that joining such an association would endanger their own economic independence.218 Only a change in the military situation interrupted this fruitless debate. On September 22, 1915, the French and British forces launched a major offensive to try to break through the Western Front in Artois and Champagne. By the end of the month-long operation, the German army had lost 150,000 men, with the Allies having suffered even greater losses, forfeiting 250,000 troops to the ultimately failed effort.219 Falkenhayn’s theory that the British would rely exclusively on the blockade to bring Germany to its knees had obviously been proven wrong. But that debacle only strengthened his determination to push for a Central European alliance as an even more badly needed defensive measure. Bethmann Hollweg recorded a conversation he had on October 15 with the general, who had 215 

Falkenhayn to Bethmann Hollweg, 28 August, 1915, cited in Afflerbach, Falkenhayn,

216 

Bethmann Hollweg to Falkenhayn, 5 September, 1915, cited in Afflerbach, Falkenhayn,

322. 323.

217 Ibid. 218 

Ibid., 325.

219 Ibid.

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insisted that “political necessity forces us together for the foreseeable future with Austria-Hungary” and that “England will soon follow this war with a second one against us. It will abstain from that only if it sees itself confronted by a Central European block. The two central powers must form the center of this block.”220 Perhaps because of the repulsed but murderous assault by the Entente, Falkenhayn’s conception of the “Central European federation” had also considerably hardened in the interim. For now he suggested that, although Germany and the Danube Monarchy could form an “indivisible union” at its continental core, it would not be an arrangement of equal partners. Instead, Falkenhayn explicitly stipulated that “Germany would have the leadership as the presiding power. To the extent that it is required to achieve this, Austria-Hungary must give up its sovereignty. Since it will not do this voluntarily, it must be forced to do so at the latest when peace is concluded.”221 Falkenhayn had no discernible ideological stake or even any particular interest in the annexation movement and he regarded his own plan for Central Europe as a purely tactical weapon in the larger struggle against the Entente, and foremost against Britain. But his demonstrated willingness to subjugate Austria, to strip it of its autonomy and to assert German dominance over the entire continent, was sufficiently chilling in itself. Bethmann Hollweg found that it only delivered further evidence of Falkenhayn’s political obtuseness. “The general,” he sarcastically noted after their conversation, did not seem to grasp the reasons either why it is impossible for Austria-Hungary, having emerged from the war as a victorious alliance partner, to be robbed of its sovereignty as a reward for its assistance, or the practical impossibility of achieving this goal through the application of force.222

Some figures within the German military leadership, such as Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, endorsed Falkenhayn’s plan, calling it, “very interesting and very farsighted and generous from his side.”223 Others, however, such as the Minister of War, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn, could only shake his head at the naiveté of it all and wondered how, and why, the obdurate military man had gotten mixed up in political matters he clearly did not understand. In early November, 1915, Wild wrote in a letter: 220  Bethmann Hollweg, memorandum from 15 October, 1915, in Paul R. Sweet, “Germany, Hungary and Mitteleuropa, August 1915-April 1916,” in Festschrift für Heinrich Benedikt, eds. Hugo Hantsch and Alexander Novotny (Vienna: 1957), 192; cited also in Afflerbach, Falken­ hayn, 329. 221  Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, 329. 222  Ibid., 331. 223  Ibid., 333.

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Today Falkenhayn came back again to his idea of a Central European federation. He won’t let go of the idea. This federation is supposed to encompass approximately all of Europe without the Entente, to represent a solid structure economically, politically, and militarily and – to have a head: the Kaiser as President! A kind of senate will stand by the side of the president. This is all not a joke! The Chancellor, to whom Falkenhayn has already laid out his ideas as well, recently said: “Where is Falkenhayn getting his ideas? There is someone else behind them. The notion has flair […] but it is not doable.”224

Naturally, it could be argued that Bethmann Hollweg himself was in no small measure responsible for the general’s dogged adherence to the idea. For by refusing, in public anyway, to quash definitively the belief in the benefit or indeed the possibility of a Central European alliance, and by simultaneously appearing to encourage those in his inner circle to continue to consider its viability even as he himself doubted it, he partially and, one is almost forced to conclude, cynically created the conditions in which such hopes could and did remain alive.225 In this convoluted political calculus, it would be difficult to say which was worse: that Bethmann Hollweg knowingly offered the people who yearned for some positive meaning for the sacrifices they were making what he privately felt was an illusory and unworkable goal, thereby making a mockery of their good faith and selfless efforts. Or, by allowing the notion to live on and gain ever more enthusiastic adherents, that he unwisely risked losing control of the narrative entirely, allowing the idea of Mitteleuropa to become dangerously entwined with the noxious ideas espoused by the most virulent proponents of maximalist war aims, fostering the belief that, as in Falkenhayn’s scenario, Germany would and should dominate not just its enemies, but its presumed friends as well. Either way, it was the very absence of any unmistakable public signals from the Chancellor with regard to a real or imagined plan for Central Europe that allowed such outgrowths of the conception to proliferate, and it was that same failure of communication which finally hastened its, and his own, undoing. For, once more, Bethmann Hollweg’s inability or unwillingness either to allow or personally engage in meaningful open discussion of central matters of state, even as he covertly pursued other designs he withheld from view, contributed to the formation of a dynamic that ultimately threatened his control over his own agenda and would come to destroy both his plans and eventually himself. 224 

Ibid., 334. Gutsche, “Mitteleuropaplanungen,” 544, in which he cites Bethmann Hollweg speaking before the Prussian Ministry of State on November 18, 1915, only a month after his latest rejection of Falkenhayn’s proposal, about the advisability of a closer association with Austria-Hungary that should “‘be founded on a solid and indestructible Central European economic nucleus,’ which other states could later join in order to create the necessary counterweight to England, Russia and the trans-Atlantic powers.” 225 See

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It was therefore a surprising but not entirely unwelcome development when Friedrich Naumann published his book Mitteleuropa in October 1915, which almost instantly became a phenomenal best-seller. Its success clearly caught his publisher off guard: after a modest first edition of only 5,000 copies – many wartime publications were issued in the tens of thousands – reeditions of Naumann’s book became necessary after only two weeks in order to meet the extraordinary demand. By March of the following year 100,000 copies were already in print.226 It went on to become by a substantial margin the most popular political work in Germany during the entire war, unleashing a tidal wave of commentary, counter-proposals, critical refutations, and friendly amendments that lasted until the very end, and it even spawned a number of organizations that worked to turn the idea into reality.227 Naumann himself participated in the ensuing debates about his book, and at one point he declared that he, too, saw the idea of Mitteleuropa, among other things, as supplying a positive purpose for the war: “The peoples have to know whether there is a purpose for which they are starving and dying for one another,” he explained in his journal, Die Hilfe. “If it is not placed before their eyes in concrete terms why we are taking so much mutual accountability on ourselves, then the war will remain a nebulous thing for the mass of people.”228 Unlike Rathenau, Naumann had apparently not given any serious thought to the whole idea before the war began, and he seems to have first used the word Mitteleuropa in print in November 1914.229 In the book itself, Naumann also revealed that the subject represented a recent departure in his own thinking about the continent, saying that his conception of “Mitteleuropa is the fruit of war.”230 Although new to Naumann himself, the notion quickly moved to the center of his reflections, and by January 1915 he had already become convinced, as he wrote 226  See Friedrich Naumann, Werke (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964), 4, 484–85. See also Theodor Heuß, Friedrich Naumann, 336. 227  See, most recently, Chapter 5, “Mitteleuropa and the war aims debate,” in Jan Vermeiren, The First World War and German National Identity. The Dual Alliance at War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016), 145–82. Once such body was the so-called Working Committee on Mitteleuropa, founded in February 1916 by Naumann and Ernst Jäckh, which also created its own journal to publish its findings and recommendations; cf. Naumann, Werke, 4, 853–54. On individual members of the committee, see Gutsche, “Mitteleuropaplanungen,” 543. 228 Naumann, Werke, 4, 855. 229  See Jürgen Frölich, “Friedrich Naumanns ‘Mitteleuropa.’ Ein Buch, seine Umstände und seine Folgen,” in Friedrich Naumann in seiner Zeit, ed. Rüdiger vom Bruch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000), 249. Naumann never mentions Rathenau in his book, nor does Theodor Heuß in his bio­ graphy of Naumann. Cf. Eric C. Kollman, “Walther Rathenau and German Foreign Policy Thoughts and Actions,” The Journal of Modern History 24 (1952), 131. 230  Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1915), 263.

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to his friend Max Weber, that it “was the most important question of contemporary politics.”231 In the end, however, the book Naumann produced several months later focused less on strictly political questions and more on narrowly economic concerns, and primarily on the technicalities of trade, tariffs, and regulations. But Naumann did grasp, if not fully spell out, the political ramifications of his conception, and he gingerly alluded to, while attempting to steer a middle course between, some of the sensitivities involved. Insisting that “both Central European empires” – i.e. Germany and Austria-Hungary – had “possessed no ready war aim” at the outset of the conflict and that, on the contrary, for them “the war was not begun in order to achieve this or that” goal, he admitted that the lack of progress and unexpected virulence of the conflict had nevertheless forced a belated recognition that certain political and economic realignments were necessary on the continent in order to prevent it from being vulnerable to any future aggression.232 Hence his book. The problem was: who would implement and administer it all? Naumann did not specify any particular governing structure or authority in his Mitteleuropa. But he more than implied what, or rather who, the controlling parties would be. “Central Europe will be German at its core,” he casually wrote; “it will naturally employ German as the language of international mediation.”233 In the same breath, however, Naumann allowed, although no less ambiguously, that “from the first day on, indulgence and flexibility will have to be shown to all participating neighboring languages, for only in that way can the great harmony flourish that is necessary for a great state, which is being fought and besieged on all sides.”234 It was this conspicuous imbalance between an unquestioned and apparently unquestionable German dominance, however configured, over the projected Central European entity, whatever that would ultimately turn out to be, coupled with a vague assurance that other, less powerful members would be shown an equally ill-defined leniency by their governors, which appealed to German readers looking for what has been aptly called “Weltpolitik by other means”235 and made everyone else understandably wary. To his credit, Naumann did acknowledge that “no state that participates in the new super state wants to sacrifice thereby its own sovereignty, which it has acquired and defended with so much difficul231 

See Jörg Villain, “Zur Genesis der Mitteleuropakonzeption Friedrich Naumanns bis zum Jahre 1915,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte 15 (1977), 210. 232 Naumann, Mitteleuropa, 8–9. 233  Ibid., 101. 234 Ibid. 235  Frölich, 257. See also Kluke, “Deutschland und seine Mitteleuropapolitik,” 382–83.

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ty and blood.”236 And he made the further allowance that “since Central Europe encompasses lands of varied composition and of various stages of development, it must in principle tolerate within itself existing differences in the inner structure of the state.”237 Or, even more pithily: “Neither the Hungarian nor the Austrian constitution is of any concern to us Imperial Germans, and vice versa.”238 But such promises of magnanimous forbearance on Germany’s part did little to assuage the worries of the people who would simply have to trust in the continuing benevolence of their senior German “partners.” Nor did those assurances alleviate the suspicions of the rest of the world who saw in the whole Mittel­ europa idea no more than a rhetorical fig leaf covering naked German ambitions.239 For that reason, Lujo Brentano, Naumann’s friend and social democratic conscience, called his book “brilliant but misguided,” arguing that it “caused us endless damage”: It was quickly translated into English and, as I was informed, spread in many thousands of copies in the United States. There it acted as glaring evidence of our claims to subjugate the world under German hegemony; it was used as proof that Germany intended to arrogate to itself the entire economic region from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf. The Americans, however, have the God-given right to engage anywhere in the world, and whoever wants to limit them in that tampers with the natural right of the American people. That was one of the most important means of agitation used to incite the Americans against us. The book was all the more effective for being brilliantly written.240

Within Germany itself, the runaway success of Naumann’s Mitteleuropa and the tremendous response it generated also proved to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it momentarily relieved pressure on Bethmann Hollweg to divulge his own views concerning the possibility of a Central European solution, which he privately regarded with skepticism at best, and it allowed him to let others do the talking for him, which had the further advantage of absolving him of direct responsibility for any particular articulation – or eventual failure – of the plan should it ever be realized. On the other hand, and by the same token, it reinforced and vastly inflated popular belief in a stratagem that many, not unreasonably 236 Naumann,

Mitteleuropa, 232. Ibid., 237. 238 Ibid. 239  That was not an altogether unreasonable conclusion, at least concerning notions that formed after the war began, but it did not act as the motive for starting it. On April 18, 1915, Kurt Riezler recorded in his diary a conversation with Bethmann Hollweg in which he laid out his conception of “my new Europe, that is, the European disguise of our will to power. The Central European Empire of the German Nation.” Riezler, Tagebücher, 268. 240 Brentano, Mein Leben, 325. In a speech he gave on October 10, 1916, Max Weber also called Naumann’s book “brilliant,” but with no further qualification; see Weber, “Deutschland unter den europäischen Weltmächten,” Politische Schriften, 166. 237 

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given Naumann’s own standing, thought reflected government policy or at least official opinion – a conclusion that the Chancellor himself was also in no hurry to dismiss publicly for the same reasons. In the end, those calculations did not add up. Although fleetingly expedient in diverting the attention of both supporters and opponents of a more aggressive foreign policy, the decision to remain silent on such an important matter, which managed to perform the trick of giving false hope to both opposing camps, served in the longer term to erode Bethmann’s domestic position only further by undermining the confidence and trust of the very people whom he so desperately needed. And, beyond that, there remained the suspicions of Allied observers who, as Brentano had noted, considered the idea of Mitteleuropa as merely providing confirmation of the misgivings they had had about an aggressively expansionist Germany all along. This, then, was the complex background against which in March 1916, at the height of the popularity of Naumann’s book on Mitteleuropa, Ernst ­Troeltsch delivered the proposal that concluded his speech on “The Ideas of 1914.” There he advocated forming a “Central European block,” or what he had identified as the one positive “political idea for the future” that he saw, like all the other ideas, as having arisen from the war. It is conceivable though uncertain that ­Troeltsch, too, thought of his suggestion as providing backing for the embattled Chancellor and was truly unaware of Bethmann’s own lukewarm embrace of the idea. But if such support was part of his intention, ­Troeltsch certainly did not advocate the idea by abandoning his own principles. For as he explicitly stated, while reiterating his opposition to any form of imperialism, within his own notion of Mittel­ europa it was of importance that this idea at the same time be in line with our old political and ethical ideals: no world domination and no politics of violence and monopoly, but rather the free, mutual complementarity of national spirits, together with the simultaneous independent development of each individual one.241

It is also not certain but probable that ­Troeltsch formulated his own conception of such a “block” in deliberate contrast to Naumann’s own encouraging but nonbinding pledges that the sovereignty of its member states would be respected. And it went without saying that ­Troeltsch fundamentally opposed the ideology behind Falkenhayn’s cold-blooded promise that such autonomy would be abrogated at the earliest opportunity, and if necessary by force. What is clear is that ­Troeltsch saw his own proposition for Mitteleuropa as part of a larger geopolitical and ideological conception that rose above purely economic concerns and even transcended the war itself. His version of a unified 241 ­Troeltsch,

“Die Ideen von 1914,” 621.

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Central Europe, that is, would not just offer protection, as he said in his speech, to the smaller and weaker “ethnic and national individualities” – Völkerindividu­ alitäten – using a word he had repeatedly employed over the past year.242 Rather, and even more ambitiously, the ideas on which his own version of Mitteleuropa rested would also stand before the rest of the world as a constructive ideological and political counterexample, as a model even for similar alliances elsewhere, thus presenting an inspiring alternative to the old and, ­Troeltsch thought, obviously failed ideas that had brought about the catastrophe of the war in the first place. As he put it: Only today do we have the possibility of a definite realization of such ideals in connection with our political reality and its interests. We can and must think of the Central European block that we must create in this sense, and we may perhaps nourish the hope that the idea, once it is realized here, could have a salutary further effect on the world and deliver the planet from being divided up among the great monopolistic powers and from horrific ultimate world wars among them. That would be the idea of an equilibrium no longer merely of the European powers, but of those of the world, and a political program that would save national individualities from anglicization and russification.243

As the last line underscored, even in advancing his conception of a unified Mit­ teleuropa, ­Troeltsch adamantly opposed both what he elsewhere in his speech called “the imperialistic will to monopoly”244 in general as well as its culturally inflected expression in its English and Russian – or, for that matter, French, American or any other – forms of imperialism in particular. But it was here that ­Troeltsch seemed to succumb to a peculiar cultural myopia of his own, and one that would color his thinking on related matters for some time hence. In reiterating that the main “political idea” that had been delivered by the war was “a confederated power block against the giant monopolistic states for the protection of all individual ethnic and national spirits and of their free development,” he immediately added that “such a block then of course entails in a certain sense German leadership, but not German domination.”245 Despite the qualifiers, as important as they are, the inescapable conclusion these words suggest is that to a significant degree for ­Troeltsch as well Germany would in fact occupy some sort of preeminent role in a projected Mitteleuropa.246 He may have been imagining something like what Bethmann Hollweg communicated privately to Theodor Wolff, who recorded the Chancellor as saying that in the postwar order he envisioned “‘a Europe organized by Germany.’ Germany would have to be so strong 242 

See ­Troeltsch, “Imperialismus,” 11, and “Der Geist der deutschen Kultur,” 57. “Die Ideen von 1914,” 621. 244  Ibid., 622. 245 Ibid. 246  See, however, the nuanced discussion by Hoeres, 272–73. 243 ­Troeltsch,

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that the small states all around would have the need to rely on it.”247 Such a scenario did not necessarily entail German dominance, but it did not eliminate that possibility, either. As had been true of the whole idea of Mitteleuropa all along, it was ill-defined enough to attract a diverse following and thus to admit numerous and even conflicting interpretations, and that was precisely the difficulty with ­Troeltsch’s version of it as well. Still, considering how dismal in ­Troeltsch’s eyes the record of imperialistic adventures undertaken by the European states had been – including, he thought, the conduct of Germany itself when it had tried to emulate them – he might be forgiven for imagining that his own country could perhaps do better. Similarly, there is more than a whiff of unexamined national self-satisfaction in his concluding arguments about the relative ability of the principal combatants to extract “new ideas” from the experience of the war. “The West European opponents,” he claimed, “sit on the yeasts of their great eighteenth century, to which only capitalism and imperialism have been added as fermenting agents.”248 Both France and Britain, he was saying, still essentially relied on a venerable but overtaxed stock of ideas in which they had merely mixed some fresh ingredients, adding only a few “modern” elements that, in ­Troeltsch’s judgment, were noxious ones at that. “But all official formulas and the entire pathos of the war stream out of their old world of ideas.” In this regard as well, he felt, Germany was not just different, but might also offer a better alternative for the future, one not to be imposed from without but rather, and only if so desired by others, freely adopted from within. As the junior member among the major powers, consolidated into a single nation only comparatively recently, Germany might just, he thought, be able to draw on a fresher store of intellectual resources that could aid in constructing a new and auspicious future, one that might reflect the values of tolerance and freedom that ­Troeltsch had just enunciated yet again, but could also avoid some of the undeniable excesses and failures of the past. Waxing poetic, ­Troeltsch concluded: For our part, we are looking for truly new ideas on which a new existence can be based. Our greater youthfulness is displayed in this shining forth of ideas in the midst of battle. They are as of yet still stars that have risen up before us out of the bloody haze of our existential battle. They will gleam coolly and somberly in the crepuscular gloom for some time to come. But may the sun follow them that is the sun of the German day and that will brighten and warm our free and independent place in the sun.249

247 

Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 358. “Die Ideen von 1914,” 624. 249 Ibid. 248 ­Troeltsch,

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It is perhaps an unfortunate and clichéd ending to an otherwise extraordinary text. Because of the final allusion to the infamous phrase, originally coined by Bernhard von Bülow in 1897 and widely used thereafter to refer to Germany’s imperial aspirations – the desire, as von Bülow had put it then, for Germany to obtain its own “place in the sun” – it delivered a conclusion that has been open to misunderstanding, further feeding into the perception that ­Troeltsch was really a closet ideologue of an overbearing German exceptionalism. But even if one were unaware of ­Troeltsch’s emphatic and long-standing anti-imperialist stance, expressed again only a few lines before this conclusion, the metaphorical language of the passage alone should allay concerns that he was referring to anything other than the metaphorical light of reason that would, he hoped, illuminate the future path of Germany and of humanity as a whole. Seen from that perspective, ­Troeltsch’s evocation of that already well-worn platitude could be interpreted as a simultaneous critique and correction of it. The only legitimate and defensible “place in the sun” that Germany could or should occupy, he appears to have been saying, would be one that was in accord with the rational, ethical ideals that ­Troeltsch had been elaborating from the beginning. And if fully realized, they might result in a polity that would benefit not just Germany alone, but could potentially provide a beacon and haven to others as well. A Germany so ordered could ideally offer both the example and the welcoming refuge of a state that was truly organized around what he had called earlier in his speech the fundamental principles of “freedom and dignity” and as such would safeguard and defend the “substance and existential depth of the person.”250 Those were, in any case, the principles in concentrated form that constituted the central “ideas of 1914” as Ernst ­Troeltsch, their most significant exponent, understood them. That they bear no resemblance to the misinformed caricatures of them that later became commonplace in scholarly accounts should by now be more than obvious. But in a strange, or perhaps all too familiar, dialectical process, ­Troeltsch’s lecture before the German Society 1914 represents not just the most comprehensive and most profound articulation of those ideas ever produced, his speech also stands as the culmination and thus the conclusion of the entire development that had led up to it. The phrase itself, notoriously, would go on to enjoy a long afterlife. But it would have virtually nothing to do with the actual circumstances that had first occasioned it or with the intentions of the person who made it famous. Moreover, no sooner had the phrase been formulated than the impetus behind it and the actual ideas informing it became passé. As ­Troeltsch’s closing remarks had indicated, the focus for him and for his country would henceforth be on the future, not on the past, and by the time he gave his 250 

Ibid., 618.

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lecture in early 1916, the year evoked in its title was becoming not just ever more temporally distant but also, and even more important, emotionally remote. One sign of that shift was that, almost imperceptibly, the hopes for one day constructing some sort of Mitteleuropa – however illusory that dream would prove to be – had already replaced the backward-looking desire to uphold the “spirit of 1914” (which itself was no less chimerical) as the cognitive cement meant to bind the German people together. Soon enough, however, both of these stopgap measures would be discarded as either a distraction or irrelevant. What Germany needed were real solutions to real political problems. And the most critical problems of all loomed just ahead.

Chapter Five

German Freedom In mid-April 1916, Friedrich Meinecke sent a concerned letter to his colleague Adolf von Harnack. “Now,” Meinecke wrote, “everything depends on supporting the Chancellor.”1 By that spring, the long-simmering domestic crisis that had begun to bubble up in the capital a year before had reached a critical level and was threatening to spill over into the entire country. Faced with the alarming scenario of a swelling political flood that could very well sweep away Bethmann Hollweg and his government with him, Meinecke was telling Harnack that the time had come to abandon any remaining scruples they may have had about openly revealing partisan bias and stand firmly behind the Chancellor or, failing that, be forced to confront the possibly catastrophic consequences if he fell. But the question remained: what exactly could be done to help him and thus their country? The conservative nationalist forces behind the infamous Seeberg Address, or Intellectuals’ Petition, advocating massive territorial expansion throughout Europe and beyond, refusing any negotiated peace that did not secure such gains through complete German military victory, had not lain idle since the debacle the previous June when their petition had been roundly rejected by Bethmann Hollweg. Despite, or rather because of, the crackdown on their activities that the Chancellor had ordered in response, the organizers behind the Seeberg Address had decided to proceed clandestinely, intentionally abstaining from forming any sort of official “club” or “society,” or even from giving themselves a formal name. Professor Dietrich Schäfer, one of the principal actors in these behind-thescenes machinations, later candidly admitted in his memoirs that the main reason for this deliberate anonymity had been to avoid the otherwise compulsory registration with the police and the unwelcome attention that such law-abiding behavior would have attracted.2 Over the fall and winter of 1915–16, a loose group of like-minded collaborators thus worked surreptitiously to build a network of influential sympathizers who could help advance their collective goals. And by the spring of 1916 their two most important objectives were, first, to persuade the 1 

Meinecke to Harnack, 19 April, 1916; cited in Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 426. Mein Leben, 172.

2 Schäfer,

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government to lift its prohibition on the public discussion of war aims and, above all, to allow Germany to wage unrestricted submarine warfare on its enemies.3

Nemesis U-Boat In December 1914, an American journalist working for the United Press published an interview he had conducted the previous month with Alfred von Tirpitz. In it, the Grand Admiral had boasted that Germany could respond in kind to the British blockade by deploying its own “undersea-boats” capable of sinking all vessels they encountered on the open sea, thus cutting off vital supplies being shipped to the British Isles. With that statement, Tirpitz had effectively broadcast a previously unimagined possibility to a stunned and appalled world. Tirpitz enjoyed a celebrity-like status among the broader public for his central role in building the imperial fleet. He was heralded as the “leader and organizer of German naval power” and considered “the leading expert of Germany and probably the world”4 regarding maritime warfare, and there seemed to be no reason to doubt the veracity of his startling revelation. And ever since then, the fear the Entente felt in the face of this new and terrifying weapon would be matched only by the eagerness of an increasingly desperate German populace to use it. Tirpitz was unmoved by the clamorous protests raised in the wake of his interview about the morality, much less the legality, of potentially sending thousands of innocent civilians to their deaths. He coolly noted that the submergible cordon he said Germany could throw around Britain would be in direct retaliation for the blockade the British had been the first to impose, which was itself in brazen violation of international law and had been designed to weaken and kill no less innocent German citizens through starvation. In the interview, Tirpitz had further mused that Germany might also employ the equally novel and frightening Zeppelin airships to bomb London to equivalent ends. “We will set London ablaze in a hundred locations,” he threatened. “But I think that a submarine blockade would be even more effective.”5 “England wants to starve us out,” Tirpitz said. “We can play the same game.”6 The problem was that they could not. There was no question that the surface ships of the German High Seas Fleet, the centerpiece of the Kaiser’s Weltpolitik, 3 

Hagenlücke, 74. an article in the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 23 December, 1914; cited in Schröder, Die U-Boote des Kaisers, 86. 5  Cited in ibid., 85. 6  Ibid., 86. 4 From

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were incapable of seriously contesting, much less subduing, the British Royal Navy, if for no other reason than that for the duration of the war the German fleet was mainly held back idling in port. After quickly losing several ships during clashes at Heligoland in August 1914, Wilhelm had decided that he wanted to preserve his fleet as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations, a function it could scarcely perform at the bottom of the ocean.7 But ever since 1909 it had already been clear that the vaunted Tirpitz Plan to defeat or at least to parry the British at sea would never achieve its stated objective and that Germany had effectively lost the arms race it had precipitously begun.8 “This was put beyond doubt in 1912,” a naval historian has written, “when the German budget favoured the army substantially over the navy. The Royal Navy had reaffirmed its lead and there was little chance that the German navy would be able to mount a successful challenge.”9 At best, the German warships might have initially served as a deterrent to British aggression. But in reality they amounted to little more than costly armed escorts for the German merchant marine – constituting an ostentatious but militarily ineffectual “luxury” fleet, as the brash new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, disdainfully called it in 1912.10 During the war, the failure of the German ships to show up for battle did not go unnoticed by the British, and Prime Minister H. H. Asquith even made taunting reference to their non-appeareance in a speech he gave in March 1915. “Where is the German Navy?” he mockingly asked. “What has become of those gigantic battleships and cruisers, on which so many millions of money have been spent, and in which such vast hopes and ambitions have been invested?”11 In the absence of all those formidable warships in the actual war, it thus fell almost by default to the humble U-boat, an innovative but largely untested platform, which before 1914 had been widely regarded, moreover, as “unchivalrous” and a “weapon of the weak,”12 to play an unexpected and outsized role, as Tirpitz had more than implied, in determining the fate of the nation. As it happened, however, at the beginning of the war Germany possessed precisely twenty operational submarines. Of those, a third at most could be out on active combat duty at any given time, and even then for no more than two weeks, 7 Röhl,

Wilhelm II., 1209. Volker R., Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan. Genesis und Verfall einer innenpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II. (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971). 9  Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game. Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 245. 10  Holger H. Herwig, “Luxury” Fleet. The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 77. 11  Schröder, 112. 12  Rüger, 256. 8  Cf.

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with the other two thirds unavailable for engagement because they were either in transit to or from operations or were sitting at dock for repair and resupply.13 That meant that for patrolling the vast expanse of the North Sea, which Britain had declared a war zone on November 2, 1914, and for monitoring the more than eleven thousand kilometers of British coastline, Germany had on average just seven submarines at its disposal. And, further diminishing their potential effectiveness, when Tirpitz made his blustering remarks to the American reporter, the U-boats were still hampered by a debilitating shortage of accurate and reliable torpedoes.14 Partly for those hard pragmatic reasons, and in order to preserve the tactical advantage of surprise for the few submarines that Germany actually did have, the Imperial Chancellery, the Foreign Office, and the Imperial Naval Office had treated the entire submarine program with the utmost secrecy. Tirpitz’s indiscretions made the Chief of Staff of the Admiralty, Hugo von Pohl, understandably furious, who said that they had “militarily greatly damaged” the German position.15 But even worse was that Tirpitz, by implicitly but erroneously claiming that Germany possessed a sufficient number of submarines to encircle Britain, had recklessly raised the hopes and expectations of his own people, while fanning the alarm and animosity of everyone else, all on the basis of what was in fact a gratuitous and apparently self-serving fabrication. Kurt Riezler, who around this time began bitterly referring to Tirpitz in his diary as “the Father of the Lie,” suspected that Tirpitz, who had previously ignored submarines in favor of the much more impressive and prestigious (and expensive) dreadnoughts that had so obviously fallen short in their primary function of deterring Britain, was now trying to cover his tracks and save his reputation by belatedly promoting the new wonder weapon.16 And in the process, the “Father of the Lie” was leading his country even further astray by making a promise that he must have known could never be kept. The extreme difficulty in which this entire situation placed Bethmann Hollweg was self-evident: not only was he excoriated in the foreign press for being ultimately responsible for the merciless official German policy presumably behind Tirpitz’s publicized threats, the Chancellor also came under extraordinary pressure at home to employ a weapon that, at least to the degree envisioned by its 13 

Schröder, 98. See also Table 6, ibid., 428–29. Ibid., 79. 15  Ibid., 91. 16 Riezler, Tagebücher, 211–12. The “father of the lie” is an allusion to John 8:44, where Jesus says of Satan: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” 14 

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champions, simply did not exist. Outside of Germany, Bethmann Hollweg was thus portrayed as a cold-blooded assassin of women and children, and inside of it, because he did not order even more to be killed, as a wavering coward who was possibly even a traitor. But of far greater concern to Bethmann Hollweg himself than the damage Tirpitz had indirectly caused to his personal reputation was that if Germany would try to use its minuscule fleet of submarines to the fullest extent possible and sink not just British warships but also all merchant vessels sailing under the flags of the neutral countries that were supplying Britain, then the resultant international backlash would make it all but inevitable that his greatest fear of all would be realized and the United States would be drawn into the war against them. And that outcome, Bethmann starkly predicted, would do no less than spell the very “end of Germany” – finis Germaniae.17

Introit America Incredibly, many within German military and naval circles who should have known better refused to believe that America posed any such serious threat, and certainly not one so great as to justify voluntarily refraining from fully using a weapon that if successful could, they were convinced, tip the balance in Germany’s favor. Tirpitz himself sneered at the “Yankee fleet,” which he deemed wholly “without significance for us.”18 And his Under Secretary, Admiral Eduard von Capelle, smugly opined that “from a military perspective, I consider the effect of a strengthening of our enemies through the entry of the USA in the war to be zero.”19 Although Tirpitz had been sidelined within the government because of his imprudent vainglory, he continued to agitate in the wings, downplaying or dismissing the threat posed by America and arguing for maximum utilization of the submarine, especially after Bethmann had reluctantly agreed in early February 1915 to allow only strictly “limited” action against neutral merchant ships. That order further stipulated that submarines were permitted to operate only under the provisions of prize warfare, which prohibited sinking unarmed vessels without giving them prior warning and evacuating their passengers and crew before firing on the ship.20 The disastrous torpedoing of the passenger liner Lusitania that May, in which so many civilians, including over one hundred Americans, had died, put a 17 Müller,

Regierte der Kaiser?, 147. Schröder, 308. 19 Ibid. 20  Ibid., 176–77. 18 

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months-long halt to Tirpitz’s rearguard campaign to deploy German U-boats against all vessels.21 But by August he was again demanding an “unlimited” use of the submarines and, when rebuffed, sought to impose his will by threatening to resign. At that point, even the Kaiser intervened, refusing to accept Tirpitz’s demission, which the Emperor declined by explaining that “I cannot allow an officer in the war to request his discharge on the basis of differences of opinion regarding the use of naval forces, over which I decide in the final instance as commander-in-chief and in the full consciousness of my responsibility.” But Wilhelm also reiterated the necessity of exercising restraint, cautioning that “America must be prevented from participating in the war against us as an active enemy.”22 Then, in September 1915, the Kaiser acted even more boldly by replacing the Chief of Staff of the Admiralty with Henning von Holtzendorff, who was Tirpitz’s most determined rival, not least of all because Holtzendorff scoffed at the very notion that submarines, much less the mere handful of them available to Germany, could ever bring Britain to heel. “Believe me, gentlemen,” Holtzendorff told his staff when he assumed his new duties, “with your U-boat war you won’t even scratch the skin of the whale.”23 Accordingly, on September 18, 1915, all submarine activity against non-military targets was ordered to cease. Nevertheless, the submarine issue itself, and the beguiling prospects it seemed to offer for altering the fortunes of the war, did not go away. During the following winter months, as General Erich von Falkenhayn considered the worsening, or at any rate not improving, situation on the western and eastern fronts – and while he was also elaborating his impolitic speculations about a Central European alliance under German authority to whomever would listen – he reviewed all of the courses of action open to him that might be able to break the stalemate, and particularly those which he thought could subdue what he viewed as the “main enemy,” England. Previously, Falkenhayn had agreed with the decision to limit submarine warfare to the stipulations of prize law, not so much on humanitarian grounds as on the strategic calculation that such studied forbearance would make it easier to win the cooperation of Bulgaria and Romania.24 But by mid-December 1915, Falkenhayn had changed his mind. He told Ambassador Karl Georg von Treutler, one of the most committed opponents of expanding the use of U-boats: “I am very sorry, but I have to depart from you in the matter of submarine warfare.”25 On December 30, after coordinating with Admiral Tirpitz, the Minister of War Adolf Wild von Hohenborn, and the new Chief 21 

See Jasper, Lusitania. Schröder, 177–78. 23  Ibid., 179. 24  Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, 377. 25  Ibid., 378. On this episode, see Karl-Heinz Janßen, Der Kanzler und der General. Die 22 

Introit America

309

of Staff Admiral Holtzendorff, Falkenhayn met with the Imperial Chancellor at the General Headquarters in Charleville-Mézières to reveal his revised thinking. “He did not understand,” Bethmann Hollweg recorded in his notes of the conversation with Falkenhayn, “why we do not take up the submarine war against England in full severity. To my response that the break with America would then be unavoidable, he said […] now that we are sure of Bulgaria, America could no longer harm us.”26 Whereas Falkenhayn’s brutish fantasies about Central Europe were relatively harmless because they had no chance of ever being put into practice, his change of heart with respect to the submarine question, combined with his nonchalance regarding the United States, posed an immediate and, the Chancellor was convinced, mortal threat to the nation. In an internal memorandum to his staff on January 10, 1916, Bethmann Hollweg compared Falkenhayn’s insistence on throwing in the lot of their country with the still unproven and insufficient squadron of submarines at their disposal to a “game of dice, where the stake is actually the existence of Germany.”27 Two days later, he also told Admiral von Müller, who found the Chancellor to be “even more pessimistic” than he had ever seen him before, that not only did “the number of U-boats available on March 1 not suffice,” but more importantly that if Germany did fully use those which they actually had on hand, the outrage around the world would be so great that “all of the still neutral peoples would arise united against us, the mad dog among peoples.”28 Yet it was the United States in particular that continued to worry Bethmann most of all. “A second Lusitania,” he prophesied to Jagow in February, “will by all means cause the break with America.”29 In order to forestall that terrifying eventuality, throughout February 1916 the Chancellor conducted a comprehensive study of the U-boat question, assessing the assorted strategic, economic, technical and, most of all, political implications of entirely unlimited submarine warfare against all ships, Allied or neutral, armed or not.30 The Chancellor was particularly interested in testing the claims being made by the Admiralty that such a campaign would so weaken Britain that it Führungskrise um Bethmann Hollweg und Falkenhayn (1914–1916) (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1967). 26 Alfred von Tirpitz, Politische Dokumente. Deutsche Ohnmachtspolitik im Weltkriege (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1926), 455. 27 Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 3, 195. 28 Müller, Regierte der Kaiser?, 147. 29  Schröder, 200. Complicating matters, President Woodrow Wilson had sent his chief diplomat, Colonel Edward M. House, to London, Paris and Berlin in early 1916. House demanded that Germany not only cease using the submarines altogether, but also that it provide financial compensation for the loss of the Lusitania, giving a deadline of January 29. 30  The full text of the Chancellor’s study is reproduced in his memoirs, “Denkschrift des

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would be forced to seek peace “within a few months.”31 And after this exhaustive review, in which he considered all the known and knowable possibilities, Bethmann Hollweg finally concluded that the gamble of an unrestricted campaign was simply not worth it: The question raises itself whether our situation is so desperate that we are forced to play va­ banque, where the stakes would be our existence as a great power and our entire national future, whereas the odds, i.e. the prospect of vanquishing England by autumn, are very uncertain. The question must be answered unconditionally in the negative.32

Based on these conclusions, on March 13, 1916, and with the blessing of the Kaiser, Bethmann Hollweg, partially bowing to the already enormous internal pressure on him but settling on what he considered an acceptable compromise, signed an order allowing the immediate resumption of strictly limited submarine operations conducted only against enemy merchant vessels and expressly forbidding the sinking of enemy passenger ships.33 Even within these relatively narrow limits, there still remained the considerable risk of an accident or misjudgment – the order made room for the absurd possibility that it might rest in the hands of a single U-boot captain whether Germany would find itself in full armed conflict with the United States – but it was a calculated wager the Chancellor felt forced to make. Yet if Bethmann Hollweg thought his compromise decision would put an end to the wrangling over the U-boat question, he soon found out it was just the beginning – and, as it turned out, it was also the beginning of his own end. On the same day of March when the Chancellor issued his order allowing only limited submarine activity, Professor Dietrich Schäfer sat down to compose a petition to the Emperor. Through the carefully cultivated connections of the covert organization he had helped to create, Schäfer had remained apprised of the debates going on at General Headquarters in Charleville-Mézières over the use of submarines, and he had even learned in early March that the Chancellor had been able to thwart Falkenhayn’s and Tirpitz’s more aggressive designs. Incensed by this news, Schäfer, along with several co-conspirators, quickly devised the plan of travelling to General Headquarters to make their case in person before the Emperor himself, only to be tersely told that they would not be received.34 The written word would have to suffice. “Every public discussion of the submarine war is forbidden,” Schäfer’s document somewhat petulantly began. “If that were not so, the cry would roar through Reichskanzlers über den Ubootkrieg vom 29. Februar 1916,” Bethmann Hollweg, Betrachtun­ gen, 2, 260–73. 31  Schröder, 189. 32  Ibid., 199. 33  Ibid., 201. 34 Schäfer, Mein Leben, 181.

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the German lands like a thundering echo: ‘We want the harshest possible submarine war and we want it without delay’.”35 That was, Schäfer agreed, the best and perhaps the only remaining way for Germany to emerge from the war with any hope for a viable future. “Either we achieve a peace that gives us a commanding position in the world or we will be paralyzed forever.”36 Schäfer and his associates also prepared a similar but more detailed document for formal dissemination in the Reichstag, in which they dismissed concerns being voiced about such ruthless measures as rank hypocrisy. “If our opponents invoke humanity against us,” their longer text announced, then we would perceive that as a mockery against honesty, lawfulness, and humaneness. […] Even if the President of the United States adopts this objection as his own, then our next thought will be that it is precisely from across the ocean that our opponents are being delivered weapons in order to murder not just tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of our own.37

And Schäfer simultaneously sent out yet another pamphlet about the submarine war, this one written by the historian Eduard Meyer, to the members of all the governing bodies within the entire country, as well as to unspecified “leading personalities,” with the request that they sign an accompanying petition. By March 22, he had already collected 40,000 signatures and in the end amassed a total of 90,000 names. In addition, he had also ordered an astonishing 750,000 copies of his brochure to be printed for wider distribution.38 At almost exactly the same time, in early March of 1916, and not entirely coincidentally, Max Weber sent a lengthy and sharply worded memorandum to the Foreign Office condemning, as his document is titled, “The Intensified Submarine War.”39 Weber had thus far largely refrained from involving himself in any of the wartime debates. To date, his only significant public contribution had been to sign the declaration produced by the group around Hans Delbrück the previous July opposing the Seeberg Address. Now, on learning of the renewed agitation for undertaking unlimited submarine warfare, Weber, who unlike most of his compatriots had actually traveled to the United States and had closely studied its culture and economy, wrote to his wife that he found “the optimism of the military and the politicians with respect to a war with America unbelievable.”40 Giv35 

Ibid., 182.

36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 

Ibid., 183; Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 424n189. Max Weber, “Der verschärfte U-Boot-Krieg,” in Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914–1918, Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1984), 1/13, 115– 25. 40  Max Weber to Marianne Weber, 3 March, 1916; cited in the “Editorischer Bericht,” ibid., 101. See also Mommsen, Max Weber, 241–51. 39 

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en the ultimate consequences involved, Weber characteristically advised in his memorandum, which he submitted to the Foreign Office on March 10, that those responsible for making the final decision should engage in an “entirely sober calculation that is absolutely free of any histrionic and emotional politics” in coming to their resolution about whether to use submarines without any restrictions whatsoever.41 Weber’s own assessment, which he dispassionately laid forth in minute and persuasive detail, was that an intensified submarine campaign made long-term strategic sense only if it would shorten the war to the benefit of Germany by forcing Britain to capitulate. The more likely scenario, he warned, was that some deliberate or “accidental” sinking of an American ship would induce the United States to enter the war on the side of the British, which, Weber emphatically argued, would mean not merely the prolongation of the war, but also and much more seriously the inevitable military and economic ruin of Germany, which would bring with it incalculable turmoil and possibly the total collapse of the state. Weber was graphic in his portrait of the foreseeable political outcome of that development: The domestic results of such an economic defeat and a loss of the war following the intervention of America on the basis of an unfortunate ‘accident’ that must be anticipated as possible cannot be compared even remotely in terms of their severity with the most unfavorable results that could otherwise occur to us even without this eventuality.42

More specifically, Weber emphasized that the prospect of a “war with America” caused him, as it should also cause the leaders of the Empire, “the gravest apprehensions about the country and about possibly the future of the dynasty.”43 And if that warning was not stark or explicit enough, Weber concluded: Everyone is aware, even if it is a very unlikely possibility, that the unpredictabilities of military events can yet make our situation more adverse than it is now. No one will make the government and the bearer of the crown responsible for that. They will, however, no matter rightly or wrongly, be held accountable for the consequences of a policy toward America that, if it fails, will be subsequently construed by broad sections of the population as recklessly hazardous politics – Abenteuerpolitik.44

Weber could hardly have been more blunt – or more prescient. With his typical austere clarity, Weber saw that in confronting the submarine question, as with any other major economic, military, or political decision, what truly mattered was the quality of the judgment being employed to address it. Weber agreed that 41 

Weber, “Der verschärfte U-Boot-Krieg,” 118. Ibid., 124. 43  Ibid., 122. 44  Ibid., 125. 42 

Exeunt Tirpitz

313

the fate of Germany and its entire way of life, including its political structure and even the monarchy itself, may very well depend in no small measure on the ignoble submarine, but not in a way that Tirpitz and his confederates imagined or still less wanted. That it had all essentially begun as a bluff would probably not have surprised Weber. But the odds are that knowing that fact would not have improved his prognosis, either.45

Exeunt Tirpitz As these and many other semi-private, semi-official messages urgently lobbying either for or against the unrestrained use of the German U-boats were making the rounds inside various ministries and government offices in Berlin, the mood among what Weber had termed “broad sections of the population” reflected little of the calm sobriety he had counseled. In the face of that growing unrest, Bethmann Hollweg undertook what was for him the extremely unusual step of appealing directly to members of the press to ask them, as he put it during a conference held on March 13, 1916, “to push public opinion in one or the other direction concerning the conduct of the war, the pros and cons of which cannot be discussed before the ears of our enemies.”46 Although the Chancellor said that “I want to sketch our war aims only in outline,” he nevertheless helpfully offered some examples of what he thought the journalists might write about: shutting down the gateways of Poland and Belgium – better borders elsewhere. Freedom of economic development – in all directions, also across the oceans. In truth, no small matter. The establishment of an inviolable Germany in the middle of Europe – around which all of the weaker states can crystalize. That means no more and no less than a Europe organized by Germany.47

Although, as Dietrich Schäfer himself had noted in his petition to the Kaiser, all public discussion of the submarine issue itself still remained prohibited, and while the feverish backroom maneuvering for influence on the question was known only to the initiated, there was one event that seemed to send an unmistakable signal about the course Germany would be taking. On the same day that the Chancellor ordered the resumption of only limited submarine warfare, and when Professor Schäfer drafted his petition arguing against any such limits, Tir45  Only later did Weber discover the full extent of Tirpitz’s prevarications, which in 1918 Weber labeled a “demagogic exploitation of one of the most difficult purely military questions;” see Weber, Politische Schriften, 284. 46  Mommsen, “Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg,” 143. 47  Ibid., 143–44.

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pitz formally submitted his resignation, which the Kaiser accepted two days later, on March 15. When it was announced, the news jolted German and foreign observers alike. Officially, it was said Tirpitz had stepped down because of illness, but of course no one believed that. By the next day, The Times already relayed an unverified report from the Evening Post about “The Resignation of Tirpitz” – whom the London journalist, in a variation on the theme privately struck by Kurt Riezler, dubbed the “father of frightfulness”48 – and on the following day the news was confirmed. “The resignation of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz,” the article in The Times proclaimed, “is by far the most important and the most interesting event which has happened in the internal politics of Germany since the outbreak of the war.”49 What the reporter for The Times could not have known was that the departure of Tirpitz represented a personal triumph for the Imperial Chancellor over the man who had become his most nettlesome bête noire. And, ultimately, the conflict with Tirpitz was in Bethmann Hollweg’s eyes not so much over the submarine question per se as over how political authority in Germany more generally was, or should be, wielded. As he wrote on March 18 to the Vice Admiral and diplomat Karl von Eisendecher: The departure of State Secretary von Tirpitz did not occur because of a differing stance on the question of unlimited submarine warfare, but rather because the agitation emanating from the Imperial Naval Office to influence the press, parliamentary circles, and other public opinion to a greater degree involved the danger of prejudicing the power of command and the supreme political leadership in their decisions and to bring them into conflict with public sentiment. A kind of auxiliary government was threatening to form that under any circumstances, and particularly now in these serious times, cannot be tolerated.50

In the succeeding days, Foreign Secretary Gottfried von Jagow exulted to a colleague that Bethmann’s move against Tirpitz had “saved Germany,” and Riezler told the Chancellor himself that he had “truly grown into his world-historical role.”51 For a moment it seemed that the struggles of the past year to regain control over the direction of the country had ended in the Chancellor’s favor. Bethmann Hollweg’s victory turned out to be both short-lived and pyrrhic. His apparent assumption that discharging Tirpitz would somehow make both the polarizing admiral and the subversive forces rallied around him simply go away, 48 

The Times, March 16, 1916, 8. The Times, March 17, 1916, 9. 50  Bethmann Hollweg to Karl von Eisendecher, 18 March, 1916; cited in Willibald Gutsche, Aufstieg und Fall eines kaiserlichen Reichskanzlers. Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg 1856– 1921. Ein politisches Lebensbild (Berlin: Akademie, 1973), 185. 51 Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 3, 286. 49 

Exeunt Tirpitz

315

thereby preserving and reinforcing the legitimacy of his own hold on power, proved disastrously mistaken. Instead, it unleashed a firestorm that soon threatened to engulf Bethmann entirely and consume his government. Even Max Weber, who was no fan of Tirpitz, disapproved of the admiral’s dismissal, seeing it as “tantamount to a lost battle” in the field, judging from the effect the news was having on opinion abroad.52 A Dutch diplomat in Bern reported on the volatile situation he had witnessed in Berlin a few weeks later in early April: Since the resignation of Admiral von Tirpitz there is more “tirpitzing” going on than before. One has to be astonished at how well-mannered people in Germany are letting themselves be induced by their chauvinism into using language in the way that is now commonplace there … The position of the Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg has been shattered; after the Bavarian Minister President refused to receive him, he remains in his post primarily only because there is no successor available for him.53

In a foreboding sign of things to come, the subsequent reaction to Tirpitz’s termination was, if for different reasons, equally vehement on both the right and the left, with the common denominator being the shared anger over the role of the Imperial Chancellor in both precipitating and then managing the crisis. One of Bethmann’s first official acts after Tirpitz’s departure was to give a speech before the Reichstag, which took place three weeks later on April 5. There he promised to provide a picture of the military situation “on the basis of sober fact.”54 Rehearsing those facts, the Chancellor reiterated the willingness he had expressed the previous December before the Reichstag for Germany to enter into peace negotiations. But now he said that he saw no such inclination on the part of its enemies. Were the Entente to change its mind, Bethmann pledged, “every party would be ready to negotiate over peace proposals that would be made by the other side.”55 While fastidiously avoiding the topic of the submarines itself, he nevertheless called attention to the “blockade” and the “starvation” it was causing, admitting that “the months that we are living through […] are difficult,” and adding that they brought “restrictions to every household and worry to many families.”56 But he also insisted that the “meaning and goal of this war for us is a Germany that is so firmly established, so well protected, that no one will ever again be tempted to want to destroy us.”57 Therefore, and to assure such an outcome, he said, “the peace agreement that ends this war must be a lasting one, it cannot carry in itself the seeds of new wars, but rather those of a new, permanent 52 Mommsen,

Max Weber, 245. Aufstieg und Fall, 186. 54 Thimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 91. 55  Ibid., 95. 56  Ibid., 92–93. 57  Ibid., 96. 53 Gutsche,

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peaceful order in European affairs.”58 Bethmann Hollweg clearly intended for his carefully balanced argument to be a veiled justification for pursuing all available avenues to victory while still avoiding using the submarines indiscriminately unless there was truly no other choice. For although he could not say so publicly, he believed that fully unleashing the U-boats would not only fail to win the war, it would also lose the peace. The Chancellor’s vague if well-meaning assurances did little to appease the Social Democratic delegates listening to his address in the Reichstag. Many of them responded to his reasoned plea for restraint for the sake of securing some future settlement by loudly demanding that, for the sake of the present, Germany should instead immediately and fully employ “the U-boat so that our women and children do not die from hunger. No one can possibly object that it is supposed to bring us peace.”59 Among the most vociferous protesters in the assembly was Karl Liebknecht, one of the few Social Democratic members elected to the Prussian House of Representatives. The President of the Reichstag tried several times to bring Liebknecht to order, repeatedly ringing his bell as Liebknecht interrupted the Chancellor’s presentation with angry shouts and objections. Liebknecht saw the submarines as the best means for ending the war and, given the information he had, he thought refusing to use them could only mean prolonging it. Furious over the Chancellor’s decision, but unbowed, Liebknecht took the matter to the streets. Over the next few weeks, and with the help of Rosa Luxemburg, he set about organizing mass demonstrations planned for May 1, 1916 in numerous cities throughout the Empire. At the largest rally that day in Berlin, some 10,000 workers and middle-class opponents of the war gathered on the Potsdamer Platz, where Liebknecht shouted to the crowd: “Down with the war! Down with the government!”60 His subsequent arrest at the end of June led to the first large-scale political strikes in Germany since August 1914, with thousands of workers demanding Liebknecht’s release and an immediate end to the war.61 If anything, the national conservative factions surpassed the Social Democrats in the fervor of their hostility not just toward the restrained policies of the government more generally, but also and especially toward the person of its current leader. The wrath was predictably intense among the Pan-Germans and assorted annexationist groups. But the most vitriolic critic of the Chancellor to emerge in 58 

Ibid., 98–99. Ibid., 103. 60  Gutsche, 187. 61  Ibid. Cf. also Ottokar Luban, “Die Massenstreiks für Frieden und Demokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Streiken gegen den Krieg – Die Bedeutung der Massenstreiks in der Metallindu­ strie vom Januar 1918, eds. Chaja Boebel and Lothar Wentzel (Hamburg: VSA 2008), 13–15. 59 

Exeunt Tirpitz

317

the aftermath of the Tirpitz affair was a previously unknown, minor East Prussian civil servant by the name of Wolfgang Kapp. Having felt personally scandalized by the unceremonious farewell bid to the Grand Admiral he privately revered, Kapp was moved five days after the announcement of Tirpitz’s “retirement” to write to Heinrich Schëuch, the Chief of Staff of the War Ministry in General Headquarters, that the news had also “produced a very profound agitation within all circles of the population.”62 Kapp believed, as he also wrote in early April to the prominent Hamburg banker Max von Schinckel, that Tirpitz “was the only one whom the English really feared. Nothing better could happen to England than Bethmann’s complete victory […] With Tirpitz, the only true statesman of the post-Bismarck era has departed. The day of his discharge is a dies nefastus in German history and in the history of this war.”63 To make his case to the world, Kapp wrote a vituperative assault on Bethmann Hollweg that he published on May 20, 1916 titled The National Circles and the Imperial Chancellor, which was distributed in 300 typewritten copies.64 Overnight, Kapp became “famous in the entire Empire,” with his work propelling him into a position that made him “the most important figure of the national opposition,” second in notoriety only to Heinrich Claß. Kapp’s pamphlet also came to mark a “turning point” in what would become a tumultuous political career of his own, culminating in the eponymous putsch for which he served as the figurehead four years later.65 With unremitting severity, Kapp described in his brochure the “intense dissatisfaction and deep mistrust” that “the most loyally minded circles of our people” were feeling – not, he hastened to add, because of any shortcomings displayed by the military forces, but rather and solely because the “political leadership” was so widely perceived as “lacking in determination and clarity of will.”66 Again and again, Kapp pressed home the “discontent” and “disgruntlement” that the German people were experiencing over their government, producing sentiments, he claimed, that were “pervasive” but at the same time paradoxically “hidden to the eyes of many.” “Even His Majesty the Emperor and King,” Kapp asserted, “is 62 

Kapp to Schëuch, 20 March, 1916; cited in Hagenlücke, 123. Kapp to Max Schinckel, 2 April, 1916; cited in ibid., 124. The dies nefastus designated a day in ancient Rome when the courts were closed and no legal business or any secular affairs could be conducted. Because of its profane and unholy connotations, it came to be used to signify any particularly unlucky or inauspicious day. 64  Wolfgang Kapp, Die nationalen Kreise und der Reichskanzler. Denkschrift (Königsberg: n.p., 1916). For details on the publication and circulation of the pamphlet, see Karl Wortmann, Geschichte der Deutschen Vaterlands-Partei 1917–1918 (Halle: Otto Hendel, 1926), 25. 65  Hagenlücke, 124 and 142. 66 Kapp, Die nationalen Kreise, 4. 63 

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said to be ignorant of the existence and the degree of this dissatisfaction.”67 Kapp did not explain how it was that he himself could be aware of what even the Kaiser did not know, but that did not prevent him from asserting his superior knowledge anyway. And the reason, Kapp went on, for the otherwise broad lack of awareness of such a dire state of affairs was the hated Burgfrieden, which he violated even as he deplored it: The free criticism of our public circumstances, as it is open to everyone in speech and print in times of peace, has been completely suppressed since the beginning of the war. Only what is agreeable to the government, what corresponds to its wishes and objectives, still finds reception in the press […] There is absolutely no room for raising divergent opinions. The discussion of war and peace aims is subject to the strictest prohibitions.68

Although there had been frequent infringements of the Burgfrieden, it had rarely been attacked so openly or so directly, and never as a means for criticizing the policy itself and even less for attacking the entire government responsible for implementing and enforcing it. “Be silent, be calm,” Kapp wrote in rancorous mimicry of the official guidelines. “Do not disturb the circles of the government,” he parroted them as advising. “It is their affair, not yours, to determine the fate of the fatherland. Only the government alone possesses the necessary insight and oversight concerning what benefits the fatherland.”69 And about Bethmann Hollweg himself, the main architect of those prohibitions, Kapp expressed disparagement bordering on insolence. “The Imperial Chancellor,” he wrote by way of introducing his grievances, “invokes the absolutely necessary unity of the people, who at such a time, he says, must stand behind him in complete confidence.”70 The Burgfrieden had always been justified as a mechanism for maintaining the unanimity of the people, for preserving the inviolate “spirit of 1914.” Now, perversely, Kapp seemed willing to jettison that unity along with the structures meant to uphold it in the interests of pursuing other political ends, foremost among them injuring, and if possible removing, Bethmann Hollweg himself. “The Imperial Chancellor demands confidence,” Kapp scornfully continued, only to pose the rhetorical question: “Does he have a right to it?”71 The answer for Kapp, obviously, was “no,” but he framed his rationale for that conclusion in incendiary terms. “The phrase ‘unity’,” Kapp explained, “is beginning to play the same unfortunate role for us that the traitorous expression ‘calm is the first duty of citizens’ once did in 1806 after Jena, which is such an inglori67 

Ibid., 4–5. Ibid., 5. 69  Ibid., 6. 70 Ibid. 71  Ibid., 7. 68 

Exeunt Tirpitz

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ous memory in Prussian history.”72 By invoking the defeat of the Prussian army near Jena at the hands of Napoleon and recalling the subsequent infamous decree by the Prussian minister admonishing the citizens to refrain from engaging in any resistance against their French occupiers, which Kapp had brazenly equated with treason, he had entered into new and dangerous terrain. Although Kapp had not explicitly called the Chancellor a traitor, he had by insinuation done so in all but name. Throughout the rest of his tract, Kapp sustained a similarly punishing barrage trained on the Imperial Chancellor, repeatedly denouncing his “craven indecisiveness” and the “weakness” of both him and his government, culminating in the question: “Can the German people have confidence any longer in a political leadership that has so fully betrayed Germany’s honor?”73 Naturally, the question of submarine warfare and “the departure of Tirpitz” factored large in the “betrayal” Kapp felt the Chancellor had committed, but Kapp emphasized that he was describing fundamental deficiencies in the Chancellor and not merely failed policies, insisting that it was “completely false to assume that it is a matter merely of the question of the U-boat war alone that has recently stood in the foreground.”74 That issue had only forced the recognition of what many had long felt, Kapp claimed, namely that the “political leadership” in general was “not up to its task and above all apparently lacks political instincts.”75 As a perhaps surprising but telling example of the comprehensive failure of the government, Kapp singled out its “false nutritional policy.”76 The acute shortages of basic foodstuffs, he maintained, resulted not from the British embargo but rather from “a confused state socialism” in Germany itself and from a “completely false economic conception of trade.”77 In a kind of inversion of the arguments made by Johann Plenge, Kapp suggested that what Germany needed in order to provide food to its people was not a command economy, but an “economic dictator,” a powerful leader who would have the “courage in the face of the spreading state socialism” to “liberate economic life.”78 “We will begin where the need is greatest,” Kapp proposed, “that is, with milk and meat.” Once “liberated” from socialist manipulation and freed to set prices according to market demands, the producers and merchants would, he said, somehow be able to increase supplies and alleviate most of the hardships. “Just the elimination of 72 

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 9. 74  Ibid., 6. 75 Ibid. 76  Ibid., 19. 77  Ibid., 20. 78  Ibid., 23. 73 

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standing in line,” Kapp predicted, “would yield an immeasurable economic advantage through the savings of time for the affected women and mothers of the people.”79 No less significant, he added: “only then will we escape the democratic morass.”80 Despite this foray into free-market economic theory undergirded by antidemocratic invective, and despite his protestations to the contrary, the submarine question remained at the center of Kapp’s complaints. He hammered away at the Chancellor’s refusal to make “determined use of this decisive weapon,” deriding the official explanation that the decision to restrict its use stemmed not from “indecisiveness” but rather from a “sober consideration of all relevant aspects.” Kapp contemptuously dismissed that argument, saying that the German people now realized that not “courage” – Mut – but rather “vacillation” – Wankelmut – had prevented the Chancellor from employing the submarine fully.81 Rising to a further inflammatory accusation, Kapp asserted that “the Imperial Chancellor’s repudiation of aggressive submarine warfare leaves only two possibilities open.”82 The first was the outrageous suggestion that Bethmann Hollweg knew of some other means of defeating Britain but for some reason declined to reveal it, or, alternatively, and even more scandalously, that “the Chancellor does not believe in victory over England and he will thus not achieve it!”83

Rallying Behind Bethmann Only a few months earlier, publicly levelling such allegations at the head of the German government would have been unthinkable. That Kapp felt he could now, in May of 1916, publish and distribute his diatribe with impunity, or at least with the presumed assent of a sizeable segment of the population, was not just startling in itself. It also seemed to confirm that the “unity” of the German people that the Burgfrieden supposedly embodied and that Kapp had so loudly disdained was on the verge of breaking apart or had already irreparably fractured. Clearly, a critical threshold had been crossed either way, and the implications of Kapp’s defiant transgression seriously alarmed the Chancellor and his supporters. Even before Kapp’s pamphlet had been distributed, and during the immediate outcry over the discharge of Tirpitz, Matthias Erzberger had already sent Bethmann Hollweg a memorandum proposing that the Chancellor reconsider his 79 

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 29. 81  Ibid., 8. 82  Ibid., 12. 83 Ibid. 80 

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stance on the public discussion of matters related to the war. The simple reason was that the only people still adhering to the Burgfrieden policy were the dwindling numbers of those who agreed with Bethmann, or who were at least willing to do so openly, and even doing that was becoming more difficult. For apart from the self-imposed constraints necessitated by observing the Burgfrieden, the risks of overtly siding with government policies were themselves not negligible. Erz­ berger recalled in his memoirs that at the time “I found a political madhouse in Berlin: whoever was not for unlimited submarine warfare was declared an enemy of the fatherland, an anti-nationalist, a defeatist, etc.”84 To counter this politics of the “street,” as he called it, and to present the government’s position effectively, Erzberger envisioned “organizing a comprehensive life guard of the government in the war aims discussion”85 that could speak publicly and without reserve. It would not be enough to remove the muzzle of the Burgfrieden, Erzber­ger felt. The supporters of Bethmann Hollweg had to mount a vigorous positive campaign to defend him. Around the same time, the Chancellor himself also began to reach out privately to favorably disposed opinion makers who he felt could help advance his cause. Among his reliable proxies was Adolf von Harnack, who in mid-April 1916 tried to enlist his colleague Gustav von Schmoller in the effort by explaining: “The closer we come – hopefully – to the end of the war, the more important the domestic situation becomes.”86 Although Harnack expressed confidence in the Chancellor’s handling of domestic affairs, he had to admit that it was unfortunately the case that Bethmann Hollweg now had only the Liberals and Social Democrats behind him […], aside from that only individuals from the other parties. It is my desire, and certainly yours as well, to improve this situation; in a conversation with the Imperial Chancellor recently I also had the impression that he would attach great importance to and gratefully accept public support for his foreign and domestic policy from respected men from the circle that had signed the Address concerning Belgium.87

To that end, Harnack asked Schmoller to “write an article in the next few weeks along those lines about some topic on domestic politics for a newspaper or magazine,” adding that it would be advisable, moving forward, “to form an official organization for acting against the Pan-Germans, agitators and big industrialists.”88 As a final incentive, Harnack mentioned that he already had contacted several additional allies for the same purpose, specifically naming, among others, Hermann Oncken, Hans Delbrück, and Ernst ­Troeltsch. 84 Erzberger,

85 Nottmeier, 86 Ibid. 87 

Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 214. Adolf von Harnack, 425.

Harnack to Schmoller, 16 April, 1916; cited in ibid.

88 Ibid.

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For his part, Harnack himself entered the fray by publishing a short but spirited essay on April 21, 1916 in response to an article by Octavio Freiherr von Zedlitz-Neukirch, a conservative politician and member of the Reichstag. Zedlitz-Neukirch had recently called for abandoning any and all moral scruples in waging the war – a barely disguised way of endorsing the unlimited use of submarines – and for relinquishing the unproductive desire to keep Germany’s conscience clean or, in the baron’s quaint metaphor, to keep its “vest white.” Harnack began, as German intellectuals were fond of doing, by quoting a relevant passage from Goethe: “If I can no longer act ethically, I cease to be a human being.” Harnack then proceeded to offer a robust defense of adhering to fundamental ethical principles – of keeping one’s “vest white” – even in the extreme situation of the world war. But Harnack also urged his countrymen to place their faith in their political leadership to implement those principles with the best interests of the entire nation in mind. That was vital for both the present and, even more important, for the future, when Germany would need the confidence and trust of other states as well. “Our statesmen provide for the strength and security of our state,” Harnack reasoned, “when in their considerations about peace aims they imagine it not as isolated but in conjunction with other states.”89 To accuse the political leaders of “fatigue” and “defeatism” when they took such long-term consequences of their decisions into account and exercised prudent restraint in their current actions, revealed those who made such charges, Harnack wrote in what was for him unusually strong language, to be “short-sighted deceivers.” “Patriotism, courage, and energy are not to be calculated in the square kilometers one demands,” he said, “or according to the elementary instruments of power one uses.”90 Rather, those qualities could best be displayed, he argued, by resolutely adhering to one’s fundamental values. Against Zedlitz-Neukirch’s naked, immoral cynicism, and against all those who thought like him, Harnack thus advocated that Germany should do everything in its power to preserve a spotless vest – or at least to prevent it from accumulating any more stains. Elsewhere, other backers of the Chancellor also vigorously took up the fight in his defense, if in a slightly different direction. At the end of May 1916, just after Kapp’s pamphlet was distributed, Paul Rohrbach sent a memorandum to the Foreign Office on “The Peace, Foreign Countries, and the Pan-Germans” in which he tried to persuade the government that, in responding to the assaults from the right, the best defense was an aggressive offence. Calling attention to the “strength and passion of the Pan-German agitation” that, left unchecked, would 89 

Adolf von Harnack, “Abschied von der weißen Weste,” Aus der Friedens- und Kriegsar­ beit (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1916), 306. 90  Ibid. See also Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 426–27.

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only continue to grow unabated, Rohrbach argued that “an entire flood” of their “polemical tracts” was having a devastating impact on public opinion abroad, most decisively in England, France, Russia, Italy, Belgium, and America, constituting a major diplomatic factor in itself that seriously complicated the “question of peace.”91 The impression created abroad by the “Pan-German warmongering,” Rohrbach said, when combined with the resolute refusal of the government to break its silence in reply to their provocations, was that the Pan-Germans appeared to be the more powerful party, seemingly dragging an ineffectual government behind it in its wake. A forceful rebuttal from the highest authorities, Rohrbach advised, would send a needed corrective signal. “If such an authoritative declaration by the German government would occur,” he wrote, “and if the declaration would also deliver convincing evidence that the Pan-Germans are neither being used as a pretext nor capable of terrorizing the government, then that will have a great effect abroad.”92 However, he warned, “one has to be prepared for the most fierce counter-attacks from the Pan-Germans”93 in response. There should be no doubt “that the Pan-Germans themselves are preparing with the greatest determination for a campaign at the moment when it will be possible for them to write and speak without hindrance from the censor.” And Rohrbach ominously, and correctly, concluded that the chief target of the attacks “will then be the personality of the Imperial Chancellor.”94 Perhaps inspired by Rohrbach’s urgent recommendations, Bethmann Hollweg himself went on the offensive in early June. In a speech before the Reichstag he took the risky and unprecedented step of identifying his attackers by name, singling out in particular what he called the “effrontery” of one Wolfgang Kapp. While he admitted that it was “bitter to have to defend oneself against the lies of foreign enemies,” he said he found it “repellent” to be forced to respond to “defamation and slander at home.”95 Denouncing the “secret writings and brochures” that were being circulated by his domestic opponents and that were, he said, “poisoning the people,” the Chancellor scornfully compared the authors of those works to “pirates of public opinion.”96 One historian has called this extraordinary outburst “his most important rhetorical feat.”97 It certainly made a stir, but its actual effect is difficult to assess. 91 

Paul Rohrbach, “Der Friede, das Ausland und die Alldeutschen,” Die alldeutsche Gefahr (Berlin: Hans Robert Engelmann, 1918), 21. 92  Ibid., 22–23. 93  Ibid., 23. 94 Ibid. 95 Thimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 120 96 Ibid. 97  Ritter, 3, 218.

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What Bethmann Hollweg mainly wanted was room to maneuver, which the public attacks against him only restricted. Privately, he was characteristically more circumspect and frank. In a conversation with Theodor Wolff he admitted: The U-boat is a keen weapon. The hope of subduing England with submarines is just as tempting for me as it is for any German. People have spread the rumor that I am against it out of sentimentality, out of a lack of courage. Such rumors are just as stupid as they are insulting. The only thing that counts is the question of cool and sober calculation. Without such sober calculation one should not play with the life of the nation.98

National Committee for an Honorable Peace In early July 1916, representatives of the assorted independent moderate forces arrayed behind Bethmann Hollweg, many of whom belonging to the now sizable company of regular participants in Hans Delbrück’s Mittwochabend, gathered in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin to formalize the unified front Matthias Erzberger had first proposed in April for organizing their fight against their internal opponents. Out of that meeting emerged an organization called the German National Committee for an Honorable Peace,99 which its creators proposed could form a “phalanx of reason” against the “annexationist insanity.”100 The main intention of the so-called National Committee, one of its founding members said, was to combat “the Pan-Germans, with their conservative and national liberal entourage, but also the proponents of a false peace” – which meant the advocates of total military victory – and instead to promote the pursuit of “a prudent middle course.”101 Identifying and hewing to such a “middle course” reflected the favored approach of Bethmann Hollweg himself, who always wanted to keep as many paths open as possible even at the risk of seeming equivocal or inconsistent. But the first few weeks of the National Committee’s existence would demonstrate that prudently staying close to the center was not just politically difficult; in practical terms it proved impossible. With the blessing and the cooperation of the Imperial Chancellery, the National Committee for an Honorable Peace forged ahead with plans to stage major public events in fifty cities all over the empire only one month after its formation, 98 

Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 357. Adolf von Harnack, 432. Cf also Willibald Gutsche, “Deutscher Nationalausschuß für einen ehrenvollen Frieden (DNA) gegründet 1916,” Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte, 2, 197–200. 100  Mommsen, “Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg,” 153; Huber, Deutsche Verfassungs­ geschichte, 5, 237. 101  Prince Karl von Wedel to Rudolf von Valentini, cited in Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 432. 99 Nottmeier,

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on August 1. That date was chosen to coincide with the third anniversary of the beginning of the war, and the large-scale action was meant to introduce the organization and its goals to the entire country. It was just as important that its message resonated abroad, and the size and scope of the planned events were supposed to ensure that “foreign countries know that the German people stand behind its negotiators in the difficult work of peace.”102 Eleven days before the mass rallies on August 1, the Committee also issued a preparatory proclamation announcing the willingness of the organization to support the Chancellor, which was signed by the principal organizers as well as by several industrialists of various political persuasions, among them August Thyssen.103 Further highlighting the ambitious hopes invested in the effort, the speakers who were invited to address the rallies included such well-known figures as Max Weber (in what would be his first public speech in fifteen years), Hermann Oncken, Friedrich Naumann, and Wilhelm Kahl.104 The last name, however, should give one pause. Kahl, we remember, had been Chairman of the ill-conceived Free Patriotic Association the year before, which had folded in on itself soon after its establishment owing to its own debilitating lack of both political clarity and practical relevance. And a similar fate was in store for this more recent attempt to compel, or simply feign, a popular consensus that was in fact rapidly disintegrating. Portentously, even before August 1, the Berliner Tageblatt, ordinarily a reliable ally, had already run a disheartening article complaining that the German National Committee for an Honorable Peace did not know to whom it actually stood closest itself, since there are adherents of all sorts of possible as well as impossible ideas in its ranks. Because it does not want to get on the wrong side of anyone, it thinks it has to get along with everyone, and thus even before its birth the rather anemic creation can contribute only to further increasing the confusion.105

Just as the Berliner Tageblatt had anticipated, on the appointed day of August 1, the heavily promoted series of lectures delivered only disappointing results. Although Harnack and Naumann spoke in Berlin and Leipzig to crowds of several thousand listeners, elsewhere the turnout was meager and, even worse, the message was hopelessly muddled.106 Some of the speakers confusingly used the occasion to champion unlimited submarine warfare, while others took it upon 102 

From a letter by Prince Karl von Wedel on July 7, 1916; cited in Hagenlücke, 76–77. Adolf von Harnack, 433. 104  For a fuller accounting of the speakers and the cities where they appeared, see Gutsche, “Bethmann Hollweg und die Politik der ‘Neuorientierung’,” 225–26. See also Bruendel, 146– 48. 105  Berliner Tageblatt, July 29, 1916; cited in Hagenlücke, 77n28. 106  Mommsen, “Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg,” 153, writes that the events on August 103 Nottmeier,

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themselves to condemn “reorientation” itself and any related domestic reforms. For all of its initial promise and its many prominent advocates, the German National Committee, whose inaugural endeavor could be declared only a “fiasco” and its agenda self-contradictory, instantly lost momentum. It desultorily went through the motions for a few more months and then sank out of sight.107 It did, however, achieve one long-lasting if pernicious effect: it inspired the formation of a belligerent counter-organization, prompting the formation of the rival “Independent Committee for a German Peace,” which announced its existence to the general public on July 13, 1916, little more than a week after the National Committee itself had been founded. Chaired by none other than Professor Dietrich Schäfer, it enjoyed the endorsement of the burgeoning numbers of individuals and groups generally hostile to Bethmann Hollweg and his government. Heinrich Claß, who like Schäfer had been lying low for much of the previous year, had been newly electrified when he had heard of the semi-official organization advocating a negotiated peace. Claß immediately wrote to the Chairman of the Pan-German League, Konstantin von Gebsattel, protesting that government-sponsored “committee” was nothing more than a “defeatist undertaking,”108 with “defeatist” an only slightly more diplomatic way of saying “treasonous.” Gebsattel himself, not unreasonably, considered the German National Committee for an Honorable Peace as constituting a “declaration of war” on his own organization and he promised to respond in kind, duly resulting in the Independent Committee.109 Although it lasted only slightly longer than its catalyst, the Independent Committee for a German Peace became the direct predecessor of a far more successful and virulent body, the German Fatherland Party – Deutsche Vaterlandspartei – which came into existence just over a year later, with Wolfgang Kapp playing the leading role in its foundation. That organization, the first real political party in Germany to be spawned by the war, would also play a substantial role in the life of Ernst ­Troeltsch, who quickly emerged as one of its most energetic and committed opponents.

1 failed because at the last minute the Chancellor forbade any direct mention of war aims or that the speakers awaken hopes for peace. 107  Hagenlücke, 78. 108  Ibid., 77. 109 See Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalender. Zweiunddreißigster Jahrgang 1916, eds. Ernst Jäckh and Karl Hönn (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1921), 346.

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Sobriety and Courage Although ­Troeltsch had counted among the select number of associates whom Adolf von Harnack had begun to enlist back in April 1916 to fight on the Chancellor’s behalf, ­Troeltsch had not been one of the founding members the German Committee for an Honorable Peace and also did not speak at any of the events that took place on August 1. But he had taken up the joint cause to defend Bethmann Hollweg in an essay he had published a week before the rallies, on July 22, called “Politics of Courage and Politics of Sobriety.”110 The words in the title were programmatic; indeed, they read, perhaps not accidentally, like a précis of the comments the Chancellor had earlier made in his private conversation with Theodor Wolff in which Bethmann had said that the only thing that mattered now was “sober calculation.” Throughout his essay, ­Troeltsch strategically stressed that “we have a courageous government” and that “the Imperial Chancellor standing at its head has the courage” to lead the country in its time of greatest peril. Like Harnack, ­Troeltsch also borrowed a fitting quotation from Goethe to adorn his argument, drawing a line from Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Jour­ neyman Years. “‘The greatest need of a state’,” it read, “‘is that of a courageous authority’.”111 ­Troeltsch’s repeated emphasis on the importance of “courage” was obviously a carefully calibrated choice. As he had done in his major essay on “Imperialism,” which had been aimed in large part at Heinrich Claß while neglecting to mention his name, ­Troeltsch also formulated his defense of the Chancellor’s courage without referring directly to his newest opponent, Wolfgang Kapp, who had so disdainfully singled out Bethmann Hollweg’s ostensible lack thereof as the most serious challenge besetting Germany. With respect to Kapp’s second main line of attack, namely his accusation that there was a widespread waning of “confidence in the leadership of the Empire,” ­Troeltsch adopted a slightly different approach while still avoiding any explicit reference to its author – and while pointedly reminding his readers of the censorship rules that were officially still in place. “Everyone in the world knows,” ­Troeltsch admitted in general terms, that influential circles of very different origin do not fully and clearly express this confidence and are even inclined to spread a critical voice in the only way possible today of personal or underground propaganda or in cryptic insinuations through the press bound by censorship. That even open declarations of a lack of confidence dare to venture forth is something that we have just experienced with astonishment.112 110  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Politik des Mutes und Politik der Nüchternheit,” Das neue Deutschland 4, 41/45 (1916), 374–77. 111  Ibid., 374. 112 Ibid.

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At the same time as he expressed this disapproval of such open violations of the Burgfrieden, ­Troeltsch acknowledged that it was hard for him, or for anyone else, to assess “the extent of this critical movement” against the government given the strictures still being placed on “public opinion.” Precisely because of the ongoing censorship, there arose “the peculiar paradox that the policies of the Chancellor cannot be thoroughly discussed and defended because of course one cannot, and one may also not prevent one’s opponents from speaking.”113 This extremely awkward situation, ­Troeltsch admitted, had given rise to many “uncertainties” and “ambiguities,” which in turn had led to the understandable urge to criticize the country’s leaders. But he also insisted that for that very reason, and because the war must still be fought and won, it remained incumbent on all Germans to avoid “weakening” the government through “criticism” and, on the contrary, it was necessary to support it with “all means” available.114 For – and he highlighted the following sentence in italics for added emphasis – ­Troeltsch darkly warned: “Unless it is absolutely necessary, only defeated or politically immature peoples overthrow their governments in the middle of a war.”115 That was an arresting statement, jarring as much for the unexpected and unprecedented possibility that it overtly raised regarding Germany’s future as for what it conveyed about the political distance the country had traveled in the relatively short time since the war had begun. For in making it, ­Troeltsch was evoking the potential of open revolt within the German Empire, plainly suggesting there was a real chance that violent insurrection and social chaos could overtake the country, with the haunting, almost unthinkable specter of military defeat hovering in the background. Those were experiences that no one could have previously imagined being possible in Germany, not for several generations anyway, and until quite recently merely the thought that such things could happen there would have seemed preposterous, even nonsensical. As ­Troeltsch obviously realized, even alluding to it also strained against the limits of censorship itself. That left two options: either ignore the distressing reality he had just evoked and retreat back into comforting illusions in order to avoid any objection or reprimand, or face perhaps difficult facts and the consequences they may entail in the interests of an even greater, if frightening, truth. Remarkably, and as a further sign of things to come, ­Troeltsch decided to drop the pretense of neutrality at this point in his essay and to speak openly about what he thought had to be said. Given the grim pass to which political matters in Germany had already come, he said he had become convinced that continuing to 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 

Ibid., 375

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adhere to the Burgfrieden would only mean doing active harm to the government that upheld it against the concerted and increasingly unconcealed efforts of those who wanted to bring it down. “It is not possible,” ­Troeltsch thus wrote, to speak of these things without mentioning these material principles by name. If the most severe injustice is not to be done to the Imperial Government, then it must be possible to formulate these principles even during the time of censorship and to declare one’s allegiance to them by indicating the reasons for that allegiance.116

And it was here, at the latest, that the readers of ­Troeltsch’s essay must have realized that the courage he had invoked in its title did not apply to the Chancellor alone. Making good on his promise to reveal his own position no matter the potential cost, ­Troeltsch then explained that were two fundamental principles that guided all of his political judgments and actions – both in general and also in this particular instance – and that those two principles pertained, respectively, to external and to internal affairs. Both principles represented, in fact, long-standing convictions that he had often expressed in a variety of ways but had never before articulated so freely or so succinctly. The first one, relating to foreign policy, was not to make the war aims dependent on general imperialistic theories, but rather on the objective possibilities of the present situation and of the presumed future, a politics of sobriety and moderation, which alone will make peace possible and rob the latent war after the peace of its dangerousness.

And the second, domestically oriented principle stipulated the inclusion of the left in a positive collaboration with the entire state, because on its willing participation alone rests the possibility of an undiminished prosecution of the war and, after the war, of a strong state that will productively employ all of the forces of its people.117

And with the open declaration of those two core beliefs, although he protested that in revealing them he was merely following the dictates of “realpolitical demands,” ­Troeltsch had entered into new political territory both for himself and for his country. What is interesting in the arguments that followed, however, is that ­Troeltsch seemed less invested in pursuing the implications of the first “principle” as it related to foreign policy than in reflecting on the second one and its meaning for future domestic arrangements. Perhaps he felt he had already said all he wanted or needed to say about the advisability of imperialistic adventures abroad. Or, as was more likely the case, he had simply come to the realistic conclusion that Germany in fact possessed diminishing control over its external fate. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid.

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The latest indication of that brutal and increasingly inescapable fact was the savage, grinding offensive at Verdun, which had been launched by Falkenhayn in February 1916 and by late July, as ­Troeltsch was writing his vindication of the Chancellor, was clearly not going according to plan. The even more bloody Battle of the Somme had just gotten underway on July 1. Reflective of those sober realities, for example, is that any mention of a Central European “block,” however conceived, is conspicuously absent in “Politics of Courage and Politics of Sobriety,” even though that notion had stood at the center of ­Troeltsch’s preoccupations only four months earlier when he had given his speech at the German Society 1914. And, although there is passing reference to “the English blockade”118 in the essay on Bethmann, nowhere did ­Troeltsch even hint at the entire vexed question of submarine warfare and how it might affect Germany’s international posture and reputation.119 But ­Troeltsch knew that Germany did still have some latitude over its internal affairs, and it was on that vital matter, now the only one over which the Germans continued to retain some measure of authority, that he concentrated his most trenchant remarks. In much more optimistic and conciliatory terms than ­Troeltsch had approached the issue the previous year in his somewhat reserved essay for The Labor Force in the New Germany, published in August 1915, he now warmly commended the imperial government for its successful attempts to engage the left, and “above all the organized labor force,” which, he said, had themselves earned that consideration for having stood up for “the endangered state” once the war had broken out. Likewise, and in a deliberately evenhanded gesture, ­Troeltsch praised the left in turn for its own pragmatic recognition and acceptance of “state necessities, military armament, and authoritative leadership.”120 Without both of these positive and necessary cooperative gestures on the left, he implied, Germany would have been defeated long ago. But ­Troeltsch was concerned as much, if not more, about what was yet to come. As he wrote, while speaking of the leadership of the Social Democratic Party and the unions: “the leaders who accomplished this great work of reconcil118 

Ibid., 377. He was, however, fully informed about the matter, as we learn from the diary entry by his former Heidelberg colleague, Karl Hampe, on 2 April, 1916 when ­Troeltsch was visiting there. “­Troeltsch takes a serious and not all too hopeful view of things. He basically believes that the war will end in a draw. He is still not very keen on the Kaiser and the government. […]. He portrays the power struggle between Tirpitz and Bethmann in a much more harsh light [than Max Weber]. He says Tirpitz had secretly thwarted the measures of the government, had intentionally left them in the dark about the number of U-boats etc., had made false statements and led a counter-government, the removal of which has to be seen as advantageous.” Hampe, Kriegstagebuch, 375. 120 ­Troeltsch, “Politik des Mutes,” 376. 119 

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iation would be blown away if they had not been able to hold out to the masses the prospect of a better political situation.”121 That meant that, to indemnify the sacrifices of the men at the front and of the women at home, as well as to recognize their achievements, and, further, in order to preserve and build on the domestic political gains already won, the leaders on the left and the responsible parties within the government would have to provide real, concrete improvements to the political status of the people. And those improvements had to be made credible through meaningful action, which meant changing some of the most contentious laws and institutions of the land. Such changes, while difficult, were crucial, for they would ensure that in the future all people – das Volk – would, as ­Troeltsch put it in a powerful if condensed phrase, would no longer be “treated predominantly as the object of legislation, rather than also be honestly recognized as a subject.”122 ­Troeltsch was fully aware of how provocative his prescriptions would be to those on the other side of the political divide, who had as much to lose as the others had to gain should such an expansion of rights within the German state take place. Acknowledging that there were legitimate differences of opinion between them, ­Troeltsch generously said that he recognized it was “not incomprehensible” that some on the right might think the time had come “finally to protect an old seigneurial culture – Herrenkultur – against democratic mass culture,” and he frankly, as well as tactically, admitted that such a “seigneurial culture” had many “attractions and advantages peculiar to it.”123 “However,” he averred, that is precisely what would make any great power politics impossible. Only with a strong and willing workforce, with the masses who consciously participate in the state, are the enormous efforts possible by which we will slowly be able to overcome the damages of the war.124

In striking these conciliatory tones, ­Troeltsch was clearly making a calculated appeal to the political realism of those of his readers who were still unconvinced by his proposal but remained susceptible to persuasion or were at least capable of accepting the inevitable. He even offered the observation, intended as solace to such skeptical holdouts, that it was not actually necessary to prefer or even to like democracy in order to enjoy its benefits or to recognize its inevitability. “One does not require any abstract enthusiasm for democracy,” he argued,

121 Ibid. 122 

Ibid., 377.

123 Ibid. 124 Ibid.

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to draw such consequences. Here in Germany, as everywhere else, they emerge from the nature of the modern major state, and we can only attempt to lessen the dangers of an all too individualistic character through the transmission of public spirit and discipline.125

The somewhat paternalistic tenor of the last clause suggests that ­Troeltsch himself had perhaps not quite accommodated his own thinking to the political reality he was promoting. But overall, the spirit of the essay, as befitting its title, is one of resolute affirmation of the best political path forward, which was also, as far as ­Troeltsch was concerned, the only one that was truly available. He was convinced that the general development toward ever greater democratization characterized every modern state, as different as the degree and kind of democracy realized in each individual instance necessarily was. The unspoken logical conclusion of that conviction was compelling: by the same token, Germany, too, if it wanted to be an equal participant in the modern world, had no choice but to follow the same ineluctable course leading toward an ever broader implementation of democracy. And to have any chance of accomplishing that end, ­Troeltsch was advising in the “Politics of Courage and Politics of Sobriety” that his fellow Germans should “trust the central leadership.” To be sure, at this point in his thinking ­Troeltsch believed that even embarking on the difficult task of increasing the democratic participation of all citizens could not happen right away and would in any case greatly depend on a favorable outcome of the war. For it remained true, or so he thought, that the German government could “make political victories only out of military ones.” But even now, he said, while the war still continued, the people already had an active and important role to play. Until the job of fighting the war was completed, the most valuable contribution they all could make toward improving the situation at home would be to allow their leader to do his appointed job as well, which meant having the courage to trust that he would and could fulfill his duty. In a concluding hortatory flourish, ­Troeltsch wrote: This war is strangely sober and, with its sacred solemnity, it tolerates no rhetorical pathos. The Chancellor, too, has none. Instead, he has insight and realpolitical sense. We all need it as well. For him, however, as for us all, courage goes without saying.126

It is perhaps difficult now for us to appreciate both the boldness and the sheer unusualness of ­ Troeltsch’s reasonable-seeming, even rather muted-sounding proposals here. For, in offering them, he was overtly breaking not just with the censorship rules that had been in place by then for almost two years (although, to be fair, virtually no one bothered to observe the Burgfrieden anymore and even the Chancellor was in effect enjoining his supporters to ignore it). But, most dra125 Ibid. 126 Ibid.

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matically, ­Troeltsch was also flouting an unspoken understanding on the part of the members of his class not to advocate in public for democratic reforms. Very few of his colleagues, even those who shared his values and convictions, had ventured into those turbulent waters before. Mainly they had refrained out of a loyal sense of duty not to upset the ship of state while it was still being navigated through the storms of war. But they also held back because there was no real unanimity about what those reforms could or should look like, what effect they would actually have, and when, or how, they might take place. Thus far, the most incisive and unambiguous – and, in its explicitness, sole – appeal for “the democratic idea” during the war had come from Gerhard Anschütz, who in his essay in The Labor Force in the New Germany in 1915 had openly demanded abolishing the Prussian three-class franchise without delay and advocated replacing it with an direct, secret, and equal voting mechanism as the best means of providing the bedrock of a genuine German democracy.127 And even earlier, albeit less stridently, Friedrich Meinecke had also tentatively expressed the hope in late 1914 that the war might allow the Germans to finish the business that the failed revolution of 1848 had left incomplete, allowing them finally to accomplish what the 48ers had not succeeded in, [namely] to take the fate of Germany into our own hands, to determine it autonomously and freely. Perhaps now the old rift between monarchical and democratic ideals will close. There are, to be sure, those who wish for one sort of improvement to our constitution, and others for something else, and the Social Democrats leave no doubt that they expect another electoral law for Prussia after the war.128

From the very beginning, starting with his speech in Heidelberg on the day after mobilization, ­Troeltsch himself had consistently alluded to what he considered the political and ethical requirement of recognizing the contributions of the soldiers who constituted the Volksheer by granting them rights on their return that reflected the pledge they had given to the state with their bodies and lives. That had always been an indirect way of arguing for a broadening of political participation, widely understood but properly camouflaged so as not to cause offense or reproach. But in the relatively brief essay on the “Politics of Courage and the Politics of Sobriety” – and, we should keep in mind, at a time of extreme and intensifying acrimony within Germany surrounding the political leadership of 127 

See Anschütz, “Gedanken über künftige Staatsreformen,” Die Arbeiterschaft im neuen Deutschland, especially the last page. ­Troeltsch had also, even earlier, in his contribution to Germany and the World War, referred to “the democratic idea,” but more in passing to object to the Allied assumption that only Western societies embraced or embodied it; see ­Troeltsch, “Der Geist der deutschen Kultur,” 65. 128  Friedrich Meinecke, “Die deutschen Erhebungen von 1813, 1848, 1870 und 1914,” in Die deutsche Erhebung von 1914. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1914), 29. Cf. also Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 131.

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the Imperial Chancellor over such questions – ­Troeltsch had come out not merely in favor of making some “improvement to the constitution,” as Meinecke had cautiously worded it. Now, and much more audaciously, when it was still not officially permitted to take such a partisan stand, ­Troeltsch had spoken out for democracy as such, not just for some specific reforms or minor adjustments, but for the very thing, for the idea of democracy itself.129 True, he had framed his promotion of democracy in ways that he thought would make it more palatable to those who did not – yet – share his point of view, couching his advocacy in the emotionless language of political expediency, presenting it not as an option among others but as an inexorable necessity. But the crucial and extraordinary fact remains simply that he did it.130 Of course, there were countless other Germans both before and after Ernst ­Troeltsch who embraced democracy as the best hope for their country, and their numbers would increase exponentially moving forward. But there were very few who had the intellectual, social, and political resources – in short, the cultural capital – that ­Troeltsch possessed and who would invest as much of that capital in the attempt to achieve that common goal. And it was here, in his relatively short defense of the Imperial Chancellor written in the volatile summer of 1916, that for the first time ­Troeltsch turned explicitly and definitively toward democracy. Although many obstacles remained to turning theory into practice, the public campaign on behalf of the Chancellor appeared at least for the moment to have worked. Despite the disappointing performance of the German National Committee for an Honorable Peace, the organizers behind it had been surprisingly successful in achieving their primary objective. They had effectively tamped down the excesses of the Pan-German provocateurs who had been clamoring for maximal use of the submarine and for minimal restraint on their own ability to lobby for it – all the while loudly demanding the fulfillment of their other burning desires, first and foremost the removal of Bethmann Hollweg himself from power. Thanks to the efforts of his supporters in beating back that threat, the Chancel129 

One of the few to appreciate publicly the full significance of ­Troeltsch’s essay was ­Adolf Grabowsky, who in his necrology wrote that “­Troeltsch counted also politically to the most enlightened minds and, what is especially remarkable for a German professor, he was always ready to stand up for his convictions with deeds. In 1916, he had, incidentally, already expressed in an essay on ‘Politics of Courage and Politics of Sobriety’ very similar ideas to those at the beginning of 1918.” Adolf Grabowsky, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Das neue Deutschland 11 (1923), Heft 3, March, 39–42; cited in Ernst T ­ roeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 414. 130  It is thus a significant lapse that the essay “Politik des Mutes und Politik der Nüchternheit” is never mentioned by Schmidt, Deutscher Historismus und der Übergang zur parlamen­ tarischen Demokratie.

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lor would gain valuable breathing room over the next several months, lasting through the rest of the summer of 1916 and into the fall, allowing him to focus his energies on actually governing. Still, publicly coming to the aid of the Chancellor carried risks. Hans Delbrück had gone so far as to accuse Bethmann’s tormentors of “demagogy,” a strong word that was made even stronger by Delbrück’s liberal application of it. “Even men,” he had sharply written in the April 1916 edition of the Preußische Jahr­ bücher, “whom one can certainly not deny a political sense of responsibility, did not find it amiss to spread among the people notions about submarine warfare, the possibility of its success and the reasons for and against it, which fly in the face of the most obvious facts, and they sought to apply pressure on the government with demagogic means of the most reprehensible kind.”131 Yet it was not so much Delbrück’s endorsement of the Chancellor, or even his forceful rebuke of Bethmann’s enemies, but rather his seemingly innocuous reference to the bleak reality underlying the submarine debate that caught the eye of the military censor, who sent a stern reprimand to Delbrück and issued the order to desist engaging in further public discussions of tactical matters.132 Hermann Oncken apparently also pushed up against the boundaries of the sayable in the speech he gave on August 1 for the National Committee for an Honorable Peace, “On the Threshold of the Third Year of War.” Oncken had exclaimed: “The Fatherland stands too high to put it at risk with the highest temerity,”133 which was taken to imply a call for civil disobedience. It was a further symptom of the enormous strains tearing at the German political fabric that such an unobjectionable, indeed patriotic comment could raise suspicions of subversion.

The Primacy of Domestic Politics The most important victory, though, for the circle around Delbrück and for other proponents of a negotiated peace, which they were all certain would be rendered impossible if Germany pursued a ruthless submarine policy that would inexorably draw the United States into the conflict, was the redirecting of attention away from external war aims, and especially from any annexationist ambitions, and toward a more narrowly drawn domestic agenda, and in particular toward the 131 

Hans Delbrück, “Der Konflikt mit Amerika,” in Krieg und Politik (Berlin: Georg Stilke, 1918), 251. 132  See Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 236n23. 133  Hermann Oncken, An der Schwelle des dritten Kriegsjahres. Rede gehalten bei der am 1. August 1916 in Cassell veranstalteten Kundgebung des Deutschen National-Ausschusses (Cassel: 1916), 9; cited in Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 102.

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question of constitutional reform.134 Over the course of the next twelve months, the focus of German political activity became ever more exclusively trained on internal matters, to the extent that they gradually became a substitute for the discussion of foreign policy objectives altogether. At first this inward focus served as a way of channeling energies away from potentially self-defeating and self-destructive exploits abroad. But then it became clear that domestic politics was the only thing remaining to Germany over which it could still exert some modicum of control. This tectonic shift from external to internal affairs as the primary arena for state action, already evident in ­Troeltsch’s essay on the politics of sobriety and courage, also emerged in an official memorandum that Adolf von Harnack prepared during the summer of 1916 at the behest of Bethmann Hollweg to provide a possible blueprint for future reconfigurations within the Empire. Called “The Tasks of Peace and the Work of Peace,” it strikingly omits almost entirely any consideration of foreign policy. “The German people are not a nation avid for conquest,” Harnack categorically wrote, notably enough, in one of the few passages dedicated to external concerns, “and the ideals of the conquistadors have no place here.”135 Instead, what motivated the Germans, according to Harnack, was not “the ideal of power,” but rather the ideal of “freedom ready to serve.”136 And those brief, rather cryptic remarks were all he had to say about any outwardly directed political activity in the almost twenty pages of his printed text. Throughout, there is no mention of Weltpolitik, Weltmacht or a Weltreich. Instead, Harnack devoted the rest of his memorandum solely to internal affairs, and above all to the question of what should happen “the moment in which the peace is concluded after this unprecedented world war.”137 Of one thing Harnack was certain. Given “how enormous the tensions are that have accumulated, how new the conditions are under which life must begin again in peace,” he wrote, “half measures would not do: they would only have a provocative effect” and would “cause the most awful reaction, and may God preserve us from what will then inescapably come!”138 And the best, and probably only, way to prevent such a convulsive, even revolutionary end to the already catastrophic war was to introduce what Harnack called “a new franchise.” Harnack said that 134 

Cf. Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 150. von Harnack, “Friedensaufgaben und Friedensarbeit. Eine Denkschrift im Sommer 1916 dem Reichskanzler auf Ersuchen eingereicht,” in Erforschtes und Erlebtes (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1923), 280. 136  Ibid., 279. See Nottmeier, Alfred von Harnack, 430–31, and Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 130–31. 137  Harnack, “Friedensaufgaben und Friedensarbeit,” 281. 138  Ibid., 281–82. 135  Adolf

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“the necessity of changing the Prussian franchise is recognized – one may say ‘on all sides’.”139 He assured the Chancellor that such a change would “not be detrimental” to the Prussian state. But Harnack also cautioned that, on the other hand, if “legitimate concerns against it” should arise and if, as a result of such objections, “granting the universal and secret franchise” did not occur, then “the most serious conflicts would be unleashed.”140 Harnack allowed that a so-called “plural franchise,” or Pluralwahlrecht – basically only a slight modification of the existing system that was being suggested by some conservatives as a compromise – might be substituted for the equal vote. But at the same time he warned, and no doubt rightly, that such a partial solution would not be acceptable to the “returning soldiers.”141 In any event, Harnack expressed confidence that, “in my opinion, a strong and prudent government will find the majority it needs in every franchise, and in general it is more of a moral significance that applies to the franchise question than a political one.”142 Changing the electoral law to make the franchise more fair and inclusive, in other words, was in Harnack’s opinion as much, if not more, an ethical imperative than a political necessity. Obviously, as estimable as they might be, such reflections were hardly ringing endorsements of the intrinsic merits of democratic principles and norms. And in fact Harnack seemed much more content to spend the remainder of his memorandum spelling out the more practical rearrangements that would be required in a newly peaceful German state, focusing on such relatively manageable matters as religious practice, education, housing, hygiene, and worker training. But Harnack’s comments were nevertheless indicative of the tenor and direction of the deliberations that would dominate domestic political discussions over the next year. Reform of the Prussian franchise was needed and was, moreover, unavoidable: on that much everyone agreed – not, perhaps, everyone “on all sides,” as Harnack had over-optimistically ventured, but certainly the majority of those in the center and on the left. The only question was how and when that reform should be implemented. Yet the deeper, more fundamental question about the principles and ideals that would or should breathe life into the sterile paragraphs of the law book were something for which one had to look elsewhere. The whole point of giving the people – or, to be precise, of giving adult male citizens – a free and equal voice in determining the affairs of state was, as ­Troeltsch had stressed in his essay in support of the Chancellor, to treat them not as “objects” to which the laws were 139 

Ibid., 288. Ibid., 288–89. 141  On the mechanics and limitations of the Pluralwahlrecht, see Patemann, 27–28, and Gutsche, Aufstieg und Fall, 178–79. 142  Harnack, “Friedensaufgaben und Friedensarbeit,” 289. 140 

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applied but to allow them to function as subjects who could freely participate in formulating those laws and then just as freely act in accordance with them. Freedom animates democracy, certainly. But it does so in a variety of sometimes contradictory ways. It was to sorting through some of the complexities of that difficult problem that Ernst ­Troeltsch had somewhat earlier turned in his probing essay on “The German Idea of Freedom.”

Is there a German Idea of Freedom? Appearing in Die neue Rundschau in January 1916, the published text on “The German Idea of Freedom” was based on a speech ­Troeltsch had given the previous October in Vienna, the capital of Germany’s major and by then only significant alliance partner. The lecture bears the traces not only of the place where it was held but also of the earlier and more optimistic – or, at any rate, less pessimistic – time in which it was conceived. Among the notions it contains that did not survive the intervening months of intense turmoil over submarine warfare and the resultant challenges to the Imperial Chancellor’s authority was the positive suggestion, as ­Troeltsch put it in the opening of “The German Idea of Freedom,” of creating “a contiguous central block” in Central Europe.143 Interestingly, ­Troeltsch mentioned in a footnote of the published text that, at the time he had given his speech in Vienna, “I had not yet read Naumann’s book on Mitteleuropa,” and ­Troeltsch insisted that any similarities between their conceptions of the economic or political benefits of such a plan had arisen “independently of one another.”144 However, as opposed to the reflections he would deliver on the subject of such a “block” a few months later in his lecture on “The Ideas of 1914,” in his Vienna address he stated unequivocally – undoubtedly taking cognizance of his Austrian-Hungarian hosts – that any such entity “will be precisely a Central European block and not a German one.”145 As we know, ­Troeltsch was more than casually attached to the idea of a unified Mitteleuropa, and in Vienna he returned to it at the very end of his speech, expressing there again the wish that “the formation of a great Central European block” might perhaps also enable the realization of what he termed “the ideal hope that the concept of national and ethnic peoples – Völkergedanke – that is given with the German idea of freedom may also have an effect beyond it and also attract other states.”146 143 

50.

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” Deutsche Rundschau 27 (1916),

144 Ibid. 145  146 

Ibid., 52. Ibid., 75.

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But it was all not to be. In addition to everything else, the decision by Romania to declare war against Austria-Hungary and to join the Entente on August 27, 1916 – an event that sent shock waves through the German High Command, causing the Kaiser to lose his composure and, in a fit of panic, to pronounce the entire war lost, leading to Falkenhayn losing his job the next day – put a definitive end to any remaining dreams of constructing a Central European union, economic or otherwise, and with or without German supervision.147 Yet Central Europe, or economics, or even, ultimately, the war itself did not stand at the center of ­Troeltsch’s thoughts in Vienna about the German idea of freedom, which were essentially unaffected by the vicissitudes of fleeting political events and would thus continue to resonate in his speeches and publications throughout the whole period. As we remember, an extended meditation on the notion of a specifically “German freedom” had stood at the culmination of his essay on “The Spirit of German Culture” in the anthology Germany and the World War in early 1915, and the concept had continued to preoccupy him ever since, appearing prominently in several other works as well.148 Admittedly, the phrase “German freedom” is on the face of it an odd-sounding, slightly off-putting formulation. It seems to suggest the anomalous view that freedom comes in distinct national or cultural permutations, with all of the logical and ethical complications that implies, and ­Troeltsch was perhaps not always as lucid as he could have been about how he understood it. Predictably, this occasional lack of clarity has led to some consternation on the part of later interpreters. Especially because of the adjective “German” placed before the noun, and particularly for those encountering the expression after 1945, there is the almost irresistible sense that it is not just a descriptive phrase, but also, and perhaps fundamentally and therefore unacceptably, an evaluative one. On such a reading, “German freedom” sounds like a ludicrous contradiction in terms, as if freedom were somehow constrained by its very definition. As a result, the notion that there is, or can be, a German freedom rather than simply freedom tout court has troubled many subsequent commentators and it has often caused some to doubt ­Troeltsch’s commitment to other specific political manifestations of freedom – for example, and not insignificantly, to democracy itself.149 147 

See Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 3, 246–47. “Der Geist der deutschen Kultur,” in Deutschland und der Weltkrieg (1915), 88–90. 149  Robert J. Rubanowice felt that ­Troeltsch intended to advocate for, rather than simply to define, the “German concept of freedom,” and Rubanowice reproached ­Troeltsch for his “typical antidemocratic, antiparliamentary wartime statements” and for his alleged “antipathy towards parliamentary, democratic forms of government.” See Rubanowice, 111, 117, 118. Hans148 ­Troeltsch,

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There is no question that ­Troeltsch intended to use the attributive adjective in the phrase “German freedom” comparatively, that is, in order to contrast the noun it modifies to other national iterations of the more general, abstract idea of freedom itself. And he no less certainly also employed the word “German” defensively, which is to say defiantly, out of a self-conscious and unbowed regard for the culture it described, one he thought and had often argued was being systematically and unjustly denigrated in the broader “culture war” against Germany as a whole. As we know, after August 1914, the word “German” had become almost universally a term of abuse, particularly in the Entente countries, and ever since then a good deal of ­Troeltsch’s efforts had consisted in pushing back against and correcting the connotations applied to it from abroad. But ­Troeltsch most emphatically did not think that “German freedom” was somehow intrinsically “superior” to any other expression of it, or, conversely, that all other realizations of freedom were by definition inferior. While he may have been attempting to vindicate Germany through his arguments, and therefore to defend its peculiar conception of freedom, he did not do so by engaging in the kind of cultural political warfare he so frequently deplored on the part of its enemies. Rather, he fundamentally wanted to show, as he memorably said here in his speech in Vienna, and quoting the poet Rudolf Borchardt in an untranslatable play on words, that “we are different from the others” – wir sind anders als die an­ deren.150 Similarly, and necessarily, the specifically German understanding and experience of freedom was in ­Troeltsch’s eyes different from the other instantiations of it – not better, and certainly not worse, but simply, and crucially, different. This central conclusion – ­Troeltsch’s pluralistic affirmation of fundamental cultural difference – should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Georg Drescher, wrote somewhat more cautiously about ­Troeltsch’s ostensible attitude at this time as being “critical of democracy” – demokratiekritisch – which Drescher thought revealed itself in “his standoffish reference to the Western idea of freedom” as opposed to his supposedly unqualified endorsement of the German conception of it; Drescher, 441. And Kurt Flasch believed that “for ­Troeltsch, the specifically ‘German idea of freedom’ is the philosophical meaning of the World War;” Flasch, 162. Common to almost everyone, even if it not always explicitly stated, is the conviction that in his essay on “The German Idea of Freedom” ­Troeltsch wanted to demonstrate, because he also believed in, as Flasch flatly declared, the “superiority of the German conception of freedom.” Ibid., 168. The more serious argument by Gustav Schmidt in Deutscher Historismus und der Übergang zur parlamentarischen Demokratie is that ­Troeltsch did eventually become an unreserved proponent of parliamentary democracy, but only after the defeat in 1918. Schmidt claims that before then, and throughout the war, ­Troeltsch supposedly advocated a so-called “German ideology” that considered German thought – philosophical, ethical, and political – to be not just different from but superior to Western forms. The central concern in Schmidt’s book is thus to explain how this break occurred, whereas I argue that no such change took place because it did not have to. 150 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 54.

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nature and development of his thinking up to this point. As we have seen, he had consistently and repeatedly championed the notion that each cultural or national entity possessed its own inviolable individual integrity, that they all represented discrete Völkerindividualitäten that were themselves the products and expressions of the distinct historical, social, and political forces that had always shaped them and would forever continue to do so. This pluralist perspective had been a prominent theme in his earlier essays on “Imperialism” and on “The Spirit of German Culture,” and it would provide no small part of the justification as well for his concept of Mitteleuropa in “The Ideas of 1914,” where he argued that such a “block” could offer economic and political shelter to the smaller and more vulnerable Völkerindividualitäten that would constitute it. But as we have also seen, the most sophisticated and relevant theoretical underpinning for ­Troeltsch’s conception of the “German idea of freedom” would come in the speech “On the Criteria for Judging Historical Matters,” which he would give to such fanfare on the Kaiser’s birthday on January 27, 1916 and which must have been written soon after he returned from giving his talk on German freedom a few months earlier in Vienna. For there, in the Kaisergeburts­ tagsrede, and expanding on the implications of insights he had already been pursuing for a decade and a half in his more scholarly theological historical studies, ­Troeltsch had set forth a rigorous attempt to reconcile the irreducible heterogeneity of all cultural phenomena across time with the logical, or wissenschaftlich, requirement for universal criteria that would make any comparisons, or judgments, about them possible at all. The problem he identified there was that all normative categories crumble when they come into contact with the unceasing and inevitably corrosive process of historical change. ­Troeltsch would offer a provisional solution to this dilemma by saying that, in fact, we all create new norms all the time, indeed human activity essentially consisted in the constant establishment of values, in the institution of inherently arbitrary norms, which the respective community that produces them recognizes as valid and binding for all of its members, and through the lens of which it unavoidably views the rest of the world as well. The further difficulty was that every other community outside of our own, which likewise has its own different, historically determined set of values and norms, does the same thing, thereby creating another and seemingly insurmountable obstacle to mutual understanding across cultures and times. But the crucial point is that, in each case, those norms are, despite their creators’ contrary impression and belief, neither unchanging nor generally applicable, but merely – and marvelously – the reflection, or perhaps better the distillate, of a particular cultural accretion at a particular moment in time, and that they are all caught up in a perpetual cycle of destruction, metamorphosis, and renewal.

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­Troeltsch had drawn from these fairly abstract considerations several startling and even radical conclusions. Just as there was no one set of values that could be seen as authoritative and obligatory for all peoples everywhere and throughout all history, so too there was no universally valid array of standards that could be used to evaluate any particular expression of any particular intellectual conception or idea. “Humanity,” “development,” “progress” were all concepts that took on identifiable meaning only in their individual, culturally determined, and temporally bound realizations, and the same was true of any other idea – including, not incidentally, the no less abstract concept of freedom. “The modern idea of freedom,” ­Troeltsch thus categorically declared in his Vienna lecture, and reflecting the thinking that he would articulate more fully three months later back at the “club” in Berlin, “is not a univocal dogma of reason, but rather the result of modern political, social, and intellectual development, and for that very reason is peculiar in all great modern peoples.”151 Both the everyday reality of freedom and the metaphysical idea informing it undeniably exist, he was saying, and they always have. But that lived experience exists for different peoples in different ways at different times. What matters in every instance for ­Troeltsch is how the idea expresses itself, for therein lies all the rich, complex diversity that makes each culture, and its sustaining ideas, irreducibly unique. For the purposes of his Vienna speech, then, ­Troeltsch wanted to show how the general idea of freedom that was particular to the modern period had actually come to manifest itself in its major individual political configurations, primarily in Britain, France, the United States, and in Germany as well. But he left no ambiguity about how he understood the idea as such in its modern guise: We are speaking about the great principle of political freedom, which the Atlantic peoples, or the Western Powers, first cultivated in connection with an advancing political and economic development and which, proceeding from them, first made its way into the middle and the east of the continent; it is one of the greatest and most sweeping achievements of the modern world, which not only secures for the individual an inalienable sphere of personal rights vis-à-vis the state, but also portrays state sovereignty itself as arising from the united individuals, so that the peoples emerge as their own self-rulers.152

In these remarkable words, ­Troeltsch actually delivered something more than simply an objective, dispassionate account of what he calls the “great principle of political freedom.” Rather, and already in the fall of 1915, he had revealed his unreserved recognition not only of the existence of that principle, but also of its supreme significance and influence around the world in the modern era. What is more, ­Troeltsch had concluded with a positive exposition of the practical effects 151  152 

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 53.

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of that modern principle that describes democracy in everything but name. Whatever else one might be able to say about this passage, it cannot be that it expresses an “antidemocratic” perspective or even one that is “critical of democracy.” Instead, it conveys the very opposite. If anything, it could be said that ­Troeltsch departed here from his usually strict adherence to neutrality in “scientific” judgments and displayed something like a subjective bias toward the democratic idea. Naturally, even in the context of such general reflections, the war and its effects could not be entirely banished from ­Troeltsch’s mind – and in all probability, without the war he would never have given the lecture in the first place, nor would it have been necessary – and it was in view of that somber background that he turned to one of the most damaging accusations made by the Entente in their “culture war.” That was the claim that Germany was, and remained nothing but, a land of autocratic reaction and repression, that it enforced the servitude of its people by oppressive means, that it epitomized, in short, the very antithesis of democracy and freedom, and that the true German aim in the war was to export its despotic regimen to the rest of the world.153 To this catalogue of denunciations ­Troeltsch calmly responded by asking, and then promising to answer, the following, seemingly simple question: “Where does Germany truly stand […] with respect to this great political progress of the modern world?”154 To begin with, as he had just acknowledged, it was unquestionably the case that the modern principle of political freedom had originated and first taken hold in the relatively richer and politically more stable countries of Western Europe, i.e. initially in England and then in France, and from there it had gradually migrated eastward.155 The English and French sources of the modern conception of freedom were, ­Troeltsch implied, something to be neither celebrated nor lamented, but were simply an historical fact.156 And, inevitably, as it traveled across the continent, the underlying “principle” of freedom naturally accumulated various 153 

For a concise and influential contemporary précis of this view, see Why We are at War. Great Britain’s Case, by Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1914), Chapter VI, “The New German Theory of the State,” 108–17. More subtle, but carried by many of the same convictions, is the book by R. W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern and Arthur Greenwood, The War and Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1916). 154 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 53. 155  This was also an argument prominently made by Hugo Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 49: “The forms in which the common political life of all civilized peoples take place today are of English-French origin.” 156  This is also why the contention by Gustav Schmidt, that ­Troeltsch considered “the basic attitude of the Germans toward history and politics more modern” than Western ones, while conforming to Schmidt’s own basic thesis, does not hold up to scrutiny; Schmidt, Deutscher Historismus, 90.

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elements stemming from its successive cultural habitats, and in so doing was constantly transforming – or synthesizing – the disparate components it assimilated to propagate ever new iterations of that principle in a continuously evolving process – something that one might also call, in a word, “modernization”: Ever since the implementation of the bourgeois capitalistic development also occurred in Germany, the Western ideas of freedom, sometimes with a more English character, sometimes with a more French one, began to prevail here as well. Bourgeois liberalism deeply influenced the unification of the Empire and its constitutional foundation and organization. And when out of this bourgeois-capitalistic development there emerged the great workers movement as its natural result, entirely different ideas underlay it in the form of socialism. But by designating itself as social democracy, it indicated at the same time that it seeks to combine these new concepts with the radically advanced Western ideas of freedom and thus for its part is also closely and consciously connected with the same spirit.157

Within this great transnational, even global development, Germany, too, occupied its own individual place, and while “modernization” did eventually arrive there, it did so somewhat later and to different effect than where that process originated. “Germany followed the West,” ­Troeltsch acknowledged; “but, as everyone knows, this happened with major qualifications, which are still active today.”158 And it was therefore to elucidating those still relevant “qualifications,” to showing how they arose and what they meant, that ­Troeltsch devoted the majority of his essay. There are three main moments in ­Troeltsch’s explication of the specifically German idea of freedom. First (and anticipating an argument made famous two decades later by the philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner), he argued that what he called the relative “belatedness” or “backwardness” – the word ­Troeltsch coined for this condition is Zurückgebliebenheit – of political maturation in Germany meant that it had lagged behind the West with respect to its own social and political formation. Germany preserved for a longer period much of what ­Troeltsch identified as its “medieval, etatist, agrarian” past, with which the more modern elements of “capitalistic, mercantile, civic culture” only subsequently came to be merged and mixed.159 Second, the geographical situation of the German states – land-locked, without natural borders, and hemmed in on all sides by large, hostile powers – produced specific pressures on its historical evolution, not all of which were conducive to the flourishing of freedom. Finally, 157 ­Troeltsch, 158 Ibid.

“Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 54.

159  Ibid., 55. See Helmuth Plessner, Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche (Zurich: Max Niehans, 1935), republished after the war as Die verspätete Nation. Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1959).

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there were the less tangible but no less decisive contributions that the idiosyncratic “German spirit and character” made to “the modern idea of freedom,” which, ­Troeltsch wrote, “Germany also naturally partly adopted, partly developed out of itself, perceiving it and feeling it differently, in its roots differently grounded and its growth differently oriented than was the case in the West.”160 In addressing the first of these three factors he had isolated – namely, that of Germany’s political and social “backwardness” – ­Troeltsch spoke with disarming candor and at considerable length. Perhaps that, too, was a reflection of his lecturing outside of his own country, where he presumably had fewer qualms about, and there were fewer penalties for, speaking more frankly. In further amplifying the origins of this “backwardness,” he said that the postponement of certain developments in Germany had occurred because of the lingering effects of “patriarchal traditions” and, even worse, because of the “heritage of a bureaucratic police state” that itself had internalized and acted according to an “official mistrust regarding the dangers of impermissible political opinions.” That retrograde legacy, ­Troeltsch said, when combined with “a plutocratic franchise” and “the application and interpretation of the laws by an administration that closely identified with certain class interests and antiliberal principles,” had resulted in an overall record that was, as ­Troeltsch now more diplomatically put it, “clouded.”161 ­Troeltsch’s tactful, or discreet, language should not obscure the power of the political critique he had just delivered, which came close to confirming some of the most negative judgments coming from abroad about the nature of the German state. Given that apparent concession, it is of extreme significance that, at this precise juncture of his talk, ­Troeltsch cited with approval the work of Hugo Preuß, author of the book The German People and Politics, which had appeared in May 1915, half a year before ­Troeltsch spoke in Vienna. “As an astute writer, Hugo Preuß, recently explained,” ­Troeltsch said, thereby indicating his agreement with Preuß, “Germany was and is an authoritarian state – Obrigkeitsstaat – and not a popular state – Volksstaat.”162 Before his book had come out, Preuß had been a relatively obscure professor of law and a liberal politician in Berlin.163 But The German People and Politics made Preuß instantly famous, earning him acclaim and respect from his similar160 ­Troeltsch,

“Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 55. This is why it is problematic, at best, to say, as Gustav Schmidt does, that according to ­Troeltsch “the German idea of freedom” is “the political form of historicism,” which begs as many questions as it seems to answer. See Schmidt, Deutscher Historismus, 96. 161 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 56. 162 Ibid. 163  See Michael Dreyer, Hugo Preuß. Biografie eines Demokraten (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2018).

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ly inclined colleagues, which laid the groundwork for his being chosen as the author of the Weimar constitution four years later. The German People and Pol­ itics is a lengthy, learned, yet engagingly written analysis of the structural deficiencies of the German polity as Preuß understood it. Combining an informative historical overview of the previous century with shrewd observations on how that hundred-year development had produced and sustained the contemporary situation, Preuß also found that Germany was indeed “different” from its Western neighbors with regard to its political development and organization, and that the chief difference setting it apart resided in what he called its peculiar “dualism of authoritarian government and constitutional state.”164 For a variety of reasons, which Preuß elaborated with great acuity in his book, Germany had stubbornly remained dominated by an authoritarian governing apparatus even as it incorporated many of the elements of what he, again similar to ­Troeltsch, described as “the modern form of the state in general.”165 (Preuß, who took care to point out on the very first page that he was being mindful of the Burgfrieden – he composed the book in early 1915 – studiously avoided using the word “democracy” to characterize what he called “the modern form” of political organization. But his intended readers understood nevertheless what he meant.) The challenge for Germany was to find the way to transition from governance by and through a conservative elite to one that reflected and embodied the will of the people. Preuß himself did not underestimate the size of that challenge: The prerequisite [for that transition] is a common political will capable of action in the people, its capacity for governing through self-organization. But who can create that will if the historical development has arranged it so that the authoritarian government is the sole political power capable of action?166

It was a difficult question – how to make a people unaccustomed to exerting its political will comfortable, even confident, in doing so, and how best to develop and select leaders capable of guiding them in the process. It was a challenge that would famously preoccupy Max Weber as well. Preuß’s book had been intended to provide merely a diagnosis, not a cure. But his evaluation, if not immediately acted upon, was widely received and in certain circles positively appreciated. In a review published in the Berliner Tageblatt not long after his book appeared, Engelbert Pernerstorfer, the Social Democratic Vice President of the Austrian House of Representatives, incisively and symptomatically wrote: 164 Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 72. See the extensive and excellent discussion of Preuß’s book in Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 68–88. 165 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 56. 166 Preuß, Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 164.

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The majority of the German people certainly does not consist of conservative elements. And yet it has tolerated that it is governed conservatively. To be sure, Germany has a modern form of state, but it is subject to, as Hugo Preuß says in a felicitous expression, an authoritarian government – Obrigkeitsregierung. In Austria we are as well. But here the ultimate omnipotence of that autocracy is limited by the manifold strong national movements that oppose one another. The contradiction between a high material civilization, high intellectual culture, a strong, unified political party formation (whereby the socialistic democracy plays a particular role) and the real political impotence of the German people lends it a backward character in the eyes of the Western democracies.167

Another Austrian Social Democrat, the prominent lawyer and philosopher Max Adler, later similarly extolled “Professor Hugo Preuß,” who, Adler wrote, in his courageous book ‘The German People and Politics’ answered the question of why the Germans, with their ‘political otherness,’ are so unbeloved in the entire world and defined this otherness as their subjugation to an authoritarian government instead of to an ordering of their state affairs through self-government.168

While these reactions to the book must have been gratifying to the author, not all of the responses were so positive. For despite Preuß’s literal observance of the Burgfrieden, his thinly disguised promotion of fundamental political change in the name of the self-governance of the people unsurprisingly drew the interest of the censor as well. Although Preuß’s publisher, Eugen Diederichs, somehow managed to issue the book without submitting it for pre-approval to the review board, he did receive a formal “reprimand” when it appeared.169 The 13,000 copies Diederichs was able to sell by 1918 no doubt provided some consolation for his trouble. To ­Troeltsch, the basic message of Preuß’s book was equally persuasive and it prompted him to make this related general observation about his fellow Germans – and thereby issue a challenge of his own to them: Such a people must evolve and liberate all the strength available to it; it must equalize itself with the other peoples of the world, must consciously want its own development and take pleasure in itself. But that is only possible if we progress to a significant degree from an authoritarian to a popular state, from a class state to one of mutual equality – Gleichberechtigung – from a hegemonic state to a commonwealth – vom Herrschaftsstaat zum Gemeinwesen.170 167 Engelbert Pernerstorfer, “Wir und die andern,” Berliner Tageblatt 421 (19 August, 1915), 2; cited in Detlef Lehnert, “‘Das deutsche Volk und die Politik’: Säkularbetrachtungen im Themenkontext einer Programmschrift von Hugo Preuß,” in “Das deutsche Volk und die Politik.” Hugo Preuß und der Streit um “Sonderwege”, ed. Detlef Lehnert (Berlin: Metropol, 2017), 9–10. 168  Max Adler, “Friede und Demokratie,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 192 (15 July, 1917), 2; cited in Lehnert, “‘Das deutsche Volk’,” 11. 169  Lehnert, “‘Das deutsche Volk und die Politik’,” 8. 170 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 57.

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These extraordinary words, spoken in the autumn of 1915, should be taken seriously and pondered deeply by anyone who imagines, all evidence to the contrary, that ­Troeltsch was at any stage of his thinking somehow “hostile” toward democracy or hesitant in recommending it for his own country.171 That being said, however, ­Troeltsch did then pivot to what one might call the logical obverse of this insight. As he had already candidly admitted, and in doing so had summoned Hugo Preuß as his witness, Germany was, compared to the major Western democracies, underdeveloped politically. It needed, ­Troeltsch had said, to integrate its people fully and equally into its governing structures, and to do that it had to reform or replace those of its institutions and laws which were antiquated or regressive. But that did not mean either that Germany should get rid of its entire political system and abandon its way of life altogether or that it ought to import wholesale political or social models manufactured elsewhere. For one thing: “Democracy has its ethical dangers just as much as aristocracy and autocracy do.”172 And for another: democracy “has not been realized anywhere, not even among the Western peoples, in abstract purity.”173 Political realist – and historian, and philosopher, and social theorist – that he was, ­Troeltsch realized that starry-eyed idealization of democracy was neither appropriate nor helpful. By disengaging critical judgment, any such blind emulation of existing templates of democracy would inevitably enlarge the risk of making preventable mistakes by replicating its undeniable institutional weaknesses and flaws. Increased democracy by all means, but if possible democracy intelligently applied, judiciously and fairly managed, and carefully tailored to existing conditions with the aim of improving the welfare of all: that is what in Ernst ­Troeltsch’s estimation German democracy – or, put differently, the practical political exercise of German freedom – should be. This more sober, not to say somewhat skeptical, stance predominates in the next section of his argument, where ­Troeltsch sought to identify some of the avoidable defects in existing democratic systems of organizing the relationship between the individual and the community. The most common form of democracy was, and still is, parliamentarianism, which ­Troeltsch said had become so

171  A

good corrective to this perception is the essay by Tim B. Müller, “Deutschlands ‘Anderssein’, der ‘Westen’ und die Demokratie. Hugo Preuß’ Weltkriegsschrift ‘Das deutsche Volk und die Politik’,” in “Das deutsche Volk und die Politik.” ed. Detlef Lehnert, 41–82. But Müller claims that ­Troeltsch displayed an “initial enthusiasm for war” that he only later “overcame” in his subsequent “commitment to Weimar democracy,” which as this book demonstrates conforms to a common misperception but not to reality; ibid., 43 and 59. 172 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 57. 173 Ibid.

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ubiquitous that it had taken on the aura of “a kind of modern natural law.”174 “In truth, however,” he objected, “neither modern popular freedom nor, indeed, parliamentary governance is a natural right of reason, but rather an implementation of the idea of freedom on the basis of specifically modern and momentary conditions.”175 Although this judgment may seem surprising, it was entirely in accord with ­Troeltsch’s general cultural pluralism. There was, he thought, no more reason to imagine parliamentarianism was or should be the intrinsically necessary or even the preferable expression of democracy than there was any inherent reason, for instance, for thinking that an Obrigkeitsstaat was the only legitimate or possible alternative. When Hugo Preuß himself considered the issue of how best to embody the “identity of state and people” in political form, he had reached a similar conclusion. “For the organization of such an identity,” Preuß had declared, “the parliamentary system is the most common one historically and politically, yet it is neither the only possible one nor its solely occurring manifestation.”176 For ­Troeltsch, in addition to the logical or theoretical problem involved in regarding parliamentarianism as the only conceivable or permissible form of popular sovereignty – in his view, its predominance was simply the result of historical contingency – there was the perhaps even more serious practical issue that it tended to represent not so much the will of the people as to establish and perpetuate “in truth only the dominion of professional politicians” and it thus most closely reflected their own narrow interests.177 To buttress his claims on this score, ­Troeltsch appealed to another major recent work by a colleague, this time a book by Hans Delbrück, who just before the war had published Government and the Will of the People.178 With his book, Delbrück had not delivered a plaidoyer for democracy; far from it. But he did attempt to provide a fair assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, particularly in its parliamentary form, and in the process Delbrück had arrived at the considered verdict that the German system of non-partisan state officials offered the greatest guarantee of truly representing the “will of the people” in their entirety since, in theory at least, it served all citizens impartially and did not answer to any particular constituency. Moreover, Delbrück showed that he was open to sensible reforms undertaken 174 

Ibid., 59.

175 Ibid.

176 Preuß, 177 Ibid.

Das deutsche Volk und die Politik, 186.

178  Hans Delbrück, Regierung und Volkswille. Eine akademische Vorlesung (Berlin: Georg Stilke, 1914). The foreword is dated 11 November, 1913. On the general outlines of Delbrück’s political stance, see the still informative essay by Emil Daniels, “Delbrück als Politiker,” Am Webstuhl der Zeit, 7–34.

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within the current configuration.179 ­Troeltsch expressly did not agree with Delbrück’s final judgment that there was no need, indeed that it would be a mistake, to eliminate the Obrigkeitsstaat entirely. But Delbrück’s arguments did demonstrate that there were reasonable grounds for disagreement in general about parliamentary democracy itself and they helped to illustrate ­Troeltsch’s greater point that large structural differences in and between different societies grew out of and reflected divergent historical developments.180 But ­Troeltsch’s foremost aim, as the title of his essay indicates, was obviously to show in what, precisely, the German idea of freedom consisted in order to provide a firm intellectual basis for determining the kind of political structure he thought might best correspond to it. In working toward that goal and by way of contrast, he offered compact sketches of the English, French, and American conceptions of freedom, integrating in each case historical and ideological analyses to form what one might call miniature cultural psychograms of each of those respective “ideas.” Those outlines are, on the whole, as balanced and accurate as such vast generalizations can be, and generally sympathetic in their appraisals. ­Troeltsch could not, however, resist pointing out that although the British spread their own notion of “English freedom everywhere as the only possible and humane” version of it, they did so, “to be sure, under the strictest exclusion of all colored people.”181 To ­Troeltsch’s credit, his own insistence that people of color should also be able to enjoy the advantages of democracy predated the war, having appeared prominently, we will recall, in the speech he had given in 1904 at the Protestant Social Congress in Breslau.182 Conversely, ­Troeltsch admixed with his broadly even-handed assessment of the idea of freedom in America – “the purest democracy in the world,” as he magnanimously labeled it – an apparently sincere admiration of the fact that the United States perceived “itself as 179 

Cf. Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 89–91. Admittedly, this does beg the important theoretical question of whether the very process of gradual democratization, which ­Troeltsch obviously recognized and affirmed as an historical reality, may have forestalled or simply obviated parliamentarization. On these complex issues, see Manfred Rauh, Föderalismus und Parlamentarismus im Wilhelminischen Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1973); the searching critique by Dieter Langewiesche, “Das Deutsche Kaiserreich – Bemerkungen zur Diskussion über Parlamentarisierung und Demokratisierung Deutschlands,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 19 (1979), 628–42; and Christoph Schönberger, “Die überholte Parlamentarisierung. Einflußgewinn und fehlende Herrschaftsfähigkeit des Reichstags im sich demokratisierenden Kaiserreich,” Historische Zeitschrift 272 (2001), 623–66. For a informative survey of the secondary literature on the topic, see Thomas Kühne, “Demokratisierung und Parlamentarisierung: Neue Forschungen zur politischen Entwicklungsfähigkeit Deutschlands vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31 (2005), 293–316. 181 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 62. 182  See ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum, 13 and 16. 180 

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something new in the world, as the sanctuary of all the oppressed and burdened.”183 The American conception of equality, as opposed to the august and somewhat chilly French notion of it, was estimable in his eyes because it guaranteed – in theory at any rate – freedom to all people regardless of their social, economic or even ethnic background, and it even seemed to privilege the least privileged among its citizens. It was only after presenting these portraits of the primary national-cultural ideas of freedom in these three major states that ­Troeltsch finally delivered this contrastive definition of the German equivalent: For us, freedom, to the extent that it is the creative participation in the formation of the state will, is not the production of the governmental will out of the summation of individual wills and not the control of business executives by customers, but rather the free, conscious, dutiful devotion to the whole that already exists through history, state, and nation. It is supposed to be freely willed as the expression and epitome of the entire entity and should always be generated anew in one’s own activity. […] This freedom consists more in duties than in rights, or rather in rights that are simultaneously duties. The individuals do not make up the whole, but rather they identify with it. Freedom is not equality, but rather service of the individual in the place assigned to him in the governing organ. Therein lie the dignity and the active influence of the individual, but also restraint and integration.184

Some have taken these lines to reveal a restrictive conception of individual liberty on ­Troeltsch’s part, as if he were advocating the limited notion that the highest, or perhaps even the only true and sole, expression of freedom in the German sense was in dutiful allegiance, which is to say servile submission, to the state.185 However, no less an authority than Hugo Preuß himself, in a published response to ­Troeltsch’s essay, objected to his claim that “the free, conscious, dutiful devotion to the whole that already exists through history, state and nation” somehow encapsulated “the specific essence of the German concept.”186 That is, Preuß did not think that ­Troeltsch’s description of freedom was too restrictive, but instead that it was too broad. ­Troeltsch’s definition, Preuß wrote, “seems to me to be precisely the essence of all political community spirit – Gemeinsinn – and thus of every political freedom.”187 What ­Troeltsch had described as “German” freedom, in other words, was, for Preuß, liberty plain and simple. The phrase “German freedom,” in Preuß’s eyes, thus amounted to something like a tautology, and 183 ­Troeltsch,

“Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 64. Ibid., 65. 185  Although Peter Hoeres offers a generally balanced evaluation of “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” he implies such a reading when discussing this particular passage; Hoeres, 416. 186 Hugo Preuß, “Innere Staatsstruktur und äußere Machtstellung,” Obrigkeitsstaat und großdeutscher Gedanke (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1916), 18. Preuß indicated that the text was based on a lecture he gave on 6 April, 1916. 187  Ibid., 19. 184 

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­ roeltsch’s definition of it basically characterized genuine political freedom any­ T where and everywhere. And, further complicating the picture, ­Troeltsch himself had gone on in his essay to extoll “the autonomous, dutiful devotion and contribution in all vigilance and responsibility” as being the spirit out of which “everything great has emerged in the preceding German century, it characterizes two such opposing expressions of life as the German army and the Socialist Party.”188 It was almost as if ­Troeltsch’s synthesizing instincts had gotten the better of him in this last attempt to unite what had traditionally been regarded as polar opposites within a single conception, which seemed only to muddy instead of clarifying the problem. Some, if not all, of the difficulties raised here can be resolved when one realizes that so far ­Troeltsch had been describing how Germans understood their freedom relative to a collective whole only – for instance, and not incidentally, with respect to the state. That is, it represented ­Troeltsch’s solution to the specific problem of how an individual could preserve his or her freedom while being a part of, and inevitably in greater and smaller ways controlled or constrained by, any given supraindividual body. And, no less important, ­Troeltsch’s solution was unabashedly idealistic. Such an outwardly-directed form of liberty was truly authentic, he argued; it was meaningfully enacted and materially demonstrated precisely because it was freely offered by the individual in the service of the larger whole, whether it be a community, an organization, or indeed an entire state. For that reason, and in order to provide concrete examples of what he meant, ­Troeltsch then launched into an extended discussion of various historical and philosophical manifestations of the ostensibly uniquely German propensity for integrating freely into communal, transpersonal structures of various sizes and complexity, including, intriguingly, the tendency to construct abstract “systems” of thought, but also to form such practical organizations as workers unions, insurance plans, and trade schools.189 But that freely offered devotion of the individual’s labor and collaboration to a greater whole was only one and, as it were, the merely external side of the equation. The other concerned the private, internal experience of freedom, or what ­Troeltsch called the “sphere of the autonomy of the individual purely for himself.”190 Notably, it is here that ­Troeltsch again explicitly recognized and endorsed the Western European contributions to the particular German idea of freedom. “It absorbed here both the French [notion of] human rights as well as the English ideal of independence,” he said; “but it also placed those in its own pe188 ­Troeltsch,

“Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 66. See Ibid., 67. 190  Ibid., 68. 189 

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culiar context, which is determined by the peculiarly German development.”191 Specifically, Germans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had adopted the idea of individual autonomy, enriched by the values of human dignity and independence inherited from both the English and the French, and they then interiorized and privatized those ideas, turning the political concept of “personal freedom” into the intellectual ideal of a virtually limitless internal “self-formation,” or Selbstbildung. That was a notion, ­Troeltsch argued, that also had roots in classical antiquity and had become the basis for the German conception of education, which focused on personal, mental, and moral cultivation, or what is known as Bildung. “One called and calls that,” he said of this notion of Bil­ dung, “German humanity and cosmopolitanism.”192 And the particular historical manifestation of that form of humanism – what is commonly referred to as ­“Wei­mar classicism” after the place where it had been most fully articulated and realized under the aegis of Goethe – was, ­Troeltsch said, “to this day our greatest pride.”193 It was these two distinct, and differently directed, applications of the freely acting individual will, then – one effectuated externally in and for the collective, the other applied inwardly within and for the independent, individual mind – that together constituted for ­Troeltsch the full scope and nature of “German freedom.” And this is a crucial point: ­Troeltsch understood both instantiations of freedom, the personal and the communal, the private and the political, as always operating both separately and in concert with each other. “If one wishes to coin a phrase for it,” he said in summary, “then one would be able to say: organized unity of the people on the basis of a dutiful and simultaneously critical devotion of the individual to the whole, complemented and corrected through the autonomy and individuality of free intellectual Bildung.”194 Or, as he put it even more concisely, capturing it almost with the force of a slogan, it consisted in: “Staatso­ zialismus und Bildungsindividualismus.”195 That was what, for Ernst ­Troeltsch, German freedom in its most concentrated expression meant: socialism of the state combined with, or rather enlivened and counterbalanced by, the inner cultivation of the individual. Again, it is hard to square such unambiguous, powerful statements – made, moreover, in the autumn of 1915 – with later claims by various commentators that in making them he was still somehow opposed to democracy as such during 191 Ibid. 192 Ibid. 193 

Ibid., 69. Ibid., 71. 195  Ibid., 72. 194 

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this or any other stage of his thinking. And from now on, instead of continuing to belabor the obvious, we ought to consider the matter settled. There does remain, however, the related issue of how ­Troeltsch viewed his conception of German freedom relative to others. There has been the suspicion that despite his professed adherence to a genuinely pluralistic perspective, whereby different cultures are just that – different, perhaps even incompatible, but not better or worse than any others – his strong endorsement of a peculiarly German idea of freedom even tendentially suggested that he favored it compared to other national or cultural expressions of liberty. Admittedly, there is some equivocal support for that view. Toward the conclusion of the Vienna address, ­Troeltsch proposed that, in light of the many qualities he had just enumerated, something like “a world mission of German freedom is a very legitimate thought.”196 And, in the very last sentence of his speech, he also advanced the hope that, “next to and above the English and the French idea of freedom, the German one would achieve great world influence,” with the point of contention obviously being the word “above.”197 These are admittedly ambiguous comments and they call out for explanation. Part of an answer might be found in the wider context in which ­Troeltsch made them. For it was in this final, closing section of his remarks that he returned to an extended consideration of the possibility of a “Central European league”198 in connection with what he termed “the most difficult and most dangerous problem of modern politics, the principle of nationality.” For, as he explained: “the principle of nationality is the natural correlate of democracy. From the self-government of peoples follows their self-formation and self-classification.”199 In ­Troeltsch’s view, when the state is construed merely additively and as no more than the sum of the individuals who live within it and who thus coexist within an otherwise undifferentiated group, the grouping mechanism itself becomes the primary means of identification, the “instinctively most palpable” element, as he put it, which is expressed only in such basic, external signs of belonging as a common language or shared customs, or even in a real or imagined “blood relationship.”200 For integrated states that had grown slowly over time that kind of identification can produce a cohesive effect and can have a beneficial influence if successfully combined with other, deeper strands of common experience – namely those which exist in the realm of the mind or spirit. But for those communities which had been artificially merged with one another through geographic, eco196 Ibid. 197 

Ibid., 75. See the critical comments in Flasch, 169. “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 72. 199  Ibid., 73. 200 Ibid. 198 ­Troeltsch,

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nomic, or military necessity, thereby forcibly joining people together who came from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, the nationalist principle, ­Troeltsch thought, contains on the contrary “a deadly explosive powder.”201 In such cases, the inherent susceptibility of democracy to atomization when combined with a tribal nationalism can become an insidious force in state territories that contain large groups of heterogeneous peoples who have been artificially united. The result, ­Troeltsch feared, could be incendiary: A freedom and democracy that makes the self-determination of individuals toward free association programmatic thus means a complete disintegration of such state formations, and every hostile diplomacy that uses the principle of nationality can toss the spark into this powder keg.202

As an example of what he meant, ­Troeltsch mentioned Russia, presumably thinking about its dangerously destabilizing interventions in the Balkans. But he saw a similar and related danger of fragmentation in what he referred to as the “nationalistic-democratic fever destroying Europe.”203 The largest and most worrisome potential victim of such particularist fever was Austria-Hungary, with its multitude of distinct ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. But in Western Europe the recently formed nation of Belgium, constituted only in 1830 by yoking the very different Walloon and Flemish populations together within a single and famously fractious union, was, ­Troeltsch thought, at risk of succumbing to the same contagion as well. These passages, which have sometimes been pointed to – while being taken out of context – as allegedly expressing ­Troeltsch’s animosity toward democracy more generally, seem perhaps startling. But the indefinite article in the first, somewhat opaque quotation just cited – “a freedom and democracy” – and the hyphenation in the second – “nationalistic-democratic” – give one some sense of what he was trying to get at. Not democracy per se, but its commingling with chauvinistic, nationalist impulses was the problem, especially when it was employed as a cynical tool not to unite but to divide people in the avowedly high-minded name of fostering their self-determination. This judgment, too, reflected a long-standing mistrust, indeed a principled rejection, of nationalism on ­Troeltsch’s part, who had strongly condemned what he had termed “the entire gruesome sham of nationality” as a “childhood disease” in his Breslau address on Political Ethics and Christianity.204 Each state, each region, each community, ­Troeltsch held, had to be treated as the unique constellation it was and should be 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid.

204 ­Troeltsch,

Politische Ethik und Christentum, 12.

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shielded as much as possible from unwanted external interference – including the interference of self-interested or, for that matter, well-meaning apostles of democracy. And that is where the idea of Mitteleruropa came in. As ­Troeltsch imagined it, when that notion was broadened even further and “applied to the world of peoples, it means a system of mutual respect and the free development of the ethnic and national individualities” – again, Völkerindividuali­täten – ”next to one another, whereby, to be sure, it is intended that they would restrain themselves to what was necessary for the existence of the state and to the mutual granting of the freedom to develop within these boundaries.”205 And it was here, in this connection, that ­Troeltsch finally suggested that the German idea of freedom may well provide something that the others did or could not offer: As opposed to them, our notion of freedom [entails] not just our right to existence and development, but also the admittedly bold and very idealistic notion of the free, mutual respect and guarantee of development by which every people should be able to evolve its spirit and substance, whereby we hope that the spirit of free integration into a greater whole, or better into the great culture of humanity, would necessarily bring with it the indispensable self-limitation of the individual states.206

­ roeltsch conceded in closing his lecture on “The German Idea of Freedom” that T his vision of such a universalized and ethically rigorous conception of freedom in its German guise – explicitly predicated as it was upon the voluntary “self-limitation” of each national or cultural expression of such freedom – represented “a bold hope” and was even, he said, “a very unrealistic belief,” but one, he felt, on which “our future and our entire spiritual being rests.”207 How in the end should we assess ­Troeltsch’s vision? Hugo Preuß, for one, was unconvinced. Even though Preuß praised the “temperate calm” and “wise appraisal”208 ­Troeltsch brought to the discussion, Preuß repudiated the notion that there could even exist a specifically “German freedom,” or as Preuß sardonically put it, a “Teutonic liberty.” To underscore his point, Preuß deliberately was using the archaizing word “Teutonic” to emphasize how alien and off-putting such a notion would inevitably strike non-Germans, making it highly improbable it would be embraced as a model that might serve as an example for the rest of the world. Preuß shrewdly perceived an additional, political danger for Germany should it decide to try to promote such an idea of a specifically German variety of freedom, which he predicted would only further antagonize the entire planet against it – if that were possible: 205 ­Troeltsch,

“Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 74. Ibid., 75 207 Ibid. 208  Preuß, “Innere Staatsstruktur und äußere Machtstellung,” 18. 206 

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In the present day, the general developmental tendency goes toward the formation of an inner state structure that organizes the state will as the exponent of the people’s will. Are we to isolate ourselves yet again through the concept of a special kind of political freedom as opposed to the general course of development?209

That was a valid criticism, and most people, and history, and eventually ­Troeltsch himself, would come to agree with Preuß. But what ­Troeltsch had in mind was not as crude as the simple notion that there were, or should be, completely independent states adhering to autochthonous, non-overlapping conceptions of freedom that existed in total isolation from one another. Together with the plan to establish some sort of Central European federation, ­Troeltsch’s dual-pronged idea of social and personal freedom promised, rather, something like a threetiered structure of mutually reinforcing liberty. At the highest level, the supranational entity of Mitteleuropa would provide the legal, economic, and military security for the polities within it, enabling them to thrive without fear of being appropriated or colonized or otherwise “improved” by external actors professing to act in the other’s best interests. At the national level, each distinctive way of life, its own political and religious institutions, its historical traditions and cultural practices – including, not least, its characteristic idea of freedom – would thus be preserved from undesired meddling and allowed to follow its own course. And the individual people themselves within those communities would have both the freedom as well as the ability to pursue their own lives, their liberty, and their happiness as they saw fit, free from arbitrary coercion and sheltered from malevolent or even well-intentioned interference. One might even go so far as to say that, by granting the idea of freedom so much space and active protection, by wanting to shield it so assiduously from external influence, ­Troeltsch was, in elaborating the German conception of it, seeking to do no more, but also no less, than attempting to give freedom – back to freedom.

The Duumvirate One year after ­Troeltsch had held his address in Vienna in October 1915, the hope he had expressed there for the establishment of a Central European block that could offer a robust sanctuary in which the free and independent Völkerindi­ vidualitäten residing within it would be able to prosper – a hope, as we know, he still held out in his lecture on “The Ideas of 1914” – no longer seemed to be merely “bold” and “very unrealistic,” as he had already admitted even as he held out that hope. Rather, by the autumn of 1916, the optimism and confidence con209 

Ibid., 19.

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veyed by the plan of a unified Mitteleuropa already felt as if they belonged to a distant and utterly different time. On the positive side, the unrelenting attacks on Bethmann Hollweg and his leadership over the submarine question had subsided after the organized campaign by his supporters to come publicly to his aid seemed to work. It had created, if only temporarily, a protective lull around the beleaguered Chancellor that allowed him to focus his energies elsewhere. That protective hiatus was further extended when General Falkenhayn, who had grown increasingly wearisome and unreliable – and whom in mid-September Bethmann Hollweg, feeling emboldened enough to drop any pretense of civility, contemptuously called a “careerist, schemer, and gambler” – was forced to step down over the fiasco of losing Romania, one of Germany’s last remaining allies, to the Entente.210 In Falkenhayn’s place, and thus forming already the third German Supreme Command in as many years of the war, the Kaiser made a dual appointment, installing both General Erich von Ludendorff and the “Hero of Tannenberg,” Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, as the coequal leaders of the army. At first, Bethmann Hollweg greeted the change in military leadership not only as necessary but as positively welcome. “The whole world knows,” he wrote in a confidential letter to the Privy Counselor to the Emperor, Rudolf von Valentini, that we have the appropriate men in Hindenburg and Ludendorff. In the face of the disaster that has now occurred, it is no longer responsible to allow the previous state of affairs to continue. The situation is too serious and is becoming more serious with every month.211

Just over a week later, the Chancellor put it this way to the Chief of the Military Cabinet General Moriz von Lyncker: Our people would not understand it if Hindenburg were pushed to one side and a second-rate commander were taken in his place. The name Hindenburg fills our enemies with terror, electrifies our army and our people, who have boundless confidence in him. Our human reserves are not inexhaustible, serious concerns about foodstuffs and the length of the war are depressing the mood of the people. But even if he were to lose a battle, which we hope God will prevent, our people would accept it if Hindenburg were in charge, as it would any peace that carries his name. On the other hand, if that doesn’t happen, the voice of the people will attribute the length and the vicissitudes of the war to the Kaiser. We have to reckon with such imponderables.212

The one imponderable Bethmann Hollweg seems not to have considered is that Hindenburg and Ludendorff, instead of seeing themselves only as the passive instruments of the Chancellor’s political calculations, could have designs of their own. Mainly, Bethmann Hollweg seemed to relish the thought of being able to 210 Vietsch,

Bethmann Hollweg, 235. Hollweg to Rudolf von Valentini, 14 June, 1916; cited in Gutsche, Aufstieg

211  Bethmann

und Fall, 189. 212  Mommsen, “Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg,” 147n82.

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rid himself of the detested Falkenhayn. But he soon realized that in the place of a man he considered a reckless gambler and untrustworthy schemer had stepped two implacable warlords who would stop at nothing short of crushing their opponents. On one level, as Bethmann Hollweg recognized, the two experienced and skillful commanders offered much that Germany desperately needed. The gigantic twin battles of 1916 – at Verdun and the Somme – both continued to rage on into the fall and early winter. By their inconclusive ends, each battle would have consumed many hundreds of thousands of lives, remorselessly adding to an already staggering toll. On the German side alone, at the close of the year more than a million men would have died since the war had begun – having claimed 241,000 lives in 1914, 434,000 in 1915 and 340,000 in 1916 – and there was still no way that anyone could see out of the murderous deadlock.213 Hindenburg enjoyed the nearly universal veneration of the Germans, who regarded him as the “Savior of the East,” and there seemed every reason to believe that he could secure victory in the West as well, which Falkenhayn had tried but so disastrously failed to deliver. Hindenburg also appeared reassuringly uninterested in politics, providing another refreshing contrast to his predecessor. Ludendorff was more of an enigma, but at first his inscrutability did not appear overly troubling. Even then, though, there were signs that might have alerted attentive observers that both men’s professional ruthlessness might eventually seek other outlets. “As a military man it is not my role to make politics,” Ludendorff had earlier told Paul Rohrbach, only to add: “but if I wanted to make politics, then it would be called: I hate England.”214 Over time, Ludendorff’s capacity for concentrated hatred would emerge more clearly. As it turned out, and perhaps unsurprisingly given his own disposition, Erich von Falkenhayn proved to be more perceptive than others concerning the aspirations of his ascendant colleagues. In a private audience with the Kaiser in July 1916, Falkenhayn had told Wilhelm: “If Your Majesty takes Hindenburg and Ludendorff, then Your Majesty will cease being Emperor.”215 Hans Delbrück agreed. Looking back just after the war at the Kaiser’s decision to transfer the supreme command of Germany’s army into the hands of Hindenburg and Ludendorff on August 29, 1916, he concluded that “on that day and with that decision the German Empire was lost.”216 A later historian was even 213 

The figures are from Keegan, 318. Nebelin, Ludendorff. Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Siedler, 2010),

214  Manfred

290.

215 Vietsch,

Bethmann Hollweg, 236. Delbrück, Ludendorff, Tirpitz, Falkenhayn (Berlin: Carl Curtius, 1920), cited in Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 236, citing Janssen, 256. 216  Hans

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more trenchant, writing that “on this day the liquidation of Bismarck’s Reich began.”217

Bread and the Franchise! Theodor Wolff, from his observation post in Berlin, reacted to the change of guard at the top with his usual poised detachment. “The news about Falkenhayn and Hindenburg,” he recorded in his diary on August 30, “is of course being well received, but not as enthusiastically as would have been the case earlier. The general pessimism and the disgust for the war are too great.”218 Over the previous months, a kind of communal depression had descended over Germany, a shared sense of dejection and dread that was relieved only occasionally by isolated events that momentarily lifted spirits or merely distracted people from their daily cares and deeper worries. Otherwise, whatever confidence had remained from the long-ago days of 1914 had been replaced by a grim determination simply to carry on, punctuated by expressions of grief, rage, and despair over the unending hardships and misery of the war. Worse, individual responses to those collective misfortunes varied from region to region, with dissatisfaction and anger seeming to increase in proportion to the distance people found themselves from the capital. The discontent become particularly pronounced in the predominantly Catholic south, serving to widen old rifts among the Germans that the war had supposedly closed. Wolff noted that “all persons who come from Bavaria especially paint very dark and sometimes lurid portraits of the mood. The Bavarians say openly that Prussia wanted the war, they engage in wild rants against the highest personages, the most extreme things are prophesied.”219 Arnold Wahnschaffe, Chief of Staff to the Imperial Chancellery, likewise told Wolff that he regretted “that there was so much gossip about the Kaiser and that, especially in Southern Germany, he is judged so unkindly. People are saying that he has his money deposited in the Bank of England, he spends half the day praying, etc.”220 Wolff agreed the situation was unfortunate, but said there was little to be done. “Everyone who returns from Southern Germany,” he noted, “especially from Bavaria, relates stories that one cannot sit in a tram car or in a restaurant without hearing some fierce lèse majesté.”221 217  Arthur

Rosenberg, Die Entstehung der deutschen Republik, 115. Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 419. 219  Ibid., 418. 220  Ibid., 430. 221 Ibid. 218 

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In addition to the horrendous loss of life at the fronts, there were also more proximate causes for the growing resentment and bitterness among ordinary Germans. As early as the spring of 1916, severe shortages of meat and fish, together with constant, painful price increases on whatever other foodstuffs remained available, had begun to take a visible toll.222 “Families, even affluent ones,” Wolff commented in May, “see meat on the table hardly once or twice a week, some even less often. Rice, pasta, etc. are entirely absent. Plus outrageous prices, for fish as well.”223 During the period when the German submarines had remained confined to strictly limited warfare, the British blockade had been able to tighten its grip even further, and by that autumn the already debilitating scarcity of food was beginning to turn from an inconvenience into a critical emergency, and most especially for the lower, poorer classes. As winter approached, starvation became a frighteningly real possibility. During the depths of that terrible time, Wolff reported that “the food situation is getting worse and worse. The bread ration is insufficient, there are no potatoes at all, one eats, apart from the things one acquires on the flourishing ‘black market,’ nothing but turnips.”224 Ernst ­Troeltsch’s friend from Heidelberg, Gertrud von le Fort, who had also moved to Berlin, recalled that during that winter in the capital, “in the restaurants there was only turnip soup, turnip schnitzel, turnip dessert. People later said it wasn’t the weapons but rather the turnips that saved the people.”225 With the falling temperatures keeping everyone indoors and immune systems strained from undernourishment, diseases also more easily took hold and rapidly spread. There were rumors of smallpox in Hamburg and Berlin, and whoever could, got a vaccination.226 On top of everything else, the winter of 1916/17 was exceptionally frigid – some referred to it as “the Siberian cold”227 – which made the drastic shortage of coal almost unbearable – for nearly everyone. To save on fuel, many cities closed down their theaters, museums, and schools, resulting in what many children gleefully called “coal holidays” – Kohlenferien.228 Thanks to such a prolonged “coal vacation” in Berlin, Theodor Wolff’s own two sons got all four weeks of February off from school.229

222 

See Kielmannsegg, 178. Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 380. 224  Ibid., 1, 483–84. 225  Von le Fort, Hälfte des Lebens, 130. 226  See Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 484. 227 Gertrud Meyer, “Erinnerungen an die Arbeitsbedingungen in einer Munitionsfabrik während des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Streiken gegen den Krieg, 97. 228  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 479. 229  Ibid., 1, 484. 223 

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But that seemed to be the only positive result of the privations. It has been estimated that by the end of the war, illness, malnutrition, and exposure to the elements claimed the lives of over 700,000 civilians in Germany.230 Female mortality increased above prewar rates by 11.5 percent in 1916 and 30.4 percent the following year, and child mortality was even higher, rising to 50 percent above what it had been in 1913.231 The often invoked solidarity between those fighting at the front and those working at home, with both enduring unspeakable suffering and sacrifice, was not a mere myth manufactured to inspire perseverance but the simple, desolate truth. As the grievances heard from Southern Germans had revealed, politics was never far from the minds of the people who were forced to experience such adversity, and those with the fewest resources and even less power – that is, the majority – had no trouble finding whom to blame for their plight. Ludwig Haas, an officer of the Reserve Infantry and chief of the Prussian administration in Warsaw, told Theodor Wolff in October, 1916 that “the mood at the front was miserable, particularly against the officers.” A lieutenant stationed in the east relayed having seen placards in the trenches displaying a defiant, rhyming slogan: Wär’ gleicher Lohn und gleiches Essen – Wär’ der Krieg schon längst vergessen – “If we had equal pay and equal food – The war would have been forgotten long ago.”232 The following March, as the first Russian revolution broke out, minor revolts began to occur in the German provinces as well, and the cities of Kiel, Magdeburg, Hamburg, Nuremberg, and places throughout the Rhineland witnessed demonstrations and work stoppages. “They are directed against the government,” Wolff confided to his diary – while also noting that “naturally, the newspapers may not publish a word about it.” And, no less disquieting, the protests were also targeted “against the estate owners who are stockpiling food and not giving any out, against the war, against the whole regime.”233 A week later – in another occurrence that, Wolff again noted, “may not of course be reported” – striking workers in Kiel condensed their demands into a simple, potent mantra. What they wanted, they shouted, was: “Bread and the Franchise!”234 A major part of the tacit bargain that the supporters of Bethmann Hollweg had struck in defending him against the assaults from the right was that he would, in turn and with their backing, continue to advance the cause of “reorientation,” the 230 

Kielmannsegg, 182. Ibid.; Keegan, 318. 232  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 444. Interestingly, the same phrase is cited in the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen, 1929), 46. 233  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 495. Regarding the prohibition on reporting food shortages, see Marquis, 482 234  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 496. 231 

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centerpiece of which was reforming the Prussian three-class franchise and instituting the secret, direct, and above all equal vote for all eligible citizens of the Empire. But the Chancellor, taking refuge behind the Burgfrieden, had never publicly or unequivocally committed himself to that goal. Once some of the internal pressure on Bethmann Hollweg had been eased in the autumn, however, his – and its – advocates reasonably, but more and more impatiently, expected some return on their investment. And the people themselves, the workers, the farmers, and the laborers, as well as many members of the middle classes and of the upper bourgeoisie, all of whom were represented among the soldiers at the front lines, were beginning to make a direct connection between their services for the state and some acknowledgement for their on-going contributions to that state in the form of a greater political recognition of their voice in its governance. Yet Bethmann Hollweg still hesitated to make any overt gestures in that direction. In his memoirs, he justified his reluctance to move forward on the program of reorientation by saying that “the internal contradictions could not be brought to an outward explosion. The war required the cooperation of all parties.”235 Once the war would have been concluded, he wrote, and after the struggle against external enemies was over, anything was possible. But “during the war it was for me a national imperative to pursue the narrow path of prudence between passions, antagonisms, and temptations.”236 As with the plan for a Central European trade union, or more recently with the short-lived German National Committee for an Honorable Peace, Bethmann Hollweg wanted to travel a middle course and to keep as many alternatives open as long as he could while not entirely alienating the mutually antagonistic factions on either side. It was a plausible and familiar political strategy, perhaps not as courageous as ­Troeltsch had suggested in his own vigorous defense of the Chancellor, yet not wholly unjustified or implausible, either. But simply biding time involved its own hazards. For by continuing to put off making a choice, Bethmann Hollweg soon found that some choices had already been made and that eventually he was left standing all alone in the middle. In September 1916, Arnold Wahnschaffe, acting perhaps at the behest of the Chancellor himself, summoned the Editor in Chief of the Berliner Tageblatt to a private conference to sound him out about some planned negotiations that Bethmann Hollweg was scheduled to address in the Reichstag. Theodor Wolff, in his reconstruction of the conversation he recorded in his diary, wrote that he seized the opportunity to press the case for reform. Wolff wrote that he told Wahnschaffe “that the Chancellor must provide clarity about the domestic ‘reorientation.’ 235  236 

Bethmann Hollweg, Betrachtungen zum Weltkriege, 2, 34–35 Ibid., 36.

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Despite the clamoring of the conservatives. The people need it. The long war winter is coming, something has to be offered to the people that they can hold onto. They don’t find it in the war anymore.”237 Wahnschaffe politely agreed, but he said that as soon as the discussion came to “concrete matters,” things became “difficult.” He asked: “Is the Imperial Chancellor supposed to speak about reforming the vote, to give certain assurances? Then a public squabble would arise.” Impatiently, Wolff replied: “nine-tenths of the people are for a domestic restructuring now,” adding that Wahnschaffe knew just as well as he did “what the mood at the front was and how the people would return home. The couple of conservatives didn’t matter at all!”238 Going further, Wolff insisted that “Bethmann cannot make only general phrases but rather has to announce right away at least the secret and direct ballot,” adding that “the Prussian franchise reform is but one part of the necessary ‘reorientation’.”239 Disappointingly, however, when Bethmann Hollweg subsequently appeared before the Reichstag on September 28, 1916 to address the state of the war and broached the domestic question in his closing remarks, he promised only a “free path for all industrious people!”240 It was uncertain what that phrase was supposed to mean, nor was it any more clear when he confidently concluded that, on such a basis, “the strong from all classes will participate gladly and happily in the works of peace as they do now in bloody battle.”241 Wolff predictably found Bethmann’s speech with its vague equivocations “unspeakably weak” and he noted that it made a “supremely miserable impression”242 on others as well. When Wolff walked around the chamber talking to delegates afterward, “the criticism everywhere was equally derogatory. In general there is a very gloomy mood. Not a trace left of the verve and radiant optimism that was paraded earlier.”243 The Chancellor’s carefully chosen wording – saying that he held out the possibility of a “free path for all industrious people!” – was typical of his approach overall, reflecting what his biographer generously called his “politically ambiguous vocabulary.”244 Simultaneously liberal-sounding yet frustratingly noncommittal, his words communicated both a measured distance from formal democracy while holding out some future, if hazy, prospect of equal chances for everyone

237 

Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 428.

238 Ibid. 239 

Ibid., 1, 429. Reichstagsrede, 28 September, 1916; Thimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 143. 241 Ibid. 242  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 434. 243  Ibid., 1, 434–35. 244 Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 210. 240 

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willing to work and support the state, and with everything presented without making any formal guarantees.245 Nevertheless, Bethmann Hollweg’s statement, as nebulous as it was, triggered an acrimonious debate in the Reichstag. In October 1916, Philipp Scheidemann, the speaker of the Social Democratic Party, accused the Chancellor of pretending to favor equality while secretly promoting oligarchy, and Scheidemann vociferously called for a “true people’s government” and drew up a separate reform package that far exceeded the relatively modest proposals adumbrated under “reorientation.” It demanded, in particular: The lifting of censorship and of the state of siege; the establishment of complete freedom of the press and assembly; the release of Germans in protective custody; amnesty for all those convicted of political offences; the creation of a responsible Imperial Ministry; securing the principle that no one can be Imperial Chancellor without possessing the express confidence of the Reichstag and thus the consultation of the popular representatives regarding the responsible affairs of the government itself; the introduction of a general, secret, direct, and equal franchise in state and local government.246

The leader of the Conservative Party, Kuno Count von Westarp, responded to Scheidemann’s long list of demands with a short and adamant “no,” objecting that they amounted to nothing less than the “democratization” of all state institutions and would unacceptably usher in “a democratically governed and organized state.”247 With that, the very thing that Bethmann Hollweg had so wanted to avoid had suddenly moved to the center of discussion. For a time, as usual, the Chancellor resisted taking a position on the underlying questions himself, refusing to address or even to mention “reorientation” in public. Theodor Wolff personally favored a parliamentary regime and he mobilized his newspaper to campaign on its behalf. Over the next several months, throughout the winter and into the spring of 1917, Wolff conducted a multi-pronged operation to urge the Chancellor to take a definitive stand, even arguing that a parliamentary system would not weaken but rather strengthen and protect the monarchy, saying that it would make the Kaiser more popular among the German people and prevent “the hatred abroad” from being “directed against his person.”248 But most importantly, and undeterred by Bethmann’s vacillation, Wolff continued to press him to make a firm pledge, or even merely to utter the word “reorientation” publicly. At long last, in a speech before the Reichstag on February 27, 1917, while addressing the question of “relations in our domestic politics,” the Chancellor 245 

See Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 5, 134.

247 

Ibid., 134–35. Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 442.

246 Ibid. 248 

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seemed to capitulate before all the relentless badgering. On that occasion, although still obviously with considerable reluctance, he suddenly and unexpectedly said out loud the word: “Reorientation!” Perhaps surprised by the expression he saw in the faces of the delegates seated before him, Bethmann immediately blurted out: “Not a pretty word. I believe I am uttering it today for the first time.”249 That was certainly progress of a sort, but it was clearly not enough for some and far too much for others. The same day, Wolff acerbically commented in an article in the Berliner Tageblatt that: Herr v. Bethmann Hollweg declares that, like all his other contemporaries, he did not invent or use the word ‘reorientation’ and that it is a word of rather unattractive coinage. Unfortunately, the people have not yet been offered anything other than an unattractive word that has no ­father.250

Count von Westarp, now directing his ire at the Imperial Chancellor himself, again rejected the creeping democratization implied by his speech, saying that it inadmissibly encroached on “monarchical sovereignty” and that, in any case, the Reichstag had no jurisdiction over the Prussian franchise question in the first place.251 Finally, two weeks later, on March 14, the Chancellor appeared before the Lower House of Representatives to make an impromptu address.252 His speech occurred in the immediate aftermath of the revolutionary agitation in Russia and in direct response to two recent and well-publicized tirades held by a pair of conservative members of the Prussian Upper House of Lords. The two representatives, Heinrich Yorck von Wartenburg and Leopold von Buch, had delivered furious denunciations of democracy in general and of parliamentarianism in particular. In response, Bethmann Hollweg, saying that “this morning I did not have the intention of coming here and speaking serious words,” revealed that he had changed his mind in the meantime, even though he objected that he had “repeatedly expressed my position on the great questions of domestic politics, most recently several weeks ago.” Now, in order to clear things up, the Chancellor said that he had decided to state his views again, publicly and with all possible clarity. Somewhat disingenuously, he insisted that previously “I gave expression to my unshakable conviction that the experience of this war will lead and must lead to a restructuring of our domestic political life in important respects.”253 Clearly sensitive to the criticisms leveled at him by Theodor Wolff and many others, he 249 

Reichstagsrede, 27 February, 1917; Thimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 193. Wolff, Tagebücher 1, 483n2. 251  Huber, 5, 136. 252  On the diatribes by Yorck and von Buch, see Westarp, Konservative Politik, 2, 230. 253  Abgeordnetenhausrede, 14 March, 1917; in Thimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 216–17. 250 

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said he knew that people would say: “what use are words to us, we want to see deeds!”254 Therefore, Bethmann Hollweg delivered the following pledge: “The Royal state government has repeatedly expressed in unmistakable fashion that it will propose a reform of the Prussian franchise.” But, he quickly added, “this reform, which will undoubtedly lead to serious inner conflicts, cannot be taken in hand at a time when we are still being besieged from without by the enemy because we cannot tolerate domestic conflicts during this time.”255 Even though it came with the customary qualification that the “reorientation” could not take place during the war, this declaration was the most unambiguous and forthright commitment to it in principle that he had ever made. This time, as could have been expected, Theodor Wolff deemed Bethmann Hollweg’s “great speech” an equally “great success,” saying that it “made a favorable impression – not, of course, on the Conservatives and the Right National Liberals.”256 Kurt Riezler also thought it “brilliant,” that “the success was tremendous” and he gloated that the Chancellor’s words had left the Conservatives “inwardly disoriented.”257 Conrad Haußmann, a member of the Progressive ­People’s Party, considered it a “historic event in domestic politics. Bethmann has now placed himself openly on the left side and, in the middle of the war, the power struggle is beginning under the leadership of the Imperial Chancellor.”258 The following day, the evening papers of the left-leaning press were also exultant, and the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung went so far as to proclaim that the way had been opened to a “democratic Germany.”259 For their part, those on the right regarded the Chancellor’s public promise to implement reform as the ultimate betrayal. Deciding to beat a momentary tactical retreat, they quickly set about plotting to take their revenge. By the time Bethmann Hollweg gave his surprise speech in the Prussian House of Representatives, however, another development had already taken place that would almost entirely negate any positive effect it might have had. After having definitively announced his break with the right by publicly embracing reform, he made a decision that would cost him the remaining support of those on the left as well. On December 12, 1916, without any prior warning or apparently much consultation, the Chancellor announced to the Reichstag that he had sent a message to the Entente countries via representatives of Spain, 254 

Ibid., 217.

255 Ibid. 256 

Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 488. Tagebücher, 418–19. 258 Haußmann, Schlaglichter, 91. 259  Cited in Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 162. 257 Riezler,

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Switzerland, and the United States, who were acting as formal intermediaries between Germany and its enemies after diplomatic ties had been severed. His message was simple: the German Empire was prepared “to enter immediately into peace negotiations.”260 That announcement, immediately broadcast in the German press, made “a very deep impression” on the German people, Wolff wrote, raising their expectations and hopes for the war to end, adding that “most really believe that peace will now come.”261 The reaction abroad to the German Chancellor’s impetuous offer was swift but devestating. In the French press, suspicions were immediately raised that the proposal amounted to no more than a cynical deception. Many newspapers derided the “hypocrisy” of the Germans. Le Temps used the occasion to enumerate, in punctilious detail, all of Germany’s previous “crimes.”262 And the new British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George – ominously, the government of his liberal predecessor H. H. Asquith had fallen on December 6 primarily over accusations that Asquith lacked the determination to fight and win the war – dismissed any consideration of peace as “unthinkable” until “Prussian military despotism,” which Lloyd George said was a threat to all of civilization, had first been completely eradicated.263 On December 31, it was made public that the Entente countries had formally rejected the German peace proposal, which they labeled “empty and insincere.”264 That humiliating and demoralizing outcome was merely the latest consequence of Bethmann Hollweg’s own political inadequacies, but it almost immediately led to something even worse. For the high-stakes gamble of his apparently impulsive peace offer meant that its refusal left him, and Germany, with few realistic choices, and it made one decision in particular practically irresistible. “It is clearly evident,” Wolff wrote in his diary on January 4, 1917, “that as a result of the Entente note the proponents of unlimited submarine warfare are rapidly gaining ground.”265 With the population starving, cold, and sick, the army faltering and showing alarming signs of dissension, and with the Entente countries exhibiting no interest in negotiations, the existential risks of not employing the submarine to its 260  Reichstagsrede, 12 December, 1916; in Thimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 180. The Finance Minister, Karl Helfferich, strongly intimated in his history of the war that he was the author of the idea to present a peace proposal to the allies; cf. Karl Helfferich, Der Welt­ krieg. Vom Kriegsausbruch bis zum uneingeschränkten U-Bootkrieg (Berlin: Ullstein & Co., 1919), 356. 261  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 462. 262  Ibid., 465. 263  Schröder, 294. 264 Ibid. 265  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 470.

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fullest extent now massively outweighed any lingering reservations about the moral risks involved in doing so. Nine days later, Wolff resignedly registered: “Now everything is in preparation for unlimited submarine war.”266 Wolff felt that it had even become unwise to oppose it publicly anymore. At the end of January in Berlin, he encountered Albert Ballin, Director of the Hamburg America Line. Ballin, Wolff wrote, seemed “very depressed” and said that “he expected as little as I did a decisive result from submarine warfare.” But Wolff advised Ballin “not to speak against the submarine decision anymore, it was no use, and now the matter had to take its course.”267 As expected, on January 31, 1917, Bethmann Hollweg went before the Reich­ stag to announce that, effective immediately, Germany would sink any and all ships sailing on Great Britain, France and Italy, and on the following day the new and now completely untethered submarine offensive commenced.268 That final decision had already been made several weeks before, following a protracted meeting on January 9 at General Headquarters in Pleß. Over the course of several hours of discussions about the submarine question, the Chancellor had tried to withstand the overwhelming consensus among the General Staff who wanted to proceed with using the submarines freed from all restraint.269 The debate placed relentless pressure on Bethmann Hollweg, especially from Hindenburg, who took the resistance from the civilian Chancellor as an affront to his own military authority. Finally, in the late afternoon after a long day of heated deliberations, Bethmann Hollweg finally gave in. After once again repeating his objections, he resignedly said: “If, however, the military authorities consider the submarine war necessary, then I am not in a position to contradict.”270 With that statement, more than a tactical and strategic shift had occurred. In effect, by uttering it, the Chancellor had ceded civilian control over the German Imperial Government to the military, embodied by the domineering duumvirate of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. For Bethmann Hollweg personally, it was “the darkest hour of his political career.”271 But for his country, January 9, 1917 was, in the words of one historian, “the day Imperial Germany died.”272 266 

Ibid., 472. Ibid., 475. 268  Reichstagsrede, 31 January, 1917; in Thimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 187– 91. 269  See Rudolf von Valentini, Kaiser und Kabinettschef, ed. Bernhard Schwertfeger (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1931), 144–46. 270  Schröder, 306. 271  Ritter, 3, 382. 272  Karl Tschuppik, Ludendorff. Die Tragödie des Fachmanns (Vienna: H. Epstein, 1931), 140–41; cited in Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 256. 267 

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Immediately after the resumption of unrestricted submarine activity, Secretary of the Imperial Colonial Office Wilhelm Solf, the founder of the German Society 1914 and a faithful promoter not only of the Chancellor himself but also of a better future for his country as a whole, sent a dispirited letter to his brother, Otto. For Solf, the renewed commitment to use submarines without any limitations ultimately meant that “reason prostrated itself before power.”273 Solf told his brother that he had repeatedly urged Bethmann Hollweg to declare publicly where he stood on the issue, but the Chancellor never had the courage to do it, out of fear of Reventlow with his conservative, Pan-German riff-raff! No one in the entire world believes a word from us anymore. If one holds out an olive branch with one hand and fires off a pistol with the other, then one can also not expect very much trust.274

Solf realized that Bethmann Hollweg was not solely responsible for what he called “this insane decision” to return to unfettered submarine warfare and that it reflected, instead, a deeper, more intractable problem: “We idolize power and unthrone reason. That is how it is, and that is why we will lose this war, unless – a miracle saves us.”275 But Solf still held the Chancellor personally accountable for the more probable outcome of a comprehensive defeat, and Solf’s dismay, even anger over that likely development were palpable: I have worked through thick and thin for two and a half years for Bethmann because in my opinion his policies in both main directions were right, namely, to sustain America’s friendship, and domestic reorientation. And now he’s placing himself right in the middle of my path! But I am not going to take another one.276

Finis Bethmann After Bethmann Hollweg died of pneumonia on January 1, 1921 at the age of 65, Ernst ­Troeltsch published an obituary that offered a modulated, even indulgent assessment of the Chancellor’s personality and career. At the time of his death, Bethmann Hollweg stood as perhaps the most reviled man in Germany, hated more passionately than even the Kaiser himself, and he was widely regarded as the person most responsible for allowing Germany to enter the war and then preventing it from emerging victorious. “Bethmann will forever remain the true gravedigger of Germany,” one of his fiercest critics wrote a year after he 273 

Wilhelm Solf to Otto Solf, 2 February, 1917; cited in Vietsch, Wilhelm Solf, 371.

275 

Ibid., 372.

274 Ibid. 276 Ibid.

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died.277 His reputation abroad was hardly better, and for a time the Allies seriously considered bringing him before a tribunal to answer for war crimes. In ­Troeltsch’s obituary of Bethmann, he rebuked the “arrogance” with which both the Chancellor’s detractors and his far fewer defenders presumed to speak about the man who, ­Troeltsch insisted, counted “among the best and most significant German human beings” of the time, someone whose fate “may be viewed only with great respect and the deepest emotion.”278 This was especially true, ­Troeltsch took care to note, when one compared him with Wilhelm II. ­Troeltsch was adamant that it was “not the Kaiser, who stood rhetorically and theatrically everywhere in the foreground, who was the leader and designer of the German destiny,” but rather Bethmann Hollweg himself.279 The histrionic Emperor, by contrast, ­was quite simply “not a statesman.”280 At the same time, ­Troeltsch acknowledged that the Chancellor had been far from perfect, and that one of his biggest faults was that “he had neither the capacity nor the will to create public opinion and lean on it.”281 In that brief but perceptive remark ­Troeltsch put a finger on the fatal flaw of the Burgfrieden policy and, with it, the greatest weakness of Bethmann Hollweg’s domestic strategy. Designed to stifle internal debate in the interest of national unity, the Burgfrieden in the end succeeded in silencing only its author. By preventing Bethmann himself from answering his critics, it also restrained him from positively shaping public discourse in a way that could have protected both his policies and his ability to achieve his most important goals. And, with regard to those goals, ­Troeltsch reduced the totality of Bethmann’s chancellorship to the attempt, and the failure, to attain two essential objectives on his foreign and domestic agenda: “externally through an understanding with England, and internally through increasingly liberal politics.”282 The war and its outcome obviously signaled the end to the first effort. But, ­Troeltsch wrote, “internally he succeeded even less.” “The reform of the Prussian franchise,” ­Troeltsch concluded, “became, in fact, the innermost and secret reason for his fall.”283 That was certainly true with respect to Bethmann Hollweg’s enemies on the right, but it did not fully explain the disenchantment of his friends in the center 277  Oberst Bauer, Der große Krieg in Feld und Heimat. Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (Tübingen: Osiander, 1922), 142. 278 Ernst ­ Troeltsch, “Bethmann Hollweg,” Kunstwart und Kulturwart 34/5 (1921), 289. Now also in KGA 14, 376–81. 279  Ibid., 290. 280 Ibid. 281 Ibid. 282 Ibid. 283 Ibid.

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and on the left. In his necrology, ­Troeltsch elected to touch on that last sensitive issue only elliptically. He mentioned that during the summer of 1918, the retired Chancellor had invited him to come to the estate in Hohenfinow. Their meeting, ­Troeltsch said, was “on the day when the news came that the great offensive was decisively broken,” which means that it took place in early August 1918, when the last German push on the Western Front was finally halted by the Allies in the Second Battle of the Marne. At one point during their conversation, ­Troeltsch recalled, “I allowed myself to ask him why, with his well-known objections to submarine warfare, he had agreed to it.”284 Bethmann Hollweg’s answer, ­Troeltsch noted, “was highly characteristic”: With flashing eyes, he responded: how could I even ask something like that. The entire army and navy had, in the interests of their honor and supported by public opinion, demanded submarine warfare as the highest test of their abilities and heroism. He said he had doubts about its success, but none that could be definitively proven, and its achievements after all showed that, if we had only had more submarines, the goal might perhaps have been attainable.285

In commenting on this scene, ­Troeltsch tactfully but unequivocally indicated that he disagreed with Bethmann’s assessment of the number and kinds of other options available to the Chancellor – and to Germany. All ­Troeltsch would say publicly was that even despite the almost hopeless situation Germany faced at the beginning of 1917, “I nevertheless could not consider his decision to be objectively accurate or properly justified.”286 ­Troeltsch’s friend and colleague Friedrich Meinecke came to the same conclusion, but he judged Bethmann Hollweg even more harshly. In his memoirs, Meinecke wrote that “I could not and cannot so easily get over his co-responsibility for the decision to wage submarine warfare, which he himself had declared to be so pernicious.” Meinecke continued: A statesman who is as circumspect as he is great and strong would have prevented this decision by any and all means and heroically taken the accusation upon himself that he had thereby caused Germany’s defeat, because his conscience would have had to tell him that the submarine war would not avert defeat, but only make it worse. Bethmann did not possess such heroism. 284 

Karl Hampe recorded a conversation with ­Troeltsch in August, 1919 in which ­Troeltsch spoke about this meeting and gave a slightly different account of their discussion of the submarine question: “­Troeltsch said he confronted Bethmann after the declaration of submarine warfare; the latter became very upset and said: the army had declared through its representatives that it would be incompatible with their honor not to venture this last chance, and the fleet equally desired some activity next to the army. He said he could not break such resistance, although he had been convinced of the perversity of the calculations. Thus the specifically Prussian notions of military honor were victorious over political reason!” Hampe, Kriegstagebuch, 893. 285 ­Troeltsch, “Bethmann Hollweg,” 291. 286 Ibid.

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Perhaps he was also too skeptical and brooding toward himself to want to make his convictions prevail at all costs against the military.287

For Meinecke, Harnack, Delbrück, and ­Troeltsch, as well as for many others besides, it was Bethmann Hollweg’s capitulation before the military camarilla headed by Hindenburg and Ludendorff and, with it, the final forfeiture of his own conscience by acquiescing in the submarine question that caused his erstwhile supporters to abandon any lingering trust or respect they once had for him. And when, as the Chancellor himself had predicted, the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare led to the deaths of more Americans and prompted President Woodrow Wilson to ask the U.S. Congress to declare war on Germany, the likely outcome of that development, which Bethmann Hollweg had also foreseen, was all but assured. ­Troeltsch suggested in his obituary of the Chancellor that the realization of the near inevitability of a German defeat led Bethmann Hollweg to take preemptive steps might have made symbolic amends for his real or perceived role in bringing about the final catastrophe. “With the entry of America into the war,” ­Troeltsch wrote, Bethmann recognized that “the great, decisive crisis had already begun, out of which there was no help.”288 ­Troeltsch speculated that, with nothing else to lose, the Chancellor perhaps thought that the sole remaining “help” for himself and for his country lay in preparing his compatriots for the equally inevitable political changes that would occur as a result of their military loss. In the same vein, ­Troeltsch intimated that, as a kind of proleptic expiation, Bethmann Hollweg had wanted to promote “a thorough ethical consolidation and fundamental political readjustment of the German people, who had to adapt to an entirely new world situation.”289 There was perhaps more of ­Troeltsch than of Bethmann Hollweg in that generous assessment, but it conformed to an interpretation of the Chancellor’s final motives and actions that was shared by others who knew him well. Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador to the United States and a committed opponent of submarine warfare, was forced to return home in March, 1917, after the United States had severed its diplomatic relations with Germany in advance of declaring war against it. Bernstorff told Theodor Wolff that he thought Bethmann Hollweg saw himself as “at least partly to blame” for the adverse turn of events affecting Germany’s external fortunes and for that reason – namely, to atone publicly for his mistakes – the Imperial Chancellor had made his surprising declaration in favor of “reorientation” before the Reichstag.290 “He now wants 287 Meinecke, 288 ­Troeltsch, 289 Ibid. 290 

Autobiographische Schriften, 295 “Bethmann Hollweg,” 291.

Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 490.

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to stand at least before history as the person who had led the German people to freer circumstances. He needs this role before himself, before history, and before the people.” Still, Bernstorff allowed that slightly less altruistic motives may have also prompted Bethmann to take up the banner of reform. “It is also his defense against the attacks that will be raised against him after the peace, during the unavoidable discussion about the causes of the war.”291 Whatever his reasons – to seize an opportune moment to press for the only political objectives still available to him, or to to shield himself preemptively from future recrimination, or simply to try to burnish his reputation in the eyes of posterity, or to forge some amalgam of all of the above – the inscrutable Bethmann Hollweg finally did decide to commit his remaining energy and authority to the expansion of rights in Germany and to try to make it a more free and just state. He may have calculated that, should his enemies on the right prevail against him, he would at least be seen as having gone down for a noble cause. Had he actually succeeded, the outcome would have spoken for itself. And if the world would have come to think better of Germany, and perhaps even of him, as a result, then not everything would have been completely in vain. In the end, it all proved to be too little, too late. No doubt, Bethmann Hollweg’s delayed and even then still hesitant embrace of domestic political reform irrevocably sealed his fate with the right. But it was ultimately the lowly submarine, and Bethmann’s inability or unwillingness to prevent its unrestrained use, that caused his remaining supporters in the center and on the left, including Ernst ­Troeltsch, to disavow him as well. And it was that final collapse of confidence which would bring about Bethmann’s own undoing and in the process hasten the downfall of the state that he had so faithfully but imperfectly served.

291 Ibid.

Chapter Six

The Struggle over Democracy On January 1, 1917, Erhard Deutelmoser, Chief of the War Press branch of the Foreign Office – which made him, in effect, the official spokesman of the German government – gave a short speech during the regular press conference held by the Imperial Ministry of the Interior in the upper chamber of the Reichstag. The subject of the briefing had been prompted by the contemptuous note the Entente had delivered the day before rejecting Bethmann’s impulsive peace proposal. Theodor Wolff, as so often on such occasions, was among those present to hear Deutelmoser’s remarks. Given the circumstances, there was not very much to feel cheerful about on that New Year’s Day, and Deutelmoser’s presentation, which Wolff said he found “rather studied,” did little to lift the mood. The speaker did, however, make a brave attempt to rouse his audience, and by implication all Germans, by appealing to their collective resolve. But to Wolff even that effort felt stale and rote. “Now,” Deutelmoser dutifully enjoined his listeners, “we have to reawaken the spirit of 1914.”1 By the beginning of 1917, that familiar phrase, symbolizing German unity in the face of a hostile world, had long since forfeited whatever genuine motivating power it may have once possessed. Instead, it was starting to sound like a plaintive lament for something permanently lost, and as time went on it would most often be used as a reproach against those who were thought to have forsaken it. For increasingly, and not a little paradoxically, evoking the “spirit of 1914,” which was necessarily always receding ever further from the present, inevitably meant reminding people of its steady waning or, worse, of its irretrievable disappearance – not to speak of the still raging war that had made that spirit necessary in the first place. It thus inescapably called to mind the very divisions that the outbreak of the war had ostensibly overcome, but which since mid-1915 had in fact grown only deeper and wider and all the more pronounced. Of course, there had been a logical flaw in the notion of the “spirit of 1914” all along: the German people could not be unified by fiat alone, simply by brandishing a slogan, and no amount of reiterating the phrase could force reality to conform to the intention 1  Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 469. See also the comments on Deutelmoser in Mommsen, “Die Regierung Bethmann Hollweg,” 149.

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behind it. Even worse, at Deutelmoser’s conference in the Reichstag on that first day of the new year, he had himself indirectly acknowledged by exhorting his audience to “reawaken” the “spirit of 1914” that, like the Burgfrieden that had been designed to sustain it, that spirit was in fact already dead to the world. A little later, in February, a conservative publicist by the name of Max Hildebert Boehm drew a related conclusion, writing fatalistically in the Preußische Jahr­ bücher that, from then on, “August 1914 will in many respects mean to us less the dawning of a new age than, rather, a solemn, poignant farewell, the glorious, thunderous final chord of a romanticism from which the German sensibility can tear itself away only with great sacrifice.”2 But what seems at first to be the candid if grudging acceptance of an evident truth takes on a different cast when one learns that immediately after the war, in 1919, Max Hildebert Boehm, together with Moeller van den Bruck (who four years later became the author of the notorious book Das Dritte Reich) co-founded the so-called June Club, an association of conservative nationalist intellectuals united in their fervent opposition to democracy and to the new German state that rested on its principles.3 For Boehm, and for Moeller van den Bruck and many others like them, the expired “spirit of 1914” came to signify not just what had been lost, but also, and to them even more deplorably, the triumph of what appeared to have supplanted it. Likewise, when General Erich Ludendorff published his memoirs, also in 1919, he pointedly accused Philipp Scheidemann and by implication the entire Social Democratic Party of “having let the spirit of 1914 be corrupted,” suggesting that they had allowed it to be contaminated specifically by democratic ideals, which Ludendorff blamed for having played a significant part in Germany’s defeat.4 Even more broadly and disparagingly, that same year Grand Admiral Tirpitz framed the disaster this way in his own reminiscences: “Complicit in the calamity is the inclination of our intellectuals toward Western culture.”5 In the final eighteen months of the war, the “spirit of 1914,” originally intended to transcend politics and to bring Germany, and all Germans, together under a single banner, became for many a bitter token of its betrayal. To the adherents of that spirit, the mounting national disintegration they saw ravaging Germany dur2 Max

Hildebert Boehm, “Mitteleuropa und das deutsche Kulturproblem,” Preußische Jahrbücher 167 (1917), 460. 3  See Ulrich Prehn, Max Hildebert Boehm. Radikales Ordnungsdenken vom Ersten Welt­ krieg bis in die Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013). Cf. also Moeller van den Bruck, Das Dritte Reich (Berlin: Ring, 1923). 4  Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914–1918 (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1919), 607. 5 Tirpitz, Erinnerungen, 150.

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ing the final phases of the war demonstrated the corrosive damage they believed an encroaching democracy had wrought. In a dismal irony, that belief itself served to turn the appeal to the violated “spirit of 1914” into one more weapon in the ensuing partisan battles that threatened to tear the Germans and their entire country apart.

A Dispirited 1917 By the beginning of 1917 at the very latest, the sense had become widespread in Germany that the unrelenting war was not just awful in the way that all wars are, but that it was exceptionally, even uniquely disastrous. Since most German commentators were classically educated, they had little trouble situating their experience along the long arc of European history. For Lujo Brentano it was quite simply “the greatest catastrophe since the decline of the ancient world.”6 Eduard Meyer, the great Berlin classicist, agreed, but he put a slightly different spin on the matter, writing in April 1917: “my conviction is becoming ever firmer that 1914 forms the turning point of modern development and that it will go downhill from there.”7 And Walther Rathenau was gloomier still, saying in the book that made him famous, Of Coming Things: “this war is not a beginning but an end, and what it will leave behind are ruins.”8 To the very end, Ernst ­Troeltsch himself would remain a principled optimist, but even his mood throughout much of 1917 reflected a similarly somber outlook. The day Bethmann Hollweg communicated the news to the Reichstag that Germany would again begin sinking all Allied ships was January 31, 1917, which fell on a Wednesday and thus coincided with Delbrück’s regular Mittwochabend gathering. Paul Rohrbach, a frequent attendee, remembered that “when the decision of the General Headquarters for unrestricted submarine warfare was announced, Ernst ­Troeltsch […] came to Delbrück’s Evening, hung his hat and coat on a hook with a resigned gesture and said: ‘Today we lost Alsace-Lorraine!’”9 Two months later, in April, ­Troeltsch’s former Heidelberg colleague Karl Hampe made a visit to the capital and happened to run into ­Troeltsch in the subway. “The prevailing mood of all these men,” Hampe wrote in his diary after the brief encounter, “is desperately serious. No one really believes in a sweeping victory 6 

Lujo Brentano, Elsässer Erinnerungen (Berlin: Erich Reiß, 1917), 130. Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, “Politik und Geschichte. Der Althistoriker Eduard Meyer im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Eduard Meyer. Leben und Leistung eines Universalhistorikers, eds. William M. Calder 111 and Alexander Demandt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 495. 8  Walther Rathenau, Von kommenden Dingen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1917), 221. 9 Rohrbach, Um des Teufels Handschrift, 206 7 See

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anymore; just get out of the entanglement as well as one can.”10 Later, when the war had ended, ­Troeltsch confessed to Hampe that “since the beginning of 1917 he had suffered so much from the mistakes of the government he began to become aware of, suffered from the slide into the abyss, that the plunge we have now taken was almost a relief to him.”11 In the summer of 1917, obviously trying not to dwell on that widening chasm, ­Troeltsch sent a disconsolate letter to his sister, Elise. “Bravery is everything and today there are countless wounded hearts,” he told her. “They all must overcome and we all have the best part of our lives behind us.” And regarding the course of the war in particular, ­Troeltsch was not able to be any more comforting: It’s no use tormenting one’s brain; no one knows anything, not even those in government. They are completely in the dark about the matter. One has to have patience and trust that a people with so many good qualities cannot perish despite all of the fools and loudmouths who publicly do the talking.12

Friedrich Meinecke also wrestled with many of the same dark feelings of frustration and helplessness throughout the long difficult months of 1917. But he found that his friendship with ­Troeltsch, and their ability to be frank with each other, helped them both in moments of utter despondency. In his memoirs Meinecke revealed that for me, the hours spent in the company of ­Troeltsch belonged to the richest and most restorative during the war. We fortified each other in our attitude toward the disintegrating domestic tendencies and toward the bad outcome of the war that loomed since 1917. I remember how once during a walk in the Grunewald in 1917 he seemed about to break down in sheer despair and saw in me, as he believed, the stronger one. I only seemed so because I maintained the faith longer than ­Troeltsch that the modest war aims we both advocated were also achievable.13

Reorientation Redux Central to the “modest war aims” Meinecke mentioned that they both shared were the internal reforms known under the shorthand of “reorientation.” ­Troeltsch himself had first used that word publicly in a lecture he had given a year earlier, in January 1916, that had been devoted to “Private Morality and State Morality” describing the initial expectations that many Germans had at the very beginning 10 Hampe,

Kriegstagebuch, 540. Hampe had also contributed an essay on Belgium to the volume Germany and the World War; see Karl Hampe, “Belgien und die großen Mächte,” in Deutschland und der Weltkrieg, 348–92. 11 Hampe, Kriegstagebuch, 892. 12  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Elise ­Troeltsch, 14 June, 1917; cited in Drescher, 422. 13 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 235.

Reorientation Redux

379

of the war. Then, ­Troeltsch had said, everyone had imagined that it would be “a terribly difficult but swift conflict that would essentially restore and secure the earlier status quo and would provide compensation for the war’s costs.”14 However, in the interim – ­Troeltsch had delivered his speech on “Private Morality and State Morality” when the war was already a year and a half old – it had become clear to almost everyone that a mere return to the prewar situation was no longer desirable or even possible. As ­Troeltsch had put it, it had become obvious that the war “was no longer a matter of simple defense, but rather of a reestablishment and reorientation of the future.”15 When ­Troeltsch publicly expressed these words in early 1916, the Burgfrieden was still nominally in force and what might have later appeared as evasive euphemism was at the time instantly recognizable as meaningful, even provocative code. Such was the perceived force of the single word “reorientation” that, as we have seen, fully another year would elapse before the Imperial Chancellor could even bring himself to utter it publicly. And, proving the point, once Bethmann Hollweg did so on February 27, 1917, only to double down by committing to actual “reform” two weeks later on March 14, his deliberate embrace of “reorientation” released a wave of surprised but grateful anticipation on one side and incredulous, seething revulsion on the other. The Social Democrats, as was to be expected, were encouraged but not entirely convinced by Bethmann’s new-found eagerness to promote political change. An article published at the end of March 1917 in Vorwärts greeted the Chancellor’s public affirmation of his commitment to reforming the Prussian electoral system with cautious appreciation. But, it warned, the willingness to wait for such reform until after the war was over had now faded. As if to remind him of the consequences of failing to act, and soon, it mentioned the February Revolution in Russia that had just ended with the abdication of Czar Nicholas II the day after Bethmann Hollweg’s second appearance before the Reichstag: The Chancellor’s speech on March 14 had in many respects a nice ring for democratic ears. We openly acknowledged that. […] But 24 hours later the sound was already no longer the same. Whereas on March 14 one heard above all the adamant will to restructure our domestic political arrangements, […] on March 15 the accent was on a small inconspicuous word: not yet […] For in the meantime a very minor triviality had occurred: the victory of the Russian revolution. We demand […] the immediate abolition of the three-class franchise, preferably tomorrow than day after tomorrow, even better today than tomorrow!16

14  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Privatmoral und Staatsmoral,” in Deutsche Zukunft (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1916), 67. The speech took place on 9 January, 1916 in the Sing-Akademie in Berlin for the benefit of the Viktoria-Fortbildungs- und Fachschule. 15 Ibid. 16  Vorwärts, 86, 28 March, 1917; cited in Patemann, 54.

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The conservatives, consumed by indignation over what they considered Bethmann’s treachery, and equally galvanized by the shocking revolutionary upheavals in the East, were no less quick to respond to the Chancellor’s speech. They concentrated their fury on what they viewed as the illegitimate attempt to undermine Prussian jurisdiction over its own affairs. On March 28, 1917, Georg von Kleist, General of the Cavalry and member of the Prussian Upper House of Lords, summarized the position of his caste with military efficiency. At the end of an impassioned speech delivered to his colleagues in the Herrenhaus in which he condemned any and all so-called “reorientation,” Kleist shouted defiantly: “Hands off old Prussia!”17 In the face of such open and growing defiance from the right, and with revolutionary threats beginning to coalesce on the left, Bethmann Hollweg felt that his only chance of saving the reform of the Prussian electoral law that he had so boldly promised, and in the process of saving himself and his government from collapse, was to enlist the aid of the Kaiser. He decided that he needed to persuade the Emperor to use his supreme authority to proclaim formally and publicly a program of reorientation that included an unequivocal pledge to introduce the equal franchise.18 Stunningly, after days of intense internal negotiations, which were punctuated by emphatic objections from Ludendorff and the majority of the German High Command, the Emperor agreed to his Chancellor’s request to make such a speech from the throne. On April 6, which providentially fell on Good Friday, Wilhelm issued the following “Easter Message” to the German people: The restructuring of the Prussian State Parliament – Landtag – and the liberation of our entire domestic political life from this question, lies especially close to my heart. On my instructions, preliminary work had already begun at the beginning of the war for changing the franchise for the House of Representatives. I now commission you to present to me specific recommendations of the State Ministry so that when our warriors return, this fundamental work for the inner formation of Prussia may be quickly implemented by way of legislation. After the enormous achievements of the entire people in this terrible war there is, I am convinced, no more room in Prussia for the class franchise. The draft law will furthermore provide for the direct and secret vote for the representatives.19

“Direct and secret,” but critically – and fatally – not “equal.” The day before Wilhelm delivered his Easter Message, Bethmann Hollweg had presented a draft 17 

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 58–59. In his memoir, Bethmann Hollweg clearly saw these issues as inextricably linked: “my experiences in the failed electoral reform of 1910 had shown me that any reform of the Prussian franchise, as soon as it left its grounding in the class franchise, would end with the equal vote;” Betrachtungen, 2, 184. 19  Text cited from Westarp, Konservative Politik, 2, 265. 18 

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of the resolution to the State Ministry for final approval. In that document he had specified “that after the enormous achievements of the entire people in this war, a franchise cannot be of benefit to the Prussian state that distinguishes between tiers or classes among the various levels of the population. Representatives should be elected through an equal suffrage and in a direct and secret vote.”20 In the version that the Emperor actually delivered, however, the crucial wording demanding the equality of the vote and abolishing all distinctions among such “tiers or classes” had been eliminated. For whatever reason, the Chancellor had allowed, or perhaps had been persuaded, that the word “equal” be dropped from the public decree. To outside observers it seemed that, once again, at the last minute and when it truly mattered, Bethmann Hollweg had reneged on his own promises and, worse, betrayed his personal convictions.21 Already universally mistrusted and despised on the right, he had finally convinced those on the left as well through this latest apparent abdication of principle and resolve that he was beyond redemption. “Viewed thus,” an early historian of the period wrote, “this draft of the Easter Message is the high point of the domestic political labors of Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg – and at the same time the end.”22

The Onslaught of Democracy As it happened, and no doubt not entirely by coincidence, on April 6, 1917, the day the Kaiser proclaimed his Easter Message promising an eventual reform of the Prussian franchise, the United States declared war against the German Empire. This long dreaded but grimly anticipated event instantly overshadowed everything else, even eclipsing the extraordinary concessions already being made at the highest levels within Germany regarding the shape of its political future. But the initial fear aroused by the entry of America into the war was quickly displaced by a pervasive sense of outrage over President Wilson’s rationale for the decision. In Wilson’s message to Congress four days earlier, on April 2, in which he had famously announced that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” the president had argued that the unrestricted use of submarine warfare – which he scornfully labelled a “cruel and unmanly business” that displayed a “reckless lack of compassion and principle” – had provided the immediate and legally justified 20 

Patemann, 61. Bethmann Hollweg, 266, takes a more forgiving view, arguing that, given the pressures on the Kaiser as well, the Chancellor got “the best possible” result available. 22  Ludwig Bergsträßer, Die preußische Wahlrechtsfrage im Kriege und die Entstehung der Osterbotschaft 1917 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1929), 148. 21 Vietsch,

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reason for his recommendation that the United States give up its neutrality and join the fight. But Wilson also closely tied the submarine question to deeper issues concerning the nature of the state that would deploy what he considered such a fiendish and cowardly weapon. Saying that he had long “been unable to believe that such things would in fact be done by any government that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations,” the President took the next logical step and asserted that “the present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind.” And behind this policy apparently setting Germany at odds with all of humanity, Wilson said, there stood a “selfish and autocratic power,” an “irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck.” The German Empire, Wilson concluded, thus posed a threat that was by definition and by its very existence a danger to “the peace of the world” and to “the freedom of its peoples.” Although the American President took care to emphasize that “we have no quarrel with the German people” and opposed only its government, it was in practice hard to maintain that distinction, and in any case it would be against the German people that the Americans would have to fight. Wilson concluded by saying he believed that democracies alone were capable of sustaining peace, or as he put it, that “a steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.” That, too, was as clear a signal as possible concerning what he thought the final political outcome of the war should be. For, “the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.” The greater motive of the United States in taking up arms against Germany, then, was not merely to subdue their foes in combat and to win the war, but to fight for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.23

Although Germans had become accustomed over the previous two and a half years to seeing themselves portrayed as the very enemies of civilization, to being branded as ruthless “barbarians” and bloodthirsty “huns,” they had rarely been depicted in such stark terms, and never by a head of state, as enemies of humanity as such, which by extension seemed to make them into something other than human beings themselves. And Wilson’s sweeping characterization of the German form of government not just as irredeemably repressive, but also, and even 23 Woodrow Wilson, War Messages, 65th Cong., 1st Sess. Senate Doc. No.  5, Serial No.  7264, Washington, D.C., 1917; 3–8.

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more damningly, as a system that was inherently inimical to freedom and peace – combined with his claim that, conversely, the only kind of government capable of cultivating universal freedom and lasting peace was democracy – all led to only one inescapable and for the Germans intolerable conclusion. The American aim in coming to the aid of the Entente was not only to defeat Germany in battle, but to eradicate its entire political structure by edict and to replace it with one approved by and modeled on the United States of America. One has to assume that, in presenting his arguments to Congress, President Wilson did not know that, almost two years earlier a German legal scholar and politician named Hugo Preuß had already incisively diagnosed the German state as “authoritarian,” and that many prominent and influential people in Germany readily agreed with him. They included Ernst ­Troeltsch, who, we recall, while citing Preuß with approval, had declared as early as October 1915 that “Germany was and is an authoritarian state – Obrigkeitsstaat,” and ­Troeltsch had also proposed concrete ways to remedy the character of the German state and to make it more democratic.24 We know that Wilson was largely ignorant of German politics, history, and culture, and that he was guided more by instinct and political expediency in making his judgments about the German regime than by information and verifiable facts.25 (As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, he had taught himself some of the German language and had briefly contemplated going to Germany to improve his skills, but he had never realized that plan.26) To make matters worse, Wilson had, more generally, “thought very little about foreign policy, either as a scholar or as a presidential candidate,” and the same was true of the rest of his administration, most of whose “leaders had little interest in events outside the United States.”27 Fatefully, the policies Woodrow Wilson announced not only for Germany but for the rest of Europe and the world at large were informed by little or no direct knowledge of, and seemingly less interest in, the complex and long-standing traditions governing the peoples whom he purported to want to save from themselves. Had Wilson actually known about the efforts already underway in Germany to bring about the very changes he advocated and to advance the same ideals he espoused, he probably would have realized that his stated intentions for entering the war, and the way in which he framed them, would very likely be counter-pro24 ­Troeltsch,

“Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 56. the insightful essay by Ido Oren, “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic Peace.’ Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany,” International Security 20/2 (1995), 147–84. 26  Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson. Ein Staatsmann zwischen Puritanertum und Libera­ lismus (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1971), 11. 27  Kendrick A. Clements, “Woodrow Wilson and World War I,” Presidential Studies Quar­ terly 34 (2004), 64. 25 See

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ductive. For he would have understood that his intervention might well discourage the very people in Germany who were already engaged in the same struggle “for democracy” he claimed was an American prerogative. He would have recognized that a significant number of German citizens had actually embarked on and made significant progress in the difficult fight to give their people a “voice in their own government,” and were also energetically championing “the rights and liberties of small nations” while arguing for particular mechanisms to ensure them. He would have also seen that, by turning the promotion of democracy into a specifically Allied war aim, he was simultaneously abetting the native opponents of such ideas, perversely assisting the enemies of democracy inside of Germany by allowing them to argue, and in fact making the argument for them, that democracy was an alien import being forcibly imposed on them from the outside by a hostile, conquering power. Wilson’s words and actions actually made it easier for the German antagonists of democracy to portray those of their fellow countrymen who were pressing for it as the unconscious agents or stooges of a foreign power, or even worse as deliberate traitors to their own nation. Had President Woodrow Wilson been aware of all that, then he surely would have also known that the best way of furthering democracy in Germany would have been to ask those Germans who were already fighting for it themselves how he could have helped them achieve their ostensibly mutual goal. Instead, by acting on the basis of a naïve and ill-informed idealism – to give it the most generous interpretation – which his detractors viewed as arrogant, self-righteous presumption, Wilson gravely harmed the very cause of democracy in Germany he said he wanted to advance while at the same time materially, if unwittingly, aiding its domestic adversaries. Of course, Woodrow Wilson was primarily providing his own compatriots with a justification for war and not, say, for attending a political convention. Whatever his other motivations may have been, Wilson’s overriding concern was to persuade his fellow Americans to commit their lives and resources to battle. For the Germans on both sides of the question, who equally had so much at stake – which is to say, almost everything – it was impossible not to respond to the American President’s challenge. But there were few options for effectively repudiating Wilson’s claims available to those Germans with whom he agreed, albeit without his knowledge. Above all, there were no counterarguments that could have reversed the American decision to go to war, which rendered all other considerations moot.

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What Does Freedom Mean? Just over a month after the American declaration of war, and more out of a sense of duty, or self-respect, or simply out of the desire to set the record straight than from any realistic hope that they might actually change anyone’s mind, five of the most respected and influential academics in Berlin held a week-long series of lectures from May 18 to 25, 1917 in the Prussian House of Representatives dedicated to the subject of “German Freedom,” resulting in a widely disseminated book bearing that title.28 Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Meinecke, Otto Hintze, Max Sering (who was the leading agrarian economist in Germany and had travelled extensively in and written about the United States), and Ernst ­Troeltsch all appeared on successive days to speak about the nature and meaning of freedom in Germany before the delegates to the Prussian Lower House. The formal venue of the Abgeordnetenhaus was obviously deliberately chosen as an integral part of their intended message, having recently been the backdrop to so many dramatic scenes during the previous several months over the questions of peace and democracy and how to obtain them – and admission to which was still determined by the infamous three-class franchise that all five speakers wanted to change. While it is true that the five men were not speaking officially on behalf of the German government, over the previous year they had all become prominent public supporters of Imperial Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg and were the next best thing to his formal representatives. And as opposed to the American President, they actually possessed some expertise on the subject they addressed. As ultimately futile, or merely symbolic, as the speeches about the idea and reality of freedom in Germany may have been, they are anything but pusillanimous or contrite. They offer in fact some of the most compelling meditations on the subject ever produced, and they display a far-sighted perspicacity, even occasionally an almost uncanny contemporary relevance, that make them still worth reading today. But the texts also inevitably bear the marks of the time and the context of their creation, and in particular they reflect the exceedingly fraught political climate, even the sense of extreme existential danger, out of which they arose. Specifically, they all exhibit, though to varying degrees, flashes of anger and frustration over what their authors felt were the tendentious depictions of Germany by their enemies, who were now conveniently concentrated in the figure of Woodrow Wilson. Each of the German speakers vigorously objected to what they saw as intentionally skewed portraits of their country and their culture that were being promulgated abroad. But they also protested against what they 28  Die deutsche Freiheit. Fünf Vorträge. Von Harnack – Meinecke – Sering – ­Troeltsch – Hintze (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1917).

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felt was an unreflective hubris with regard to the political realities in the Allies’ own states, which the Germans saw as arising from an uninformed arrogance, resulting in an intolerable sanctimoniousness combined with an apparently cynical pretense. Of the five addresses, the one by Adolf von Harnack, who inaugurated the cycle on May 18, is the most unrestrained. “I do not like to use strong words,” Harnack said by way of introduction, and then proceeded to unleash a torrent of choice ones.29 Harnack heatedly protested that “this” – meaning Wilson’s war message to Congress – ”is the most brazen, the most insolent, and the most hypocritical declaration that the head of a great power has sent to another people since the days of Napoleon I, and Napoleon did it as an Imperator and toward conquered states!”30 Conscientious scholar that he was, Harnack took care to spell out exactly what he meant by each one of those three inflammatory adjectives. First, Harnack accused Wilson of “brazenly” styling himself as the “leader of democratic pacifism,” only to demand in the same breath “the annihilation of our German state in the name of pacifism.”31 Harnack was incensed by what he regarded as a flagrant example of bald two-facedness: “Wilson seeks to divide the people and the state, places a ban on contemporary Germany, erases it from the ranks of the peoples of honor, insults it as an enslaved people, and defames its government as an autocracy and as insanely running amok.”32 “That,” Harnack objected, “is its brazenness!” Next, Harnack turned to what he called Wilson’s “insolence”: the American President, he said, ascribed all “nobility” and “freedom” to his own country and political program while professing “to want to liberate us, i.e. to apportion the necessary degree of freedom to us and at the same time to determine how this freedom must be constituted!” And, finally, Harnack claimed that Wilson’s “hypocrisy” consisted in retailing “cheap phrases of peace” in order to avoid issuing “an open declaration of war” – disingenuously cloaking his true intentions under conciliatory euphemisms, presumably, Harnack sarcastically speculated, so as not to offend “the pacifistic souls in America” and in order “at least to hold onto the defoliated olive branch.”33 Harnack’s intemperance is perhaps understandable, but it was obviously not very politic, and most of all it was ineffectual. Just as none of his fellow Germans listening to him speak that day in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus would have found anything in his speech to disagree with, so too no one outside of Germany who read the printed version (an unlikely event in any case, given the Entente 29  Adolf 30 Ibid. 31 

von Harnack, “Einleitungsworte,” Die deutsche Freiheit, 3.

Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 4. 33 Ibid. 32 

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embargo on German publications) would have been swayed by Harnack’s overheated, accusatory rhetoric. Apparently heedless of such considerations, Harnack pressed forward to excoriate Wilson as a “vassal” of England as well as of Ameri­ can “plutocrats,” a man who was gullibly in thrall to the native “Morgans and partners,” all of whom, Harnack fulminated, “wanted to earn, earn a lot in the war.” Harnack even insinuated that Wilson’s true motive stemmed from the desire “to save their money for them.”34 Harnack also bitterly condemned the “campaign of lies” against Germany and even more “England’s war of starvation,” about which, he indignantly noted, as opposed to the German use of submarines, “America did not protest.”35 But about halfway into his speech Harnack seemed to catch himself and to realize that it would not be very useful or edifying to deliver nothing but a furious litany of complaints and accusations against the American President. Regarding “democratic pacifism,” Harnack said, coming back to an earlier point: “I am of course far from taking what Wilson made of that to be its essence. There is as certainly a noble, genuine democratic pacifism as there is a monarchical one.”36 And, following this generous if somewhat reluctant concession, Harnack concluded his speech by expressing his abiding conviction in a fundamental commitment and adherence to freedom in Germany, but with significant conditions: we want freedom out of our past and with our past; for only in that way can we maintain and promote it! With it belongs the indivisible unity with our social imperial monarchy – unser soziales Kaiser- und Königtum – from which no power on earth can separate us.37

Put in slightly less melodramatic terms, Harnack was insisting that, whatever form freedom would finally take in Germany, it would have to be rooted in its own historical traditions to be acceptable and viable. Stripped of its excessive language, that seems like a reasonable demand, one to which anyone who professed to respect indigenous cultures and self-determination could hardly object – provided that the message was heard in the first place.

Are Germans Free? Friedrich Meinecke was the next speaker in the series. Unlike Harnack, who had somewhat theatrically unburdened himself with an emotional outburst aimed primarily at the person of Woodrow Wilson, Meinecke managed to retain his com34 

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. 36  Ibid., 8. 37  Ibid., 13. 35 

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posure, allowing him to offer a much more even-tempered and cogent account of “German Freedom” itself, as his lecture is programmatically titled. Max Sering, who had been the initiator of the entire undertaking, had assigned the task of delivering the keynote address to Meinecke, who tried to do appropriate justice both to the central topic and to his own leading role in presenting it to the assembled delegates.38 That did not, however, prevent Meinecke from indulging in some acrid sarcasm of his own in his opening words, in which he imaginatively slipped into the supposed role of the peoples of the Entente as they stood in judgment over their German foes. “We are the free peoples,” Meinecke ventriloquized the members of the Entente as saying to the Germans: you are the unfree people! Your unfreedom bears the responsibility for this terrible war. And we, once we have destroyed the cause and the seat of your unfreedom, will give you our freedom, that is, our democracy, so that you will become as happy and – as innocent, as harmless, as thoroughly peace-loving as we so clearly are and attest every day anew.39

The war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, Meinecke continued, still spinning out his sarcastic thought experiment, was, in the eyes of their enemies, “thus a war of liberation, except that the couple of still unfree peoples cannot liberate themselves, but rather have to be forcibly liberated by world decree.”40 Finally dropping his pantomime, Meinecke said that in ordinary times one might laugh at such “bloody nonsense.”41 But the extraordinary times in which they were living called instead for a serious consideration of the proposition behind the those criticisms. Thus, Meinecke seriously asked: was Germany – and were the Germans – truly unfree? What followed was an effort to answer that complicated question by offering a judicious and candid appraisal of the present conditions in Germany as viewed through the prism of history. Meinecke accepted that it would not suffice, in attempting to answer such a critical question, merely to insist “that we feel ourselves to be free, at least just as free as our opponents.”42 What was needed, instead, was honest self-reflection and rigorous, factual analysis. Meinecke acknowledged that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to view ourselves objectively, or to see ourselves as others see us, admitting that “it can be the highest degree of unfreedom not to perceive one’s chains any longer.” But he also pointed to the larger truth that freedom did not exist without its opposite: “Where there is free38 

See Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 285. Friedrich Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” in Die deutsche Freiheit, 14. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42  Ibid., 15. 39 

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dom, there is also unfreedom – here in Germany as in the rest of the world.” The difficulty was in determining where to draw the line between the two in their inevitable conflict with each other: Freedom in general is not something that is stable and substantial, but rather something developing and living, a negotiation and struggle with unfreedom. Freedom is not a given, but a task, something that always has to be created anew because it is always threatened with annihilation, and complete freedom is a marvelous, rare blossom, and perhaps only the dream of such a blossom.43

Following on these general observations, Meinecke turned to the specific question of freedom in Germany. Taking a cue from ­Troeltsch, Meinecke allowed that, as was in fact the case everywhere else as well, comprehensive political freedom had not – or had not yet – been fully realized in his own country. But he said there were particular historical and cultural reasons for its incomplete development. He made a point of stressing that some Germans themselves had already articulated the negative view that the German political situation reflected their collective mentality in several specific ways, saying that from within our own midst the opinion has been expressed that the measure of political unfreedom here is connected with the character of our people. We are, they say, too malleable, too organizable, too accustomed to expecting the good from above.44

Meinecke rejected this particular self-critique, implying as it did that the Germans were not just intrinsically servile, but also forever and inalterably so. In reality, Meinecke felt, there had been a variety of developmental, and therefore extrinsic and above all changeable, factors, of both foreign and domestic origin, that in the last three hundred years or so had contributed to “disfiguring our political freedom.”45 It was undoubtedly true, Meinecke granted, that “the idea of patriarchal authority” – Obrigkeit – complemented by the “regimented police state” that fostered the “resignedly obedient subject” – the word he used was Untertan – had thwarted or at least impaired individual autonomy in the German states.46 However, there were also certain objective external pressures that Meinecke admitted had over time “stunted our instincts for political freedom.”47 43 Ibid. 44 

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 18. 46  The most scathing, and justly famous, exposé of the mindset Meinecke described is the novel, serialized during the war and first published in book form in 1918, by Heinrich Mann, Der Untertan (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1918). The noun forming the title has no precise equivalent in English, and it has been variously translated as Man of Straw, The Patrioteer, and The Loyal Subject. For another contemporary perspective on this figure, see also the chapter “Der Untertan,” in Endres, Die Tragödie Deutschlands, 268–75. 47  Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 19. 45 

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Above all, he said, and again echoing arguments made by ­Troeltsch, Hintze, and many others, the geographic position of the German lands, caught over the centuries between powerful rivals on all sides, had cost it, Meinecke argued, not only its “unity and power, but also its complete political freedom” by compelling those states to place power over liberty, to prioritize security over freedom in order to pursue the more elemental goal of sheer survival. Out of this strategic, geo-political necessity, Meinecke conceded, “there thus arose the strict Prussian military and bureaucratic state.”48 Having acknowledged the reality of that particular historical development, however – and crucially –, Meinecke stressed that what was important now was to change it. Apart from the question of whether Meinecke’s analysis was sound or not – and there are certainly reasons to quibble with it – what is most impressive about his account is its calmly self-critical stance, striking a tone that is neither apologetic nor defensive, but rather clear-eyed and matter-of-fact. Meinecke openly recognized defects of the German polity that could not be denied. But he also highlighted equally undeniable merits that should not be. The same equable even-handedness evident in his critique of German political life also characterizes his unapologetic affirmation of the enduring existence of a positive strain of German freedom that had persisted through the depredations of the past. It was a freedom that, because of the nature of that past, was necessarily focused initially more on the private, internal realm of the individual mind and less on the external relation of the individual to the state. Nonetheless, Meinecke asserted that, following the defeat of Napoleon and the first stirrings of liberal reform in the early nineteenth century and awakening hopes for political unity, “there arose out of the depths of personal freedom a new, a German idea of political freedom.”49 Given the comparatively belated and non-synchronous development of the relationship between the modern state and the political maturity of its citizens in Germany – here Meinecke was again advancing another perspective he shared with ­Troeltsch – German political freedom as a whole also lagged behind and lacked the naturalness of the relationship between the individual and the state that existed in England and France. “In every respect,” Meinecke averred, “culture, the individual, and the state thus live in the West in a more balanced, frictionless manner with one another” than in Germany, where “fate has made it more difficult for us to acquire that harmony.”50 But there did exist, Meinecke maintained, a native sense of personal freedom in Germany, originally derived from the individual relation to God fostered by 48 Ibid. 49  50 

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 20–21.

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Protestantism and culminating in the radical self-determination of the subject within the philosophical tradition of German idealism, which underwrote the emergent political consciousness of the individual within Germany as well. It was on that basis, according to Meinecke, that a distinctive notion of political freedom had resulted over the course of the previous century: The patriarchal state mentality of the Untertan was thus able to be transformed into the autonomous, moral state mentality of a people who felt themselves to be free and had a magnificently positive effect during the era of the Prussian reform and uprising. And from the idea of personal freedom, as it was conceived of in the philosophy of German idealism, there also flowed not only a new devotion to the state, but also a new political freedom and demand for freedom. […] From then on, the state was supposed to rest entirely on the ethical freedom and dignity of the citizen and human being, and to recognize and accentuate them in all of its institutions. That is thus the actual quintessence of our modern idea of political freedom and simultaneously the intellectual justification of what our opponents today call the German subservience to the state; for it liberates and obliges at once.51

In his major speech in Vienna in late 1915 on “The German Idea of Freedom,” Ernst ­Troeltsch had also emphasized the dual nature of that idea, the separate but inextricably connected inward and outward expressions of freedom that had arisen within German history and culture. Notably, at this point in his speech Meinecke also openly acknowledged that “I know no better formula than the one ­Troeltsch gave: German freedom wants to combine cultivation of the individual with socialism of the state.”52 And with that, Meinecke gave a generous but fitting tribute to the outsized role his friend had played in formulating the distinctively German conception of freedom – the fusion, as ­Troeltsch had succinctly summarized it, of Staatsozialismus und Bildungsindividualismus – and Meinecke placed it at the center of his own articulation of German freedom as well.53 Meinecke’s excursus was thus perhaps not the most original defense of the ideational framework upholding the German political edifice one could imagine. But it was respectable and defensible enough, and it certainly served his present purposes. Yet concerning the central issue – that of the specific role and significance of democracy in the German context – Meinecke appeared more ambivalent. He accused the Western Allies, personified by Woodrow Wilson – whom he derisively labeled the self-appointed “world president” who wanted to “impose his normal constitution on us” – of deliberately aiming to destabilize Germany under the disingenuous pretext of wanting to do no more than benevolently bestow democracy upon it. Meinecke was having none of it. “The democratic world of today,” he countered, “demands of us that we become democratic, so that we 51 

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 28. 53 ­Troeltsch, “Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,” 72. 52 

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– become harmless and innocuous for them.”54 Or, more pithily: “They want to democratize us in order to disorganize us.”55 ­Troeltsch, we remember, had said something similar in his Vienna address as well, cautioning against an all-too credulous belief in the purely altruistic intentions of self-proclaimed champions of democracy who sought to disseminate it beyond their own borders. Meinecke even maintained that the Allies were well informed about the unstable domestic political situation in Germany and were strategically promoting their version of democracy there “because they know that today we are in a dispute with ourselves about whether we need democracy, and if so how much, to have true political freedom. They know that the democratic institutions of the Western peoples also find advocates among us and, after the fall of Russian autocracy, they hope with redoubled strength for a great victory of the Western spirit over us.”56 It is unclear what, if any, evidence Meinecke had for his contention that Allied proponents of democracy deliberately sought to use it as a wedge to divide and conquer Germany. But one may presume that the Allies would not have been disappointed had that been the result. More intriguing is Meinecke’s counterclaim that, if this were indeed the Allies’ plan, then they would be running through an already partially open and ever widening door. “To begin with, we can readily acknowledge that Western ideas in general have had a powerful effect on us from the very start and have stimulated the formation of our own ideals of freedom.”57 However, he added, in another nod to ­Troeltsch, “that there is no universally valid ‘normal’ freedom,” and, with respect to “Western ideas” of freedom in particular, Germany could employ for itself only “what is homogeneous to us.”58 Still, as Meinecke had done earlier, but now even more explicitly, he again conceded that there were some elements of the German system that could and should be not just modified but discarded entirely. “Our opponents want for Germany to be liberated from the dominance of militarism and ‘junkerdom’,” Meinecke said, suggesting that he mainly agreed with that desire. But he stipulated that here, too, certain “distinctions” had to be made.59 The main “distinction” was that Germany could not and would not allow itself to become weak and therefore vulnerable, either militarily or economically. Yet Meinecke did agree that, while the predominant influence of the Prussian mentality on German social and political life had produced both negative and positive effects, the time had 54 

Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 30.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 57 

Ibid., 31.

58 Ibid. 59 Ibid.

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come to relegate its commanding role to the past. Having already forcefully criticized the “patriarchal authority” that had produced the Untertan, Meinecke now phrased it in even stronger and simpler terms, declaring: “We no longer want to be ruled in Prussia by Junkers and students who belong to a dueling fraternity.”60 Claiming that “the German people have become mature enough to appoint sons from its midst to all of the leading positions for which until now Junker ancestry or a Junker mentality was advantageous,” he categorically announced that “every, and I mean every remnant of the spirit of privilege and class prejudice is an evil.”61 At that time and in that place, those were brave, even incendiary words. Meinecke was, after all, speaking in the Prussian Landtag, an institution notoriously dedicated to defending the privileges of junkerdom. A later commentator went so far as to declare that he detected in Meinecke’s words a “tone of revolutionary impatience.”62 That is surely putting it too strongly. But it is indicative of the exceptional nature of this open criticism of the Prussian ethos by one of its own standard bearers that Meinecke himself singled out this passage of his speech for comment in his own memoirs. There he wrote that “at the time and for years thereafter people in conservative circles deeply resented me for several quite sharp words about Prussian junkerdom.”63 But Meinecke justified his unusually outspoken language in his speech by saying that he felt he was not merely expressing his personal opinion, but rather communicating a widely-held sentiment, and that he had done so after having concluded that “what weighs on the souls of countless people has to come out.”64 In effect, then, he thought of himself as speaking on behalf of all those Germans who had not previously had a voice in determining their own affairs, acting as an advocate of those “countless people” who sensed but could not articulate their dissatisfaction with how they were being governed. Underscoring that impression in his speech itself, Meinecke then overtly turned to the contentious issue of “reorientation,” deliberately and demonstratively addressing it in the very chamber where, only two months before, the Imperial Chancellor himself had for the first time openly given his commitment to “reform the Prussian franchise,”65 only to be followed by the disappointment over the halfway measures announced in the Kaiser’s “Easter Message” a few 60 

Ibid., 32.

61 Ibid.

62 Llanque,

Demokratisches Denken, 116. Autobiographische Schriften, 285. 64  Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 32. 65  Abgeordnetenhausrede, 14 March, 1917; inThimme, Bethmann Hollwegs Kriegsreden, 216–17 63 Meinecke,

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weeks later. Meinecke, having already endorsed constitutional reform in a widely read essay published that February, now approached the matter in direct and unambiguous terms. He did so by placing such reform in the larger context of revitalizing German political life more generally in the way he had just mentioned, namely by breaking down any remaining barriers to the participation of all members of society in the affairs of the state.66 “All the reforms of the constitution that we demand,” he said, “are now intended above all to shatter the encrustations that inhibit the advancement of personalities in the state. I also view the reform of the Prussian franchise from this perspective.”67 Once more acknowledging the controversial nature of the reform proposals, as well as the real political hazards they involved, Meinecke made this principled statement: Certainly, we are risking something if we now lower the barriers between the masses and the state. But, as things stand today, we are running a much greater risk and stand to lose much more if we do not lower them. We cannot ignore the world-historical lesson and effect of this war. Only a state that is closely bound with its people and with the masses of its people can henceforth stand upright in the world and again wage such an enormous defensive war as we are waging today. Power and freedom will henceforth be much more closely conjoined than before. That is also the sense in the nonsense of our opponents, that indeed a powerful, unstoppable wave of democracy is going through the world.68

Meinecke could hardly have stated it more clearly: democracy was unavoidably the way of the future, including the future of Germany, and there were practical as well as political – not to speak of ethical – reasons for embracing its “unstoppable” advance. Yet returning to his insistence that democracy should conform to the traditions and values of the people by whom it is implemented, Meinecke expressed skepticism that “the parliamentary system” itself in particular was appropriate to the German situation.69 While acknowledging that “the parliamentary system is supposed to assert the will of the people as the sole authority in the state,” Meinecke dryly added that “we dispute that it succeeds” in doing so in practice.70 The primary reason for its failure to serve the majority, Meinecke thought, was that the parliamentary system so often privileged minorities, favor66 

See Friedrich Meinecke, “Die Reform des preußischen Wahlrechts,” in Politische Schrif­ ten, 152; cf. also Meineke, 277. 67  Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 33. 68  Ibid., 34. 69 Ibid., 35. See on this general question, Georg Kotowski, “Parlamentarismus und Demokratie im Urteil Friedrich Meineckes,” in Festgabe für Hans Herzfeld zum 65. Geburts­ tag, eds. Wilhelm Berges, Carl Hinrichs (Berlin: 1958), 187–203. 70  Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 35. The same point was made in September, 1917 by Hugo Preuß, “Deutsche Demokratisierung,” in Staat, Recht und Freiheit. Aus 40 Jahren deutscher Politik und Geschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1926), 335–44, esp.  342.

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ing especially those few who were in a position to wield power themselves.71 Such an arrangement benefited, he insisted, “always, and always only, the parties, and within these only very small social strata and groups, who then, as the power brokers of the ruling party, receive a wonderful opportunity to exploit the state for themselves.”72 As such, Meinecke concluded, “the parliamentary system does not correspond to the interests of the German workers, for party governments are a very poor guarantee for social policy and the just distribution of taxes.”73 On the basis of all of these considerations, and in conclusion, Meinecke proposed the following compromise solution as being best suited to Germany and its particular circumstances: A social monarchy, liberated from the remainders of the old state of classes and privileges, dependent on contact and harmony with the representation of the people, but simultaneously free and strong enough to intervene as a counterbalance and mediator between majorities and minorities and thus to find a synthesis of the deeper popular will, and, further, externally strong enough to represent and lead the nation vigorously and calmly in war and in peace – that is the Siegfried Line of our political power and freedom.74

Whether such a mixed constellation, such a Naumannian “social monarchy,” would have indeed been able to provide a better safeguard for the liberties of all German citizens and prevent the abuses he attributed to parliamentary regimes is debatable but at least worthy of consideration. Yet it is important to stress that Meinecke saw his proposal as a blueprint for a genuine democracy, albeit one grounded in and reflective of what he viewed as German values.75 If realized, it would expand what he called “political rights” to “the masses,”76 giving them some measure of influence over their individual and 71  Although

Meinecke did not mention him by name in this context, he was possibly thinking here of the work by Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens (Leipzig: Dr. Werner Klinkhardt, 1911); Meinecke had referred positively to this book in an earlier essay from 1912, “Der Sinn unseres Wahlkampfes,” in Politische Schriften und Reden, in Werke 2, 49–52; cf. Klueting, 88. 72  Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 35. 73  Ibid. Thus, the judgment by Stibbe, 169, that “Meinecke firmly rejected any transition in Germany to a western-style parliamentary system on the grounds that this was incompatible with the German idea of freedom,” is at best one-sided. 74  Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 36–37. The metaphor Meinecke used here of the “Siegfried Line,” or as it was known in English the “Hindenburg Line,” referred to the system of defensive forts and tank barriers established on on the Western Front in 1916–17 to halt Allied advances. 75  Or, as Harm Klueting put it, Meinecke stood “clearly on the side of democracy, even if it was democracy in Meinecke’s definition;” Klueting, 86. 76  Meinecke, “Die deutsche Freiheit,” 33.

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collective public lives, while protecting the socially and economically weaker members of the state from forces beyond their control. Finally, it would provide, ideally, the means to balance the interests of the many against those of the few in the effort to make the entire state more just and equitable toward all. And that, in essence, was what “German freedom” in Meinecke’s estimation ought to be.

How Free are the Others? Professor Max Sering, who spoke immediately after Meinecke, chose a slightly different approach to the same central question. In “The State and Social Structure among the Western Powers and in Germany,” Sering proposed examining various claims the Allies were making about both Germany and themselves by using the relatively simple method of comparing their high-flown rhetoric about democracy with the political reality in each of the respective states. Sering’s own political credentials for his undertaking were not negligible. And as we may recall, he had been among those original members of Hans Delbrück’s Wednesday Evening group who had convened nearly two years earlier, in July 1915, to discuss the Delbrück-Dernburg Petition.77 At its core, Sering’s address before the Prussian House of Representatives was animated by the same commitment to the autonomy and self-determination of all peoples – including, and not incidentally, the German people themselves. In that spirit, Sering began his address with the frank acknowledgement that “a powerful democratic movement is going through the world, through our own land as well.”78 That meant that the issue was not whether to accept democracy or to reject it, but rather how best to form and manage it in one’s own country. Since the “Western powers” all thought of themselves as democratic, indeed aggressively advertised and promoted their political structures specifically as democracies, Sering thought it reasonable to test the validity of their contentions in each individual case so as to be able to choose the best or most compatible elements of their structures for application within Germany. Sering therefore proposed as his point of departure that “the essence of a democratic constitution” was “that it designates all adults, or at least all male adults, without consideration of social differences as participants in the exercise of public power.”79 77  See Grumbach, 410. Sering did not, however, sign the petition; see Schwabe, Wissen­ schaft und Kriegsmoral, 79. 78 Max Sering, “Staat und Gesellschaftsverfassung bei den Westmächten und in Deutschland,” in Die deutsche Freiheit, 41. 79  Ibid., 42.

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That seemed as good a definition of the contemporary understanding of democracy as one could fit into a single sentence. But if it was true that the universal franchise is a necessary if not sufficient condition of any democracy deserving the name, then the case of Britain already posed a problem. As Sering tartly put it: “If we proceed from this notion, then England is to be eliminated from the group of democratic states. It finds itself on the path to a democratic order, but its state constitution is not much less aristocratic than the organization of its society.”80 Ever since the Third Reform Act of 1884, only 60 percent of men over the age of twenty-one in the United Kingdom had the right to vote, meaning that millions of men, including many of those who were currently fighting and dying in the war, did not enjoy that basic democratic right.81 Despite the well-known deficiencies of the Prussian three-class system, it was nevertheless the case that in national elections all men in Germany twenty-five or older were permitted to vote (how much their vote counted was of course another matter). Both of those facts led Sering to the technically correct conclusion that “the much disparaged Prussian franchise is more democratic than the English one.”82 In an equally piquant conclusion, Sering said: “if therefore President Wilson considered only democratic peoples worthy of entering into the ‘Peace League’ that he encouraged for the continuation of the war, then he would have had to exclude England and turn somewhere else.”83 In the absence of any such admission by the American President, Sering set about conducting the search himself for indisputably democratic polities around the world. And in doing so he determined that, unlike Britain, “the French and American republics are, however, genuine democracies in the broadest sense.”84 What followed was a nuanced, knowledgeable discussion of the respective governmental forms of both of those states, neglecting neither their strengths nor their weaknesses, and each assessed regarding the relative degree of democracy they displayed. Sering presented, on balance, an impressively fair appraisal, many elements of which still merit attention – once one has come to terms, that is, 80 Ibid.

81  Chris Cook, The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Nineteenth Century, 1815–1914 (London: Routledge, 2005), 68. The earlier Reform Act of 1832 had roughly doubled the number of adult males who had the franchise in Britain to about 18 percent; see D. G. Wright, De­ mocracy and Reform, 1815–1885 (London: Longman, 1970), 49–56; “By modern standards, Victorian democracy was undemocratic. […] As late as 1911, only sixty-three percent of all adult males were on the electoral lists. […] the idea of property-ownership as a basis for political rights lingered on, in the form of a business premises qualification, until 1948.” Ibid., 105. 82  Sering, “Staat und Gesellschaftsverfassung,” 43. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid.

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with the slightly unsettling spectacle of a German professor passing informed judgment on Western democracies at the height of the First World War. And to bolster his arguments, apart from drawing on his own experiences and observations from his travels in the United States, Sering cited the works of several leading authorities, including two books by Woodrow Wilson himself, namely Con­ gressional Government: A Study in American Politics (1885) and The State: Ele­ ments of Historical and Practical Politics (1898), the latter of which had been translated into German in 1913.85 Sering additionally referred to the findings of William Milligan Sloane, a distinguished Professor of History at Columbia University, who decades earlier had studied in Germany under Theodor Mommsen and Johann Gustav Droysen and went on to earn his doctorate in Leipzig in Classics, with a focus on Arabic. Sering relied especially on a critical study that Sloane had written on Party Government in the United States of America (1914), which had first appeared in German the year before, having been based on university lectures Sloane had held as a guest professor in Berlin and Munich in 1912–13.86 Armed with these and several other unimpeachable sources, as well as his own political judgment and ethical sensibility, Sering performed a wide-ranging tour d’horizon of the political systems in France and the United States, in his opinion the two principal democratic republics in the world. He tried to weigh impartially their achievements and lapses in the attempt to distill lessons from them, again both positive and negative, that might aid Germany in negotiating its own journey on the difficult path toward democracy. “One must acknowledge,” Sering wrote of the French parliament, “that the French chamber reflects the vital energies of social and public life more or less faithfully.”87 On the other hand, and citing Woodrow Wilson for support, “corruption” remained a stubborn problem in France, with many politicians there viewing “public office as a reward for personal or partisan services.”88 In America, the “two-party system,” first developed in Britain, had provided an impressive means for making “the demos governable,” avoiding the stasis and chaos easily caused by multiple splinter groups and factions that were an unavoidable feature of parliamentary regimes.89 In practice, however, such a narrow concentration of power meant that the governing clique in practice “excluded the masses,”90 leaving, in the words of another 85 Woodrow

Wilson, Der Staat. Elemente historischer und praktischer Politik, trans. Günther Thomas (Berlin: Hermann Hillger, 1913). 86  See the Foreword to William Milligan Sloane, Die Parteiherrschaft in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, ihre Entwicklung und ihr Stand (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1913), iii. 87  Sering, “Staat und Gesellschaftsverfassung,” 44. 88  Ibid., 46. 89  Ibid., 47. 90 Ibid.

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expert witness, “a few leaders to think for those who are led.”91 Too, such large, monolithic parties require massive amounts of money to function, “which are delivered to them by eager careerists who want to be reelected and by high finance and big business. The average and poor people thus become the objects of trade for the rich and the powerful.” This unequal role of money in American politics accordingly resulted, Sering said, in the “demos” being de facto “purchased,” rendering it “intellectually enslaved through mass manipulation and mass suggestion” as politicians fought to hold onto their offices and influence.92 (Here Sering quoted another observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, who had also found, although for different reasons, that “nowhere is there so little freedom of deliberation as in North America.”93) Significantly, despite these shortcomings, Sering did not dispute, as he had in the case of England, the claim that America made to being a true democracy. But he did say that whoever wants to get to know the strong and healthy forces of American political life has to go to the recent rural settlements of the far west. There the prerequisites for a genuine and vigorous self-government of the people are given: an approximate equality of living conditions and wealth, of interests, and of education.94

Sering positively admired the fact that, as he saw it, there still lived on in the west “much of the spirit of the democratic, Christian communities that the Pilgrim fathers founded on the stony soil of New England.”95 And, more broadly, he applauded “the wise and estimable creators of the American constitution, such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams,” who, he said, “had clearly foreseen the dangers of extreme democracy in a more highly developed society.”96 Sering recognized that they had imagined the most virulent threat to American democracy in the potential rise of an unbound dictator or tyrant. “They feared the final result of tyranny”97 Sering said – “for the masses crave authorities”98 – and on the 91 

Ibid., 49. The quotation is from Wilhelm Hasbach, the most well-informed and respected prewar theoretician of democracy in Germany; see Wilhelm Hasbach, Die moderne Demokratie. Eine politische Beschreibung (Jena: G. Fischer, 1912). Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 96, calls this study the “most comprehensive German language work to date on the history and development of contemporary democracy.” See also Hans-Christof Kraus, “Wilhelm Hasbach: Theorie und Kritik der modernen Demokratie,” in Lehnert, ed., “Das deutsche Volk und die Politik,” 109–28. 92  Sering, “Staat und Gesellschaftsverfassung,” 50. 93  Ibid., 54. 94  Ibid., 55. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97  Ibid., 56. 98  Ibid., 57.

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basis of that worry the Founding Fathers had sagely established opposing “conservative counterweights” such as the “separation of public powers.”99 Unfortunately, this original “intention had been largely invalidated in that the legislative and judicial branches had become dependent on the party apparatuses. Even the Senate, although it is an entirely undemocratic institution, has not proven itself to be a defense against the described abuses and ills.”100 Compounding the problem, Sering went on, American presidents had continued to amass power to themselves, symbolized in the universal presidential right to veto and the president’s sole stewardship of foreign policy, something that not even the German emperor possessed. That gave the American head of state, in the words of yet another commentator, powers that were “more regal than those of an English monarch.”101 Yet for all of Sering’s severity toward America’s perceived deviations from the democratic path – its gradual straying onto a Sonderweg of its own, as it were – Sering most emphatically did not issue a censure of American democracy per se. Rather, he was offering what could be considered a friendly critique of America’s failure to live up to its own democratic ideals. Finally, in terms of what Sering called “the most burning problem of the social present” facing the entire developed world, namely “the industrial workers’ question,”102 he found that in France, where at least “social democracy is at home,” the situation was marginally better than in the United States. “The idea of protecting the weak,” Sering observed, “has remained entirely stunted in the North American republic.”103 But in toto one unfortunately observed in “both republics the common phenomenon that the socially weak in the democratic state lack a protective authority that would attend to them.”104 In Germany, by contrast, which had been the first state to implement comprehensive “workers’ insurance,”105 “the German unions stand in first place among civilized nations regarding their number of members and their inner strength, and no country has such a strong workers’ party as Germany.”106 In sum, Sering concluded,

99 

Ibid., 56.

100 Ibid. 101 

Ibid., 64. Sering was quoting an otherwise unidentified “Hare”. Ibid., 59. 103  Ibid., 61. 104  Ibid., 62. 105  Ibid., 71. Cf. Michael Stolleis, Origins of the German Welfare State Social Policy in Germany to 1945 (Berlin: Springer, 2013). 106 Sering, “Staat und Gesellschaftsverfassung,” 72. Sering had long been interested in these questions, as evidenced by his book, Arbeiter-Ausschüsse in der deutschen Industrie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890), which was commissioned by the Verein für Socialpolitik. 102 

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the German constitutional monarchy does not take second place to any of the great democratic republics with regard to the content of its substantive freedoms. It better protects individual rights to freedom; our people do not have a smaller share in legislation than they do, and in the great questions of foreign policy we are better secured against resolutions opposed to the popular will than North America or England.107

A “constitutional monarchy,” then, with a robust social welfare system, coupled with a well-organized and powerful labor force that shields the more vulnerable members of society from undue harm or coercion, thereby securing individual liberty in a meaningful sense: that was Max Sering’s assessment of the German state, one that he claimed compared favorably to any in the West, and in its composite nature was very similar to Meinecke’s conception of a “social monarchy.” However, like Meinecke as well, and in the same context, Sering also took the opportunity to mention that things were far from perfect in Germany. He specifically deplored the aftereffects of “particularism” – Kleinstaaterei – that continued to linger on even almost a half century after national unification, and he roundly condemned the remnants of the “old police state” that also still afflicted the Empire.108 Mirroring Meinecke’s motion in this respect, too, Sering openly endorsed the program of “reorientation:” “We are now demanding in Prussia a stronger participation of the lower classes in the governance of the state and in self-administration, and for that reason a modification of the franchise.” And as a final thought, Sering added for good measure that “we likewise demand a reform of the state parliaments – Ständehäuser – in order to ensure the proper influence of the leading elements from all occupations and classes.”109 Sering’s lecture was an example of German Wissenschaft at its best: it was based on demonstrable facts, it was balanced, scrupulously fair, and honest. But before turning away from Max Sering and toward the lecture that Ernst ­Troeltsch delivered three days later in this remarkable mini-series about freedom and democracy both at home and abroad, we should briefly pause to contemplate just how unusual and thus even more significant the entire event was in itself. For it was the first time that men of such unassailable stature and reputation, eminent “bourgeois” scholars and intellectuals who in themselves personified the German establishment elite, had stood before one of the most consequential legislative bodies of the nation and had so unreservedly, indeed explicitly, spoken out in favor of fundamental political reform with the aim of advancing what they described as the already ongoing democratization of the German state. Only half a year earlier, before the Burgfrieden had been lifted in late November 1916, such an occurrence would have been not just impossible, but unimaginable. It must 107 

Sering, “Staat und Gesellschaftsverfassung,” 73. Ibid., 76. 109  Ibid., 75. 108 

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have taken some time just to get used to the idea of being able to speak so freely about such explosive political subjects, particularly in such a prominent and politically weighty place, and to do so as the war dramatically worsened. Too, in the interim there had been many other pressing matters to attend to – including, not least of all, finding enough food to eat and enough coal to keep warm – which would have made the composition of scholarly disquisitions on political theory of whatever sort seem to be a luxury most Germans were not really in a position to afford. But almost as soon as it was practically feasible to do so – and in the wake of the successive shocks caused by the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February, followed by the resultant declaration of war by the United States in April, and the deeply dismaying failure of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to honor his own pledges regarding progressive internal reform – five leading representatives of the German moderate liberal intelligentsia took up the cause of defending workers’ rights, of levelling class distinctions throughout society, and of enabling the equal participation of all citizens in all the affairs of state. And perhaps most provocatively, they were thereby endorsing political aspirations previously upheld in Germany only by members of the Social Democratic Party, whose loyalty to that state had so long been doubted and even openly denied. Whatever other motivations may have prompted the five speakers to take this public stand – and their reasons were unquestionably varied – their indisputably courageous act stands as a major testament to the genuine efforts within Germany itself at a time of extraordinary upheaval – and well before any end to the war was in sight – to move it and its people further along the path of democracy.

A Democracy of Beggars? Given that fact, and given how much ­Troeltsch in particular had already contributed to that broader endeavor, he can perhaps be excused for beginning his own address in the Prussian Lower House, combatively titled “The Onslaught of Western Democracy,” with an impassioned counterattack of his own. But – and contrary to a superficial reading of the title – ­Troeltsch’s lecture was most expressly not targeted against democracy itself, but instead at the mendacity and bad faith on the part of those who he thought were using, or rather misusing, the banner of democracy as a mask for other, less than benevolent designs.110 110 

See the perceptive remarks by Marcus Llanque, “The First World War and the Invention of ‘Modern Democracy’,” in Germany and ‘The West.’ The History of a Modern Concept, eds. Riccardo Bavaj and Martina Steber (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 77–78.

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In that vein, ­Troeltsch opened his remarks by ridiculing the official rationale the American President had originally given for urging his country to enter the war. Wilson’s initial justification ostensibly rested, ­Troeltsch said, on the “legal conflict” resulting from the dispute between Britain and Germany over the British blockade and the German response to it in the form of the submarine offensive. With regard to the British, ­Troeltsch bitterly noted, “Mr. Wilson merely diplomatically censured and condemned England’s hunger blockade” by issuing toothless remonstrations against Britain. In the case of Germany, by contrast, the American President was “prepared to break our defense against this hunger war with violence.”111 This imbalanced response by the United States to two similar violations of international law revealed to ­Troeltsch that it had actually been less a legal than a moral principle, and a parochial one at that, that had guided Wilson’s actions. “The reason given for this unequal treatment was American moral idealism, which saw the lives of American citizens possibly threatened by the German methods, but only American goods by the English ones. Thus an exclusively moral argument!”112 In response to Wilson’s disproportionate ethical calculus, ­Troeltsch pointedly reminded his listeners that human lives – not just the lives of Americans, but those of Germans, British, and of many other nationals as well – were in fact at stake in both instances and that actions by both Britain and Germany had mutually precipitated what had turned into a murderous standoff. ­Troeltsch also pointed out that it was the British blockade that had first necessitated “the submarine war, whose severity we also regret, but which we are forced to use as the only suitable means to oppose to the English hunger blockade,” and the blockade itself represented an action that had, furthermore, “violated all international law from the very beginning.”113 Yet it was Germany, and Germany alone, that America intended to punish.

111  Ernst ­ Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” in Die deutsche Freiheit, 79–113, here 79. ­Troeltsch published almost simultanously a condensed version of his speech; cf. Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Die westlichen Demokratien,” Europäische Staats- und Wirtschafts-Zei­ tung 2, 21 (26 May, 1917), 529–33. 112 ­Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” 79. 113  Ibid., 80. In the essay by Friedmann Voigt, “Deutsche Freiheit und das europäische Projekt der Moderne. Ernst ­Troeltsch und der Erste Weltkrieg,” in Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914–1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössicher Theologie, ed. Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 281–303, Voigt reads this passage as “defending the German submarine war against the ‘Onslaught of Western Democracy’,” 298. If one reads ­Troeltsch’s words carefully, it emerges that he was clearly explaining why Germany had to employ the submarine, and not advocating that use, much less legimatizing it, as Voigt implies, as a weapon against “democracy.” Seen this way, the passage does not contradict but affirms

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But after exposing what ­Troeltsch considered the specious legal argument initially put forth as the pretext for American intervention in the war, he then asserted that increasingly not even the Allies themselves pretended to believe in that argument anymore and that the original “legal conflict” had already receded “behind the purely moral reasons of democratic conviction”: It is regarded as imperative to wage the war for freedom, law, and humanity; for democracy, world peace, and antimilitarism; for the progressive Western civilization gathered around the two Anglo-Saxon empires, which have now been finally joined by the new Russian democracy, with the noble will of sacrificing oneself for the cause of world democracy until its victory has been decided.114

In ­Troeltsch’s eyes, the war had been transformed from a legal disagreement into a moral “crusade against us,” one that was understood and unabashedly promoted by the Allies as “a war of democracy and pacifism […] opposed to the Central European monarchies that cannot be peaceful because they are monarchies; if they were,” so went the argument, “they would have granted their peoples freedom long ago.”115 But even this second set of “moral” reasons, just like the legal ones preceding it, also rested, ­Troeltsch thought, on either deliberate deceit or willed self-delusion; in either instance they did not coincide with the truth. For ­Troeltsch, then, “with this declaration of war for the sake of peace, with this defamation for the sake of morality, the insanity and falsehood of this war have reached their pinnacle.”116 As ­Troeltsch had already often argued, here too he maintained that the reasons being proffered on all sides for the war, the “ideas” for which it was allegedly being fought and the origins out of which it was said to have sprung, had in reality little to do with the deeper motivations actually driving the conflict – motivations, ­Troeltsch said, that were essentially and in themselves “completely untroubled by democracy and morality.”117 In truth, stripped of all self-serving pieties and naive platitudes, the reason for the present war was not, and never had been, primarily about promoting democracy, enforcing the rule of law, preserving world peace, defending private or public morality, or any other idealistic cause. Rather, it was, he insisted, in the first place and at its core an existential struggle among all the major nation states for raw power.118

what we otherwise know about ­Troeltsch’s views on German submarine warfare (see the end of Chapter 5 of this book). 114 ­Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” 80–81. 115  Ibid., 81. 116 Ibid. 117  Ibid., 82. 118  In taking this position, ­Troeltsch was again remaining consistent with the definition of

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More bluntly than he had ever done before, ­Troeltsch declared that the conflagration had become at bottom a fierce battle for economic supremacy among the chief capitalist regimes in the world and that its prime protagonist was Britain, which fundamentally wanted to maintain its imperialistic hegemony over the international order: “This war – not, albeit, at the beginning – has become in the course of things a sophisticated, diabolically implemented trade and economic war by England, which moreover unscrupulously employs all of the weapons of defamation and incitement.”119 When America was drawn into what he called this vicious “trade war” and began to participate in the “defamation campaign” that had served to legitimate it, its public appeal to the ideals of democracy, ­Troeltsch said, served only as a convenient “fig leaf for entirely different interests.”120 But since the kernel of the “litany” that the Allies constantly recited against Germany was that “we are not a free people as demanded by modern progress and humanity,” ­Troeltsch submitted that the best way of creating some clarity about what actually underlay what he also termed the “democratic-pacifistic jargon”121 used as an offensive rhetorical weapon to justify the war was simply to ask oneself, calmly and objectively: “Wherein does the difference between Western freedom and ours truly exist, provided it exists at all?”122 It was a good question, similar to other questions he had posed to himself over the previous months and years about these issues, and most fully in his Vienna lecture on “The German Idea of Freedom.” And, as usual, ­Troeltsch insisted that in answering it one would have to consider within each individual national context how that idea was “to be understood historically and evaluated politically.”123 Drawing on and elaborating some of those earlier reflections, ­Troeltsch now said that it was not enough to respond by analyzing merely the “current political situation.” Rather, he felt an “expansive historical stocktaking” was necessary that took “the last couple of centuries” into account.124 And the first thing that the state he had given in his address to the Protestant Social Congress in Breslau in 1904; cf. ­Troeltsch, Politische Ethik und Christentum, 7. 119 ­Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” 81–82. 120  Ibid., 83. 121  Ibid., 85. 122  Ibid., 84. 123  Ibid. ­Troeltsch had published in February yet another essay on the subject, this time focusing solely on what he labelled “On Several Peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon Civilization,” which was based on a lecture held on October 22, 1916; cf. Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Über einige Eigentümlichkeiten der angelsächsischen Zivilisation,” Die neue Rundschau 28 (1917), 230–50. ­Troeltsch drew on some of the insights he elaborated in this extremely interesting essay for his speech in the Prussian Lower House in May 1917. 124 ­Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” 84.

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emerged from such an extensive survey was that it “immediately leads us to essential differences, but these lie precisely not in doctrine and morality, but in historical facts.”125 As he had argued in other contexts, and most profoundly in the lecture he had given on the occasion of the Emperor’s birthday in January 1916, there are no immutable constants in the cultural life of different peoples during different periods. Values, all values, inevitably reflect both the specific circumstances in which they are formed and were recognized as such, just as they also mirror the constant process of historical change itself that gradually transforms those values over time. Such historically conditioned difference was, for ­Troeltsch, an unavoidable fact of cultural life, unwelcome perhaps to dogmatists or propagandists, but true nonetheless – and it applied just as inexorably to the value we know as “freedom.” There simply was no one thing, no single fixed idea that is always and everywhere recognized as freedom. Instead, there were many ideas that went by that name, and in fact that “idea” was in every case something absolutely unique. Those who suggested otherwise were not only being “unhistorical,” they were also, unconsciously or not, engaging in the “tactic of couching the completely ruthless battles for economic and political world domination in the diplomatic and inflammatory language of absolute and popularly understandable doctrines.”126 ­Troeltsch acknowledged that his scholarly, philosophical-historical approach would make the matter even more complicated and perhaps put Germany further on the defensive in the war of words. But he was convinced that doing so would ultimately serve a beneficial purpose. “That things thus appear more convoluted and less passionately suggestive is at first an undeniable disadvantage for us. But it is the truth, and the truth must triumph in the end if honesty and clarity shall once again count in this world of passions, iniquity, and lies.”127 In making the attempt to uncover that deeper truth, ­Troeltsch embarked on both a systematic and an historical analysis of the principal meanings of freedom among the relevant national groups. First, on the systematic level, he isolated three main senses of the term, advancing from the particular to the more general. They were: 1. the freedom and uninhibitedness of personal self-expression, or the guarantee and form of one’s style of life; 2. the intellectual and cultural freedom of the exchange of ideas; 3. the properly political freedom of the participation of the individual will in the formation of the general will of the state.128

125 Ibid. 126 

Ibid., 86.

128 

Ibid., 87.

127 Ibid.

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Although ­Troeltsch made interesting observations about the first two conceptions of freedom with respect to its differing realizations in British, French, American, and German culture, it was obviously the third one, about the role of the individual in public life, that was most pertinent to the central question of democracy. And, he argued, just as it becomes immediately evident to any perceptive and honest observer that all of “the Western peoples themselves are completely different according to their historical development,” it was, or should be, equally apparent that their respective idea of “freedom is, according to the nature of the matter, nothing simple, absolute, and intrinsically clear in and of itself.”129 For the same reasons, “the idea of ‘democracy’ as something entirely and naturally uniform and everywhere identical” had to be seen by anyone with any knowledge of history or of different cultures around the world as no more than an illusion or an intentional sham.130 That was not to suggest, ­Troeltsch hastened to add, that democracy itself was any less desirable or necessary; on the contrary. But because the issue was so important, it was also critical to understand what one was talking about in order to address “the difficult problem of the absolutely essential but very heterogeneous democratization of modern peoples.”131 By way of approaching that “difficult problem,” ­Troeltsch said that, for one thing, it was ludicrous to imagine, or to try to peddle, “democracy in itself and everywhere as the principle of world peace and international understanding and the elimination of all human suffering.”132 The evidence of history, indeed that of the current war itself, offered enough testimony to the contrary as to render redundant the refutation of the notion that there was some inherent connection between democracy and peacefulness. Despite what Woodrow Wilson appeared to believe, democracy by itself did not intrinsically instill in people the inclination to pacifism and brotherly love. In addition, ­Troeltsch continued, if one were to heed the Allies’ demands and suddenly introduce radical democratic practices everywhere and dismantle all traditional forms of sovereignty, thereby dissolving all “not purely national states into plebiscitary democracies,” the result would “unleash all conflicts and passions, destroy all of the culture that can be created by the state alone and [produce] chaos in all areas of life.”133 Even more sharply, ­Troeltsch blatantly accused the Allies of employing a double standard when it came to making such demands, preaching the blessings of democracy abroad while preserving imperialistic prerogatives for themselves: 129 

Ibid., 91.

130 Ibid. 131 Ibid.

132  Ibid.,

92. This is also the central thesis of the essay by Oren, “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic Peace.’” 133 ­Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” 92.

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“The democracies of the great states today are for economic and sentimental reasons completely saturated with imperialistic claims and hopes, and they require only foreigners, not themselves, to dissolve into small national republics.”134 Joining Meinecke (with whom he later said “I completely agree”135), ­Troeltsch went so far as to voice the suspicion that “the entire world-redeeming pacifism” proclaimed by England and America was not really meant seriously by its apparent advocates and was “intended only [to impose] control and the protectorate of the two Anglo-Saxon powers over the world,” with their real aim being “to splinter Turkey, Balkanize Austria, and disarm Germany and rob it of its trade.”136 To think otherwise, ­Troeltsch said, was to fail to recognize “that the English people are a state of conquest like ancient Rome” and that the “American republic” had also “proceeded first to conquer the North American continent and then Middle America.”137 These were, ­Troeltsch said, incontrovertible historical facts, so conspicuous and plain that not “even a blind man” could fail to see them.138 It was a bracing barrage, impassioned, hard-hitting – and cogent. Once more, however, it is important to stress that ­Troeltsch was not adducing these arguments in order to condemn democracy itself, or even to reproach the states in their entirety that practiced their particular version of it. Rather, he wanted to pare away the unconscious or cynical prevarications that get bound up in the narratives that all peoples, including democratic ones, tell themselves and others about their own actions, motives, and ideals. Unthinking sloganeering and pious moralizing were not just distracting or merely irritating, ­Troeltsch was saying. They also actively inhibited rational analysis and genuine self-knowledge and thus stifled or even prevented effective political action. What was needed instead was an unsentimental appraisal of democracy that saw it as the product of specific political and historical pressures. For only then, ­Troeltsch thought, could its reality over time and within various contexts be fully understood, its benefits advantageously deployed – and its dangers mitigated. But the larger question of whether to implement democracy or not in Germany or elsewhere was not at issue. That question, ­Troeltsch repeatedly insisted, had already been settled by history. Now the challenge was to appreciate how democracy truly worked, what its constituent elements actually were, as opposed to the interested and biased claims made about by its partisans, and on such a factual basis to decide how best to realize it. “For in truth,” as ­Troeltsch said once more, 134 

Ibid., 92–93. Ibid., 111. 136  Ibid., 93. 137  Ibid., 93–94. 138  Ibid., 94. 135 

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the democratization of the modern peoples is not the effect of a simple and unambiguous moral dogma, but rather the natural and necessary result of the formation of major nations and the enormous growth of populations, through which every individual becomes interested in the success and the economy of the whole, the independent intellectual and moral energy of every individual is utilized by the whole and precisely for that reason a right of codetermination of every individual within the whole must be granted.139

Following this unqualified acknowledgement of the irreversible advance of democracy in the modern world, which he regarded as the inevitable product of the large-scale social, economic, and political developments he had just alluded to, ­Troeltsch then turned to its various historical manifestations, and in particular to “the democratic development of the Western peoples.”140 Not surprisingly, he found that “in no major nation in the world does a completely pure democracy exist. […] The democratized giant states of today are all only conditionally democratic.”141 England, he argued, and in agreement with Max Sering, “was in truth until very recently not a democracy at all, but rather an aristocracy, or better an oligarchy.”142 This verdict led ­Troeltsch to conclude: “England may thus perhaps become a democracy, until now it has not been one.”143 Things were different in France, of course. But there, too, even after the Revolution, “there was, to be sure, no thought of the self-rule of the masses, but rather of the parliamentary self-government of the third estate, that is, of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, next to whom the working class did not yet even exist independently and could be forgotten.”144 And the United States – which ­Troeltsch deemed “in relative terms the most genuine among all the great democracies,”145 adding that “Washington’s constitution is, indeed, proof of a noble and great democratic spirit”146 – was showing disconcerting signs of abandoning its own venerable democratic legacy. Adding to some of the concerns already voiced by Sering as well, ­Troeltsch said that the “equality of opportunity” reputedly available to everyone in America increasingly “means in truth relentless competition and, with the diminishment of opportunity, as it is happening today, an almost grotesque reign of plutocracy.”147 The 139 

Ibid., 94. The word ­Troeltsch used for the “right of codetermination” – Mitbestimmungs­ recht – did not come into common usage or legal force in its narrow economic sense until after the Second World War. 140  Ibid., 96. 141 Ibid. 142  Ibid., 97. 143  Ibid., 99. 144  Ibid., 101. 145  Ibid., 103. 146  Ibid., 104. 147  Ibid., 105.

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related “danger of anarchy,” which ­Troeltsch also thought hovered over American social and political life, had additionally given rise to a disturbing “uniformity and tyranny of public opinion” created by those who had the means to generate and control it – a view he had in common, incidentally, with two observers of America whom he admired, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.148 ­Troeltsch further deplored the merciless “lack of any social or welfare policy” in the United States and the “naked control of the party machines,” all of which he said was causing “the colonial farmer democracy to disappear” and cede its place to “a capitalistic major nation.”149 All of that lead him to the startling conclusion that whereas “England may become a democracy, America is gradually ceasing to be one in the old sense.”150 This forceful overview of the principal existing democracies in the world finally brought ­Troeltsch back to Germany itself and to what he termed “the situation of the democratic idea with us.”151 In that regard, ­Troeltsch was direct and unequivocal. Like Britain and France, “our state, as well, commenced democratization as a matter of course long ago.”152 Over the previous century, he explained, Germany had become ever more democratic as a natural function of its overall political evolution: “With its development into a major state, it advanced bit by bit toward democracy and had to do so. And, indeed, its intellectual foundations and practical example initially also came from the West, from France and England.”153 That argument, which by then ­Troeltsch had been making for the better part of a year, also meant that it was an illusion at best to imagine, with respect to democratization as a process, that there was a categorical divide between Germany in its entirety and its Western neighbors. As he said, “it is just as little true that there exists here a completely separate development and that a fundamental contrast prevails” between the West and Germany.154 Rather, “we have merely appropriately modified Western democracy for our circumstances.”155 Furthermore, just as those specific circumstances had created “here a particular situation, so too each of the Western peoples has its own particular situation and particular 148 

Cf. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 2nd. ed. (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1859), 132, where he wrote that “the complete establishment, in this and other free countries, of the ascendancy of public opinion in the State” was “a more powerful agency” than any other “in bringing about a general similarity among mankind.” 149 ­Troeltsch, “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” 105. 150  Ibid., 105–06. 151  Ibid., 109. 152 Ibid. 153  Ibid., 110. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid.

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result.”156 At the same time, ­Troeltsch reiterated that he did not believe that the future peace was necessarily guaranteed by any particular form of state as compared to another. “Democracies as well as monarchies,” he insisted, “indeed today if anything the former rather than the latter, are equally inclined toward imperialistic power politics if they believe they can thereby improve their economic interests and if the passions of national vanity are awakened.”157 Instead, peace, a genuine peace, would depend in all cases “on the degree to which peoples and governments would refrain from intervening in the inner affairs of foreign states and, through the mutual delimitation of their vital developmental spheres, try to be content to live in harmony.”158 And that, ­Troeltsch said in closing, was ultimately the only kind of freedom that truly mattered and without which all “inner freedom” was practically meaningless. A state had to have the freedom to exercise and preserve its own autonomy and independence. For Germany, that crucially meant, given ­Troeltsch’s conviction that the war was basically economically driven, the freedom to maintain and expand its ability to engage in commerce and trade with the rest of the world: Without the recovery and protection of our trade, without the supply of raw materials and the sale of our goods, even with the most beautiful democratic constitution, we would be only a democracy of beggars. […] It is for this forgotten minor detail that we are fighting, working, and dying.159

In ­Troeltsch’s considered opinion, Germany already was and had long been on the path to democracy. What it needed now were the means – the political, social, economic and, yes, the military means – that would enable it to keep hewing to that course.

The Second July Crisis ­ roeltsch’s speech, and those which proceeded it, are remarkable enough in T themselves, and together they provide a far more informed, balanced, and self-critical perspective on the nature of political freedom than a cursory glance at the texts – or merely their titles – would suggest. But as important as the arguments were that all of the speakers had set forth both about democracy as such and about its various articulations throughout the world, even more noteworthy is the very fact that they did so at all. To appreciate the full significance of that 156 Ibid. 157 

Ibid., 112. Ibid., 113. 159 Ibid. 158 

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decision, it is perhaps useful to take a step back and to consider the larger context. In mid-May, 1917, the German Empire found itself under massive pressure from unprecedented threats on all sides. The external situation had gone from dire to nearly hopeless only a month before, after the Americans had resolved to enter the war, and the already alarming internal unrest at all levels of society seemed to be becoming greater and more uncontrollable by the day. On top of everything else, that April mass strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers had been staged throughout Germany, the largest such demonstrations to take place since the arrest of Karl Liebknecht the year before. This time, the strikes were focused primarily on the inadequate supply of food, leading them to be known (and in their political importance dismissed) as the “Bread Strikes.”160 And yet, in the middle of this turbulent and wrenching series of events, and while men in the field continued to die in appalling numbers, it was deemed by five of the most politically astute members of the intellectual class that the most urgent problem for them to address individually and as a group – and as a nation – concerned the essential nature of democracy. And they approached that question by asking to what extent democracy had, or had not yet, been realized in Germany. What is more, they did so by affirming its general significance for their country and by demonstrating their own personal commitment to many of its principles. Judged even superficially, with regard only to its significance as a political gesture, the week-long lecture series in the Prussian House of Representatives must count as one of the major turning points of the war in Germany. For it marked the moment when discussions about foreign policy and national domestic politics as a whole – and in concert with each other – first began to be formulated by respected figures on the national stage with explicit reference to the democratic idea.161 It also meant, almost inevitably, that any remaining vestige of nonpartisan consensus vanished as those both for and against democracy subsequently abandoned all previous restraint and began staking out their respective ideological ground with increasingly determined resolve. In June, obviously sensing that a new and perilous phase in the political life of his country had begun, and recognizing that a moment had arrived that demanded immediate, decisive action, Adolf von Harnack sent Bethmann Hollweg an urgent memorandum spelling out what he saw as “The Requirement of the Hour.” In it, Harnack wrote that “until 160  See Gutsche, Aufstieg und Fall, 207. Cf. also Luban, “Die Massenstreiks für Frieden und Demokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg,” 15–20. 161  An alternate view can be found in the dissertation by Hans Jörg Schmidt, “Die deutsche Freiheit.” Geschichte eines kollektiven semantischen Sonderbewusstseins (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen: 2007), 186.

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a few weeks ago” he had privately agreed with the Chancellor’s tactics of trying “to prevent serious domestic fissures through the solidarity of the parties and through delaying important decisions.”162 Now, however, at this perilous moment, Harnack had become convinced that, despite the risks involved in taking a definitive stand, the dangers of not doing so were even greater, and “that the time of dithering must end:”163 We have arrived at a deadlock in every respect and we must, whatever it may cost, get beyond it. We have been held at this deadlock for a long time on the major battlefronts, at a deadlock with respect to our peace initiatives, and above all at a deadlock domestically. A gloomy, unhappy mood is spreading, not only on this or that level of the population, but everywhere and also among the best. I observe it daily. If it continues, then the capital – the moral capital – with which alone a war can be fought and a tolerable peace can be concluded threatens to run out. And where this mood has not yet gained the upper hand, people are lulling themselves into absolutely terrifying illusions about both the military and general situation, as if we were still in August 1914 and would soon have a conquered world lying at our feet. The awakening from this mood can become more dangerous than resigned or despairing dejection.164

This bleak diagnosis seemed convincing, if distressing, enough; but what to do about the situation appeared less than clear. Of one thing Harnack was certain: direct action was possible “only domestically.”165 The military and diplomatic impasses on all fronts had proved to be intractable and were not in any case susceptible to unilateral control. That is to say, peace through victory in the field or on the seas appeared as remote as ever, and the chances for a negotiated settlement, let alone a favorable one, seemed to have receded even further. Where Germany still could exert its own will to positive effect, Harnack had been persuaded, was therefore solely on itself. “It is not yet the final hour,” Harnack wrote, while trying to impress upon the Chancellor that such an hour was rapidly approaching: The idea of a social monarchy must be completely and practically followed through on now. There resides in it the measure of democracy that we need and it contains as well the defense against a democracy that does not correspond to our character and the spirit of our state and people. The franchise question must be resolved by the government now in the sense of a universal, equal, and direct franchise.166

Not only would Germany benefit internally by such measures, Harnack argued, an invaluable political gain would also accrue internationally from “the obvious fact of inner reforms,” namely: “it takes away the most powerful intellectual 162  Adolf 163 Ibid. 164 

von Harnack, “Das Gebot der Stunde,” in Erforschtes und Erlebtes, 298.

Ibid., 298–99. Ibid., 299. 166 Ibid. 165 

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weapon from our enemies!”167 Harnack stressed that such “liberal progress” would not and must not be pursued “for the sake of our enemies” alone. But he thought, nevertheless, “such an undertaking will make the strongest impression on them.”168 Moreover, there were also purely objective reasons, he felt, that made such reforms necessary not just in themselves, but in order to correct the perception of Germany in the eyes of their enemies as well: “Next to our great political merits,” he admitted, in what was for Harnack a truly striking concession, “we really do lag behind them in several respects and they see and feel only that backwardness.”169 Even Harnack, who had taken such umbrage at Woodrow Wilson, was now willing to concede that he may have had a point: In my opinion, it is a serious deception on the part of our newspapers – not to speak of the PanGermans – to declare that it is mere “cant” and hypocrisy when England, France, and America attribute freedom to themselves and autocracy and servitude to us. Very many people who speak that way abroad subjectively intend it honestly and really want to liberate us and the world. We can and must not disown our fundamental character: but we can also no longer afford that luxury of standing there as the misunderstood oddity.170

Harnack reiterated that “inner reforms of a liberal nature” were now not just the only option left to Germany, they were also in his view absolutely essential to its very survival. “Without them,” he warned, “we will obtain no peace; with and through them it draws closer. For that reason the inner reforms are more important than the entire submarine war.”171 It would be hard to overstate the momentousness of Harnack’s last words. They conveyed an open acceptance of the supremacy of domestic affairs over foreign policy in determining the ability of Germany to conduct the war and to secure an acceptable peace. And they also revealed his belief that the promised program of “reorientation” and its democratizing impetus would be of much greater benefit to his country and its future than the submarine campaign, on which so many Germans still pinned their remaining hopes for prevailing against their enemies – as mistaken as that belief was. In short, at that hour of extreme danger to his country, Harnack was saying that Germany could still be preserved

167 

Ibid., 300.

168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 

Ibid., 301. Cf. Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral, 151, who writes that “Harnack’s memorandum is perhaps the most characteristic document for the path that the discussion about war aims and reform took among the moderates,” providing a clear illustration of how “demands for reform transformed from a mere function of German wartime policy into a program with its own weight, into the alternative to all annexationist plans.” 171 Ibid.

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– but not by the submarine. Now he was convinced that only democracy – or rather “the measure of democracy that we need” – could save it. Bethmann Hollweg quickly responded to Harnack’s message. On June 22, he invited Harnack to a private meeting in the Imperial Chancellery. Astonishingly, instead of acknowledging the urgency of the situation and agreeing to the necessity of immediate measures, the Chancellor calmly explained to Harnack that “there still exist insuperable obstacles and that one still had to wait.”172 Bethmann Hollweg said he recognized that Germany’s enemies did not themselves present the principal challenges he was facing, but that his main difficulties stemmed from the domestic opponents of his policies. Nevertheless, and maddeningly, he still cautioned that “he could unfortunately not afford to have such a falling out with the conservatives (he was referring specifically to the East Elbian Junkers) that it would come to an outright domestic battle.”173 That conversation, in which the Chancellor still seemed to be trying to hold back a deluge that had already begun to crash down over him, appears to have been the final straw for Harnack. He seems to have come to the conclusion that Bethmann Hollweg, by refusing to push more strenuously for reforms out of fear of antagonizing the right, only to alienate by such inaction his increasingly skeptical friends to the left, was being either disingenuous or simply delusional. Harnack decided that if the Chancellor would not act, then he and others would have to act in his stead. A week later, on July 1, 1917, Harnack’s long-time collaborator Hans Delbrück wrote a brief announcement he published in the Preußische Jahrbücher that was signed by nine others, including Harnack himself, Friedrich Meinecke, Alexander Dominicus, who was the Mayor of the Berlin district of Schöneberg, Paul Rohrbach, Friedrich Thimme, and Ernst ­Troeltsch. The “Berlin Declaration,” as it came to be known, read in full: The great battle in which the German people find themselves has not yet ended. The undersigned have until now mainly honored the notion that the promises of the Imperial Easter Message, in order to avoid all too serious domestic battles, were to be implemented in agreement with the conservative elements of public life. But the resistance that is being put up from this side is so great that doubts had to arise whether the Easter message would be fully achieved in accordance with its spirit after the conclusion of the peace. Today such doubt is intolerable. In order for the German people to retain the confidence it has a right to, it is necessary to take the matter in hand without delay. We thus will not wait to raise publicly the demand of the day: that the government immediately present to the Diet a franchise reform that introduces not only the universal, direct, and secret vote, but also one that 172  From a letter by Harnack to his niece on June 23, 1917, describing the meeting; cited in Richard Fester, Die Politik Kaiser Karls und der Wendepunkt des Weltkrieges (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1925), 256. 173 Ibid.

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is equal, and that the government also otherwise give effective and visible expression to the confidence that the German people deserve.174

With that short, defiant statement demanding immediate political reform in the shape of an equal vote for all (male) citizens, which the right-wing Berliner Neu­ este Nachrichten contemptuously attempted to brush off as no more than a “pathetic proposal […] by intellectuals”175 and which the Social Democratic Vor­ wärts hailed as the declaration of the “Nine Upstanding Men,”176 the second July Crisis burst into the open.177 Although the specific problem of the Prussian franchise, and in particular the equality of each voter’s voice, was obviously at the center of the renewed and rapidly escalating surge of internal strife, that was not really the fundamental concern.178 The deeper issue, which had also been at the heart of the five speeches delivered just over a month earlier in the House of Representatives, concerned precisely the meaning and role of democracy as such in Germany: how, or if, it should be implemented, what its form should or should not be, and, most decisively, who should wield ultimate authority and power in the state. And the full force of the “Berlin Declaration,” the reason that it precipitated a national crisis, was that what before had been a localized political matter within a single federal state had become elevated, through the insistent and reiterated appeal in the declaration to all of “the German people,” to the level of a national cause.179 As a result, what had previously been a more narrowly Prussian problem became a broader German one, and at stake was nothing less than the future of the democratic idea itself within the nation as a whole. On June 22, the same day Harnack had his private colloquy with Bethmann Hollweg, his Chief of Staff Arnold Wahnschaffe had also summoned the Social Democratic leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann to the Chancellery to discuss their concerns, who both took the opportunity to tell him that what they and the people wanted was not this or that minor adjustment, but rather rapid and full “democratization!”180 Their opponents on the right – the Pan-Germans, of course, but also the many other conservative nationalist groups, industrialist cartels, powerful agrarian as174 Cf.

Preußische Jahrbücher 169 (1917), 156. Cited in Patemann, 85n6. 176  Prinz Max von Baden, Erinnerungen und Dokumente, 108. He mistakenly remembered there were “ten” signers to the declaration. 177  See the detailed reconstruction of this episode in the chapter “Die Juli-Krise” in Ritter, 3, 551–84; cf. also Patemann, 82–96; 178  Cf. Patemann, 82. 179  See Huber, 5, 161. 180 Philipp Scheidemann, Der Zusammenbruch (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1921), 156. 175 

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sociations, and, most ominously, the majority of the Supreme Army Command – were no less convinced that the very fate of the Empire depended on halting the quickening advance of democracy at whatever cost. An official Conservative Party announcement put the matter succinctly: The equal franchise does not correspond to the character and the historical past of the Prussian state. It is suited, rather, to convulse the stable framework of Prussia and also surrender this state to complete democratization.181

In a memorandum that Colonel Max Bauer prepared in March, 1917 for his superior, the commander of the German army Erich Ludendorff, Bauer wrote even more unnervingly that “if one wanted to make our form of government more democratic, then we will irretrievably move via a revolution toward democracy and toward downfall.”182 Ludendorff himself, who signaled his distaste for the Emperor’s Easter Message by refusing to dignify it with any other name than the unpalatable-sounding “April Edict,” interpreted that “edict” and everything it implied as a disgraceful sign of weakness and inner capitulation. “The destructive elements,” Ludendorff later wrote in his memoirs, meaning by that contemptuous phrase his fellow countrymen who were in favor of reform, “sensed the fear of the government and became more demanding. The strikes in the second half of April were their response; they were an echo of the Russian revolution.”183 Bethmann Hollweg, who was able to read Ludendorff’s book in preparing his own memoirs, commented on this passage as being representative of Ludendorff’s views, which Bethmann Hollweg elucidated by saying that Ludendorff “condemned political reforms in general that had a democratic effect or broadened parliamentary rights as feeble concessions to the so-called Zeitgeist.”184 On both sides, then, the fundamental question of democracy provided the ultimate, if frequently unspoken, rationale for actions everyone was undertaking, but were swiftly exceeding anyone’s ability to control. Regardless, despite the ever more exclusive focus on domestic politics, and on the question of democracy in particular, foreign policy and military strategy did not of course lose their importance, even if the Germans’ capacity to influence external matters seemed to be dwindling by the day. The most sensitive issue of all, naturally, was the on-going unrestricted submarine offensive, which in July was entering its sixth month of operation, the time when the German Admiralty had brashly promised that Britain would be “forced to its knees”185 and “beg for 181 

Ursachen und Folgen, 1, 325; cited in Fischer, 435. Oberst Bauer, Der große Krieg in Feld und Heimat, 137. 183  Ludendorff, 256. 184  Bethmann Hollweg, Betrachtungen, 2, 191. 185  Cf. Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 251. 182 

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peace.”186 Initially, the tonnage of ships being sunk in the new campaign had risen appreciably: 520,412 tons were sent to the bottom of the ocean in February; 564,497 tons were sunk in March, followed by a staggering 860,334 tons in April.187 Ludendorff, seizing on these tallies, asserted in April that the submarines were working even better than the Admiralty had predicted and he informed the Foreign Office that “we can expect that a complete success of the U-boat war will be achieved in the time of 5–6 months indicated by the naval staff.”188 The German military establishment spread this conviction – if it was truly believed by those who retailed it – through leaks and off-the-record conversations, allowing it to be amplified by a compliant press eager to tell the German people what it thought they wanted to hear or would further a particular political agenda. As a result, in the spring of 1917 many ordinary citizens sincerely hoped and believed that, with the aid of the underwater miracle weapon, the war would be over by autumn. Those who possessed a robust memory would recall that they had heard similar promises before. And, as before, reality proved to be unresponsive to rhetoric. After the Allies introduced the convoy system for escorting unarmed ships in April 1917, their losses dramatically declined, even falling by mid-summer to levels below those recorded before the unrestricted sinkings began.189 Even more disturbing for the Germans, as the summer wore on and the self-imposed six-month deadline the High Command had so confidently set for British capitulation steadily approached, no sign of the anticipated plea for peace emerged. Although as early as February Prime Minister David Lloyd George had called attention in a public speech “to the great and to the growing menace of Germany’s piratical devices,” which he underscored by admitting that “the peril is great,”190 and despite ongoing concern about the material and psychological costs of the submarine threat, Britain did not budge. Matthias Erzberger, who had privately long questioned the inflated claims made about the submarines, began to fear that the German people were being made the victims of a cynical public relations ploy to sustain morale and provide a steady supply of human fodder to the front. In his memoirs, Erzberger wrote he had been “surprised” in June when Colonel Max Bauer, whom he dubbed “Ludendorff’s right-hand man,” had perhaps incautiously expressed his “amazement at having found a downright irresponsible optimism in Berlin about the end of 186 

Schröder, 356. Keegan, 353. 188  Schröder, 331. 189  Keegan, 353. 190  Schröder, 335. 187 

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the war; the German people, he said, do not see the situation clearly.”191 Troubled by this frank and thus all the more disquieting revelation, and perhaps also goaded into action by the “Berlin Declaration” on July 1, Erzberger decided that the time had come for him, too, to take a stand. As he put it: “Since I was convinced it was mathematically certain that the submarine war would not force England to peace in the foreseeable future, the Reichstag had to deliberate the question about the way it could be achieved.”192 After conferring with his Center Party colleagues in closed committee about his plan to state this view publicly, and upon receiving yet another “completely unsatisfactory answer from the naval staff concerning my calculations regarding the U-boat question,” Erzberger finally came to the conclusion it was his “national duty and first obligation as a representative” to “become more explicit, which I could all the more easily do since the proceedings were confidential and nothing had been published in the press either about the previous discussions.”193 What Matthias Erzberger then delivered before a general assembly of the ­Reichstag on July 6, 1917 amounted to a political bombshell: not only did he, as the first elected official in Germany, publicly call for an immediate and complete cessation of the submarine campaign, he also sought to dispel any lingering illusions the Germans may have had about the likelihood of a military victory by any other means as well. “The continuation of the war,” he gravely announced to the gathered representatives, “could lead to ruin.”194 If, as Erzberger had been persuaded was likely, the submarines did not bring the British to the negotiation table any time soon, another “winter campaign” was all but assured, which the people at home, not to mention the soldiers at the front, may very well not be able to survive. The only responsible, and the only truly realistic, course of action for Germany, Erzberger decided, was to seek out and follow whatever path was available that would lead most expeditiously to peace. Erzberger was fully aware of the magnitude of what he was proposing and he also realized what the probable reaction on the right would be. But, displaying the impetuous courage of someone who was convinced he had the truth on his side, he urged his fellow delegates not “to worry about the 25,000 Pan-Germans, but rather to let those people go crazy. It would be much cheaper to build sanato191 Erzberger,

Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 252. Ibid., 254. 193  Ibid., 255. 194  Nebelin, 326. The full text of the stenographer’s transcription of Erzberger’s speech can be found in Ursachen und Folgen. Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart. Ein Urkunden und Dokumentensam­ mlung zur Zeitgeschichte, eds. Herbert Michaelis and Ernst Schraepler (Berlin: Dr. Herbert Wendler & Co, 1956), 2, 6. 192 

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riums for them than to continue the war for another year.”195 Still, Erzberger also acknowledged that the decision to seek peace as soon as possible would not by itself end the war instantly and that the fight for Germany’s future would have to continue for some time. But just the act itself of making a sincere bid for peace would, he felt, create the most favorable and possibly the only conditions for peace to occur: By giving up the submarine war we will not of course come closer to peace. We must continue to wage the war using all means. But if a vast majority in the Reichstag, or perhaps all the representatives, could unite behind the idea from August 1, 1914: we are standing in the posture of a defensive war and draw the consequences from that fact, we seek a compromise peace that recognizes the power relationships that have arisen because of the war, a peace that will not entail the forcible oppression of peoples and border areas; if the Reichstag could say that to the government, then that would be the best path leading toward peace.196

As Erzberger had foreseen, his speech stirred an “enormous commotion,”197 and not just among his ideological opponents. Theodor Wolff noted in his diary that it created a “sensation in all political circles,” and that especially Erzberger’s daring call to end the “submarine war made a colossal impression.”198 Some even described the general reaction to it as one of absolute “panic.”199 In the immediate aftermath, Friedrich Ebert, Chairman of the Social Democratic Party, went so far as to assert that Erzberger’s move had created “a completely new parliamentary situation.”200 Ebert agreed that it was doubtful that “a better peace could be achieved next year than now,” and he urged his fellow party members to follow Erzberger’s motion to seize the initiative and draft a peace proposal to present to the Allies.201 Suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, a broad-based coalition had formed in the Reichstag that appeared to have the momentum to break through the political stalemate paralyzing the country, providing a goal that appeared to be both attainable and, at least for some, honorable. In the classic account published ten years later, Arthur Rosenberg even called Erzberger’s address “a revolutionary deed,” and on that basis Rosenberg singled out July 6, 1917 as the day when “the cornerstone of the German bourgeois republic was laid.”202

195 

Ursachen und Folgen, 2, 6.

196 Ibid. 197 

Nebelin, 326. Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 509–10. 199  Huber, 5, 292. 200  Nebelin, 327. 201 Ibid. 202 Rosenberg, Die Entstehung der Deutschen Republik, 156. 198 

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Erzberger’s gesture, whether actually or merely potentially revolutionary, certainly got the attention of the forces of order. That same afternoon, a telegram was sent to the High Command at General Headquarters in Bad Kreuznach alerting them to the alarming developments in Berlin. Hindenburg then sent a telegram of his own to the Kaiser at 10 pm that evening informing the Emperor that he and Ludendorff would be coming immediately to the capital to discuss “domestic questions.”203 In a later message to Wilhelm, Hindenburg was more explicit about his concerns: The Minister of War tells me that the Reichstag intends a declaration about a peace proposal that could be construed as a peace of renunciation – Verzichtfrieden. I harbor the most serious reservations against such a declaration, since it would increase the already existing agitation within the army and would be regarded at the present moment as a sign of inner weakness. It would, according to the statements by our external enemies, be met with no understanding whatsoever; rather, it would strengthen our enemies’ will to fight on.204

For his part, the Emperor was irritated by the breach of protocol displayed by his two top generals, who appeared unbidden in the capital the following day, attempting to involve themselves in affairs that by rights did not concern them. Erzberger reported that the Kaiser curtly advised them to return immediately to Kreuznach where, Wilhelm said, they “undoubtedly had more important things to do.”205 But before departing, Ludendorff did have time for a brief meeting with Gustav Stresemann, the leader of the National Liberal Party, who told the general what he thought was necessary to calm the current unrest. “First,” Stresemann said, “the pledge to submit a franchise bill in the autumn. Second, the parliamentarization of the government by appointing representatives to ministerial posts. And further, above all, a change of Chancellor.”206 Naturally, Ludendorff could not accept the first two items, but the third one met with his full approval. Ever since mid-February 1917, when Bethmann Hollweg had finally uttered the word “reorientation” before the Reichstag, the diverse coalition of opposition forces lined up against him had been concertedly plotting to get rid of him. On February 25, for example, a meeting had taken place in the Hotel Adlon attended by well-known representatives of the Conservative Party, as well as by several prominent figures from trade and industry, who signed a petition to be submitted to the Kaiser advocating for Bethmann’s removal.207 In May, the Bavarian Minister of War, Philipp von Hellingrath, was al203 Müller,

Regierte der Kaiser?, 300. Paul von Hindenburg to Emperor Wilhelm II, July 12, 1917; cf. Ursachen und Folgen, 2, 25–26. 205 Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 259. 206  Nebelin, 331. 207  Cf. Haußmann, 86–93. 204 

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ready saying of the embattled Chancellor that “his days are numbered.”208 At the end of June, Ludendorff himself had announced, and in doing so represented a sentiment widely shared within the General Staff, that he would “very much like to see a change of Chancellor, but did not know the appropriate means to bring it about.”209 Soon, there was even a popular slogan being circulated by the Berlin tabloids that made a sardonic play on the Chancellor’s name: Bethmann soll weg, they jeered: “Bethmann should go.”210 Having broken definitively with the right over his backing of internal reform, as belated and half-hearted as it had been, only to have exhausted the patience and good will of everyone else because of his congenital inability to make any decision and stick to it, Bethmann Hollweg had by the mid-summer of 1917 managed to isolate himself entirely. He suddenly found that he was standing completely alone, forced even to endure the indignity of the boulevard press publishing mocking rhymes calling for his ouster. There was no obvious way out of the dilemma that did not involve making some drastic choice – a situation that the choice-averse Chancellor could only have found unbearable. Feeling trapped by a predicament that was even more miserable by having been largely of his own creation, Bethmann Hollweg confided to Karl von Weizsäcker, the Minister President of Württemberg, that he had seriously considered committing suicide. Yet all too characteristically, the wavering philosopher of Hohenfinow found he was unable to carry out even this last desperate act. As he somewhat self-pityingly explained to Weizsäcker, the soldiers “in the trenches had it easier. They could put a bullet in their brain, but in the terrible situation he was in, he said, he could not.”211 Like virtually everyone else, Ernst ­Troeltsch, as one of the nine prominent signatories of the Berlin Declaration on July 1, 1917, had by that time finally given up on the Chancellor as well. Just over a week after the declaration appeared, on July 10 – and, as it happened, almost exactly one year after he had published his principled endorsement of “sobriety” and “courage” in politics and of the Chancellor as their embodiment – ­Troeltsch wrote a letter to his youngest sister, Elise, describing the tumultuous atmosphere in the capital and his own changed estimation of the country’s leadership. Clearly sympathetic to the stance that Matthias Erzberger had taken in the Reichstag, ­Troeltsch explained to his sister that, contrary to the exaggerated claims being made by the backers of unrestrained use of the submarines, the U-boats would not and could not bring 208 

Ritter, 3, 551. Nebelin, 322. 210  Fritz Stern, Bethmann Hollweg und der Krieg: Die Grenzen der Verantwortung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1968), 13. 211 Vietsch, Bethmann Hollweg, 260. 209 

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about an end to the war in only a few months. In fact, ­Troeltsch said that he thought they would only prolong it, while in the process further eroding Germany’s already low standing in the world and with it any hopes for a favorable peace. “It essentially concerns the fact that the U-boat war will not bring a decision by the fall and the duration of the war thus becomes incalculable,” ­Troeltsch told his sister. Some things are beginning to dawn on people and some illusions are sinking […] The matter is becoming serious and it comes down to the continuation of the current Imperial Government or the installation of new men. Today no one knows if the Chancellor will remain. I have no particular interest in him. His irresolution with respect to the Pan-Germans and the Conservatives has made me very skeptical toward him.212

Three days later, on July 13, Wilhelm II accepted Bethmann Hollweg’s resignation. “What an irony of fate!” wrote the Chief of the Imperial Naval Cabinet, Georg Alexander von Müller, in his diary. The Imperial Chancellor, who had balked at the senseless Pan-German agitation, is falling through a push by Erzberger who in his rejection of the Pan-German war aims has descended almost or entirely to the level of the Social Democrats. He falls as the victim of the battle against the High Command, with the company of Hindenburg and Ludendorff against him, he, the very person who … put that company into the saddle …213

The Peace Resolution Suddenly, the warning ­Troeltsch had delivered a year before in his essay defending the Chancellor – that “only defeated or politically immature peoples over­ throw their governments in the middle of a war”214 – seemed darkly prophetic and even more ominous. At the worst possible time, Germany had abruptly terminated its political leader and disbanded its government, putting the stability of the whole country and its very viability at risk. On the same afternoon that Bethmann Hollweg resigned, the Kaiser quickly named a replacement for him. But the Emperor’s apparent lack of planning and consultation resulted in the improbable choice of Georg Michaelis. He was a completely unknown and inexperienced Prussian bureaucrat whose sole preparation for the job of running the country was to have managed various government agencies overseeing food and nutrition since the beginning of the war. Given this 212  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Elise ­Troeltsch, 10 July, 1917; cited in Drescher, 447–48. In the text, Drescher erroneously refers to the date of the letter as “July 1916.” 213 Müller, Regierte der Kaiser?, 302. 214 ­Troeltsch, “Politik des Mutes und Politik der Nüchternheit,” 375.

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jarring mismatch of the office with its new holder, suspicions were raised that Michaelis had been chosen precisely because of his lack of qualifications, which would make him more susceptible to being used as a pawn in the machinations of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who wanted the new Chancellor above all to shut down the peace initiative being spearheaded by Erzberger. Although Michaelis later denied that he was merely a front man for the two generals, his own political convictions, which were what one would expect from a dedicated Prussian civil servant, could only have been congenial to them. Four days before his surprising appointment, for instance, when Bethmann Hollweg was still Chancellor, Michaelis wrote to his wife that the political intrigues in Berlin were all “very exciting. The ministers are divided: if Bethmann stays and pushes through his democratic and feeble goals, several intend to go.”215 And Michaelis later acknowledged in his memoirs that when the Emperor offered him the post, the Kaiser stressed that he was most concerned about the political situation, which he considered to be so dangerous because Erzberger’s attack against Bethmann Hollweg in the Reichstag caucus and his introduction of the resolution with its far-reaching readiness for peace signaled to the enemies an undignified avowal of weakness, which did not correspond to the war situation and would achieve the opposite of what its advocates were seeking.216

Although Michaelis reportedly said nothing during this encounter, Wilhelm obviously came away thinking there was no reason to believe that his designated Imperial Chancellor disagreed.217 Predictably, Bethmann Hollweg’s precipitate departure followed by the equally hasty installation of his lackluster successor, while a relief to many, created considerable distress and confusion in themselves. Experienced politician that Matthias Erzberger was, he deftly exploited the chaotic situation to press forward with his own plans. As he recalled in his memoirs, in the days following his stunning speech in the Reichstag calling for an end to submarine warfare and for an active pursuit of peace, which had been widely reported in the press, the agitation became great within the German people. I received a tremendous number of letters of approval, particularly from the front; protests also came in; many could not understand the entire course of events. The scene in Berlin itself, however, changed not just daily, but almost hourly. It was an agitation that far exceeded any of my experiences in Rome, Bucharest or elsewhere.218 215 Bert

Becker, Georg Michaelis. Preußischer Beamter, Reichskanzler, Christlicher Re­ former, 1857–1936. Eine Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007), 354. 216  Georg Michaelis, Für Staat und Volk. Eine Lebensgeschichte (Berlin: Furche, 1922), 323. 217  Cf. Becker, 364. 218 Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 259.

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In the midst of this consuming maelstrom of apprehension, anger, and fear, Erz­ berger quickly cobbled together a document setting forth a “peace resolution” and formally presented it to the Reichstag on July 19, 1917, less than a week into the new government of Imperial Chancellor Georg Michaelis. Erzberger’s Friedensresolution, which was adopted by a large majority of the sitting representatives, declared: As on August 4, 1914, the words from the Emperor’s speech are still valid for the German people on the threshold of the fourth year of the war: “We are not driven by the desire for conquest!” Germany took up arms to defend its freedom and independence, for the integrity of its territorial vested rights. The Reichstag seeks a peace of understanding – Verständigung – and of the lasting reconciliation of peoples. Forced acquisitions of territory and political, economic or financial violations are incompatible with such a peace. The Reichstag also rejects all plans that aim at the economic isolation or antagonization of peoples after the war. Freedom of the seas must be assured. Only an economic peace will prepare the ground for the friendly coexistence of peoples. The Reichstag will energetically promote the creation of international legal organizations. However, as long as enemy governments show no interest in such a peace, as long as they threaten Germany and its allies with conquest and violation, the German people will stand together as one, steadfastly persevere and fight until the right of it and its allies to life and development has been secured. The German people are invincible in their unity. The Reichstag knows itself to be one with the men who are protecting the Fatherland in heroic battle. They can be sure of the everlasting gratitude of the entire people.219

Two Varieties of Vaterland Erzberger’s own Center Party had of course voted for the Peace Resolution, as had the center-left Progressive People’s Party and the center-right National Liberal Party, which were all joined as well by a majority of the Social Democrats. To the Conservatives, however, and to other nationalist organizations, the brazen passage of the resolution, with its explicit renunciation of any territorial acquisitions and its equally unambiguous expression of the desire to enter a negotiated peace reached by political concession rather than through military strength, evinced only weakness and surrender. Indeed, many thought that it amounted to nothing less than an act of “treason against the fatherland.” To them it was, quite simply and intolerably, vaterlandsverräterisch.220 That was the incendiary word that General August Keim used to describe the resolution in a letter to the Chairman of the Pan-German League, Heinrich Claß. 219  220 

Ibid., 265–66. Hagenlücke, 144.

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Wolfgang Kapp, the erstwhile nemesis of Bethmann Hollweg, was equally incensed. The harsh response to Kapp the previous year over his pamphlet against the Chancellor had, instead of chastening Kapp, only further radicalized and emboldened him. Naturally, Kapp was pleased by the downfall of Bethmann and encouraged by his replacement with a potentially more pliable successor. But Kapp’s satisfaction over that turn of events had been cut short by Erzberger’s having outmaneuvered the unprepared Michaelis by pushing through the Peace Resolution. Moreover, Michaelis had bafflingly responded to it with a public statement that sounded so equivocal that many took it as an endorsement. “I did not expect a speech from the new man that was so weak in content and form,” Kapp wrote in dismay. “Tactically, politically, in terms of statesmanship it was a complete failure. He found no word of response to the insolent jostlings of power-hungry democracy.”221 The last word is telling: for Kapp, the true issue behind the Reichstag resolution did not concern Germany’s war aims, the kind of peace it should pursue, or even the nature of the country’s leadership. To Kapp and his confederates, the Peace Resolution represented an undisguised act of ideological warfare, an opportunistic foray by the forces of democracy in Germany into the heart of the state that had to be stopped by any means. Since the new Chancellor had already demonstrated that he was ill-suited to the task, Wolfgang Kapp thus resolved that it was necessary to take matters into his own hands. Following more than a month of back-room lobbying and planning, Kapp convened a meeting of just over a dozen associates in Königsberg on September 2, 1917 – the date was chosen because it coincided with Sedan Day, marking the decisive victory over France in the 1870 war and as such stood as the oldest national holiday of the German Empire – in order to bring a new political party into being. After various names for the planned entity were considered and rejected – early contenders for the honor were “Hindenburg Party” and “Bismarck Party” or, striking an apparently more conciliatory tone, the “German Unity Party” – the final decision was made to christen it the German Fatherland Party – Deutsche Vaterlandspartei.222 Among those appointed by acclamation to serve on the Executive Committee overseeing the new party were the Mayor of Königsberg and lifetime member of the Prussian House of Lords, Siegfried Körte, and the conservative mayor of Halle and fellow member of the Prussian Upper House, Richard Robert Rive.223 They were joined by two academics, the professors of history Georg von Below 221 

Wolfgang Kapp to Ulrich von Hassel, 19 July, 1917; in ibid., 145. Hagenlücke, 159. 223  See Manfred Weißbecker, “Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (DVLP) 1917–1918,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte, 2, 391–403. 222 

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and the indefatigable Dietrich Schäfer. Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg, the President of the German Colonial Society since 1895 and a staunch proponent of German imperialism, was elected as a suitable Honorary Chairman. Wolfgang Kapp himself graciously agreed to serve as Vice Chairman. And sitting at the head of the Fatherland Party as its official leader and mouthpiece was none other than Great Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. For Kapp’s greater ambition, which he had been pursuing for years, was to use whatever means available, including his new party, to launch Tirpitz into the position of Imperial Chancellor, and now he had a party to promote him.224 It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of Kapp’s gambit. Although the organization itself would not outlast the war, the political reverberations of its founding and short-lived existence profoundly affected the German Empire until the very end and continued to resonate long thereafter. In 1946, the eighty-fouryear-old Friedrich Meinecke went so far as to say that “the Pan-Germans and the Fatherland Party were a precise prelude to the rise of Hitler.”225 That is undoubtedly eliding too many complex factors within a single line of historical progression. But it does vividly capture the kind of impact the Fatherland Party was thought to have had in the eyes of its opponents. And even though it could only be surmised at the time, Tirpitz was in fact prepared to go to extreme, even mutinous lengths to further his own agenda. Tirpitz, as we know, had long been frustrated by Bethmann Hollweg’s reluctance to let the submarines operate with impunity, as well as by the Chancellor’s seeming eagerness to reach an accord with the British at the expense of the German Navy, all of which had been enabled by Wilhelm II’s galling refusal to replace the head of the government. As early as March 1915, Tirpitz had vented his exasperation by proposing in a private letter that the Kaiser should “cede his power for some time, e.g. to Hindenburg,” which would make room for a more muscular approach.226 Admiral von Müller noted with alarm a short time later, in April, that he had also been privy to “communications from which I was forced to infer that a group that did not stand far from Admiral von Tirpitz was contemplating inducing the Kaiser to relinquish his governmental authority.”227 General Ludendorff, too, although not directly affiliated with the new Fatherland Party, had already intimated in 1915 that his ultimate loyalty was to his country, not to the Emperor. “I say: Your Excellency Fatherland,” he had written to General Helmuth von 224  Cf.

Hagenlücke, 153. In his memoirs, the archconservative Junker Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau also talks about his “presentiment that Tirpitz as Imperial Chancellor would be the right man in the right place;” Oldenburg-Januschau, Erinnerungen, 175. 225 Meinecke, Die deutsche Tragödie, in Autobiographische Schriften, 354. 226 Tirpitz, Erinnerungen, 456. See also Hagenlücke, 218. 227  Von Müller, Regierte der Kaiser?, 98.

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Moltke, whereas “the Field Marshall still says: Kaiser.”228 Given this constellation of figures orbiting around the Fatherland Party who professed greater allegiance to their country than to their Kaiser, there thus existed the very real possibility that the association Tirpitz now formally headed and had been masterminded by Kapp – whose own putschist proclivities would fully emerge only three years later – was at least partly designed to provide cover for staging a coup. Even if one were ignorant of such criminal intentions or considered them unthinkable, anyone with even a passing knowledge of domestic politics in Germany during the war up until that point could have seen that the formal “Proclamation” issued by the Fatherland Party announcing its aims was an example of breathtaking duplicity and unscrupulousness. On the one hand, its opening statement condemned the Peace Resolution endorsed by the “current Reichstag majority” by baselessly declaring that it did not correspond to the desires of “broad circles of the German people.” Yet on the other hand, the proclamation also asserted that their party had been founded “in order to protect and shield the German fatherland in the greatest and gravest hour of German history against the original evil of disunity and partisanship” and that, to do so, the party intended “to consolidate all patriotic forces without distinguishing between political partisan orientation.”229 Apart from the self-contradiction contained in these few lines – which purported to eschew partisanship even while blatantly engaging in it and simultaneously called into question the legitimacy of the Reichstag majority by appealing to otherwise unnamed or uncounted “circles” of people – they obscured the even more fundamental truth that the Fatherland Party was the direct beneficiary of the disorder fracturing the country, which in itself had allowed the party to become the first explicitly political organization to be established since the outbreak of the war. The founders of the Fatherland Party, opportunistically taking advantage of the disarray surrounding the fall of Bethmann Hollweg – who despite all his other undeniable faults had still managed to prevent the complete breakdown of German political life into the open rivalry of antagonistic splinter groups – had audaciously moved into the breach created by his exit to make a naked grab for power, all the while attempting to cloak their motives in conciliatory rhetoric. “We do not want any inner discord!” their founding charter professed, while at the same time stating that “individuals may stand toward domestic disputes how228 

See Egmont Zechlin, “Ludendorff im Jahre 1915. Unveröffentlichte Briefe,” Historische Zeitschrift 211 (1970), 346. In his memoirs, Ludendorff disingenuously claimed with regard to the Fatherland Party that he “stood in no relation to it. However, its activities were highly welcome to me in the interests of conducting the war.” See Ludendorff, 369. 229  The full text of the original proclamation is reproduced as a facsimile on the flyleaves of the book by Hagenlücke.

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ever they wish, decisions about them are to be reserved to the time after the war.”230 That, too – with its clear if veiled rejection of the most contested political question of all, namely the immediate reform of the Prussian franchise as demanded by the “Berlin Declaration” on July 1 that had touched off the second July Crisis – was the expression of a very definite, indeed defiantly partisan, position. “Now the only thing that matters is victory!” it proclaimed, in an equally indirect but unmistakable repudiation of Erzberger’s call to seek a negotiated peace, while also rejecting his claim that the submarines were not and could not be effective in ending the war. Instead, the charter maintained, with little justification, that “England, whose vital nerve has been hit by the submarine war, still hopes in the final hour for German unrest and disunity.” Finally, making a mockery of the careful arguments about democracy advanced by the five professors who spoke in the Prussian House of Representatives earlier in the year, the program presented by the Fatherland Party crudely insisted that “German freedom stands sky high above phony democracy with all of its supposed blessings, which English hypocrisy and a Wilson want to con the German people into so as to annihilate Germany, whose weapons are invincible.”231 Given the crass hypocrisy and mendacity permeating their platform, not to speak of its undisguised belligerence, it is probably safe to say that the creators of the Fatherland Party did not really expect that their appeal for unity and national cooperation would actually restore calm to the nation. They no doubt assumed that those already sympathetic to their cause would continue to exhibit unquestioning fidelity to crown and country or, failing that, that they would obey their superiors with the blind subservience expected from the German Untertan. The more Machiavellian among them may have also thought that they could usefully turn any resulting divisions that issued from their efforts to their own advantage. Nevertheless, the founders of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei were probably at least somewhat surprised by the almost instantaneous and vociferous backlash that their party unleashed. On September 20, 1917, less than three weeks after it was established, Max Weber published a blistering condemnation of what he contemptuously called the “new so-called ‘Fatherland Party’,” which he openly accused of engaging in nothing less than rank “agitation” and “demagogy.”232 Weber disdainfully brushed aside their unfounded claim that the Peace Resolution did not reflect the “mood of the people” – Volksstimmung – by saying, while employing a play on words to reinforce his point, that there was a “simple means 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 232 

Max Weber, “Vaterland und Vaterlandspartei,” in Politische Schriften, 217, 218.

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of testing the truth of this assertion: a popular referendum – Volksabstimmung. It might just give the fighting forces in particular, who after all put their blood on the line for all of this bloviating swagger, the opportunity to express their opinion.”233 Knowing that such a popular plebiscite was the last thing the backers of the Fatherland Party wanted, Weber was especially harsh in his judgment of their contention that the Peace Resolution had somehow “spoiled the mood in the country.” Instead, Weber insisted, it was not the pursuit of peace promoted by the Reichstag but rather the fruitless continuation of the war through the submarines that had changed people’s outlook: it was the disappointment of the uninformed masses over the failure of England to capitulate this autumn, which had been publicly and repeatedly held out in abominable fashion by politicians from the right with the greatest certainty as an assured prospect, while making reference to ostensible information from a certain admiral.234

The last barb was a barely disguised allusion to Tirpitz. But Weber realized that, while these were all important issues, the real, in fact “the only goal that truly inwardly lies close to their hearts” was precisely the adamant resistance of the Fatherland Party against the inexorable inner reorientation, whose expeditious implementation alone can give the returning warriors the guarantee that in the elections that will take place immediately after the war, it will not be the war profiteers alone who hold power in their hands and that the warriors in the leading state in Germany [i.e. Prussia] will not remain unrepresented.235

The true underlying cause motivating the founders of the Fatherland Party, Weber had astutely recognized, was to oppose the advance of democracy in Germany, which they not unreasonably feared would weaken or even dislodge their own tightly held grip on power. But what was bad for the brokers of the Fatherland Party, Weber concluded in an impassioned flourish, was good for the citizens of the fatherland, and rejecting the former now offered the best way of supporting the latter: That is where the interest of the fatherland lies. To be sure, in the case of reorientation, the fate of the Empire will never lie in the hands of the demagogues whose irresponsible, ranting behavior has had its part in causing almost the entire world to unite against us in a perverse coalition. That is where the interest lies of those who debase the name of the fatherland by turning it into a demagogic partisan endeavor against reorientation. But the nation will know how to choose between fatherland and “Fatherland Party.”236

233 

Ibid., 217. Ibid., 219. 235  Ibid., 220. 236 Ibid. 234 

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The People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland Max Weber was an early and exceptionally outspoken critic of the new national political organization, but he was far from the only one. Despite the declared expectations of its creators to the contrary, not only did the Fatherland Party fail to return tranquility and unanimity to the country, it only further escalated the already widespread discord and alarm. To make matters worse, the hapless Georg Michaelis, after little more than one hundred days in office, was relieved of his duties as Imperial Chancellor on October 31, 1917 and replaced by Georg von Hertling, a seventy-four-year-old conservative Bavarian Catholic member of the Center Party who would prove to be more politically adept than his predecessor but equally unable, and some thought unwilling, to further a progressive agenda.237 Several leading figures in the capital thus decided, both to serve as a backstop against the renewed and intensifying political turmoil and also to provide a counterbalance to the ideological pressure being exerted by the Fatherland Party, that the time had come to found an opposing political organization to defend the principles and policies that had been orphaned by the departure of Bethmann Hollweg. That new organization would also be a political party in all but name and called the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland – Volksbund für Frei­ heit und Vaterland – as an ostentatious way of signaling that freedom was not antithetical to, but on the contrary consonant with the German fatherland. The impetus for this effort seems to have come principally from three men: an influential political journalist named Adolf Grabowsky, Friedrich Meinecke, and Ernst ­Troeltsch.238 Following initial planning discussions in October, a large 237  On

the circumstances surrounding the end of Michaelis’s chancellorship, see Becker, 513–25. 238  Accounts differ regarding the precise origins of the People’s League. Many of its associates strenuously denied that it had been created solely in response to the Fatherland Party, presumably in order to underscore its own independent aims and broader political legitimacy. At its inaugural meeting on November 14, Johannes Giesberts said “the idea came to me,” while insisting that “the notion was much older than the founding of the Fatherland Party,” having been discussed “frequently in the last six months in internal circles;” see “Rede des Reichstagsabgeordneten Giesberts,” in Um Freiheit und Vaterland. Erste Veröffentlichung des Volksbundes für Freiheit und Vaterland (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1918), 22. According to Adolf Grabowsky, however, “it is no secret that the idea of this Volksbund came from me;” Adolf Grabowsky, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Das neue Deutschland 11 (1923), Heft 3, March, 39–42; cited in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 415. Meinecke also mentions Grabowsky as its originator; cf. Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 285. ­Troeltsch himself merely stated that “it emerged from a coincidence of wishes by Grabowsky, Meinecke, and me to create an activist – agitatorisch – association with a moral-political platform.” Cited from an undated letter, probably written in late January 1918, in Johannes Rathje,

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assembly was convened in the Prussian House of Representatives in Berlin on November 14, 1917 to formally constitute the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland. It was the first large-scale, extra-parliamentary effort undertaken during the war on the part of the moderate forces within Germany to provide a broad political basis to achieve their two main goals: to implement domestic structural reforms that would expand the political rights of all German citizens and to seek the next, best opportunity for ending the war and establishing a durable peace. Unfortunately, the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland, like the democratizing movement out of which it emerged, has not yet received the degree of attention it deserves. It is symptomatic of that neglect that there has not been a single monograph or even an extensive scholarly essay devoted to the Volksbund, and apart from brief references to it in other contexts, there exists almost no literature on it at all.239 When it is mentioned, it is generally written off as only a brief and insignificant episode, memorable solely because of its perhaps admirable but, as is always more than implied, ineffectual challenge to the social and political forces gathered behind the Fatherland Party – which, by contrast and equally characteristically, has been exhaustively studied.240 Yet to point out only some of the most obvious facts, the People’s League was numerically far larger than the Fatherland Party and it lasted twice as long. At its height, the Volksbund officially claimed a total of over four million members – it already counted three million when it was officially constituted in November 1917 – and it continued to exist until mid-1920, when it was formally dis-

Die Welt des freien Protestantismus. Ein Beitrag zur deutsch-evangelischen Geistesgeschichte. Dargestellt an Leben und Werk von Martin Rade (Stuttgart: Ehrenfried Klotz, 1952), 256. 239  Virtually the only independent study of the organization is the brief reference article by Herbert Gottwald, “Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland (VfFV) 1917–1920,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte, 4, 414–19. This continuing lack of interest in or even knowledge about the Volksbund would have greatly surprised contemporaries. In an article published in 1920, Adolf Grabowsky optimistically wrote that “if the intimate history is written one day of the final years of the war and of the prehistory of the collapse and revolution, then the historian will not be able to ignore the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland. Indeed, it can be maintained that he must devote a particular study to it;” see Adolf Grabowsky, “Zwei Jahre Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland,” Neues Deutschland 8/9 (1920), 172. 240  Cf. the tendentious and dismissive remarks on the Volksbund in Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks, 509–11. In his monumental history of modern Germany, Thomas Nipperdey noted only in passing that the Volksbund was “considerably weaker” than the Fatherland Party, and he never returned to the subject again; see Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918. Macht­ staat vor der Demokratie, 2, 844. In an older landmark study on ­Troeltsch and “the transition to parliamentary democracy,” mention of the Volksbund is confined to a brief and uninformative footnote; cf. G. Schmidt, 205. An important exception to the prevailing view of the Volks­ bund is the essay by Bernd Sösemann, “Das ‘erneuerte Deutschland’,” 136–44.

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solved.241 The Fatherland Party, by contrast, mustered fewer than a million names on its registers and its entire raison d’être vanished the moment the Empire collapsed in November 1918, little more than a year after the party was founded.242 It is true that, backed by powerful and well-funded interest groups representing heavy industry, the landed aristocracy, and the military establishment, the Fatherland Party was able to compensate for its relatively meager membership roster in ways that belied its actual size. Nevertheless, of the two organizations, the Volks­ bund für Freiheit und Vaterland was in several respects the more impressive – and arguably the more consequential. It was not just the sheer numbers boasted by the Volksbund that made it a force to be reckoned with. True to its name, the People’s League also strategically sought to embrace a large and heterogeneous cross section of the German population, one that in the makeup of its political affiliations broadly corresponded to the Reichstag majority that had endorsed Erzberger’s Peace Resolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its leadership was largely drawn from the successive quasi-formal organizations that had been formed over the past several years promoting moderate and progressive policies. Its principal drivers were people associated with Hans Delbrück’s Wednesday Evening group and its various offshoots, such as the ill-fated Free Patriotic Association in 1915 and the even more short-lived National Committee for an Honorable Peace that was formed the following summer. The members of those previous constellations, however, had all operated under the tacit aegis of Bethmann Hollweg, which had given them equally indisputable if somewhat diffuse clout and prestige. But now, after his departure, they were compromised by their close association with the disgraced Chancellor, making them anathema in the reshuffled government and especially among the military figures who more or less openly wielded complete control. With their direct access to power severed, and without the cover or backing of a patron, the advocates of democratic reform and peace had to operate on their own. Having learned some of the practical political lessons of those earlier efforts, the founders of the Volksbund placed a premium on including a wide variety of 241 

The inaugural Chairman of the Volksbund, Ernst Francke, announced at its founding that “three million members are united in it;” Ernst Francke, “Geleitwort,” in Um Freiheit und Va­ terland, 5. Gottwald, 414, mentions four million. This membership number is frequently relativized in the secondary literature because it represents corporate and not individual memberships, which were vastly smaller in number. Given the paltry scholarship on the Volksbund, however, the actual size, nature, and activity of its membership remain unclear. 242  The numbers for the Fatherland Party are no less problematic. Wortmann, 72, gave the figure of its membership as 1,25 million, but without citing any source to support it. Hagenlücke revised that number down to around 800,000, but he noted that corporate memberships, amounting to approximately half that number, were also counted in the total. See Hagenlücke, 180–81.

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social and religious organizations within its ranks, which embraced a large number of employee federations, labor unions, and workers’ associations.243 From the outset, and reflecting its enormous and diverse constituency, the People’s League also had a much larger and more fully articulated organizational structure than the Fatherland Party. By the time of its official founding on December 4, the People’s League already had a sizeable Working Committee in place with over fifty-three members, including most prominently Gerhard Anschütz, Lujo Brentano, Hans Delbrück, Bernhard Dernburg, Friedrich Naumann, Hugo Preuß, and the brothers Alfred and Max Weber. Significantly, it did not consist solely in a coterie of intellectuals: joining these illustrious names on the Working Committee were also dozens of representatives from its numerous constitutive employees and workers organizations and unions.244 The smaller, more select Advisory Council consisted of sixteen people, most of them also long-standing associates of Delbrück’s Mittwochabend circle. Among those were Delbrück himself, the economist Heinrich Herkner, Friedrich Meinecke, Hermann Oncken, and the two editors of The Labor Force and the New Germany, Carl Legien and Friedrich Thimme – as well as, remarkably, one woman, the sociologist Helene Simon.245 And, finally, the governing Executive Board, as one would expect, was smaller still, comprising only eight people. It was chaired by the social reformer Ernst Francke, who was joined in the capacity of Vice Chairman by Gustav Bauer, a distinguished member of the Social Democratic Party and future Imperial Chancellor – the eleventh person to occupy that role – serving from June 1919 to March 1920. Two other prominent members of the Executive Board were, notably, another woman, the famous feminist 243 

To name only a few, the Volksbund incorporated representatives of the Union of German Trade Associations, the Social Consortium of Civil Servants, Central Syndicate of Ceramicists, the League of Railroad Craftsmen and Workers, the Printers Union, the Woodworkers Association, the Construction Workers Union, the Farm Laborers Federation, the League of Christian Miners, the German Association of Men and Women Caregivers, and the Central Federation of Bakers and Confectioners. 244  For the full listing of its leadership, see Um Freiheit und Vaterland, 46–47. 245  Helene Simon (1862–1947) is a forgotten but important figure. As a young woman, she had not been allowed to study formally at a university, but through contacts with Eduard Bernstein she went to London in 1896 where she met Sidney and Beatrice Webb and joined the Fabian Society. On returning to Berlin, she attended lectures by Gustav Schmoller and until the war published numerous articles in Social Democratic and trade union journals on questions of social policy and feminist rights. She also wrote numerous books, including a dual biography of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in 1909. Cf. Sabine Klöhn: Helene Simon (1862– 1947). Deutsche und britische Sozialreform und Sozialgesetzgebung im Spiegel ihrer Schriften und ihr Wirken als Sozialpolitikerin im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1982).

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activist, politician, and author Gertrud Bäumer, and last but certainly not least Ernst ­Troeltsch. The ambition and scope, not to say the idealism, of the People’s League were impressive. But even if it abstained from the label of a political party as a way of signaling its ecumenical inclusiveness, it still had to contend with stubborn partisan realities. As the very existence of both the Fatherland Party and the People’s League themselves amply demonstrated, the German Empire had never been so starkly polarized since the start of the war, and perhaps ever. To be sure, there had been several abortive attempts over the last two years – foremost among them the Free Patriotic Association and the National Committee for an Honorable Peace – to prevent just such a potentially catastrophic fracturing of public sentiment. But now that such a seemingly irreparable split had already occurred, everything depended on winning as many adherents to one’s own side as possible, which also meant downplaying wherever possible contentious issues that might alienate prospective supporters to their respective cause. Of the two new political groups, as we have already seen and as Weber had furiously deplored, the conservative, nationalist Fatherland Party engaged in the most egregious practices of obfuscation and outright deception to conceal its true intentions. While arguing for the necessity of absolute military victory and rejecting any kind of negotiated peace, the Fatherland Party did not explicitly call for new territorial acquisitions. It did, though, unwaveringly and virtually to the exclusion of any other external objectives, insist on retaining control over Belgium. And, even more implausibly, it also officially maintained it had no interest at all in internal affairs. But in truth, the leaders of the Fatherland Party never abandoned their expansionist ambitions and they were positively obsessed with domestic politics, and in particular with arresting the encroachment of democracy on the German body politic. Wolfgang Kapp, at the pinnacle of the controversy over Tirpitz’s demission the year before, had already written to Heinrich Schëuch in March 1916: “Germany’s future at home and abroad would be saved only if a sweeping change of system and personnel would immediately occur.” Otherwise, Kapp feared, Prussia and with it all of Germany would drown in the “democratic morass.”246 With his tailor-made party, Kapp now thought he finally possessed the means to forestall such an ignominious end. As one of the representatives of the Fatherland Party, Lieutenant General Günther von Kluge, had perhaps unadvisedly but all the more revealingly exclaimed during a rally on November 8, 1917: “Some parties want to require the immediate democratization of the Empire; the Father-

246 

Wolfgang Kapp to Heinrich Schëuch, 20 March 1916; cited in Hagenlücke, 124.

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land Party wants to ward off this disaster, that is its only purpose.”247 A week later, even Tirpitz let himself be carried away to declare in a speech in Munich that “it was precisely domestic politics that matter the most; it is necessary for the Fatherland Party to counteract the democratic development.”248 To its credit, the People’s League was much more forthcoming about its own motives. But it, too, had to be careful to calibrate its message judiciously because of the need to bring as many people into its camp from as many disparate backgrounds as possible – and to steer clear of military censorship and controls. The ordinary workers, laborers, farmers, civil servants, bourgeois professionals, merchants, and businessmen it consciously sought to recruit – which is to say, Social Democrats, but also members of the Catholic Center Party as well as those in the centrist parties, and even some moderate conservatives – were all critical to the success of the People’s League. But many of those still hoped-for members regarded the very idea of democracy warily or even with hostility, most particularly since the Allies had made it into the rallying cry of their cause against Germany. It was a delicate, somewhat bizarre balancing act: the Volksbund had to recruit ordinary Germans to the cause of democracy without admitting openly it was doing just that. In his inaugural address to the constituting assembly of the People’s League on November 14, 1917, Johannes Giesberts, a union leader and representative in the Reichstag for the Center Party, thus studiously avoided the problematic word “democracy” and he appealed instead to the feelings of solidarity everyone had over common issues, foremost among them the catastrophic “nutrition difficulties.”249 About that shared concern it was possible to be frank: “We don’t have to hide it,” Giesberts said, “and we don’t lose face by openly acknowledging this fact. It has nothing to do with gloominess or with pessimism. Rather, it would be a fatal self-deception if we didn’t enter into these things and recognize their full import.”250 Giesberts also felt comfortable applying the same forthrightness when it came to the accusation that those who desired a negotiated peace were somehow advocating a “peace of renunciation,” or Verzichtfrieden. “Never has a more flagrant, wretched, and pathetic smear campaign been waged in Germany,” Giesberts indignantly asserted, “than by those who allege that the wish for a strong peace of understanding is a wish for a peace of renunciation.”251 247 

Hagenlücke, 221. Frankfurter Zeitung quoted Tirpitz’s speech on November 16, 1917; cited in Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 219. 249  “Rede des Reichstagsabgeordneten Giesberts,” in Um Freiheit und Vaterland, 10. 250 Ibid. 251  Ibid., 15. 248 The

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Turning to more sensitive domestic matters, Giesberts promised that the People’s League would support “a government and a parliament” that would promote their own “social policy.” It would advance a platform, he elaborated, that would help the people “that demand its place in the political sun, in the social sun,” or in other words grant them “equal rights in the life of the state.”252 And, with particular reference to the all-important “franchise question,” Giesberts appealed in his speech directly to his colleagues: “Gentlemen, I hope that the Prussian House of Representatives will not have the audacity not to fulfill the Royal pledge and reject the franchise bill. That would truly mean the greatest, most severe disappointment for the people.”253 Giesberts had a blunt message for the Fatherland Party as well. While emphasizing that the People’s League had a positive program of its own and had no intention of wasting its energy reacting only defensively and polemically to its antagonists, he nevertheless delivered this warning to animated applause: “But if efforts should arise within the Fatherland Party that are directed against this progressive, social-economic domestic activity, then we will ruthlessly take up the fight with them.”254 Somewhat jarringly, Giesberts repeated his assurances to his audience that the platform of the People’s League was intended to support the state and not to undermine it by saying: “No one will want to maintain that these are revolutionary ideas.”255 No doubt some listening to him were not so certain. Again, these were all meant to be reassuring if fighting words, but they still skirted around several potentially divisive matters, none more so than the status of democracy itself within Germany. Friedrich Meinecke, who also gave a rousing speech at the inaugural November meeting, came no closer to stating the issue explicitly, but he did so in all but name. Admitting that “we once again have sharp and deep partisan oppositions among use, and out of these oppositions our League was born,” Meinecke excoriated the Fatherland Party for attempting to coopt patriotism exclusively for itself, accusing it of further fanning the flames of division and even of fomenting “class warfare” in Germany.256 Meinecke also poured scorn on the misleading claims by the Fatherland Party that it was focused solely on “immediate war aims and not on the entire reformation of our domestic and foreign political existence, the entirety of our vital questions.”257 252 

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 19. 254  Ibid., 22. 255  Ibid., 19. 256  “Rede von Professor Dr. Friedrich Meinecke,” in Um Freiheit und Vaterland, 25–26. The text of Meinecke’s speech was republished as “Um Freiheit und Vaterland,” in Politische Schriften, 213–21. 257  “Rede von Professor Dr. Friedrich Meinecke,” 27. 253 

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Internal and external affairs were inextricably linked, Meinecke countered, and any attempt to dissociate them was the expression either of faulty political judgment or, even worse, of the deliberate will to deceive. “We see the inner, liberal – freiheitlich – reorganization of our fatherland as just as urgent and unavoidable as the clarification and determination of what Germany needs in order to emerge free, secure, and powerful from this war.”258 That consideration led Meinecke to deliver a stark warning. Should the Fatherland Party prevail, he said, the result would be not just political stasis or a return to the status quo before the war, but rather the advent of something far worse: The politics of conquest and violence of the Conservatives, the Pan-Germans, and the members of the Fatherland Party must result, as it once did in the system of Napoleon I, precisely in a repression of the political desires for freedom within the nation, in the establishment of a despotic militarism. Not all of them will consciously want the strong hand, the military dictatorship that will send the Reichstag home – but they are being driven in that direction by objective extension.259

Meinecke felt that the danger represented by the Fatherland Party was so acute – even those people who opposed it, he said, had “no idea of the abyss we would be driven into if the entire domestic and foreign program of the intellectual fathers of the Fatherland Party were to become the program of our responsible statesmen”260 – that he eerily predicted that, should it triumph, the party would “perpetuate the world’s antagonism against us and soon provoke a second world war.”261 With the prospect of Germany facing such a potentially devastating future, Meinecke portrayed the choice confronting his compatriots as being no choice at all: “If we want to remain invincible in war and powerful in peace, then we must be free at home. If we want to remain free at home, then we must respect the freedom of other peoples. Healthy power and true freedom is the watchword of our league.”262 Did all of that, albeit tactically camouflaged, constitute a genuine defense of democracy? The opposition clearly thought so. It had become common at the time to use, as Meinecke had just done, the euphemism freiheitlich – a relatively new and thus historically unencumbered word, boasting not Latin or Greek but reassuringly German roots – in place of more familiar but loaded equivalents when referring to political freedoms.263 In an audience with the Kaiser on July 9, 258 Ibid. 259 

Ibid., 32. Ibid., 33. 261  Ibid., 30–31. 262  Ibid., 34. 263 The Grimm dictionary cites only one source for the word freiheitlich, significantly enough from a contemporary history of the French Revolution: Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, 260 

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1917, for instance, Wilhelm Solf spoke circumspectly of the freiheitlich transformation of inner affairs that he said was needed in Germany, also deliberately choosing the word freiheitlich in order to avoid having to say “democratic.” Solf had deliberately sidestepped that word, his biographer explained, because in the roiling crisis surrounding Bethmann Hollweg that summer the term had acquired an “ugly aftertaste.”264 But no one was fooled simply by the substitution of demokratisch with frei­ heitlich. One contemporary critic of the Volksbund regarded the organization as a whole as the embodiment of an even larger malaise, one that he said afflicted “our entire left and with it the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland.” “In typical German devotion to beautiful foreign wares,” the same critic wrote, “our left has almost completely succumbed to the suggestion of the familiar slogans of Western democracies.”265 Likewise, in the opinion of retired Lieutenant Colonel Karl Wortmann, the sympathetic author of the first history of the German Fatherland Party published in 1926, the case was equally straightforward and reprehensible. “The People’s League represented an association of a democratic character,” Wortmann simply stated, as if that settled the matter.266 And later commentators have, if for different reasons, concurred with these general estimates. Most recently Steffen Bruendel judged that the notion of a popular state – Volksstaat – promoted by the Volksbund “stood de facto in the Western European constitutional tradition and corresponded to its conception of a universal development toward political freedom and democratic self-government.”267 That was true: the final goal of the Volksbund was a Volksstaat, a state based on the free democratic governance of, by, and for the people – das Volk.

Politics and Ethics What is beyond dispute is the active, central role that Ernst ­Troeltsch played from the beginning in the conception, development, and promotion of the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland. Adolf Grabowsky later wrote that “­Troeltsch Geschichte der französischen Revolution bis auf die Stiftung der Republik (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1845). 264  Cf. Vietsch, Solf, 171. 265  Hans Volkelt, Demobilisierung der Geister? Eine Auseinandersetzung vornehmlich mit Geheimrat Prof. Dr. Ernst T ­ roeltsch (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1918), 42, 39. 266 Wortmann, Geschichte der Deutschen Vaterlands-Partei, 96. 267  Bruendel, 152. A more skeptical view is offered by Llanque, Demokratisches Denken, 221, who asserts, without further argument or evidence, that the Volksbund did not “create a basis for the exercise of political responsibility.” Stegmann, 511, simply writes the Volksbund had “no chance.”

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immediately made himself available with all of his enthusiasm,” adding that “he very rarely missed the closed meetings of the Executive Committee and of the Advisory Council that took place every week.”268 Those meetings were held Friday mornings at 11:30 and, in a further expression of the personal and institutional affiliations behind it, they were convened in the Palais Pringsheim in the rooms reserved for the German Society 1914. On the occasions when ­Troeltsch could not be present for these working sessions, he scrupulously made sure to notify the managing director, Martin Wenck, of his absence.269 But the greatest contribution ­Troeltsch could make to the People’s League was to lend it his personal prestige, his erudition, his moral authority, and his ever more refined political judgment, all of which he was able to bring compellingly to life through his exceptional skills as a public speaker. This he did in spectacular fashion in the opening speech he gave to the first general assembly of the Volksbund für Frei­ heit und Vaterland, which took place on January 7, 1918 in the politically resonant venue of the Prussian House of Representatives in Berlin. The published text of the speech ­Troeltsch held that day in front of several hundred members of the People’s League who assembled in the Landtag is called “The Inner Connection of Political Demands.”270 Possibly it was this rather dry, academic-sounding title that led one later commentator to make the unfounded speculation that it “more likely put the assembly to sleep than inspired it,” a conjecture that, apart from everything else, conflicts with all that we know about ­Troeltsch’s reputation and skill as a speaker.271 And, in fact, an editorial note to the official transcript of the meeting in the Prussian Landtag indicated that ­Troeltsch’s address was greeted with the “animated, repeated applause of the entire assembly.”272 Adolf Grabowsky himself, with perhaps friendly hyperbole, hailed it as a “brilliant speech, surely one of the most brilliant that has ever been 268  Grabowsky, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” 415. The person and activities of Adolf Grabowsky have been unjustly neglected; see Joachim Klein, “Adolf Grabowsky, ein vergessener Politikwissenschaftler,” in Marburg in den Nachkriegsjahren. Aufbruch zwischen Mangel und Verweigerung, Benno Hafeneger, Wolfram Schäfer, eds. (Marburg: Rathaus-Verlag, 2000), 2, 393–410. 269  Cf. e.g. his note “to the Volksbund” on March 13, 1918; KGA 21, 439. 270 Ernst ­ Troeltsch, “Der innere Zusammenhang der politischen Forderungen,” in Von deutscher Volkskraft. Zweite Veröffentlichung des Volksbundes für Freiheit und Vaterland (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1918), 6–21. The number present for the speech is unknown, but the chamber of the House of Representatives could accommodate nearly 450 people, with more room for observers above the plenary floor; see Hans Wilderotter, Das Haus der Abgeord­ neten. Ein Denkmal preußischer und deutscher Geschichte in der Mitte Berlins (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001), 42. 271  Hagenlücke, 366. Hagenlücke’s entire account of the speech is marked by an equally pronounced skepticism. I am unaware of any other discussions of ­Troeltsch’s speech in the scholarly literature. 272 ­Troeltsch, “Der innere Zusammenhang,” 21.

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held in Germany.”273 Further attesting to its significance in the view of both its author and the broader public, the speech was republished several times and in various edited forms, which ­Troeltsch carefully tailored to lend it have maximum effect on the respective audience, as in the more pithy and combative abridgement of it that appeared a month later in German Work: Monthly Journal for the Aspirations of the Christian-National Labor Force.274 And we know that excerpts from his speech were also read aloud by others at subsequent mass assemblies, including at one gathering of Social Democrats in which it was reported that “­Troeltsch’s remarks read verbatim by the speaker were cheered.”275 Certainly, the unparalleled gravity of the circumstances in which Germany found itself in the first week of January 1918 demanded the full application of every resource ­Troeltsch had at his command. In addition, there were obviously enormous risks involved even in launching the Volksbund itself, which ­Troeltsch described in his opening words as constituting “a completely new phenomenon in our political life.”276 At the beginning of his speech, ­Troeltsch acknowledged all of those difficult circumstances by referring to the “extremely tense situation at the moment.” He then proceeded to lay out in explicit, concrete terms the political, economic, and even the ethical considerations that had necessitated the creation of the People’s League – whose already “considerable numbers” ­Troeltsch also took care to stress – and that would, or should, guide its actions moving forward.277 With purposeful frankness, ­Troeltsch first drew attention to the ideological split now dividing the country. “After the fall of Bethmann,” he explained, “there gradually occurred throughout all of Germany an unavoidable separation of minds.”278 After three years of trying to maintain an increasingly threadbare and artificial unanimity among the German people, the collapse of the government the previous July had produced one irrefutable result: it had revealed that, “in responding” to the “difficult and complicated questions” raised by the continuing war, “a general agreement was no longer possible, but rather opinions about what was possible and desirable diverged.”279 And with those few, trenchant words 273 

Grabowsky, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” 414. Cf. Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Der Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland,” Deutsche Arbeit. Mo­ natsschrift für die Bestrebungen der christlich-nationalen Arbeiterschaft 3 (1918), 49–54. See also Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Freiheit und Vaterland. Einführungsrede des ‘Volksbundes für Freiheit und Vaterland’ in seiner Berliner Versammlung vom 7. Januar 1918,” Deutsche Politik 3 (1918), 72–78. This latter text is identical to the one published in Von deutscher Volkskraft. 275 Volkelt, Demobilisierung der Geister?, 6–7. 276 ­Troeltsch, “Der innere Zusammenhang,” 6. 277 Ibid. 278 Ibid. 279  Ibid., 7. 274 

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Ernst ­Troeltsch had basically acknowledged, if not said so directly, that in the summer of 1917 the vaunted “spirit of 1914” had been finally extinguished. But at the same time he also gestured toward what might replace such an evanescent, even deceptive “spirit” by making a discreet appeal to the kind of pragmatic realism and political rationality he had been preaching all along. That is, ­Troeltsch would try to remind his audience that politics is the art of the possible, and that the necessary compromises politics involves will inevitably mean that some things one may wish for are actually impossible – including, for example, complete unanimity in political matters – and that unconditionally insisting on them in defiance of unalterable facts may leave no alternatives at all. This clear-eyed perspective also characterized ­Troeltsch’s view of what he, echoing Max Weber, likewise referred to as “the so-called Fatherland Party.”280 To begin with, ­Troeltsch took issue with the name of the organization itself, which in terms of its subjective, emotional attraction was, he admitted, “expedient for the purposes of agitation, but objectively as unfortunate as possible.”281 Specifically, ­Troeltsch disputed that it was even a political “party” at all in any recognizable sense. It represented, rather, “an organization of private personalities,” providing a public front for a small collection of powerful and wealthy individuals who falsely purported to represent the interests of the entire country. But it did so, even more outrageously, by contradicting the will of “the government, the Reichstag, and fellow Germans – Volksgenossen – who think differently from them.”282 That was a deft move: ­Troeltsch was arguing that, in purporting to speak for the nation, the forces behind the Fatherland Party were in reality speaking against it – or at least against the majority of its citizens – and instead only for themselves. And for that reason, ­Troeltsch then said, while rising to the first rhetorical flourish of his speech: “We do not know any Fatherland Party, but rather only a fatherland common to all parties.”283 In his inspired appropriation of the Kaiser’s famous words at the outbreak of the war, ­Troeltsch was impressing upon his listeners that Germany, their common fatherland, was not the exclusive property of any one party or class – or, for that matter, of any one person – but rather the shared possession of them all. Here, in his opening bid to unmask the narrow class interests behind the Fatherland Party and to recover the fatherland itself for the people who actually constituted it, we can already begin to appreciate the formidable task ­Troeltsch faced in his speech and to discern his strategy for accomplishing his objectives. 280 

Ibid., 8.

281 Ibid. 282 Ibid. 283 Ibid.

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First of all, he had to set forth a positive message for the People’s League while simultaneously discrediting its political rivals. That was difficult enough. But even more challenging, he had to articulate a coherent set of realistic and actionable policies while explaining their underlying principles in a way that would be able to motivate the already existing membership of the Volksbund to action without turning off those it still hoped to attract. One time-tested way to achieve such an aim that was to suggest that the two organizations were actually working toward the same ends but – alas! – employing opposing methods to achieve them. Ironically noting that, “in the spirit of a democratic era, the men of the Fatherland Party employ all means for forming public opinion,” ­Troeltsch drily observed that their opponents could hardly object if the People’s League responded in kind. He said he was sure, in fact, that they would agree “it would be a sign of unforgivable foolishness and weakness on the part of those who think differently if they did not resort to the same means.”284 In that vein – i.e. taking advantage of the “democratic” freedom of speaking openly in order to shape public opinion to the benefit of one’s own cause – ­Troeltsch declared in a model of sarcastic understatement that “we also wanted to acknowledge the same basic goal as the Fatherland Party, but to rectify its omission and to moderate its exaggeration.”285 Both sides could presumably agree, ­Troeltsch proposed, that the supreme “goal” they each endorsed was to protect and strengthen their fatherland, and to obtain a peace that would secure its future. That much surely had to be uncontroversial. But it was to elaborating the crucially significant ways in which they differed on how to attain that goal – to identifying what he had disarmingly called the “omission” and “exaggeration” of the Fatherland Party – that he devoted the remainder of his remarks. They would amount to one of the most unvarnished, visceral, even moving statements of his political beliefs that ­Troeltsch would deliver during the entire war. In formulating it, he dispensed with his usual scrupulous habit of drawing a vast historical-philosophical panorama, in which he would patiently explain how the present situation had resulted from various long and complicated cultural evolutionary processes. In his speech to the members of the People’s League ­Troeltsch instead resolutely focused on the immediate, vital matters confronting the German people at that very moment, matters that directly affected their individual lives within the state and potentially the future viability of that state itself. 284 Ibid.

285  Ibid. Hagenlücke, 366, misunderstands and misrepresents this moment in the speech, writing that ­Troeltsch’s words were so ambiguous that they could be taken to mean that “the Volksbund and the Fatherland Party were actually two sides of the same coin and both wanted the same thing, only that the Volksbund just expressed it somewhat more moderately.” As the following discussion of the speech demonstrates, nothing could be further from the case.

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And it was here, in contrasting the divergent responses to those existential questions, that ­Troeltsch made his strongest case for the values informing the Volks­ bund and against those of the Fatherland Party. For, as he now dramatically revealed, the innocuous-sounding “omission” he had found the Fatherland Party guilty of was nothing less than “the sidelining of the demands for domestic freiheitlich reforms, particularly for the new Prussian franchise.” “It seems to us,” ­Troeltsch forcefully said, “that these demands cannot be stressed emphatically enough, because they are truly the most fervent and solemn demands of the great masses.”286 And the equally harmless-seeming “exaggeration” he had accused the Fatherland Party of committing consisted in their aggressive demands for “a number of ruthless continental annexations and the acquisition of a military position of power that would make us, at least, the lords of Europe.” Even more gravely, ­Troeltsch alleged that the Fatherland Party was also trying to overcome internal resistance to its plans by deliberately attempting to destabilize domestic political structures, in particular by waging a “battle against the Reichstag and the Imperial government” as well as by “manufacturing mistrust against our fundamental institutions and our official leadership.”287 This last claim contained an extraordinary charge, one that stopped short, but only just, of declaring the Fatherland Party an enemy of the state. That was, if only implicitly, a shocking accusation, an allegation so serious that it would soon come back to haunt ­Troeltsch as the political climate further coarsened during the waning months of the war. As necessary as ­Troeltsch felt it was to expose the extreme dangers the Fatherland Party posed to Germany both within and outside its borders, it was even more important for him to make clear what the People’s League itself positively stood for. To underscore the urgency and larger relevance of the struggle they were engaged in, he insisted that the principal domestic concern of the Volks­ bund, namely reforming “the Prussian electoral law,” was “the most important point in the current domestic situation not just of Prussia, but of Germany.”288 That was true: the Prussian three-class franchise had become a matter of more than regional significance. As the Berlin Declaration that touched off the second July Crisis had demonstrated, electoral reform now concerned the German people as a whole, which also meant that the Volksbund, by endorsing it, could honestly claim to be acting in the interests of the entire nation. Moreover, ­Troeltsch argued, the suffrage question had implications that extended far beyond Germany itself, inevitably affecting its international relations with other 286 ­Troeltsch, 287 Ibid. 288 

Ibid., 11.

“Der innere Zusammenhang,” 9.

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states, most obviously and importantly with the Allied countries. For what was ultimately at issue in the debate about the Prussian franchise, what stood as the essential, if still unspoken cause for which the electoral law and its reform had become the concentrated “symbol,”289 was nothing other than democracy. Describing democracy in everything but name, ­Troeltsch gingerly – or shrewdly – stepped around that volatile and divisive issue, which the Fatherland Party had dedicated itself to quashing, by avoiding the word itself while insisting that “one can and must view the matter in a purely practical and realistic fashion, and one can thus completely disregard any theories.”290 One could disagree about this or that fine point of political ideology, ­Troeltsch was saying, endlessly argue over the relative merits of one iteration of it or the other, but about the reality of the fact itself there could be no debate: The forms and factors of government that determine the right to vote are not the product of eternal truths and universal moral requirements, but rather in logical and practical terms a necessary result of the respective condition of a given society. Modern society, with its universal education, general conscription, public opinion, and the conscious interest of every individual in the general state of affairs, demands with absolutely logical necessity the participation of every individual in the formation of the political will.291

This was an argument, as we know, that ­Troeltsch had long been making and had most recently advanced as part of the series of speeches on freedom and democracy that had taken place in the very same chamber in which he was now speaking again on behalf of the Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland. On that earlier occasion, seven months before, ­Troeltsch had plainly stated that, as a corollary of long-term historical processes that had begun in Western Europe, “our state, as well, long ago commenced democratization as a matter of course.”292 Furthermore, he had also gone on to say, “democratization” itself constituted a development that was as natural as it was inexorable in all of the modern states in which it occurred. Germany, too, “with its development into a major state, advanced bit by bit toward democracy and had to do so.”293 Yet, when ­Troeltsch had made those more unguarded comments the previous May, Bethmann Hollweg was still Chancellor and, even though the overall political situation had by then already reached an extraordinary level of uncertainty and rancor, the state itself had still seemed stable and impervious to serious harm. Now, in early January 1918, nothing appeared assured anymore. It was no longer entirely clear who was in charge apart from the two remorseless generals, and the 289 

Ibid., 13.

290 Ibid. 291 

Ibid., 11–12 “Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie,” 109. 293  Ibid., 110. 292 ­Troeltsch,

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war itself continued to grind away. Everything had to be done to preserve the country from succumbing further to paralyzing dissension and possibly even to internal collapse – including, as now seemed to be the most prudent course of action, advocating the principles and values of democracy without actually pronouncing that contentious, and possibly even dangerous, word itself. In performing this elaborate rhetorical juggling act, ­Troeltsch was also seeking to convince the current – and future – members of the Volksbund that its primary domestic aim did not stem from some abstract or arbitrary “theory,” but arose instead as the natural and inevitable correlate of modern society more generally. “The participation of every individual in the formation of the political will,” he explained in his speech, represented a “consequence of such compelling necessity that it asserts itself all the more imperatively in all modern states the more they respond to modern life.”294 Put that way, “democracy” would be merely a label for something much greater that was already and unstoppably underway. But at this juncture ­Troeltsch made a subtle shift in his argument. As he had consistently done, beginning in his 1904 lecture in Breslau on Political Ethics and Christianity and regularly thereafter, up through and including his address on “The Ideas of 1914,” ­Troeltsch had always emphasized the importance of ethical and spiritual substance for lending moral content to political ideas. Here, too, he reminded the gathered members of the Volksbund that merely demonstrating the sheer logical necessity of democracy may render any objections to it futile. But such unassailable arguments hardly ignited the kind of genuine enthusiasm any political movement needs to remain viable. For that, there had to be some way for individual people to see themselves and their own values mirrored in the policies they were being asked to embrace. There had to be, that is, what ­Troeltsch called an “immediate and vital moral meaning,”295 and not just dry, unfeeling reasoning, animating political doctrines. Politics, so goes the old adage, must appeal to hearts as well as minds. Again carefully pointing out that one did not need to rely on “universal theories of equality and rights, about which one can endlessly argue,” to justify the foremost domestic political goal of the Volks­ bund, ­Troeltsch said that he saw its validity instead, or in addition, “in the indispensable satisfaction of the political sense of honor in every citizen.” The single greatest political lesson of the past three and a half years had been that the state could not survive, much less win, the war without the full participation of the people who were fighting it. The people, all of the people, had given themselves completely and freely to that cause. But they wanted, and even more they needed to see their actions and decisions recognized by the state in a way 294 ­Troeltsch, 295 Ibid.

“Der innere Zusammenhang,” 12.

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that showed that it respected them as individual human beings. That is what ­Troeltsch meant by honor. The people required a meaningful sign demonstrating that the confidence they had shown in the state by defending it with their lives was fully and inalienably reciprocated. They wanted something that would allow them to see themselves as active, independent subjects and not as passive, subordinate vassals in the functioning of the state. Each citizen, in other words, demanded, ­Troeltsch said, “to see his human freedom and personality, his dignity – Würde – as a responsible being, be expressed and given public acknowledgement by having a voice that has the same weight and the same value as every other in elections for representative bodies.”296 Even if ­Troeltsch did not overtly mention democracy here, these were nevertheless powerful, stirring words spoken undeniably in its spirit, words that had never been publicly uttered in Germany since the war had begun by anyone else of comparable standing or with such clarity and force. What is more, ­Troeltsch had not only just given a vigorous defense of the democratic idea, he had also intimately tied its central, defining element – popular sovereignty as expressed in the equal vote of every citizen – to the basic ethical principle of dignity – meaning the intrinsic worth of each individual human being as such – which he had said that right to vote both reflected and validated. The fact that two prominent female representatives of the women’s movement sat on the administrative committees of the People’s League – the previously mentioned Gertrud Bäumer and Helene Simon – provided conspicuous, if tacit, testimony that at least in principle it envisioned gender equality in the new state as well. By including them among its leadership, the Volksbund was clearly signaling that it counted women – who did not yet have the right to vote – among those human beings whose dignity should also be formally observed by bodies purporting to represent “the people.”297 It was an historic if hitherto overlooked moment in the political development of modern Germany: here, in early 1918, Ernst ­Troeltsch had emphatically, and for the first time, placed the notion of human dignity – and implicitly that of both women and men – at the center of a German political party program. With that, he anticipated by just over three decades the first article of the constitution, or Grundgesetz, of the Federal Republic of Germany that was adopted in May 1949 and declared that “the dignity of human beings is inviolable.”298 That fact in itself merits attention. 296 

Ibid., 12–13. It is thus another indication of the difference between the two organizations that, as Hagenlücke writes of the Fatherland Party: “Despite the quite sizeable number of women adherents, not a single women served in the decision-making organs of the Party.” Hagenlücke, 184. 298 Cf. Das Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Artikel 1: “Die Würde des 297 

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But ­Troeltsch’s elaboration of both the logical and moral grounds justifying the equal franchise as the linchpin of a democratic polity led to another related conclusion, one that for him was just as incontrovertible and momentous. “If the participation of the people extends in this way into the authority that bears responsibility for the entirety of the state, then it also becomes necessary for the people, on the basis of its basic needs, to have a say in the outcome of the war and the enabling of peace.”299 Full participation in the state meant participation in all of its affairs, both foreign and domestic. At that moment, no matter of foreign policy weighed more heavily on the German state than how to end the war. As we know, that question – whether to seek a negotiated peace or to press for conclusive military victory – together with the proxy war being fought over democracy under the rubric of the Prussian three-class franchise, had been primarily responsible for bringing down Bethmann Hollweg and had led directly to the creation of the Fatherland Party. Thus, when ­Troeltsch announced in his speech to the members of the People’s League that it had become evident “that the war cannot be ended purely militarily, but rather to an eminent degree requires the correct policy,”300 his programmatic intention was to connect the issue of peace and how to achieve it with the justification he had just offered for the equal participation of all the people in all matters of state. Since the people would obviously be the primary beneficiaries of the peace – and were just as clearly paying the heaviest price for the prolonged war – it naturally followed that the people should have a determining say in how and when the peace should be concluded. And the people – in the democratically sanctioned form of the Reichstag majority that had passed the Peace Resolution the previous July – had already made their wishes known by decidedly speaking out in favor of entering into peace negotiations as soon as practicable. ­Troeltsch thus categorically stipulated that “the first willingness to negotiate” to come from the Allies “must be met with the immediate and complete preparedness” to respond in kind from Germany.301 On the strength of this impressive two-fold argument, ­Troeltsch made peace appear as both a moral and a political imperative. Yet as ­Troeltsch had repeatedly argued in the past and had also stressed in his speech on democracy and freedom in the Prussian Landtag in May, no peace – and no state – is feasible without the economic means to sustain it. It was thereMenschen ist unantastbar.” The closest the Weimar Constitution of 1919 came to articulating this idea is in Article 151 at the beginning of the Fifth Section on Economic Life that states: “The structure of economic life must correspond to the principles of justice with the goal of guaranteeing a humanly dignified – menschenwürdig – existence for all.” 299 ­Troeltsch, “Der innere Zusammenhang,” 16. 300 Ibid. 301  Ibid., 18.

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fore crucial, he said, that any peace agreement ensure “our world trade posture and our share of the world economy regarding the procurement of raw materials and trade sales.”302 How the economic future of Germany would be guaranteed, or even what it would look like, was at that point completely unknowable and would presumably be the chief subject of the long and difficult deliberations to be expected ahead. Of one thing, however, ­Troeltsch was already certain: Germany could have an economic future only as an integrated part of the international order, and it could take its place in that order only through cooperation and mutual forbearance, and not through military conquest and brutal subjugation – on anyone’s part. As he said: “the restoration of the world economy is, given its entire character, possible only through negotiation and agreements and not through occupations and annexations.”303 For that simple and irrefutable reason, “a negotiated peace that secures our economic future is the most essential and important goal.” In a final rebuke to all the proponents everywhere of a purely military solution to the problem of peace, ­Troeltsch said that “forcible annexations and war reparations cannot do that.” Nor, he firmly added for good measure, could “that be the result and goal of the submarine war.”304 From one angle, ­Troeltsch’s reasoning about the macroeconomic ramifications of the war, like his arguments concerning the suffrage question and even peace itself, could be viewed as the expression of a hard-bitten pragmatism, as no more than the logical requirement of a rational Realpolitik that dictated certain policies as requisite because they provided the greatest benefit to the greatest number. Yet in the closing words of his speech to the gathered members of the Volksbund, ­Troeltsch revealed that he also believed that, as in domestic affairs, in the international arena as well, ethical values and principles were indispensable not just to the practical success of particular endeavors. They were needed as well for the long-term willingness and even ability of people to engage in them at all. As ­Troeltsch put it, “a negotiated peace – and this is the last thing I have to say – is not possible without the disposition toward negotiation.”305 For any peace to be possible, an attitude toward peace was necessary. And for that to occur, there had to be, as it were, an intellectual armistice that would accompany, or even better precede, the laying down of physical arms. The “culture war,” which had been so feverishly fought and proved so endlessly destructive, would also have to yield to a kind of cultural disarmament on all sides if the needed spiritual reconstruction were to have a chance to begin to take place and provide the foundation on which a lasting peace could be built. 302 

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. 304 Ibid. 305  Ibid., 19. 303 

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“Just as we spoke of a mobilization of the soul at the beginning of the war,” ­ roeltsch thus said, “we also rightly speak at its approaching end of a demobili­ T zation of minds. This demobilization is necessary everywhere, in all countries, and must rest on reciprocity.”306 Ever mindful of those who were quick to see only “weakness” and pusillanimity in any readiness to embrace peace, ­Troeltsch denied that such an intellectual disarmament automatically entailed some timid “sentimentality” or “universal pacifism.” On the contrary, he assured his listeners that Germany would, indeed must, continue to fight for its legitimate interests and vigorously protect them even after peace had been brokered. The “demobilization of minds” he had proposed did not mean that Germany unilaterally had to renounce its rightful claim to equal status among the world powers. “But it must necessarily consist in one thing above all: in relinquishing the theory of power and violence as the sole political doctrine, in relinquishing absolute mistrust as the sole political wisdom.”307 In a concluding, synoptic coda, ­Troeltsch gathered together all of the themes he had developed over the course of his address and made a final compelling plea that the same ethical principles he had demanded in the treatment of individual citizens within a state also be observed in managing the relations of nation states with and among each other: The modern world of states necessarily needs for its existence, next to the requisite guaranties of power, also the willingness to agreement and trust. It requires, in addition, the moral recognition of the dignity and freedom of states and nations as well as of those of individuals. Without that there would be only a new world empire – which in any case would not be us – or continued suicide. In that respect, these demands are also intended and justified in entirely practical and pragmatic terms. But here we may not be content only with what is practical and pragmatic. Europe’s moral convictions and its religious world of ideas must be articulated here as well.

Finally, finishing on a rhetorical high note, ­Troeltsch made one last bid for national unity based on mutual cooperation and collaboration, culminating in an almost Lincolnesque slogan, saying that the motto of the People’s League would henceforth be: “Freedom and Fatherland, neither one against the other, each one through the other, and each one for the other.”308 To the end – and from the beginning – Ernst ­Troeltsch thus saw salvation for his country not in a restrictive adherence to some exclusively “German” qualities or customs, but rather in its full integration within the larger cultural traditions – the religious, ethical, and political ideals – that he had always understood as a 306 Ibid. 307 Ibid. 308 

Ibid., 21.

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shared European inheritance. As part of that vision, he hoped that the other countries of Europe would also realize that the best way forward for them all would involve affirming their common humanity. And that meant, among other things, but not least of all, readmitting Germany as an equal member into the world community on the basis of the similarities it incontestably exhibited and in spite of the differences it necessarily displayed. That was particularly the case with regard to what ­Troeltsch had repeatedly affirmed as the universal political phenomenon of modern society: the pursuit and enlargement of democracy. If Germany were to be truly committed to the democratic path, then the best way to help keep it steadily pursuing that course would be to acknowledge it was actually doing so. Only time would tell how difficult it would be for everyone, both inside and outside of the country, to understand and accept that basic fact. After ­Troeltsch concluded his speech to the members of the People’s League on that remarkable day in early January – and after the sustained applause that ensued had died down – two other speakers addressed the assembly in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus. Carl Legien, a delegate to the Reichstag for the Social Democratic Party and a member of the Advisory Council to the Volksbund, spoke first. He was followed by Adam Stegerwald, a Center Party politician and the Second Vice Chairman on the Executive Board. The response to their two speeches was noticeably more muted. In the published transcript, the editor noted that only “lively applause” arose after Legien spoke and made no comment at all about the reaction to Stegerwald’s address. In that way, the apparently diminishing enthusiasm in the responses to Legien and Stegerwald prefigured the fortunes of the People’s League more generally in the months to come. As had happened so often before in so many other contexts throughout the war, external events conspired to negate the intentions, even the most well-meaning ones, of people who were trying to control forces that refused to be governable. Well into October of 1918, Ernst ­Troeltsch continued to devote his talents and energy to the Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland, but even he had to be disheartened that for most of that year none of its major goals could be realized, at least not in they way that either it or he had envisioned. Still, it would be a mistake, as well as historically unjust, to rate and thus dismiss the People’s League as nothing but a minor diversion and a political failure. Adolf Grabowsky looked to an earlier antecedent to explain the enduring significance of the Volksbund, insisting that “even if it existed for only two and a half years, in historical and developmental terms this end takes away nothing of the glory of having been just as important as the German National Union of the 1860s.” Grabowsky was referring to the organization that half a century earlier had played a pivotal role in helping Germans move from local to national political involvement and to summon the collective will to found the Em-

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pire.309 Friedrich Meinecke, for his part, found an illustration for the lasting importance of the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland not in the past, but in the future, writing that it had essentially “prepared” the ground for the establishment of the “Weimar Coalition of the post-war period.”310 That Coalition was the majority block formed in the 1920s by the Social Democratic Party, the Center Party, and the German Democratic Party, the latter of which was founded on November 16, 1918, exactly one week after the Revolution. Either way, it was owing more to Ernst ­Troeltsch and his decisive role in the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland than to any other single person that this first foray into organized party politics during the First World War encouraged a sufficiently broad and diverse array of people in Germany to come to believe that democracy was desirable and, even more, that it was possible.

309  Grabowsky, “Zwei Jahre Volksbund,” 173. On the Deutscher Nationalverein, see James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978), 96–97. 310 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 285. See also Hagen Schulze, Weimar. Deutschland 1917–1933 (Berlin: Siedler, 1994), 71–72.

Chapter Seven

Between Reaction, Reform, and Revolution As the political battles within Germany intensified during the second half of 1917, claiming the casualties of first one Imperial Chancellor and then another, and as the entrenchments on both sides of the deepening ideological divide hardened into fortified partisan ramparts from which the two camps defended their respective terrain and repeatedly launched fierce assaults on each other, the actual military situation in the field took an unexpectedly auspicious turn for the Germans. On July 31, 1917, less than two weeks after the Reichstag had passed the Peace Resolution, the British and French armies commenced a ferocious onslaught against German positions in Flanders. That marked the official beginning of what has been called “the most notorious land campaign of the war, known as the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele,” named after the obliterated village unlucky to find itself in the epicenter of the violence.1 The ground attack had been preceded by a relentless two-week artillery bombardment during which over four million shells had rained down on the Germans – a mere million had inaugurated the Battle of the Somme – but the German troops still managed to stop the Allied advance and lose comparatively few men. On the very first day of the offensive, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the general leading the German defenders, noted in his diary that he “was very satisfied with the results.”2 By the end of the nearly four-month campaign, in early November, the commander of the British forces, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, had committed fully half of his entire army to the effort, at a total loss of over 250,000 soldiers – the Germans suffered slightly lower casualties – but he came away with no appreciable results to show for the long and terrible ordeal. What counted as a wrenching and costly disappointment for the British, however, served as a painful but reassuring sign to the Germans that all had not yet been lost. For, in the infernal logic of the war, avoiding defeat could almost be considered a victory.

1 

Keegan, 355. Ibid., 362. Cf. also Jonathan Boff, Haig’s Enemy. Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018), 178–97. 2 

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Then, after a mere two weeks’ respite, the Battle of Cambrai in Northern France began in late November, notable among other things for technological innovations such as the first large-scale use of tanks by the Allies (the preceding clashes at Passchendaele had witnessed a similar escalation in aerial warfare). The Germans again not only repulsed the advance, they also staged a successful counter-attack and captured territory long held by the British, bringing the battle to a typically inconclusive – which is to say not completely disastrous – denouement on December 3, 1917. In the barely fourteen days the operation had lasted, over 40,000 men had died on either side of the muddy fields separating the two adversaries.3 On December 15, in an even more encouraging development for the Germans, the new leaders of Soviet Russia, having just come to power in the October Revolution and eager to bring peace and bread to their tired and starving people, agreed to an armistice with the Central Powers. A week later, formal negotiations began in the town of Brest-Litovsk, located on the border between Poland and Belarus. Although the treaty concluding the peace would not be signed until the following March, the most significant immediate consequence of the talks was that the German High Command knew it would soon be able to withdraw forces from the east and redeploy them on the Western Front, where they might finally break the deadly stalemate that had paralyzed the line for over three years. For the first time in a long time, there appeared to be reason for the Germans to hope. Theodor Wolff recorded in his diary a conversation he had on December 19, 1917 with Gottfried zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, the Ambassador for Austria-Hungary to the German Empire. “I think it’s going splendidly,” Ambassador Hohenlohe said to Wolff by way of greeting. “Don’t you think so, too? I also think that the general peace is no longer remote. The affair is clearly nearing its end. In February or March, I believe, we will have peace. The Entente is unmistakably beginning to crack.”4 At the end of December, Ernst ­Troeltsch also conveyed a sense of restored, if more muted, optimism to his friend Wilhelm Bousset, writing: “Now I believe in victory, which I did not believe in until recently. The water had often risen up to our necks. But it is now going to go through. It will still be difficult enough, and afterward above all. All I can say now is, just thank God.”5 As the relieved but subdued tone of ­Troeltsch’s letter implied, there may have been some grounds for confidence as the calendar changed to 1918, but there was little cause for joy. Although the overall news seemed to be improving some3 

Cf. Keegan, 369–71. Wolff, Tagebücher, 1, 571. 5  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Wilhelm Bousset, 28 December, 1917; KGA 21, 410. 4 

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what, men continued to die at a mind-numbing rate. Alfred Grotjahn, a prominent physician and staunch Social Democrat who was well-informed through his association with the German Society 1914, entered into his diary on January 3 that “according to a credible estimate, 10 million men have now been carried off by this war.”6 It was an unfathomable toll. Naturally, those killed at the front were the most obvious victims of the war, but the suffering it brought reached far into the lives of countless others who never saw a battlefield. On October 7, 1917, ­Troeltsch’s father had died after having declined into an ever deeper despondency following the death of his wife almost exactly three years earlier, who herself had never recovered from the stroke that had felled her at the outbreak of the war. “Of course, an endless amount is awakened by such a loss,” ­Troeltsch wrote the following month to his friend Gertrud von le Fort to thank her for her condolences. “One’s parental home and youth are gone once and for all, and with them the most beautiful things we had from life, or so it seems later in life, with its worries and anxieties and disappointments.” Too, he said, the grief over the deaths of his parents had lent the universal truth about “the transitoriness of life in general” a very personal meaning. “And of course there is also the sting that one could have been more to them, could have shown them more love and thanks. Well, may they rest in peace. They have earned it and, were they still alive, they would not find it.”7 It was, for ­Troeltsch, an uncharacteristically somber reflection. Real peace, he seemed to be saying, was not possible except for those who had already been granted eternal rest. Even though the winter of 1917–18 was not quite as bitterly cold as the previous year and the fall harvest had been comparatively bountiful, food and fuel still remained in critically short supply, and “coal holidays” continued to be a common nuisance. The Heidelberg historian Karl Hampe noted in his diary that the Gymnasium his children attended had been closed for a week in mid-December 1917, only to be followed the next month by another two full “coal-free” weeks.8 It was reported that even large families were living in one or two rooms of their apartments to conserve heat and electricity, and where food was available, prices could be astronomical. Hampe was amazed that an apple – if it was a “nice specimen” – could cost 3 marks, or 17 dollars, and a bar of Kohler’s chocolate went for as much as 16 marks, or an exorbitant 88 dollars.9 But those 6 

Alfred Grotjahn, Erlebtes und Erstrebtes. Erinnerungen eines sozialistischen Arztes (Berlin: F. A. Herbig, 1932), 183. 7  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Gertrud von le Fort, 5 November, 1917; KGA 21, 383. 8 Hampe, Kriegstagebuch, 629, 644. 9  Ibid., 624. The dollar amounts are estimated according to the exchange rate in January 1917.

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were luxuries that, when they were to be had at all, few could afford. Mainly, people subsisted on whatever they could find, which was usually very little, with the average daily ration for adults providing a meager 1,000 calories, a third of what it had been before the war. Somewhat later in 1918, Doctor Grotjahn registered with clinical interest that “since last weighing myself I have again lost 6 pounds. Now I weigh 118 pounds unclothed, whereas my net weight in peacetime was 149 pounds.”10 In April, Ernst ­Troeltsch made one of his regular trips to Heidelberg to visit old friends there, including Karl Hampe, who found his former colleague, too, “less vital than usual, also leaner.”11 Early 1918 also brought another cruel irony. While the seemingly improved military outlook offered a momentary boost to morale, it quickly turned out to have the perverse effect of reducing the accumulated political pressure that had been driving the domestic push for both peace and reform. When Georg von Hertling had first assumed the office of Imperial Chancellor at the beginning of November 1917, some had optimistically entertained the hope that, given his experience in the Bavarian parliament, Hertling might exploit the momentum that had gathered under his predecessor and bring both the Peace Resolution and the promised reform of the Prussian franchise to a formal conclusion, which would lay the foundation for even broader democratization. On November 3, just after the new Chancellor had taken office, Grotjahn wrote in his diary almost in disbelief: “With Hertling, the parliamentary form of government is actually coming to Germany.”12 But only four days later, Grotjahn made the no less incredulous comment: “Suddenly, democratization and parliamentarization have again been suspended: Why? […]. What a change in a few days! We were just thinking about negotiated peace and democratization, and today there appears the phantom of a Duke of Courland and a Grand Duke of Lithuania next to that of a King of Poland, in other words dynastic politics as if we still lived in the 18th century.”13

10 

Grotjahn, 188. Hampe, 683. 12  Grotjahn, 182. 13  Ibid. It is unclear what exactly Grotjahn was referring to, but it seems to concern abuses being reported at the time from the Baltic regions occupied by the Germans, which ­Troeltsch also knew about and appears to have found particularly troubling. Meinecke wrote in a letter the following month to his wife that “­Troeltsch told me terrible things yesterday about the reign of terror of Isenburg in Lithuania,” referring to Archduke Franz-Joseph zu Isenburg-Birstein, a lieutenant colonel and head of the German administration of Courland (Kurland), which is part of modern Lithuania. Prince Isenburg-Birstein was known for his harsh and cruel policies toward the native inhabitants; see Friedrich Meinecke, 10 December, 1917, Ausgewählter Brief­ wechsel, 93. The following April, when ­Troeltsch was in Heidelberg, Hampe also heard him 11 

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The situation was not quite as dire as Grotjahn imagined, but his excitement over the imminent advent of parliamentary rule in Germany had been premature nonetheless. The reason for the abrupt and discouraging turnaround had to do with an internal struggle in the government over the post of Imperial Vice Chancellor, involving a procedural question that, although a seemingly minor technical issue, had profound systemic implications. Under the German constitution of 1871, the Vice Chancellor, like the Chancellor himself, was chosen by the Kaiser alone. There was no requirement for the monarch to consult the Reichstag in making those appointments, let alone to seek its approval. However, in the autumn of 1917 the four parties that constituted the Reichstag majority, newly empowered during the brief and ineffectual administration of Georg Michaelis, had drawn up a list of various “conditions” that they submitted to the new Imperial Chancellor-designate Georg von Hertling at the end of October. One of those demands included the authority for party leaders in the Reichstag to nominate candidates for the governing cabinet, of which the Vice Chancellor was naturally a key member. That would mean that, when Hertling left his post, the next in line to succeed him would automatically be the choice not of the Emperor but of the Reichstag, resulting in the de facto end of the existing constitutional system in Germany, in which the monarch reigned supreme at the top, and marking the beginning of a truly parliamentary governance.14 While Hertling initially agreed to several of the conditions placed before him, he balked over this decisive issue and refused to consider replacing the sitting Vice Chancellor, Karl Helfferich, with the nominee of the Reichstag, Friedrich Payer, a member of the Progressive People’s Party. Rudolf von Valentini, Privy Counselor to the Emperor and a participant in the heated negotiations, observed that, for Hertling, “the limit of an acceptable parliamentarization had therewith been reached.”15 In the end, remarkably enough, the Reichstag factions prevailed. Wanting to prevent yet another governmental crisis, the Kaiser accepted Helfferich’s resignation and Payer was named his successor as Vice Chancellor, which effectively marked a departure from the principles of existing constitutional law and introduced the rudiments of a parliamentary system.16 It was only slightly more than a symbolic victory, perhaps, but it was a victory nonetheless. Through this measspeak “about the atrocious rule of the German governor Prince Isenburg in Lithuania;” Hampe, 681. 14  See on this entire question Huber, 5, 388–98. 15  Bernhard Schwertfeger, Kaiser und Kabinettschef. Nach eigenen Aufzeichnungen und dem Briefwechsel des Wirklichen Geheimen Rats Rudolf von Valentini (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1931), 182. 16  Cf. Huber, 5, 398.

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ure, the German government had by no means achieved the status of a full parliamentary democracy, but some of the essential groundwork had been prepared for it to become one. As Richard von Kühlmann, the Foreign Minister of the Empire at the time, later put it in his memoirs, “in itself, Hertling’s appointment was implicitly the recognition of the idea of parliamentarization.”17 And, as if in negative confirmation of the magnitude of that change, in its aftermath, the septuagenarian Chancellor Georg von Hertling sent the unmistakable signal that he had no intention of surrendering any additional terrain. Over the following eleven months he remained in office, Hertling would demonstrate that, if nothing else, he was a master in the arts of passive resistance. He deftly used administrative delay and bureaucratic attrition in the attempt to wear down his opponents and to fend off any further encroachment of parliamentary norms. Colonel Max Bauer, the section chief to Ludendorff, revealed that what many took to be merely inept dithering by an elderly statesman actually issued from a conscious political strategy, revealing that the Field Marshal himself, as well as the entire “entourage of His Majesty,” were all counting on “Hertling’s skill to save the domestic situation by stalling the parties.”18 In at least one important respect, that tactic proved to be a spectacularly successful expedient: it brought the effort to change the Prussian electoral law to a sudden and, it turned out, indefinite standstill. The first plenary reading of the reform bill took place from 5–11 December, only to encounter vehement objections and dissatisfaction from all sides, which brought the process to a halt before it had even properly begun. Chancellor Hertling, who could have actively steered the proceedings forward had he chosen to intervene, frustratingly kept his own counsel instead, all the while claiming that he wanted to consider all points of view. Four more readings – at the beginning of April, 1918, then in May, in June, and again in July – all failed to move the bill forward.19 It became the signature non-event of the Hertling administration. In September, the Social Democrats, their options and patience exhausted, staged a protest against the unconscionable “delay of electoral reform” and demanded an immediate end to the whole “franchise comedy.”20 But whether the legislative fiasco amounted to a comedy, a tragedy, or a farce – the historian Arthur Rosenberg wryly likened it to an “operetta”21 – it would not be until November 13, 1918, four days after the old regime had been swept 17 

Richard von Kühlmann, Erinnerungen (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1948), 511. Bauer, 187. 19  Cf. Huber, 5, 482–92 20  Ibid., 494. See also on this long and complicated development, Patemann, 127–228. 21  Rosenberg, 209. 18 

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away, that it was finally resolved that a national assembly would be formed based on “the equal right to vote for all men and women.”22 What Chancellor Hertling’s actions, or the lack thereof, had also made abundantly clear was that the easy access and influence within the highest reaches of the German government had come to a definitive end for Hans Delbrück and his Wednesday Evening associates, who had actively buttressed Bethmann Hollweg in a variety of ways, either through private personal counsel or through public attempts to generate support for his policies. The sole remaining sympathetic contact for Delbrück and his colleagues within the halls of power had been ­Rudolf von Valentini, whom both Hindenburg and Ludendorff detested and whom they unceremoniously forced to resign on January 18. With Valentini’s dismissal, the two generals had eliminated the last vestige of true civilian authority within the government, finalizing the transformation of the German Empire into what was effectively a military dictatorship under their joint control.23 The significance of that development was readily apparent to anyone who was paying attention. “One can summarize the political situation as follows,” Grotjahn matter-of-factly wrote in his diary in March: “there is only an army command and no longer any actual government.”24 Now, as the desultory fate of the Prussian reform bill amply confirmed, the only chance for making any headway on the issues that mattered most to the advocates of moderation lay outside of the official apparatus of a state that had stopped functioning normally as one. The People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland, originally conceived as an extra-parliamentary response to the potent forces of unbridled military aggression and extreme political reaction within Germany, now appeared to be one of the few remaining bulwarks to prevent those forces from totally engulfing the country – and it represented its best, and perhaps last, chance for democracy and peace. Yet the state was being threatened not only by a “revolution from above,” as Karl Hampe worriedly put it in a diary entry on January 9.25 Those on the lower end of the social scale – the vast majority of the working German people – were also beginning to stir in a disquieting manner. The suspension of hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers had understandably awakened the hopes 22 

Patemann, 228. Cf. Schwertfeger, 190f; Nebelin, 366; and Nottmeier, 453–57. Hans Boldt, Deutsche Ver­ fassungsgeschichte. Politische Strukturen und ihr Wandel. Band 2. Von 1806 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: DTV, 1990), 212, correctly points out that while High Command could exert its absolute will over the government and parliament, it never possessed the formal dictatorial power to silence its opponents. 24  Grotjahn, 186. 25  Hampe, 644. 23 

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of millions of ordinary Germans that a general peace was at hand and the end that so many yearned for would finally follow. That, of course, was an outcome that the German military leaders, who had other designs, were equally determined to avoid. Alfred Grotjahn said on January 2 that he had heard “through medical channels that Tirpitz and his people from the Fatherland Party are feverishly acting behind the scenes to prevent a ceasefire from developing during the holiday rest at the front.”26 Around the same time, rumors also began circulating that, as Grotjahn noted a little later, the German High Command, finally able to concentrate all of its resources on a single front, was organizing a “big offensive in the west” for the spring.27 And that, in turn, was the last thing that the majority of the people, particularly the soldiers who would do the fighting and the laborers in the factories who would have to supply them, expected or wanted – quite apart from all the other uncounted ordinary Germans who were simply hungry, cold, and weary. To those people it appeared grotesque that the peace dividends won in the east should be used only to purchase more war in the west. But the extraordinary political developments in Russia during 1917 had also provided dramatic proof that the people – any people – did not have to be the compliant instruments of someone else’s will. The Russian revolutionaries had vividly demonstrated to the Germans that they, too, if they acted together, could take matters into their own hands. Karl Retzlaw, a worker in a cable manufacturing plant in Berlin, recalled hearing people beginning to say around this time: “If you all wouldn’t work so much, then we would have to call it quits because of an ammunition shortage; we can’t win the war anymore, either way.”28 The calculation seemed seductively simple: if no more bullets and shells could be delivered to the troops, the generals would have no choice but to send everyone home. Adding more fuel to this already combustible mix, on January 8, 1918 President Woodrow Wilson went before the US Congress and presented his Fourteen Points – or, as he also referred to them, his catalogue of “arrangements and covenants” – that Wilson said should serve as the template for peace and, in the process, for refashioning the world order.29 The first of his five “points” laid out general guidelines that all nations would be expected to observe: in the future, there should be, it stipulated, only “open,” not secret, diplomatic treaties or agreements among states. Further, there must be “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas.” Wilson also called for “the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers” among states and for the establishment of free and equal 26 

Grotjahn, 183. Ibid., 184. 28  Karl Retzlaw, “Erinnerungen an den Januarstreik 1918,” in Streiken gegen den Krieg!, 123. 29  A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013), 471. 27 

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trade. He demanded the reduction of arms in all nations “to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety,” and, in addition, pressed for “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.”30 The following eight points concerned specific territorial and border questions on the continent and in the Near East, in particular concerning Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, Poland, the Balkans, and Turkey. Point VII addressed Belgium, demanding that it “be evacuated and restored,” arguing that “no other single act” would “restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.”31 The fourteenth and last point famously called for the formation of an “association,” later known as a “league,” of nations “for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”32 It was a startlingly far-reaching, even grand vision for reordering the entire developed world, one that would inevitably entail a disruptive rearrangement of complex political, economic, and military structures that in many cases had persisted for centuries. This time, however, unlike the previous April when Wilson had asked the United States to declare war on the German Empire in the name of democracy, there was no general outcry in Germany against American hypocrisy and self-righteousness. On the contrary, in a speech that Bernhard Dernburg gave later that year before an assembly of the Volksbund, the banker-turned-politician went so far as to extoll the Fourteen Points as the practical realization of the prospects outlined in Immanuel Kant’s essay from 1795, On Perpetual Peace.33 One reason for this more positive reception is that Wilson had not come up with all of his recommendations himself but had appointed a team of experts under his Secretary of State Robert Lansing to conduct an “inquiry” based on an informed examination of the myriad issues involved.34 As a result, many of the points Wilson set forth closely aligned with or were even identical to the aims of those Germans who were working no less assiduously for peace within their own country. Strikingly, and ominously, however, Wilson had this time refrained from 30 

Ibid., 470.

31 Ibid. 32 

Ibid., 473. See Bernhard Dernburg, “Völkerbund und Frieden,” in Völkerbund und Frieden. Dritte Veröffentlichung des Volksbundes für Freiheit und Vaterland (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1919), 9–24. The Neo-Kantian philosopher Karl Vorländer came to the same conclusion; see his “Kant und Wilson,” in Kant und der Gedanke des Völkerbundes (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1919), 67–85. 34 Berg, Wilson, 464–65. 33 

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demanding full national self-determination for all peoples. The President was attentively following the events in Russia and keeping a watchful eye on Lenin, for good reason impressed by the explosive power being unleashed there. In view of those developments, Wilson now preferred to take a more moderate, not to say cautious approach to the question of popular will and sovereignty. In the words of one historian, as in his domestic policy, so in his foreign intervention as well, Wilson wanted to encourage renewal and change by acting as a “reformer and not as a revolutionary.”35 Nevertheless, the effect of the American President’s audacious call for peace among all combatants was electric – and all the more agonizing in Germany because there was no one at the helm willing or able to grasp Wilson’s extended hand. In yet another example of the rapid and wildly undulating mood swings experienced by many Germans throughout the war, the attitude among broad segments of the population absorbing all of these contradictory messages often shifted within a matter of weeks and sometimes days or even hours from despair to hope to defiance – and frequently back and forth again. Yet for those with the most to lose – or for those who perhaps thought there was little left for them to save – the time had come not just to feel but also to act. Two days later, on January 10, the executive and advisory committees of the Independent Socialist Democratic Party, the more radical break-off wing of the party, resolved to mount a three-day “demonstration strike” at the end of the month. Although no one could have known it then, the planned action would turn out to be what Arthur Rosenberg called, using another theatrical analogy, “the dress rehearsal for the November Revolution.”36

The Specter of Civil War Observing this darkening scenario play out on all sides from his vantage point in the middle, with the menace of revolution looming ever larger from both above and below, Ernst ­Troeltsch composed a remarkable message to his old colleague and friend, the Marburg professor of theology Martin Rade. In his letter, ­Troeltsch analyzed what he saw as the twin dangers imperiling their country from within and he tried to persuade Rade to join the organization that ­Troeltsch felt had the best chances of steering the state between the Scylla and Charybdis on the left and the right. “The Volksbund is doing just what you are always looking and wishing for,” ­Troeltsch told Rade, namely advancing “a moralization of politics 35 Schwabe, 36 

Woodrow Wilson, 75. Rosenberg, 193.

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that turns against the abstract doctrine of violence, partly out of consideration for the moral damage that it does to the people, partly out of consideration for foreign countries.”37 But ­Troeltsch also realized that the galloping pace of events had already rendered those high-minded but also thoroughly pragmatic motives – which, we remember, ­Troeltsch had so stirringly expressed before the members of the Volksbund only days before, on January 7 – somewhat beside the point. The maneuverings of the unchecked German military camarilla, which found Wilson’s proposal for world peace inconvenient to its desire to escalate the war in the west, and whose designs were aided by a complicit or merely complacent civil government, had all accelerated the need for some kind of constructive intervening action. Both the army and the government were now facing open resistance, even rebellion, by the undernourished, overworked, and despairing working classes. “In this last respect,” ­Troeltsch continued, meaning the miserable plight of the working people, “the backdrop is very serious. The labor leaders fear revolution – food riots or demoralization and apathy. The other organizations agree, and thus for them domestic politics, the franchise, and parliamentarization stand at the forefront.”38 Those were goals which ­Troeltsch also endorsed, but achieving them was becoming more difficult by the day. For, on the one hand, the Fatherland Party is having a terribly destructive effect through its connection with Ludendorff. It is a class party to an eminent degree, working under the full social influence of the conservatives and the money of heavy industry. For the former, what matters, as Ludendorff puts it, is “victory and the full enjoyment of victory;” for the latter, the defeat of the inner enemy and the war reparations that will mitigate the coming tax burden. I don’t even want to talk about the academic fellow travelers. This party is lead by Tirpitz, an experienced schemer who wants to take his revenge on Bethmann […]. At every difficult moment, Ludendorff drops in and, by threatening to resign, forces the Kaiser to dismiss this or that person […]. The Kaiser is simply compelled step by step. Should it be necessary, the gentlemen would force him to abdicate. It is a revolution from above and Ludendorff is a bit playing the role of Wallenstein –.39

That last reference to Albrecht von Wallenstein, the charismatic, renegade Bohemian general who had fought during the Thirty Years War under Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II and who was assassinated for his suspected treason, was a learned and perhaps wishful gloss on the destiny that the stars perhaps also held in store for the German commander. But as sinister as ­Troeltsch considered the plots to be that were being devised by Ludendorff, Tirpitz and Co., ­Troeltsch 37  The letter, without a date but probably from the second half of January, is published in excerpted form in Johannes Rathje, Die Welt des freien Protestantismus, 256; it is also reproduced in KGA 21, 415–17. 38  Rathje, 256. 39  Ibid., 257.

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feared even more the consequences to be expected from the lack of any leader in Germany capable of grasping the olive branch proffered by the Allies to end the war. Failure to seize that opportunity would, he was convinced, generate only greater unrest, perhaps leading to further disintegration and chaos, possibly ending in complete social, political, and military collapse. And should that outcome occur, it might then conceivably invite the Allies’ unchecked retribution against a prostrate and defenseless Germany. Therefore, ­Troeltsch told Rade, there is, on the other hand, the rising bitterness of the working class, the Social Democrats constantly at the mercy of the Independents and, as Legien very gravely told me, the danger of the most massive strikes and uprisings, the revolution from below. The danger is great and pressing. […]. The situation is terribly serious; I know a State Secretary of the Empire who said: he is in despair over the future.40

­ roeltsch’s analysis, and the despair of the unnamed State Secretary, appeared to T lay bare a nearly hopeless dilemma from which there was no obvious escape. And that predicament seemed to grow worse when, as foreseen, hundreds of thousands workers went on strike at the end of January 1918 in Berlin. They were joined by over a million others in dozens of cities across the country, including Kiel, Hamburg, Danzig, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg, as well as in many more locations throughout the industrial Ruhr region, involving as many as fifty-seven German municipalities in total.41 The aptly named January Strike became “without a doubt the largest anti-war strike in German history,”42 far exceeding the other mass demonstrations that had taken place in the previous two years. Ironically – or appropriately – enough, plans for the strike to start on January 28 had been finalized the day before, on January 27, which was of course the birthday of the Kaiser. Since the state of siege had remained in effect since the beginning of the war, which prohibited any assemblies without prior approval, the organizers had deliberately convened on the day reserved for celebrating the Kaisergeburtstag because, as Karl Retzlaw observed, “the police was busy with parades,” making it easier to meet without being under their vigilant eye.43 Retz­ law also remembered some of the slogans he chanted along with his striking comrades as they flooded the factories, streets, and squares of Berlin on January 28. “We are striking to end the war!” they shouted, and: “We want peace!” In40 Ibid.

41 Friedhelm

Boll, “Der Januarstreik 1918 in seinen friedenspolitischen Kontexten,” in Streiken gegen den Krieg!, 34. 42  Ibid., 27. See also Volker Ulrich, “Der Januarstreik 1918 in Hamburg, Kiel und Bremen. Eine vergleichende Studie zur Geschichte der Streikbewegungen im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 71 (1985), 45–74. 43  Retzlaw, 124.

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stead of issuing the customary birthday salutations to the Emperor as they had in years past, they called out: “We do not want to deliver any more weapons to the Kaiser and his generals! We want brotherhood with the Russian Revolution, we want to strike until the war is over! Long live the Russian Revolution, long live Lenin and Trotsky!”44 Such expressions of solidarity with the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leaders were alarming enough in themselves. But of even greater concern to the forces of order were the concrete aims of the striking workers. At the top of their catalogue of demands stood peace, but they explicitly declared it must be a peace obtained without any annexations or reparation claims. Their next demand called for an immediate improvement in the provision of food, followed by the suspension of the state of siege and the restoration of the freedom of speech and assembly. They also insisted on the release of all political prisoners, and, finally and most comprehensively, on the “sweeping democratization of all state institutions in Germany, and in particular the introduction of the general, equal, direct, and secret franchise for the Prussian parliament for all men and women of the age of 20.”45 Although the means being used to achieve the strikers’ demands were extreme, the content of those demands themselves largely corresponded to the program of the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland. That overlap should not be particularly surprising given that many of the strikers belonged to the unions that provided the bulk of the Volksbund’s membership. And that connection may also help to explain why, as one modern historian expressed it in mild surprise, the “workers were highly politicized, even though (or perhaps because) they came from relatively well-paid and largely draft-exempt jobs.”46 The massive strike was originally supposed to last for a week. But after only three days it began to flag, and it collapsed entirely on February 3. The largest walkouts and demonstrations to occur outside of Berlin, namely those staged by the dockworkers at Kiel, were already over by February 1. According to Retz­ law, many of the women strikers especially started to complain after a few days about not being able to earn money to provide for their families, “and they already missed the daily bowl of turnips in the canteen.”47 And many middle-class 44 Ibid.

45  Cf. Richard Müller, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution. Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik (Berlin: Olle und Wolter, 1974), 1, 240. 46  See Stephen Bailey, “The Berlin Strike of January 1918,” Central European History 13/2 (1980), 162. Bailey also notes, in response to the question whether the strike was “revolutionary,” that “the specific points of the program called for reform rather than revolution;” Bailey, 160. 47  Retzlaw, 126.

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on-lookers throughout the country, who may have had some sympathy with the strikers and even with some of their political and economic objectives, strongly disagreed with the methods employed in the strikes, which many viewed not so much as hastening the peace as disastrously impairing any chance of obtaining it. Karl Hampe in Heidelberg wondered to himself: “Where will we end up with such foolishness and insanity? […] It is infinitely sad. Can it really be that just at the moment when Germany could seize the victory palm it will be snatched away by the foolishness of the masses and the irresponsible rabble-rousing of certain leaders?”48 For those on the right, and particularly for the industrial and military leaders whose interests were most directly affected, the size, national scope, and above all the expressly political character of the strikes were both frightening and infuriating. The Pan-Germans, as usual, were beside themselves with rage over the “inner enemy” and screamed for revenge. The official authorities responded by fiercely cracking down with mass arrests and the forced enlistment of thousands of strike participants.49 Philipp Scheidemann described walking home on the evening of January 31 in Berlin and being roughed up by approximately twenty policemen who were, he said, “armed to the teeth.” Even though they shoved and kicked him, Scheidemann prudently forced himself not to run away and he stoically absorbed their mistreatment out of fear, he said, of being “shot while escaping.”50 A few days after the strike was over, Karl Retzlaw and his friend Paul Nitschke both received their conscription orders in the mail. Having already decided not to obey any such summons, they quickly went into hiding. Paul Nitschke left under the dark of night to take refuge with a family friend, while Retzlaw defiantly returned his own orders “to the sender as a matter of form, with the comment that I did not have anything to do with their war.”51 The January Strike may have thus constituted a moral victory and in retrospect represented a harbinger of things to come, but in the short term it failed to achieve any of its intended goals and in some respects made things even worse. Apart from triggering the backlash and reprisals carried out against the strikers themselves, it also gave the military leadership the convenient pretext to enforce draconian measures on everyone else. Instead of relaxing restrictions on press freedom as the strikers had demanded, the military censors further tightened them. The Social Democratic Vorwärts was forbidden from publishing for three days for having issued a summons to the strike, and many other newspapers, such as the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the Deutscher Kurier, the Reichsbote, and 48 

Hampe, 650–51. Retzlaw, 127 50 Scheidemann, Der Zusammenbruch, 74. 51  Retzlaw, 127. 49 

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even the standard Berliner Tageblatt were also ordered to shut down their presses on several occasions.52 There was “intense nervousness among all the authorities,” the editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, noted at the time, “especially in High Command, where censorship is harder at work than ever.”53 Fear of running afoul of the heightened constraints even spread among the general populace. Werner Weisbach, the art historian and friend of ­Troeltsch living in Berlin, wrote that in those tense days and weeks, “no one dared any longer say a word in a public place, in a restaurant or on the street, that conflicted with officially desired views.”54 Worse, the resumption in the manufacture of essential war materiel after the strike ended meant that there were no more obstacles to the massive military build-up in the west in advance of the planned action in the spring. On February 7, in the midst of this lowering atmosphere of suspicion and fear, Ernst ­Troeltsch wrote a letter turning down a request to travel to Hamburg to speak publicly about current political events. He politely asked his would-be host to understand “the impossibility of giving a lecture on this topic under the present circumstances.” The general political and social situation in Germany, ­Troeltsch explained, had deteriorated to the point that the only way to describe it would be to call it an “intellectual civil war.” He then enumerated some of the many factors that would, he felt, inevitably restrict or even prevent any meaningful discussion in such a volatile situation: The course of our inner affairs, the demagogy of the Fatherland Party, its indubitable relationship to the Army Command, the stance of our civil government, which is condemned to half measures and contradictions and stands under the most severe constraints, the threatening intellectual civil war, the uncertain stance of the Social Democrats who are being besieged from above and below and are being forced further into opposition; the conflict over the Peace Resolution: all of that is an obstacle to saying openly what in my opinion would have to be said. Wilson’s charges are being confirmed on all sides by reality and our democrats have consciously or unconsciously adopted the principles of our opponents.55

Even though ­Troeltsch doubted that the conditions were conducive to the calm reflection required for genuine dialogue, he obviously did not believe that total inaction was a solution, either. Only a few days before, he had written to Albert Einstein thanking him for an encouraging note that Einstein had sent to him about ­Troeltsch’s speech before the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland a month earlier. Given the “deceitful whipping up of all passions by the Fatherland Party,” ­Troeltsch explained in his response to Einstein, 52 

Cf. Koszyk, 44–45. Wolff, Tagebücher 2, 584. 54 Weisbach, Geist und Gewalt, 163. 55  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Ami Kaemmerer, 7 February 1918; KGA 21, 426–27. 53 

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the Volksbund was the only thing that we could create. The strike now is a severe test for it. It is all the more important that our intellectuals pledge themselves to it and join. I would also like to ask you to do so. Now every man is necessary for the sake of reason. Unfortunately, the newspapers that are sold directly and indirectly by the opposing party are very difficult for us to access. Private action is all the more important.56

Einstein politely declined the invitation – having become a Swiss citizen in 1901, he was not permitted to join German political organizations – but the exchange showed that ­Troeltsch viewed the Volksbund as the best, and perhaps only remaining, way to fight the rising surge of right-wing extremism within Germany. In the middle of February, ­Troeltsch repeated these concerns to his publisher, Paul Siebeck, saying I am involved here in enormous activity. Public life is more or less consuming me and I am continually tossed back and forth. If one knows the insanity of the warmongers and their ulterior motives, then one cannot remain inactive. It is very unfortunate that an intellectual civil war has gradually arisen, and few people want to see the real situation.57

The advent of what ­Troeltsch was now regularly referring to as as an “intellectual civil war” in Germany was an astonishing and depressing development. Over the years, there had been recurrent flare-ups of frustration, resentment, and even anger over differences of opinion between the two main camps in Germany about their preferred course for the war. Sometimes those feelings had coalesced into concerted action, but most often they had dissipated under the realization that open conflict would bring more collective harm than any positive gain that could accrue to any individual cause. And as long as the Burgfrieden had lasted, such struggles had largely taken place behind the scenes, confined on the whole to personal communications and private conversations, known to the principal actors involved but mainly unseen by the public eye. But after the prohibition against discussing war aims had been lifted at the end of 1916, and as the German fortunes grew ever dimmer, such antagonisms had increasingly become more overt, only to explode into full view following the exit of Bethmann Hollweg and the creation of two new political movements that formalized the political split rending the country. Worse, the shock of a massive, disruptive strike had terrifyingly revealed that those divisions had the potential to cripple the entire nation. And as the various external and internal risks to Germany mounted while its real options for action dwindled, reasonable debate had begun to devolve ever more into personal slurs and open abuse.

56 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Albert Einstein, 4 February 1918; cited in the editor’s introduction to KGA 15, 6. 57  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Paul Siebeck, 16 February 1918; KGA 21, 432.

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No one was spared on either side. Even a man such as Wilhelm Solf – who was after all a State Secretary and an ever more plausible candidate for the post of Imperial Chancellor – frequently had to endure the indignity of being called a “defeatist.” Most often, Solf’s detractors used the untranslatable German words Flaumacher or Miesmacher to describe him, and he was accused of being a proponent of a “rotten peace,” all of which was tantamount to calling him a traitor, only in a slightly politer register. In 1916, no one less than Admiral von Tirpitz claimed that Solf had made false statements about the submarine war and Germany’s strength at sea, strongly hinting that Solf had thereby deliberately sought to undermine the German cause. The Honorary Chairman of the Fatherland Party and long-time President of the German Colonial Society, Duke Johann Al­ brecht of Mecklenburg, also cast suspicion on Solf for harboring “defeatist tendencies.”58 To be sure, those on the opposing side could, and often did, give as much as they got. As ­Troeltsch’s comment in his letter to Paul Siebeck indicated about the “insanity” of the “warmongers,” even he was not immune from occasionally employing untethered language himself. As time went on, however, and as the urge to place the blame on someone, or something, for the mushrooming catastrophe grew stronger, the imagery everyone employed would become more savage and raw. Speaking before the Reichstag later in 1918, Matthias Erzberger said that both “State Secretary Tirpitz and Capelle deserved to be brought before the State Court for treason.”59 And Ernst ­Troeltsch reported that, after giving a lecture in Braunschweig, he had been invited to dine at the residence of Duke Ernst August and his wife, Viktoria Luise von Hohenzollern, the daughter of the Kaiser. During that occasion, ­Troeltsch said he heard the Duke remark: “a man like Tirpitz should simply be put up against a wall.”60

A Dispute with Dr. ­Troeltsch For all of that, in early 1918, the “civil war” ­Troeltsch thought had descended on Germany remained predominantly an “intellectual” one, confined for the most part to words spoken or written against ideological opponents but rarely leading to actual physical confrontation – or worse. True, the January Strike had demonstrated that there did exist a new and frightening readiness for violence, at least

58 Vietsch,

Solf, 161. Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, 228. 60  Hampe, 892–93. 59 Erzberger,

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on the right, that could erupt at the slightest provocation. But thus far, ­Troeltsch himself had been spared any serious direct attacks, even of the verbal variety. That changed in the spring of 1918 when a young academic by the name of Hans Volkelt published a seventy-seven-page booklet in response to ­Troeltsch’s programmatic speech to the People’s League earlier that January. Titled Demobi­ lization of Minds? A Dispute primarily with Privy Councilor Prof. Dr. Ernst ­Troeltsch, Volkelt’s publication illustrated by its very existence the personal peril ­Troeltsch had assumed by taking on such a highly visible role within the expanding and increasingly toxic partisan battles. Yet as the title of Volkelt’s pamphlet also suggested, ­Troeltsch’s stature still shielded him from the worst excesses of such polemical combat. Volkelt almost deferentially justified his own work by writing that ­Troeltsch’s Volksbund speech was “equally significant with regard to the person of the speaker and to its content and purpose,” and Volkelt even admitted that ­Troeltsch himself was an “historian of undisputed objectivity.”61 But that did not stop Volkelt from bluntly stating his central complaint. When ­Troeltsch claimed that the war could no longer be ended by military means alone, that meant there could be “no doubt that these sentences by ­Troeltsch and related proclamations foster thoughts in the people that paralyze the will even to carry on the fight.”62 Volkelt was careful never to use the word itself, but the implication was clear: the message ­Troeltsch conveyed was in its tendency and in its essence defeatist. And everyone knew what that meant. While the person of Privy Councilor Ernst ­Troeltsch had to absorb the brunt of this assault, Volkelt also took aim at the entire Volksbund and its program itself. The January Strike – or, as Volkelt scornfully called it, “the strike of the masses” – had obviously rattled Volkelt as well, and he saw in it an irrefutable indictment of the platform advanced by the People’s League. If one still needed proof of the fact that the dedication to the fight – Kampfestreue – among important parts of the home-front army can be diminished by an excess of the desire for peace to the point where the entire vigilance of the state has to be summoned in order to avoid a catastrophe, then it has been provided by the mass strikes in Austria and by the German partial walkouts in January of this year.63

While not explicitly holding the Volksbund responsible for instigating or even condoning the strikes, Volkelt did find it guilty by association with the Free – that is to say, Socialist – Trade Unions that had declared themselves officially “neutral” on the strikes, a stance that Volkelt said indicated “‘toleration’”: 61 Volkelt,

Demobilisierung der Geister?, 1–2. Ibid., 7. 63  Ibid., 49–50. Kampfestreue is an unusual word and difficult to translate. Hindenburg also used it to describe his relationship to Ludendorff; cf. Paul Hindenburg, Aus meinem Leben (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1920), 78. 62 

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which means in the eyes of the workers: ‘endorsement’. This behavior by the Free Trade Unions is especially deplorable since they represent a major component of the membership of – the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland.”64

The outraged italics graphically conveyed where Volkelt felt the loyalty of the Volksbund should lie – and was lacking. He was even more incensed that the People’s League had issued a statement on the first day of the strike that, though without mentioning the uprising specifically, did contain the comment that “the delay of the demanded reforms had ‘influenced the mood of the broadest segments of the population in a very unfavorable manner’ and emphatically approved that there prevailed ‘the strongest indignation among the widest circles of the people’.”65 Not only did those statements amount, Volkelt felt, to a tacit sanction of the strikes, the strikes themselves also contradicted the official pledge made by the Volksbund at its founding to support the armed defense of the country. “Is it still proud of its four million members?” Volkelt mockingly asked, seeking to tar the entire organization and its members with the same defeatist brush. As that last rhetorical question revealed, Volkelt was clearly unsettled by the size of the People’s League – “whose organization,” he repeated elsewhere, “already encompasses four million people”66 – but he recognized that the ideas animating it signified a danger even greater than the number of its members. “Incomparably more important than what ­Troeltsch says about the military means for ending the war,” Volkelt wrote, “are his observations about the intel­ lectual means that he wants to see applied to achieving peace.”67 Volkelt was referring to the phrase calling for a “demobilization of minds” that ­Troeltsch had expressed in his speech before the Volksbund, and it was also the phrase that had inspired the questioning title of Volkelt’s own book.68 ­Troeltsch’s call for an intellectual armistice was worth taking seriously, Volkelt wrote, but only because in issuing it, “he is attempting to influence directly and explicitly the general intellectual attitude that the German people are currently taking toward the war.”69 While Volkelt acknowledged that “the deepest ethical and religious conviction of the speaker is being expressed here,”70 it was precisely for that reason that it warranted particular attention – and, Volkelt felt, the strongest repudiation. 64 

Volkelt, 50. Ibid., 51. 66  Ibid., 1. 67  Ibid., 8. 68  Actually, neither the phrase itself nor the proposal to deescalate the wartime rhetoric was original to ­Troeltsch. Friedrich Meinecke had already proposed a similar “demobilization of minds” in an article published in the Frankfurter Zeitung on September 23, 1917; cf. Meinecke, “Demobilmachung der Geister,” Politische Schriften, 195–200. 69 Volkelt, Demobilisierung der Geister?, 9. 70 Ibid. 65 

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­ roeltsch had aired, he charged, private views that were being turned into public T policy. For: the exposition of this mindset is the centerpiece of ­Troeltsch’s speech. It is also exceedingly indicative of the intellectual orientation of the other leaders of the People’s League. But even more: the general psychological and political attitude of the entire Reichstag majority and thus of the presumptive – to be sure, only numerical – home-front majority of the German people find here concise expression.71

That last sentence contained a remarkable admission, and one wonders if Volkelt himself fully realized the import of it. It would be hard to imagine a more pure articulation of anti-democratic sentiment and of contempt for the volonté générale. Volkelt had just acknowledged that the program of the Volksbund, which Ernst ­Troeltsch had laid out with such lucidity and vigor, reflected the views not just of the Reichstag majority, but also of the preponderance of the German people as a whole. But, according to Volkelt, the wishes of ordinary people – of individuals, their representatives, indeed of the entire mass of “the people” themselves – should have no role in determining the affairs of state. It represented a remarkable recognition of a fact that Volkelt bizarrely sought at the same time to diminish, reasoning that they – again, “the people” – were “only numerically” superior to otherwise unspecified members of the population, but who for Volkelt could only have been those who agreed with the stance of the Fatherland Party. If that is what he indeed meant, Volkelt’s assertion implicitly but inescapably placed his Party at odds with the very people, “the home-front majority,” they purported to be defending – and it damningly corroborated the argument ­Troeltsch had made in his speech in January. For, there ­Troeltsch had said that the Fatherland Party, while pretending to speak for Germany, really only spoke for itself. Volkelt may have sensed that he had maneuvered himself into an untenable logical and rhetorical position. He spent the remainder of his tract rather weakly asking whether the entreaty to “demobilize your minds!” issued by both ­Troeltsch and, as Volkelt again almost compulsively reiterated, by the entire “Volksbund with its four million members,” were producing an “effect” that was truly “in the interest of our fatherland?”72 Obviously, Volkelt thought the People’s League was not acting in the best interests of their country. But he was apparently not able to propose anything positive in its place besides attempting to vilify it as an ideological opponent. “In truth,” he wrote, “the danger currently lies almost exclusively in the intellectual attitude and foreign policy of the left.”73 And Volkelt 71 

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 13. 73  Ibid., 42. 72 

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finally tried to discredit ­Troeltsch personally by portraying him as belonging to an older, naiver, and irrelevant era. “The optimistic political idealism of ­Troeltsch,” Volkelt declared, “basically belongs to the age of the Enlightenment. He is essentially unhistorical. The Christian conception of ‘human rights’ are the foundation of his constructions.”74 But what Volkelt seems to have thought was a withering reproach was, to its addressee, a compliment – and an entirely accurate description. Although clearly a nuisance, Hans Volkelt was hardly a worthy adversary for one of the most formidably learned and talented scholars of his time. Volkelt was then thirty-one years old and had received his doctorate in 1912 not in philosophy, history, theology, sociology, or any other relevant discipline, but rather, and incongruously, in animal psychology. He would never obtain a permanent academic position as an Ordinarius even though he lived to 1964, when he died at the age of seventy-eight.75 But ­Troeltsch apparently felt that, in the current overwrought climate, it would have been unwise to let any charge, even one so risible, go unanswered. He may have also considered a response to Volkelt’s polemic as a welcome opportunity to say again, and more plainly, some of the things he had necessarily left to the imagination in his public appearance before the Volksbund, where he had also been speaking not principally on his own behalf but on that of a diverse – and, as Volkelt would have nervously added, enormous – organization. And it seems likely that ­Troeltsch would not have been wholly unprepared for such an assault and had already anticipated having to respond in some fashion. In his speech to the People’s League he had, after all, come close to accusing the Fatherland Party of being an enemy of the state, and it could not have come as a complete surprise that it – or one of its willing lackeys – struck back.

Denunciations of Defeatism Even if Hans Volkelt himself presented a relatively easy target, ­Troeltsch did not underestimate the capacities of the partisan forces arrayed behind him. When ­Troeltsch published his short rejoinder to Volkelt in May, he made up for its brevity by turning it into a spirited defense of the broader principles involved. In his response, called “Denunciations of Defeatism,” ­Troeltsch not only defiantly used the word in his title that Volkelt himself had primly – or timidly – avoided, 74 

Ibid., 61. Volkelt joined the Nazi party in 1932 and was regarded as an “overactive Nationalsocialist”; see https://research.uni-leipzig.de/catalogus-professorum-lipsiensium/leipzig/Volkelt_ 361/ 75 

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he also gave a lesson on where that word came from, what it meant, and why it mattered. “Defeatism,” ­Troeltsch explained, donning his professor’s cap, “i.e. people who consciously or unconsciously want to bring about the defeat of their own land and people,” was a word originally coined in France – défaitisme – following the Franco-Prussian war to designate those people who were convinced that it was less costly and more opportune to give up territory or to accept a defeat than to start or continue a war. Now, however, the stakes for France were exponentially higher, ­Troeltsch wrote, turning to the current use and meaning of the word, and in the context of the mortal struggle the French were currently waging, “the French government zealously tracks down these people into their most intimate private conversations and brutally punishes them.”76 The Italian government, ­Troeltsch continued, proceeded “similarly,” severely persecuting known or suspected “defeatists.” In Britain the practice was “uneven”: “sometimes they vigorously intervene, sometimes people can express themselves very openly.”77 The point was that the free exchange of opinion, and even more the freedom to entertain and express ideas about important matters that may conflict with official policy, was frequently not only prohibited in the countries Germany was fighting against, it was often ruthlessly suppressed. Volkelt could scarcely wish, ­Troeltsch seemed to be implying, that Germany follow suit and forbid or, worse, prosecute the expression of differing perspectives among its citizens, especially when it came to the life and death questions of war and peace. “The Imperial government has never interfered in this dispute,”78 ­Troeltsch pointedly wrote, more than suggesting that it should stay that way. It was a strong opening. But ­Troeltsch had even bigger quarry in mind. He said that Volkelt’s “little work” promoting the “standpoint of the Fatherland Party” – which ­Troeltsch again ostentatiously and not a little dismissively called “a private association” – had provided merely the external impetus to his own essay. What he really wanted to do was to explain that behind the “very real-political interests” that motivated the proposals for liberal reform and the “idea of rapprochement” advanced by the Volksbund, there stood “fundamental convictions that, insofar as they are connected with real-political considerations, are of the greatest practical significance for the possibility of coexistence with other peoples – and with our fellow citizens as well.”79 Given that such serious matters were at stake, it was regrettable, ­Troeltsch said, and somewhat silly, that “Mr. 76 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Anklagen auf Defaitismus,” Deutsche Politik 3/1 (1918), 661.

78 

Ibid., 662.

77 Ibid. 79 Ibid.

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Volkelt” had denounced “me, my speech at the founding of the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland, the People’s League itself, the Reichstag majority, the entire political left, and finally ‘pacifists, to the extent they still have an ounce of love for the fatherland’.” And, even more disappointingly, Volkelt had accused all of these groups “of weakening the will to victory, of disbelief in victory, of renouncing the absolutely necessary assurances and compensations, of a lack of understanding of politics and power, of weakliness, softness, unmanliness and over-conciliatoriness.”80 But beyond this sweeping catalogue of grievances, it was above all Volkelt’s assertion that, “in my opinion, military effort, victories, and blood sacrifice were ineffective and that only a democratic policy could help” – “which is, to be sure, not my personal opinion,” ­Troeltsch hastened to add – that needed to be put straight and placed in proper perspective. It was preposterous as well as impudent, ­Troeltsch asserted, to want to make the war into an ideological conflict between Volkelt’s conception of German culture and the “‘primitive, rationalistic, and moralizing mindset’ like that of the Western Europeans and whose intellectual influence had also migrated over to me.” That was a ridiculous contention, ­Troeltsch said, primarily because it “was me of all people who, as the author well knows, was the first to have revealed the difference between German and Western European political and social thought, even if I have admittedly never denied that we need a combination of the two.”81 ­Troeltsch compared the method of Volkelt’s “polemic” to the “holy simplicity” exhibited during the Middle Ages by people who persecuted heretics, whose blasphemy they considered explicable only as the “workings of the devil.” In the same way, “Mr. Volkelt can apparently explain any thinking that deviates from the platitudes of a contemporary patriotic man of letters only as the seductions of Western democracy and as the feebleness of an unpolitical intelligence and strength of will.”82 And with that, ­Troeltsch turned away from Volkelt and toward more serious matters: What, in truth, the People’s League and my speech wanted above all was an energetic consolidation of domestic and foreign policy. For my part, I deliberately never employed democratic or natural-law justifications, but merely pointed to the constraints of the situation and the conclusions drawn from the social condition of the modern state and its performance in the war. Democratization, no matter what one otherwise thinks about it, is necessary in order to strengthen the unity and propensity of our masses and to increase the momentum of the whole for a successful war. The ‘parliamentarization’ that is closely associated with it is necessary in order to lend a greater impact to German imperial politics, which everywhere in the world suffers 80 Ibid. 81 

Ibid., 663.

82 Ibid.

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from the suspicion of insincerity and opportunism, and to provide our people with a political education, without which it will always be only a well-administered people of subordinates – Untertanen – but cannot become a sovereign people – Herrenvolk – that makes progress in the world.83

The resonances in the last sentence of Max Weber’s thinking are not accidental. ­Troeltsch himself immediately added: “I do not need to say any more about this after Max Weber has impressively expounded these thoughts in a work on ‘Parliament and Government in the Reordered Germany,’ with which I largely – not entirely – agree.”84 That last slightly negative qualification is vague but important. Weber’s now famous essay, which would not formally appear until that June, articulated his muscular conception of parliamentary democracy as the best way to overcome the deficits of authority in the existing German system and for cultivating true political leaders capable of guiding the nation to its greater imperial destiny.85 ­Troeltsch had only obliquely hinted that he did not accept all elements of Weber’s vision – a response to one polemic was not the ideal place to engage in yet another one with someone else, much less with an ally – and we would have to guess what specific aspects ­Troeltsch rejected. The notion that the Germans should become a Herrenvolk – an ambiguous, multi-layered word that figures prominently, and controversially, in Weber’s account – and that the Germans should assume mastery over anyone but themselves was actually alien to ­Troeltsch’s thinking and he quickly abandoned it along with its easily misconstrued connotations.86 And ­Troeltsch never even mentioned another coinage Weber proposed for the elite cadre of “leaders” that parliamentary democracy ostensibly created, namely what Weber called “Caesaristic” Führerpersönlichkeiten who would then preside over a Führerdemokratie.87 That, too, was a startling take on the possibilities of democratic governance. But it bears the germ of Weber’s later and even better-known concept of the “charismatic character” necessary for all genuine political leadership.88 Such powerful leaders were required, Weber believed, if Germany were to fulfill its potential at home and even more crucially if it wanted to 83 

Ibid., 665–66. Ibid., 666. 85  See Max Weber, “Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland. Zur politischen Kritik des Beamtentums und Parteiwesens,” in Gesammelte politische Schriften, 294– 431. See also the perceptive comments on this essay in Mommsen, Max Weber, 188–206. 86  Weber’s use of the word Herrenvolk, which is usually translated misleadingly (as well as simply incorrectly) as “master race,” has caused understandable consternation among his interpreters; see the footnote in Mommsen, Max Weber, 188. 87  See ibid., 202. 88  Cf. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” in Gesammelte politische Schriften, 493–548; see 84 

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be able to assert its rightful place in the unavoidable contest of strength on the larger world stage. As Weber starkly put it: “Only sovereign peoples – Herrenvölker – are called to grasp the spokes of the world’s development.”89 Weber’s somewhat opaque imagery was apparently meant to convey the forceful idea that only those nations have any business engaging in world affairs which have first shown themselves to be competent in governing their own. Or, put even more pointedly, those who are not masters of themselves should not presume to aspire to be masters of others. Again, Weber’s harsh, agonistic worldview was not ­Troeltsch’s. In a letter from the previous summer to Paul Honigsheim, ­Troeltsch had written that “Max Weber has developed such a radicalism during the war and judges the entire situation so pessimistically and with such animus, that he has totally isolated himself and fallen out with most people, among others also with me.”90 Unlike his once close friend, ­Troeltsch did not believe in the inevitability of perpetual conflict, that an implacable Darwinian struggle for existence defined – or should be allowed to determine – all human interaction. Despite ­Troeltsch’s enlightened acceptance of the results of the historical-critical method repudiating the absolute claims of Christianity, or of any religion, he never abandoned the idea that the ethical and spiritual values of understanding and reconciliation, of mutual recognition and respect, and above all of the supreme good of peace and of the persistent effort to achieve it, should ultimately inspire and guide human affairs. That was, after all, the purpose behind the appeal for a “demobilization of minds” that had so irritated Hans Volkelt: it was intended to establish an intellectual truce so that everyone could concentrate on what they shared in common rather than on what was quite literally tearing them apart. But all of these differences between Weber and ­Troeltsch, as important as they are, should not cause us to overlook the equally significant similarities, and especially the one positive political proposition that, in responding to Volkelt, ­Troeltsch did endorse. For it was in his essay on “Denunciations of Defeatism” that ­Troeltsch had for the first time, and almost incidentally, spoken out in favor of the necessity of “parliamentarization” in Germany, saying that, like “democratization” itself, such parliamentarization was indispensable to its continued progress and development. Such an unreserved endorsement of parliamentarization was a new and sudden departure for ­Troeltsch and also an omen of things to come. It is unclear what, besides Weber’s own essay itself, motivated him to make it. Possibly ­Troeltsch also the chapter “Vom liberalen Verfassungsstaat zur plebiszitären Führerdemokratie” in Mommsen, Max Weber, 587–613. 89  Weber, “Parlament und Regierung,” 430. 90  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Paul Honigsheim, June 12 1917; KGA 21, 291.

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was simply acknowledging the new parliamentary reality in Germany as reflected in the provision that allowed the Vice Chancellor to be an appointee of the Reichstag and was thus merely describing what already existed. Whatever the case, ­Troeltsch, also like Weber, viewed parliamentary democracy, as needed and necessary as he now thought it was, not as an end it itself but as a means to other specific political goals. Characteristically, Weber saw it as a rough-and-tumble breeding ground, a hard-knocks preparatory school for future leaders who would be able to prove that they could prevail in the endless, tooth-and-nail contest for dominance, demonstrating that they could triumph in the ongoing struggle for social and economic supremacy both at home and abroad. But ­Troeltsch, true to his allegiance to the values of the European Enlightenment, which to his credit Volkelt had discerned even as he deplored it, understood democracy rather as the best means for all human beings to realize their aspirations and abilities, both as individuals and as the collective members of a society. Given his ethical commitments, ­Troeltsch remained anxious to dispel the perception that what he was advocating was somehow unrealistic, that his insistence on an ethical underpinning to political action was dangerously naive or “sentimental,” and that his ideas were therefore condemned to failure, and, finally, that Germany, should it embrace them, was thereby also doomed to weakness and defeat. Harking back to the argument he made in his speech before the Volksbund that a state should appropriately acknowledge the “dignity” of its citizens, ­Troeltsch reiterated in “Denunciations of Defeatism” that his conception “truly combines the purely national interest and the masses’ need for justice and human dignity.”91 On the one hand, and also returning to the economic argument he had long been making, ­Troeltsch said that he saw the primary “political goal of ending the war” in the “recovery of our world trade, because on that rests the possibility of survival for our seventy million people.”92 But on the other hand, for such an economic recuperation to have any chance of succeeding, “the political and moral hatred toward Germany” would first have to subside. And that, he said, could not occur if such hatred were constantly being stoked at home by jingoistic “German journalists” who insensibly kept adding fuel to the already raging fire. What was needed, rather, in this “incredibly difficult task was to unite a truly iron firmness of will with great prudence and thoughtfulness of action and bearing.”93 Winning over the minds of their adversaries would be as challenging as winning any military campaign. But that was in some ways an even more diffi91 ­Troeltsch, 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid.

“Anklagen auf Defaitismus,” 666.

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cult operation than physical battle, one that had to be undertaken with great deliberation and restraint in order to reestablish something as fragile as the trust on which any future cooperation among Germans and the rest of the world would depend. “The sword of our great generals does not extend into these arenas,” ­Troeltsch cautioned, trenchantly adding, “the U-boats alone cannot do that, either.”94 At the center of “Denunciations of Defeatism,” then, ­Troeltsch wanted to defend and promote the perhaps idealistic but also eminently realpolitisch task of creating the mental or psychological conditions that would enable peace and with it the resumption of normal life in all of its facets for everyone. That was an objective to which ­Troeltsch wanted all of his fellow “intellectual” Germans to devote their energies as well and which he thought only a “demobilization of minds” could facilitate. That summons, which had so infuriated Volkelt, was not the product of some abstract, starry-eyed theory, ­Troeltsch insisted, much less a weak-kneed or effete capitulation before the ostensibly cruel facts of life. Such an intellectual armistice was instead very much the expression of a rational and pragmatic strategy. Nevertheless, ­Troeltsch did admit: the fact that it largely coincides both with the political and ethical wishes of our masses, who are actually very mature and accomplishing immeasurable things, as well as with the humane sentiments of those who are concerned about the continued existence of European culture, I consider only to be a benefit that is simultaneously realpolitisch and moral.95

And speaking of the masses, ­Troeltsch, in addition to praising their political and ethical “maturity,” called attention to their own hard-won sense of realism, castigating Volkelt for his insulting insinuations that “the masses” could be easily influenced or manipulated by ­Troeltsch or by anyone else – including by the cynical demagogues in the Fatherland Party: Mr. Volkelt completely underestimates the total mistrust of the masses who come into consideration for the People’s League toward all academic literature and toward all semi-official depictions of the war. These people are in some cases very well-informed. They know that the semi-official doctrine about the English government causing the war does not correspond to the facts, and they know that the recapture of world trade is not possible through solely military means.96

In time and through painful experience, the working classes in particular had become immune, ­Troeltsch wrote, to the kinds of entreaties or demands that they lend their “superiors” their blind trust. One example among many would suffice. “As is well known,” ­Troeltsch reminded his readers, “confidence in the U-boats 94 Ibid. 95  96 

Ibid., 667 Ibid., 667–68.

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was badly misused precisely by the circles Mr. Volkelt belongs to.”97 “One really may not come to them only with enthusiasm and merely with bugbears about the economic consequences of a premature peace of renunciation – Verzicht­ frieden.”98 Such ploys, ­Troeltsch argued, after so many years of distortions, omissions, and outright lies, had become “inoperative on the people.”99 But the people were still susceptible, ­Troeltsch believed, to the truth. That, ultimately, was what a “demobilization of minds” was supposed to make room for: a more comprehensive truth that went beyond narrow or factional political interests, one that crossed the divide between ideologies and classes and even rose above the national barriers separating all the peoples and countries currently at war. It was the interest in what is finally, at its deepest roots, a Christian European culture and mentality, which demands a suspension of destruction and self-immolation and requires the possibility of a reconnection of the peoples whose minds today are poisoned beyond measure. And therefore we must now, while we are still in the middle of the war, already make provision for an attenuation of the climate of hate and for the contemplation of a possible coexistence again.100

­ roeltsch’s provocative call for an intellectual demobilization, which he had just T reiterated in “Denunciations of Defeatism,” was in its essence an appeal to reject the culture of violence that pervaded all of Europe. In order to begin that process, it was first necessary for people to banish that collective mania from their minds. ­Troeltsch frankly acknowledged in closing that it was likewise in his own commitment to achieving that same goal that “Mr. Volkelt rightly recognizes the expression of a certain humanitarian, cultural disposition of mind and, in combination with Christianity, of an elevation of the spiritual community of humanity over that of the state and nation.”101 At bottom, then, what the people of Germany had in common with those in the other countries of Europe – and, it was implied, with the rest of the world as well – was that they were all human beings and deserved to be treated as such. And that truth, for ­Troeltsch, transcended everything else. There is an undeniable nobility of spirit in what even Hans Volkelt had recognized as ­Troeltsch’s “optimistic political idealism.” It is a stance epitomized by his reasoned plea for the cessation of hostilities within the realm of the mind as the necessary precondition for extinguishing the all too real conflagration still consuming the continent. ­Troeltsch’s political idealism was demonstrated, too, 97 

Ibid., 668.

98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100  101 

Ibid., 668–69. Ibid., 669.

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by his unwavering dedication to a higher, ecumenical faith that the best way of permanently putting out those flames was to appreciate and respect the dignity of every human being – everywhere. Yet at the same time ­Troeltsch also had to confront the innumerable sordid and dismal truths that continued to stand in the way of attaining that loftier goal. Those included the appalling fact that the “culture war,” which had originally been conducted against Germany by its external enemies and which ­Troeltsch had spent so much of his time and energy over the years attempting to check, had distressingly jumped over the border and, as exemplified by Hans Volkelt’s behavior, was now being waged with equal ferocity at home by the Germans against themselves. Volkelt’s presumptuous tract, while mostly annoying, was in its tendency at least potentially dangerous and thus needful of public censure. But it was also clear that Volkelt’s book was merely the symptom of a much more worrying and menacing problem.

A Growing Threat That larger peril was personified, perhaps paradoxically, by the figure of the acclaimed historian Georg von Below. Born in Königsberg in 1858 to an old and large aristocratic Prussian family that produced dozens of officers and loyal servants to the state, Below had become one of the most visible and outspoken conservative critics of the same political tendencies that Ernst ­Troeltsch just as vigorously championed. Even before the war, Below had long been a vocal opponent of any radical change to the Prussian franchise. As he had already written in 1909, he thought on the contrary that the three-class system was a welcome means “of quite considerably fortifying the dam against the democratic inundation.”102 But Below was also a serious, respected scholar: Max Weber, for one, admired Below’s work, even if he did not always agree with it, and Below became the successor to the chair at the University of Freiburg that Friedrich Meinecke, then the most important historian in Germany, had vacated when he moved to Berlin. Naturally, ­Troeltsch knew Below’s writings as well, and in September 1915 ­Troeltsch sent his colleague a letter graciously thanking Below for forwarding a copy of his most recent publication on German historiography, saying that “it is not only extraordinarily instructive, it also coincides so closely with certain fundamental ideas of my own that I am very sorry to see that you

102  Georg von Below, Das parlamentarische Wahlrecht in Deutschland (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1909), 160.

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have preempted me. In reality, I can of course only be delighted by the agreement and the confirmation it contains.”103 But as with so much else, the war brought a jarring end to this once amicable relationship. Only a month after ­Troeltsch had sent his friendly note to Below, the Freiburg historian published a scathing but anonymous review of the volume on The Labor Force in the New Germany, which had, we remember, brought together twenty social democratic and “bourgeois” authors, including ­Troeltsch, in the spirit of cooperation on behalf of the national cause. Below delivered a stinging attack specifically on the “bourgeois” contributors to the effort, accusing them of “capitulating” before Social Democracy and suggesting that if Germany had a “democratic government” during the war, it would have already lost. “If one wants to initiate a reconciliation between Social Democracy and the bourgeoisie,” Below wrote, “it is misguided to extol absolute democracy as the sole remedy. Our most recent experiences have after all shown that better things are to be found in our less ‘democratic’ Germany than in the ‘democratic’ states that are governed by parliamentary rule. Democracy,” Below opined, “is in no way identical with true freedom and the welfare of the people.”104 Similarly, in another anonymous article, Below condemned Hugo Preuß’s book, The German People and Politics, rejecting its searching critique of the governing structure in Germany as an Obrigkeitsstaat, or an authoritarian state inimical to individual freedom – a view to which, as we also know, ­Troeltsch would emphatically and publicly subscribe as well. “Where is there a state,” Below indignantly asked, in which freedom in the true sense of the word reigns to a greater degree than in Germany? […] Preuß regrets that we have a franchise that is so little democratic. But do many states possess a franchise that is more democratic? One could sooner say that hardly any other state is more democratic in its franchise than Germany.105

103 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Georg von Below, September 15, 1915; KGA 21, 141. ­Troeltsch was referring to the articles that became the book: Georg von Below, Die deutsche Geschichts­ schreibung von den Befreiungskriegen bis zu unseren Tagen. Geschichte und Kulturgeschichte (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1916). ­Troeltsch later engaged extensively with this work in his own work, Der Historismus und seine Probleme. 104 Anon., “Professor Anschütz über künftige Staatsreformen in Deutschland,” Deutsche Wacht. Wochenschrift der Deutschen Vereinigung 8/20 (Oct. 3, 1915), 155; cited from Kurt Töpner, Gelehrte Politiker und politisierende Gelehrte. Die Revolution von 1918 im Urteil deutscher Hochschullehrer (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1970), 179–80. 105 Anon., “Eine Kritik unserer deutschen Zustände von einem deutschen Staatsbürger,” Konservative Monatsschrift 73/1 (1916), 260; cited from Töpner, 181.

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It was an odd, slightly self-contradictory argument: Below was asserting that Germany was already democratic enough, making any further democratization either superfluous or harmful, or somehow both. What truly radicalized Below, however, was Matthias Erzberger’s Peace Resolution in July 1917 and the new Chancellor’s subsequent failure to shut it down, which Below principally blamed for irrevocably splitting the nation in two. “In August 1914, our people was essentially unified,” Below later wrote about that episode, now openly using his own name as author. “And this unity could have been strengthened and deepened if we had had a great leader of the nation. It would have been the task of the man standing at the head of the Imperial government to strengthen and deepen the unity of the nation. But the Imperial Chancellor failed.”106 Small wonder, then, that Below not only joined the Fatherland Party that formed in the turmoil that ensued after the Peace Resolution was passed, but he was also elected to sit on the Executive Committee of the party along with fellow historian and seasoned agitator Dietrich Schäfer. And from then on Below single-mindedly devoted himself to the fight against, on the one hand, the “Devastating Effects of the threatening Democratization of Germany,”107 as one of his essays is titled, and for the “Duty and Achievement of our patriotic – vaterländisch – Endeavors,”108 as another is called, on the other. To be fair, Below and his wife Maria, or Minnie, née von der Goltz – she, too, issued from an ancient and distinguished noble Prussian family – had powerful personal reasons to feel betrayed by the unwanted changes taking place in Germany. Two of their three sons had fought and given their lives for their country. Ernst von Below, their middle son, had been killed in the first months of the war at the age of 18. In the biography Minnie later wrote of her husband, she revealed that the boy’s death “affected his father terribly and deeply – should I conceal the fact that he wept?”109 Then, in July 1918, during the Second Battle of the Marne, their youngest son also fell, and their oldest boy was badly wounded for the second time.110 In an autobiographical sketch Below published in 1925, he stoically noted their casualties only in general terms, divulging merely that “the war struck

106 Georg von Below, “Die Spaltung der Nation und der 19. Juli 1917,” Das größere Deutschland 5 (1918), 865; cited from Töpner, 180. 107  Georg von Below, “Ein Wort über die verheerenden Wirkungen der drohenden Demokratisierung Deutschlands,” Deutsche Wacht 3 (1918), 22–25; cited from Töpner, 183. 108  Georg von Below, “Pflicht und Erfolg unserer vaterländischen Bestrebungen,” Das größere Deutschland 5 (1918), 7–10; cited from Töpner, 183. 109  Minnie von Below, Georg von Below. Ein Lebensbild für seine Freunde (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1930), 142–43. 110  Ibid., 154.

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me with its entire severity.”111 But these traumatic experiences may help to explain why, as his wife Minnie put it, Below threw himself so relentlessly at “combating disgraceful defeatism – Flaumacherei – behind the valiant front that protected our borders!”112 And why, when Hans Volkelt’s pamphlet appeared accusing Ernst ­Troeltsch of that very attitude in all but name, Below was quick to publish a glowing review of the book, extolling it as “a work that absolutely had to be written and accomplishes its task magnificently.”113 Georg von Below personally joined the effort against the allegedly rampant defeatism among his professional colleagues in an essay dedicated to elucidating “The Stance of University Professors toward Questions of the War,” which he published later that same year. Precisely because Below was so highly regarded in academic circles, at least among his more conservative colleagues, and because he was socially and politically so well-connected, it mattered that he singled out ­Troeltsch as a particularly egregious exponent of the supposedly widespread inclination on the part of university professors to “renounce” any prospect of victory. Or, as Below more insultingly phrased it in his essay, that he found ­Troeltsch guilty of Verzichtlertum – an even more offensive word for “defeatism” that implied a gratuitous surrender of what rightfully belonged to Germany.114 “The question will have to be posed thus,” Below wrote: “how are we to explain in general the strong prevalence in Germany of wanting to renounce, and why do academics have a not inconsiderable share in it?”115 Below’s own answer – having to do with the overspecialization of most scholars and their tendency to form abstract “theories” and “doctrines” that make them ill-suited to making sound political judgments about realities that refuse to conform to their airy conceptions – is less interesting, or troubling, than the very fact that he raised the question in the first place. For in posing it, and by presenting the Verzichtlertum ostensibly pervading academia as an even bigger and serious problem for the country overall, Below provocatively turned ­Troeltsch into the figurehead of a movement purportedly undermining the German will to fight. Again commending “Dr. Hans Volkelt” for his “perceptive work directed against Professor E. Tröltsch” [sic], Below contended that “the same complaint has already been raised by many” others, including “Professor Theobald Ziegler” and an other111 

Georg von Below, “Georg von Below,” in Die Geschichtswissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. Sigfrid Steinberg (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1925), 1–49, here 41. 112  Minnie von Below, Georg von Below, 154. 113  Georg von Below, “Hans Volkelt: Demobilisierung der Geister?” Deutschlands Erneu­ erung, 6 (1918), 446. 114  Georg von Below, “Die Stellung der Hochschullehrer zu den Kriegsfragen,” Deutschlands Erneuerung 2/12 (1918), 812–24. 115  Ibid., 815.

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wise unidentifiable “Professor Kärst,” both of whom, Below said, had also published persuasive critiques of “Tröltsch’s theory.”116 “People have already spoken about the scholarly sponsors of pessimism in wartime,” Below concluded, but “the ‘demobilization of minds’ that Tröltsch called for […] is the most unfortunate idea that could be expressed.”117 This time, for whatever reason, ­Troeltsch did not dignify the personal attack on him with a formal response.118 Perhaps he thought Below’s arguments, such as they were, simply did not deserve a rebuttal. Or perhaps he had become convinced that rational dialogue, even among academic colleagues, had ceased being possible at all. Or, most likely, he refrained from responding because events had already overtaken Below’s unforgiving truculence, making any sort of reply redundant. But ­Troeltsch’s silence should not tempt us to trivialize Below’s public condemnation of him as merely a highbrow and thus relatively harmless quarrel between two intellectuals. For it was during these waning months of the war that political opponents in Germany began to turn into bitterly hated enemies, and their stances hardened from principled disagreement into something far more virulent. At the end of 1918, for instance, ­Troeltsch tried to offer his good wishes to the great scholar of Greek antiquity, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who turned seventy on December 22 (and whose own son, Tycho, had been killed on the Eastern Front in October 1914). The eminent classicist rudely rebuffed ­Troeltsch by saying that he “could not accept congratulations from a traitor to the fatherland.”119 Nor would the expression of such sentiments remain confined to words. The political murders that took place in the period immediately after the war – most prominently those of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were both killed in January 1919, the assassinations of Matthias Erzberger in August 1921 and of Walther Rathenau in June 1922, as well as the failed attempt on the life of 116 

Ibid., 812. Ibid., 813. 118  Others were not so reticent. Below also aggressively attacked Hans Delbrück in a publication officially produced by the Fatherland Party itself, using words such as “criminal,” “traitor,” “informer,” etc. to describe Delbrück; see Georg von Below, Das gute Recht der Vater­ lands-Partei. Eine Antwort auf Dr. H. Delbrück. Schriften der Deutschen Vaterlands-Partei Nr.  1 (Berlin: Deutsche Vaterlands-Partei, n.d. [1918]). Delbrück responded with a forceful refutation, with the rationale that he was doing so precisely because “Professor v. Below is not just anybody. He is an eminent scholar” who was “not only knowledgeable, but is also known in the learned world as a very skilled polemicist;” see Hans Delbrück, “Prof. v. Below als Vorkämpfer der Vaterlandspartei,” Preußische Jahrbücher 172 (1918), 128. 119 As reported in a letter by Ernst ­ Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, June 15, 1922; ­Troeltsch, Briefe an Friedrich von Hügel, 126. 117 

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Philipp Scheidemann that same month – were all rooted in the same elemental fury and profound sense of betrayal experienced by millions of Germans as their country, for which so many others had sacrificed their lives, began to turn into something they did not recognize or want.120 General Erich von Ludendorff, later nursing his own resentments in Swedish exile, said to his wife, Margarethe: “If I ever come back to power, then no quarter will be given. With a clear conscience I would have Ebert, Scheidemann, and associates strung up and watch them swing!”121 In mid-1918, such extreme violence did not yet pose an immediate threat to someone in ­Troeltsch’s position. But his role as perhaps the best-known proponent of the ideas behind the Volksbund made him a natural target for its detractors, which only raised his visibility even more, especially among those who held democracy itself directly responsible for the mounting troubles afflicting Germany. That he had become so conspicuously exposed to such denunciations must have been unsettling for ­Troeltsch, providing further evidence of how far the “intellectual civil war,” as he had called it, had already spread and how precarious the domestic situation overall had become. No less disconcerting, his call for a “demobilization of minds” had placed him a tricky position: to respond to his attackers in kind would have seemed hypocritical and self-contradictory – as well as out of character – yet to remain mute hardly seemed to be an appropriate or realistic solution. Discretion can be the better part of valor, but certain antagonists seem to be only emboldened by silence. And ­Troeltsch reserved a special disdain for those of his colleagues who he knew saw things as he did but were too fearful or opportunistic to speak out. “The professors especially are dreadful in their folly,” he had written in a letter in November 1917, “and the apprehensive ones, as I have unfortunately discovered to my dismay, are too cowardly to avow their opinion before the world against the terrorism of the ‘good patriots’.”122 It thus took some persuasion, but only a little, to prompt ­Troeltsch to take up his pen again to comment on yet another critical publication that appeared later that summer and had taken aim not so much at him personally as at the People’s League itself. On July 24, an essay written by Paul Herre, a historian at the University of Leipzig, appeared in the Berlin daily paper Der Tag. In his article, Professor Herre purported to submit the positions of both the Volksbund and the Fatherland Party to an “impartial examination” and to explain evenhandedly the “opposition of both systems.” In the end, Herre said he had “objectively” come down on the side of the Fatherland Party for its “understanding of the great world 120 

121 

See Emil Julius Gumbel, Vier Jahre politischer Mord (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft, 1922). Margarethe Ludendorff, Als ich Ludendorff’s Frau war (Munich: Drei Masken, 1929),

122 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, November 8, 1917; KGA 21, 390.

209.

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struggle,” while he disparaged the “democratic enthusiasts” in the Volksbund and what he termed their “categorical, unrealistic politics.”123 The tone of Herre’s article was generally civil, if disapproving, and he demonstrated unfeigned respect for the “power and importance of the People’s League,” which he said he “rated highly.”124 The managing director of the Volksbund, Martin Wenck, reported on the matter in a letter to ­Troeltsch, noting with obvious satisfaction the generally respectful attitude that Professor Herre displayed in his essay. But Wenck told ­Troeltsch that he thought Herre’s article nevertheless represented a “false conception” of their association that, if left unchallenged, could prove “detrimental.” Wenck, acting in his official capacity as the Geschäftsführer of the People’s League and “in conjunction with Dr. Grabowsky,” thus asked ­Troeltsch if he would consider writing a riposte on behalf of the Volksbund for publication in the same newspaper.125

Two Kinds of Realpolitik Two weeks later, ­Troeltsch’s response, “Two Kinds of Realpolitik,” appeared in Der Tag. Mindful of his own exhortations to dampen the rhetoric employed in such discussions, ­Troeltsch made a point of positively emphasizing the “calm tone” of Professor Herre’s original piece and he pledged to observe similarly “cool and sober” language in his own rejoinder, even as he acknowledged that the underlying issues provoked “fiery passion and worry, at least in the hearts” of all concerned.126 ­Troeltsch began as dispassionately as he could by laying out the essential differences between the two organizations as he saw them. The Fatherland Party, he wrote, fundamentally advocated the “determined will to war and to victory, and a strong peace that satisfies our needs.” Or, in other words, he said the Vaterlands­ partei represented the “party of Realpolitik,” which sought to justify its aggressive policies by tracing their origins back to Ranke and, above all, to Bismarck.127 123  Paul Herre, “Deutsche Vaterlandspartei und Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland,” 24 July 1918; cited from the footnote in KGA 21, 467. 124 Ibid. 125  Martin Wenck to Ernst ­Troeltsch, 25 July 1918; ibid. Wenck was keenly sensitive to the issue of public opinion and especially to organized efforts on the right to influence it and thus government policy. One of the most useful and empirically grounded contemporary analyses of the Pan-German League and its political, organizational, and journalistic strategies is Martin Wenck, Alldeutsche Taktik (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1917). 126  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Zweierlei Realpolitik,” Der Tag, 18/184 (August 8, 1918), 1. 127 Ibid.

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In this understanding of Realpolitik, ­Troeltsch continued, it was a doctrine that had taken hold of large parts of the “educated bourgeoisie,” the military, and “major industry.” Basically, according to this conception, Realpolitik amounted to an unapologetic reliance on an unrestrained “national egoism,” an eager dependence on uninhibited “power and violence, on the ruthless exploitation of every opportunity that offers itself, on a politics that comes down to mere interest.”128 But, ­Troeltsch added, what its advocates did not seem to realize was that this notion of Realpolitik described a doctrine that in its essence was not confined to Germans only. Rather, it also motivated “the imperialistic groups among our enemies that are fighting us in such bitter and venomous ways,” even if those adversaries wrapped “their imperialistic theories very carefully in moral and humanitarian theories.”129 That was a subtle and potentially devastating argument: the hard-nosed Real­ politik so beloved by German nationalists, which they thought was so redolent of cold, Nordic ruthlessness, suggesting an unsentimental aggression unconstrained by the tender-hearted emotions they imagined fettered more weak-willed Westerners, was in fact identical to the predatory policies practiced by the Germans’ enemies as well, except that they gave it another name, cloaking it in the mantel of “imperialism.” Not only that, in its guise as “modern imperialism,” this ostensibly uncompromising doctrine of purely self-interested action was really “more a theory of Realpolitik than Realpolitik itself.” What that meant was, for all of the bombast and bravado put on display by the would-be purveyors of Realpolitik, both foreign and domestic, the actual nature of a state’s “interest” and the goal of its “national egoism” remained “usually undefined and general,” vaguely promising “an enticing splendor of world-political prestige and economic expansion.”130 The true “interests” motivating a state were rarely, if ever, articulated in any detail, ­Troeltsch said. For if they were, it would quickly become evident that those interests would inevitably come into conflict with actual realities, namely with the equally valid interests of others, both of other individuals and of other states. And at that point, he sarcastically noted, the “supranational and purely spiritual values disconcertingly irrupt.” As soon as one attempted to define precisely what Realpolitik actually entailed, it immediately became clear that even in the realm of apparently pure power politics, human values were not so easily dispensed with after all. And ­Troeltsch was saying that the rapacious, self-consciously unprincipled form of imperialism that fancied itself as Realpolitik was not only un-German; even worse, it was impolitic. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid.

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Following this dissection of the pretensions entertained by those who formed the core constituency of the Fatherland Party, ­Troeltsch proposed that there was, however, another, different kind of Realpolitik. This other conception did not rest, as he put it, on a brutal “Darwinistic-amoralistic” view of the world, but rather accepted certain fundamental values as being not just desirable but also indispensable to the practical functioning of individual states and, equally important, to the peaceful cooperation among them. And that, he argued, was not some unworldly, spineless “theory,” but rather the genuinely realpolitisch platform on which the Volksbund firmly stood: It is our conviction that, without such a strong and categorical acknowledgement of morality, to which, in the modern world, the responsible participation of the people in the government belongs just as much as does a certain international perspective of all politics, we will not escape the world turbulence and strife, that we must combine the uncompromisingly resolute will to assert our vital requirements with an alignment with the universal political movement of the world and with the categorical recognition of an international morality, as is already the desire felt entirely on their own by countless fellow citizens here at home who are suffering grievously from the moral afflictions of the war.131

More specifically, the founders of the People’s League had certainly envisioned the real, practical “effect of such a politics.” “It would,” ­Troeltsch said – and by “it” he meant a political system resting on democratic principles – strongly bring our people, which is facing division, inwardly back together again and would give our Imperial government, which is beset with impotence and unscrupulousness, a strong, popular backbone and invest it with an indisputable authority that represents the whole.132

One might perhaps call this kind of Realpolitik a sort of pragmatic idealism: guided by a rational assessment of the broader political situation and of its inherent possibilities, such an approach nevertheless demanded an adherence to certain non-negotiable principles, an unbending commitment to a moral vision. It represented an ethical sensibility that required, as ­Troeltsch had expressed it in his response to Hans Volkelt, the “elevation of the spiritual community of humanity over that of the state and nation.”133 Pragmatism, for ­Troeltsch, did not need to exclude idealism, or vice versa. But in some situations, even the interests of a particular nation were, and morally had to be, subordinate to the higher dictates of humanity. Living up to that lofty creed, in any case, had always been the hope and the intention behind the Volksbund, at least as ­Troeltsch understood it. But – and this is true test of any political platform – had the Volksbund actually achieved its 131 

Ibid., 2.

132 Ibid.

133 ­Troeltsch,

“Anklagen auf Defaitismus,” 669.

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aim? In the second and final installment of his response to Professor Herre, which was published the following day, ­Troeltsch confronted head-on the legitimate question of whether the People’s League had in fact realized its ambitions. “I think that today, at the conclusion of three quarters of a year, it is already possible to form an opinion about that.”134 The answer, ­Troeltsch was forced to admit, was not encouraging: “The program of the People’s League, at least for now, has failed.”135 The reasons for this conclusion were paradoxical: The tragedy of the Prussian franchise, the uncertain existence and wavering explanations of our parliamentarized Imperial leadership, the mood of large portions of the people following the Russian “peace” and the spring successes of the Western offensive, all of that initially pointed in entirely different directions, toward uncertain and unclear conditions, which seemed to open a less encumbered field to Realpolitik and to make the democratic guidelines of our politics superfluous or impossible.136

Contrary to all reasonable hopes and expectations, some of the most promising developments that had occurred since the time the Volksbund had been founded had quickly proved to be disappointingly short-lived or illusory. Those initial developments included the moderately improved military situation in the west, the providential peace in the east, and the installation of a new chancellor that seemed to usher in at least some technical elements of a parliamentary regime. In the meantime, all progress on the signature domestic cause of the People’s League, the reform of the Prussian electoral law, had stalled, abetted by a lethargic and possibly conniving government; the Russian peace agreement had only brought a massive new escalation of war; and the resulting frenzy of violence during the first half of 1918 had made it seem that the adherents of a harsher Realpolitik had perhaps won after all, which meant that their conciliatory, liberal opponents had been roundly and perhaps permanently defeated. It would have been better, ­Troeltsch somewhat dispiritedly concluded, as well as more truly realpolitisch, if “the nation and the imperial government had consistently and clearly advocated from the outset a democratizing program, one that was limited to the necessities of life and supported by the devotion of the masses, and constantly held up anew to the people and to the world.”137 Alas, he wrote: “it was not to be. Fate has temporarily decided against the Volksbund.”138 But what appears to be the resigned acceptance of a disappointing failure actually gave ­Troeltsch one last opportunity to analyze the causes of that reversal – and to issue one final warning about the future. He wrote that, in halting the 134 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Zweierlei Realpolitik,” Der Tag, 18/185 (August 9, 1918), 1.

135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 

Ibid., 2.

138 Ibid.

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progress promised by the Volksbund, the “actual impediment has been the class structure of the Prussian-German state in its close connection with military and bureaucratic power and legal relationships, as well as with the ideologies that pervade these classes.”139 That was, albeit in highly condensed form, an extraordinary and powerful indictment of the entire social system in Germany. ­Troeltsch had just portrayed the whole governing structure of the country as having been primarily responsible for feeding opposition to the Volksbund – and hence to democratization itself. And he was saying that the Volksbund had foundered – at least temporarily – because the very makeup of German society as a whole prevented its success. But ­Troeltsch went further still. If society was the obstacle, it logically followed that society must and inevitably will be changed. The only variable was whether that change could be controlled or not. “Such a class structure is, however, nothing eternal, and people have not without good reason called this war a social revolution in the shape of a war.”140 The word ­Troeltsch used was Umwälzung, which can signify a more generic kind of convulsion than the word “revolution,” with its specific historical and political connotations. But the meaning of both words here is virtually identical – and unequivocal. The war itself, he was arguing, represented a social upheaval of unprecedented proportions and only those who lacked any knowledge of the past could imagine that they and their world were safe from the potentially cataclysmic changes the end of the war would unleash. And, he went on, preventing or at least attempting to check such a convulsive outcome with its unforeseeable consequences had been one of the politically realistic objectives of the Volksbund from the start. “It would have been the task for a genuine Realpolitik,” he explained, “to contain this movement with the necessary elasticity and to regulate it in a timely manner by absorbing it to a certain degree. That was our idea in participating in the Volksbund.”141 But without such a realpolitisch management of the highly explosive social forces that had been building up during the war, there now existed the real possibility that, in the absence of careful leadership, they would blow up the very structures that had created them, but which the beneficiaries of the old order complacently thought they could control. ­Troeltsch scathingly concluded: “it remains to be seen whose intelligence judged more accurately.”142 In a final admonition, he added that “the educated class of our people is faced with a serious moral question: to consider to what extent its 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid.

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­ ealpolitik corresponds to actual circumstances and to what extent it was on the R right path with the realpolitical amoralism it has liked to flaunt.”143 As things proceeded, it cannot have brought much comfort to ­Troeltsch to see it subsequently confirmed that his opponents had been heading down the wrong path all along. And he surely would have found it preferable to have avoided a revolution altogether than for one to occur in order to prove him right.

The End of the Beginning The first half of ­Troeltsch’s acute if slightly dejected rumination on the two possible varieties of Realpolitik had appeared on August 8. In another one of the many ironic coincidences that abounded during the war, that same day marked the conclusive breakdown of the various obstacles he had just identified as obstructing the progress of the People’s League and its program. And the long-term effects of the events that took place that day also cut short the ability of the Volks­ bund’s principal adversaries to continue mounting any kind of resistance to it or to anything else. In an often-cited passage from his memoirs, Erich von Ludendorff wrote that “August 8 is the black day of the German army in the history of this war.”144 On that day, which inaugurated the Allied offensive known as the Battle of Amiens that would finally bring the war to a close, Germany lost as many as 30,000 men. In an instant, all of the long-cherished dreams held by the promoters of a merciless German Realpolitik, who coveted nothing less than total conquest and its attendant spoils – vast acquisitions of land and resources to the west, to the east, and beyond; military, political, and economic domination of the entire continent; and, most tantalizingly, the overthrow of Britain as the world hegemon – suddenly evaporated before the bleak reality that Germany would lose the war and would be lucky not to lose much more than that. And just as suddenly, in a dizzying succession of events, the way forward for the Volksbund and for a far different future path for Germany, which ­Troeltsch that same day had despondently pronounced insurmountably blocked by a brutish version of Realpolitik, would open up, making room for other possibilities as well that had been virtually unimaginable before. At every stage, however, things very well could have taken a far different course. In the early months of 1918, major military operations continued in the east as Germany sought to consolidate its gains throughout central and eastern 143 Ibid. 144 

Ludendorff, 547.

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Europe so as to impose maximally stringent conditions on the Bolsheviks in advance of the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty on March 3. Most of the Baltic region – home to Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians – as well as all of Poland, Finland, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, would be compelled by the terms of the treaty to sever their ties to Russia, making them fall solely under German jurisdiction.145 For the victors, the Brest-Litovsk agreement would have thus provided the blueprint, one might say, for the foundation of a conservative, nationalist version of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa. But all of that had been merely the prelude to the coming confrontation in the west that would decide everything else. For months, Ludendorff and his staff had been considering various options for the envisaged spring offensive on the Western Front before settling on “Operation Michael,” the code name chosen in homage to Germany’s patron saint and savior. After having spent three and half years maintaining a stationary and predominantly defensive posture, the Germans would finally take up the offensive again and attempt to regain the momentum lost when the Schlieffen plan had bogged down at the Marne in September 1914. The objective seemed tantalizingly simple: capture Paris and conquer France, beat back the British to the sea and force them to quit the mainland – and to do so before a sufficient number of Americans arrived who could halt the German advance. That plan, which placed all of Germany’s hopes in a military solution, obviously entailed a cessation of any on-going diplomatic efforts to create some negotiated basis for a peace agreement.146 There were several last-minute attempts to persuade Ludendorff to pursue such avenues, but the intransigent general seemed to think there was no acceptable alternative to fighting. “We do not have the choice between peace and war,”147 he explained in a letter to Friedrich Naumann on February 22, 1918, who along with several others had sent a petition to Ludendorff asking him not to give up on a political resolution. Naumann, referring to the mass strikes in January a few weeks earlier, had even warned in the petition that “the events of the last weeks have shown that our home front, which until now was entirely unified, is no longer completely immune to convulsions.” Even more portentously, he noted that “in all countries the authority of the state, even the military order, is threatened by a revolutionary unrest.”148 Ludendorff remained unmoved. “Only action brings success,” he told Naumann. “Attack has always been the way Germans fight.”149 To others, Ludendorff was even more 145 

See on this episode Keegan, 377–92. Huber, 5, 497. 147  Ludendorff to Friedrich Naumann, in Ursachen und Folgen, 2, 250. 148 “Eingabe Friedrich Naumanns, Professor Jäckhs, Dr. Robert Boschs und anderer an General Ludendorff,” in ibid., 246, 249. 149  Ibid., 250. 146 

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blunt. When asked what would happen if the offensive failed, he simply said: “Then Germany will just have to go under.”150 At first, it seemed the Germans might actually emerge victorious. Heartened by the relatively favorable outcomes of the two main battles at the end of 1917, and strengthened by the influx of men and materiel – and optimism – coming from the east, the German forces amassed in the west in early 1918, totaling as many as four million men and significantly outnumbering the Allies, seemed to have the advantage of numbers and morale. Beginning on March 21, when “Michael” got underway with a punishing pre-dawn artillery barrage, the German divisions moved westward at lightning speed, rapidly piercing through more than fifty kilometers of Allied territory along a frontline eighty kilometers long, stopping just short of Amiens.151 Initially, the British were stunned and disoriented, having suffered their “first true defeat since trench warfare had begun.”152 The Kaiser was so elated by the gratifying developments that on March 26, after a prolonged dry spell, he had champagne served again in General Headquarters. As always, the political or ideological ramifications of the military campaign were not far from mind. “If an English parliamentarian would come to beg for peace,” Wilhelm gloated while offering a toast, “he would first have to kneel before the Imperial flag, for what this means is the victory of monarchy over democracy.”153 After the Allies’ initial shock had subsided, they quickly regrouped. By April 5, it was already clear that the German push had reached its limit, and Ludendorff was forced to suspend the operation. Four more times, in April, then again in May, June, and in one final surge in July, the German army tried to break through the enemy lines, only to encounter a point beyond which no further advance was possible.154 All the while, the German ranks were being decimated at a rate that replacements could not offset, and the United States Army continued to deliver tens of thousands of men to Europe every day. What had been 318,000 US troops in March 1918 had already swelled to 1,300,000 by August, eventually reaching almost three million by the autumn.155 The German contingents, increasingly weakened by hunger and fatigue, insufficiently supplemented by inexperienced and hastily trained recruits, and demoralized by the realization that, yet again, the 150  151 

Max von Baden, Erinnerungen und Dokumente, 235. Keegan, 403. See also Martin Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918 (Stroud: Tempus,

2005). 152  Keegan, 400. 153 Müller, Regierte der Kaiser?, 466. 154  David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall. Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011), 30. 155  Keegan, 372.

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decisive blow had not been delivered, were being systematically overwhelmed by inalterable facts. They also began to surrender, or allow themselves to be captured, in unsustainable numbers. On the infamous “black day” of August 8, over seventy percent of the German casualties were prisoners, and a month later, on September 12, seventy-five percent of the losses were men who had turned themselves over to the Americans.156 There was no “stab in the back” of the German army, as the poisonous legend would later have it; the army faltered and then crumbled from within. Still, it took some time for Ludendorff to accept the inevitable. It was not until September 29, the day Bulgaria opened separate negotiations with Britain and France to end the fighting on its frontier, that he realized there was no escape from the ring of steel tightening around Germany. “The situation of the army,” he told his assembled staff who were gathered in Spa in what would be their last general headquarters, “requires an immediate armistice to prevent a catastrophe.”157 What Ludendorff meant by “catastrophe,” he spelled out two days later, on October 1, in an emotional speech to his gathered section chiefs: The Supreme Army Command and the German army are finished. Not only is the war no longer winnable, but ultimate defeat is probably also unavoidably imminent. Bulgaria has defected. Austria and Turkey, at the end of their strength, will probably soon follow. Our own army is unfortunately already severely infected by the poison of Sparticist-socialist ideas. The troops are no longer reliable. Since August 8 it has gone rapidly downhill. Troop units continuously prove themselves to be so unreliable that they should be quickly pulled back from the front. If they were to be replaced with troops willing to fight, they would be received with the cry “strikebreaker” and urged to stop fighting. I can’t operate with divisions I can’t rely on anymore. It is thus to be expected that the enemy, with the help of the Americans who are eager to fight, will very soon succeed in achieving a major victory, a breakthrough on a very grand scale; then the western army will finally lose its grip and flood back over the Rhine in complete disarray and bring the revolution to Germany. This catastrophe must absolutely be prevented.158

It was as much the prospect of military defeat in the field as of political revolution at home that prompted Ludendorff to do something revolutionary himself. He made the decision – and it was he who made it – that Germany must both immediately seek peace and swiftly adopt parliamentary governance. It was a stunning, almost surreal reversal. When Ludendorff announced his intentions on that first day of October, the effect on his listeners was, in the words of Albrecht von Thaer, one of the officers present, “indescribable. As Ludendorff spoke, one heard a quiet groaning and sobbing, tears ran involuntarily down the 156 

Kielmannsegg, 658–59. See also Münkler, 704–05. Ursachen und Folgen, 2, 319–20. 158  Albrecht von Thaer, Generalstabsdienst an der Front und in der O. H. L. Aus Briefen und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1915–1919, ed. Siegfried A. Kaehler with Helmuth K. G. Rönnefarth (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), 234. 157 

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cheeks of many, probably of most.” Thaer said that he was standing next to General Ernst von Eisenhart-Rothe as they all absorbed the anguishing news. “We involuntarily grasped each other’s hands. I almost broke his by squeezing it so hard.”159 Whatever Ludendorff’s motivations were for performing his sensational volteface, it most assuredly did not stem from a political change of heart.160 There is no indication that he ever personally subscribed to the principles he now formally advocated; quite the opposite. That obvious discrepancy immediately raised suspicions that he harbored ulterior motives. But one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that even the remorseless general was at least partially moved by human feelings. In 1917, his oldest stepson, Franz Pernet, had been shot down and killed in his airplane over France. (Ludendorff’s wife, Margarethe, had brought four children from her previous marriage into their union). That loss was followed in the spring of 1918 by the death of his youngest stepson, Erich, who was also a pilot and in Flanders suffered the same fate as his brother. Ludendorff tried to console Margarethe by telling her at the end of April that “the war has taken two beloved sons from you, I have lost two beloved children. […] I would relinquish my so-called fame if I could get back both boys for it.” Ludendorff’s grief was undoubtedly genuine. He had the remains of Erich, whose body could not be retrieved until several months after he had died, buried in the park surrounding the general headquarters in Spa. “I wanted to keep him here,” he explained to his wife. “I often go to him.”161 And Ludendorff seemed to extract a broader lesson from his personal loss as well. “As long as I still believed in victory,” he confided to someone else after the war, “I was at liberty to lead every division against the enemy. Ever since the moment I lost that faith, I no longer had the right to let any son of any German mother die.”162 But whatever finally impelled Ludendorff to make his astonishing decision to beat both a military and ideological retreat, he evidently calculated that the only way to prevent Germany from sinking further into chaos and dissolution was to give the people what they said they wanted. Cunning strategist that Ludendorff undeniably was, he also knew that doing so would conveniently give him the 159 

Ibid., 235. Joachim Petzold, “Die Entscheidungen vom 29. September 1918, Zeitschrift für Militärgeschichte 4 (1965), 517–34 and Eberhard Kessel, “Ludendorffs Waffenstillstandsforderung am 29. September 1918,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 2 (1968), 65–86. 161  Nebelin, 423–24. Margarethe Ludendorff also described the event in her memoir, where she said that, after receiving the news one evening by telephone, she “collapsed and from this day on was sick and miserable for years;” Als ich Ludendorff’s Frau war, 155. 162  Wilhelm Breucker, Die Tragik Ludendorffs: Eine kritische Studie auf Grund persönlich­ er Erinnerungen an den General und seine Zeit (Stollhamm: Helmut Rauschenbusch, 1953), 62. 160  See

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means, should the nation collapse anyway, of being able to shift the blame for its downfall onto those who promised its deliverance but who only hastened its ruin. Something like that thought seems to have been behind his final words to his staff. “I have asked His Majesty,” Ludendorff told the dismayed officers standing before him on October 1, to include in the government those circles now as well whom we mainly have to thank that we have reached this point. We will thus presently see these gentlemen enter the ministries. They should now conclude the peace that now must be concluded. They should now eat the soup they have served us!163

And with those few simple but patently venomous words, the path to parliamentary democracy in Germany was finally cleared. It is at least partially true, as Arthur Rosenberg incisively observed, that “the parliamentarization of Germany was not won by the Reichstag, but rather decreed by Ludendorff.”164 But it is important to remember that Ludendorff did not supply the ingredients for the soup that was already in the pot, nor did he oversee its preparation. By no longer choking the flame, he merely permitted it to be brought to a boil. Then, almost as a reflection of the afterthought that he had in fact already become, there was the Kaiser. Both Ludendorff and Hindenburg had informed Wilhelm on September 29 that the army could no longer be relied on to fight. Admiral von Müller, who was with the Emperor at General Headquarters when he received the news, recounted how Wilhelm seemed strangely relieved by his generals’ “confession,” saying that he would have preferred it if the decision to end hostilities had been made earlier. “The war is over,” the Kaiser announced, “to be sure, in a completely different way than we had imagined it.”165 When Müller replied that, “however the war ends, the people have acquitted themselves brilliantly,” Wilhelm tartly responded: “Yes, but our politicians have failed miserably.”166 The complete lack of self-awareness, let alone self-criticism, conveyed by the Emperor’s remark is staggering, yet also highly characteristic. Substitute the word “politicians” with “sovereign” – and leaving aside Wilhelm’s imperious belief that he himself was not a lowly “politician” – and it could serve as the epitaph to his reign.

163 Thaer,

Generalstabsdienst an der Front, 235. Rosenberg, 237. 165 Müller, Regierte der Kaiser?, 421. 166 Ibid. 164 

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Yet Another Imperial Chancellor Given the new clarity about what was not possible anymore, the first order of business was to find someone who might lead the transition to whatever was coming next. When the Kaiser, who still wielded sole authority over appointing the Imperial Chancellor, approached Georg von Hertling about implementing Ludendorff’s plan, Hertling demurred, saying “that he was too old, did not feel he was up to the new difficult situation, and that he begged for his discharge.”167 For the third time since the beginning of the war, Germany thus needed to replace its Chancellor. In his critical history of this incident, Rosenberg faulted the Reichstag for failing to capitalize on its new-found parliamentary prerogatives and for neglecting to put forward a candidate of its own. “It is again indicative of the inner weakness and uncertainty of the majority parties,” Rosenberg wrote, “that they had no man to present who stepped to the head of government.”168 But that judgment, too, does not quite do justice to the complex reality of the situation. Although unfairly neglected in historical accounts of this period, Wilhelm Solf, the State Secretary of Colonial Affairs and creator of the influential German Society 1914, enjoyed the respect and support of many of his like-minded contemporaries. While he was not (and, as a cabinet member, could not be) officially affiliated with any party, he was close to the Progressive People’s Party, one of the four caucuses that made up the Reichstag majority, which reflected his liberal personal temperament. As early as the previous year, when it had become necessary to find a successor for Georg Michaelis in late October 1917, Adolf von Harnack had already said that in his view there were only two people who came into question for the post: Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the democratically inclined German ambassador to Denmark, and Wilhelm Solf.169 And in September 1918, when it seemed that another change of Chancellor was unavoidable, Crown Prince Rupprecht, commander of the Bavarian army on the Western Front, confided to his diary that he also knew of only two men whose integrity could win trust both at home and abroad, Prince Max von Baden and Wilhelm Solf.170 167 

Friedrich von Berg, Erinnerungen aus seinem Nachlaß, ed. Heinrich Potthoff (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971), 179. 168  Rosenberg, 229. 169 Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 452. Werner Contze described Brockdorff-Rantzau as being “an aristocrat by tradition and lifestyle, a democrat out of political conviction;” see Werner Conze, “Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich Graf von,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie (1955), 2, 620–21. 170 Vietsch, Wilhelm Solf, 192.

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The proximate reason for General Rupprecht’s confidence in Solf during the momentous autumn of 1918 stemmed from a speech Solf had given that August in his “club” in the Palais Pringsheim. In that speech, Solf had focused largely on questions of foreign policy. Concerning the west, Solf had said that Germany had no intention of keeping Belgium and that nothing stood in the way of its restoration other than the will of Germany’s enemies to continue the war. Regarding the east, Solf declared that the treaty of Brest-Litovsk provided merely a “framework” that could be amended as required.171 To that end, he argued that the peoples oppressed by Russia ought to be able to enjoy German protection as no more than an intermediate stage toward attaining their own full “capacity for complete self-determination,” and Solf explicitly rejected any “annexation.”172 Citing Kant’s essay On Perpetual Peace, Solf also condemned the ongoing “war of extermination” and the “false doctrines of hatred” that threatened to suffocate the “most profound inner commonality of human beings.”173 He firmly believed, however, that people existed in all countries who were ready to reach an agreement, forming groups that one could call “centers of the European conscience.”174 The way forward, Solf said, would be possible only if those “centers” in all nations would bring about an awareness among their compatriots of their common duties as human beings. It was a speech, in other words, that bore more than a passing resemblance to the current thinking and arguments of Ernst ­Troeltsch, with whom, as we know, Solf was in close and regular contact. Solf’s address to the members of the German Society 1914 attracted an unexpectedly strong and unusually positive international response, particularly within neutral countries. The most influential Swiss daily, the Neue Zürcher Nachrich­ ten, called it a “deed of outstanding magnitude.”175 A Dutch paper predicted that Solf’s words would have a beneficial impact on the very “centers of the European conscience” he had invoked. Solf’s speech even got a favorable reception in Britain, where Lord Eustace Cecil enigmatically termed it “a great step forward – partially.”176 In Germany, it was also greeted with widespread if not universal enthusiasm, especially among the working-classes, and Vorwärts ran an article claiming that if the German side had always spoken that way, the German people would be in better shape. With its focus on foreign policy, which was the exclusive province of the Imperial Chancellor and his cabinet, Solf’s speech sent an 171 

Ibid., 190–91. 191. Solf did, however, argue throughout 1918 for an expansion of Germany’s colonial possessions in Africa; cf. Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, 785–90. 173 Vietsch, Wilhelm Solf, 191. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid. 176 Ibid. 172  Ibid.,

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unmistakable signal that he aspired to that office and indicated what he would do once he was there. Like Crown Prince Rupprecht, the left-liberal press, and not least Theodor Wolff’s Berliner Tageblatt, championed Solf as someone who provided preeminently eligible Chancellor material. But the liberal weekly Nation ominously warned that Solf’s appointment would represent a “very serious defeat for the Pan-Germans,” indicating that he was almost the only man who had never, at any time, identified with German power politics, which in the eyes of the right of course counted as an automatic disqualification.177 The opposition of the Pan-Germans was serious, but an even greater foe was found in the person who still tightly held the reins of power in his hands. At the end of 1917, Ludendorff had already clashed with Wilhelm Solf over a memorandum that Solf had prepared containing a phrase renouncing German possession of Belgium. On Ludendorff’s order, the offending passage was struck from the document.178 When Solf then again expressed in his speech in August 1918 the reassurance that Germany would not retain Belgium even as a “security pledge,” Ludendorff can only have taken that public statement as a conscious act of insubordination. It is thus no surprise, but only further evidence of the general’s less than innocent designs, that on the dramatic day of Oct. 1, when he warned of the “catastrophe” that could befall Germany, Ludendorff proposed not Solf, but the far less well-known Prince Max von Baden as the man who was “now the most suitable candidate to conclude the necessary peace.”179 In Wilhelm Solf, the Reichstag majority did have someone to recommend who both believed in and openly endorsed the same principles it upheld. The problem was that, no doubt for the same reason, Ludendorff did not want him. And so it happened that two days later, on October 3, 1918, Prince Max von Baden became the last Chancellor of the German Empire. Max von Baden occupies a curious place both in German cultural memory and in the historiography of the time. For some, such as Thomas Nipperdey, he stands as “a decided representative of reforms and of a negotiated peace, not a party man, but rather a reform-minded monarchist,”180 whose short but eventful tenure is therefore understood as much as a reflection of his own sensibility as a pragmatic response to the demands of the moment. Others, such as Heinrich August Winkler, more skeptically note that Prince Max “had previously emerged neither as a proponent of the parliamentary system nor as an advocate of the Peace Res-

177 Ibid. 178 

Ibid., 186. Erinnerungen, 185. 180 Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, 2, 864. 179 Berg,

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olution from July 1917,”181 suggesting that he may have been reacting more to events than actively steering them. Most agree that Max von Baden was a reluctant and not very able politician. But his posthumous reputation has unquestionably benefited from the contingent fact that he stemmed from the comparatively liberal southwest region of the country and, more immediately, that he presided over, if was not actually responsible for, the transformation of the German Empire into a formal parliamentary democracy. Complicating the picture further, his biographer Lothar Machtan has recently cast considerable doubt on whether Max von Baden even personally endorsed the policies of his own government.182 And the discovery of a cordial, decade-long correspondence between Prince Max and the nationalist, stridently anti-­ Semitic author Houston Stewart Chamberlin has thrown an even deeper shadow over the prince’s motives and inclinations.183 In July 1917, for example, at the time when Max von Baden was being considered as a possible replacement for Bethmann Hollweg and began to take an active interest in political questions, he had asked an advisor whether “we can continue the war without having to fear inner unrest if we do not immediately comply with the wish of the people for socalled democratization.”184 For, he continued, “I hate this word democratization, which reeks of everything one does not love: the rule of mediocrity, vulgarity, the rule of the masses, of lawyers, etc.”185 Singling out “lawyers” was perhaps a not so thinly veiled reference to Jews, who constituted a disproportionate percentage of those in the legal profession and, even worse, were just as likely to belong to the Social Democratic Party. In another private letter Max wrote six months later, in January 1918, he again not only repudiated parliamentary democracy, he also

181  Heinrich August Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933. Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993), 23–24. 182  Cf. Lothar Machtan, Prinz Max von Baden. Der letzte Kanzler des Kaisers. Eine Bio­ graphie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013). 183  Cf. Karina Urbach/Bernd Buchner, “Prinz Max von Baden und Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Aus dem Briefwechsel 1909–1919,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52/1 (2004), 121–77. On Chamberlain, see Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York: Columbia UP, 1981); see also Udo Bermbach, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Wagners Schwiegersohn – Hitlers Vordenker (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2015). 184  Max von Baden to Hans von Haeften, July 7, 1917; cited in Machtan, Prinz Max von Baden, 300. 185  Ibid. The second clause is omitted in the 1927 edition of Max von Baden’s memoirs, 107. See on this issue Lothar Machtan, “Autobiografie als geschichtspolitische Waffe. Die Memoiren des letzten kaiserlichen Kanzlers Max von Baden,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeit­ geschichte 61/4 (2013), 481–512.

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derided any peace agreement that would endanger the claim of the German Empire to the status of a world power.186 What, then, are we to make of this contradictory portrait? When it was publicly announced on October 3, 1918 to an understandably perplexed German people that Max von Baden, who before then had been virtually unknown to the population at large, was to be their new Imperial Chancellor, the lead article in the Leipziger Volkszeitung captured well the puzzling nature of the whole arrangement. “Just as parliamentarization is being implemented to the exclusion of the parliament,” its author mused, “so too the democratization of Germany is now beginning under the leadership of a prince.”187 That was not an auspicious sign, the article continued, for no matter how “benevolent” such a nobleman may be, he still came from “those circles to which democracy is anathema.”188 Hans Delbrück took a more realpolitisch perspective, telling Valentini the previous October that Max von Baden would make a useful compromise candidate for Chancellor because he would appeal to multiple constituents both in and outside of the country. For as Delbrück explained in a slightly cynical turn of his own, the “experience of world history” taught the paradoxical lesson “that democrats especially like to be led by aristocrats. And the right would be, if not won over out of deference to the prince’s rank, at least somewhat tempered in their opposition.”189 It is not known to what extent Ludendorff may have also been inspired by such considerations to choose Max von Baden over Wilhelm Solf or anyone else, or even whether he wasted much time weighing such subtleties. It is tempting, though, to imagine that Ludendorff, seeing in Max von Baden a weak, conflicted character, someone who was an aristocrat by breeding and instinct, but who was also a self-conscious man of the world receptive to new ideas, may have spied an appealing opportunity. Ludendorff may have thought that by installing such a man as Imperial Chancellor there was a good chance that, after several months of fruitless, half-hearted “modernization” by a political amateur, whose evident incompetence might even cause the siren song of democracy to lose its charm, an exasperated, rudderless Germany would gratefully welcome back a man who they knew would be able to restore discipline and order. That Max von Baden led a double life as a closeted but active homosexual also conveniently made him vulnerable to blackmail or more direct measures should the matter not resolve itself through the natural course of events.190 Provided that Ludendorff harbored 186 Machtan,

Prinz Max von Baden, 410. “Der Prinz an der Spitze,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, October 3, 1918; cited in ibid., 386. 188 Ibid. 189  Hans Delbrück to Rudolf von Valentini, October 12, 1917; cited in ibid., 329. 190  Cf. the section “The Love for Wilhelm Paucke,” in Machtan, Prinz Max von Baden, 187 

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any such nefarious scheme in the first place, it would presumably not have squared with his plan of laying a cuckoo’s egg of old guard resistance in the nest of the fledgling democracy if it turned out that his chosen man truly was a convinced republican, someone who would not merely go through the motions of leading Germany toward a parliamentary regime and securing an acceptable peace, but actually succeed in achieving both.

The Education of a German Prince As much as it may have thus been in Ludendorff’s interests for Max von Baden to fail, it was equally vital to the prince’s liberal backers that the new Chancellor, and more specifically the new government, flourish. They were accordingly determined to do all they could to make sure that he, and thus it, thrived. Some time in mid-1917, probably just before the tumultuous events in July that precipitated the forced resignation of Bethmann Hollweg, Hans Delbrück had invited Prince Max to take part in one of his Wednesday Evenings. It was a more select and intimate affair than usual: in attendance were only Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Meinecke, and Ernst ­Troeltsch, the latter of whom Max von Baden, when he later wrote about the meeting in his memoirs, said was “well-known to me from Heidelberg.”191 In his own recollections, Meinecke said that during that initial conference they discussed “the question of the Prussian franchise reform. He sat there looking at us with a friendly and interested air, and each one of us three made the effort to elaborate as concisely as possible the pros and cons of this question. He said not a word himself but thanked us for the information he had received.”192 (Perhaps one reason Max remained silent during the meeting emerges from a letter sent to him around the same time by a confidant named Anton Fendrich who in reference to one of their previous exchanges questioned the prince about why he thought that “the equal franchise was in itself an inner untruth.”193) On October 3, 1918, amid the general consternation following the sudden announcement that an aristocrat had been appointed Imperial Chancellor to advance democracy in Germany, and during the ensuing deliberations among the 232–39. Machtan writes that by 1912, Max von Baden, although married and with two children, had “in the meantime understood how to live his homosexuality in a self-confident manner;” ibid., 236. 191  Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, 119. 192 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 286. 193  Anton Fendrich to Max von Baden, July 10, 1917, in Anton Fendrich, Die Kluft. Ergeb­ nisse, Briefe, Dokumente aus den Kriegsjahren 1914–19 (Stuttgart: Frankh, 1919), 72.

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intimates of Delbrück’s Mittwochabend about what that development might mean for their own agenda, Meinecke reassured his associates that it was Ernst ­Troeltsch who had “pointed out that Prince Max’s political information had hitherto come out of our circle,”194 thus reminding them that a welcome resumption of their involvement in governmental politics at the highest level was perhaps in the offing. And, indeed, throughout the eventful month that Max von Baden’s administration lasted, Meinecke affirmed that “proposals also reached him from our circle – we constituted in a way a private state council to the prince.”195 Notably, of all the members of Delbrück’s circle who sought to counsel the new Chancellor, Ernst ­Troeltsch seems to have played the most prominent and decisive role, and he did so well before Max von Baden assumed his official duties as leader of the nation. Beginning around the time when their first formal Wednesday Evening discussion had occurred, in mid-1917, ­Troeltsch would send several long, nuanced letters to Prince Max discussing matters pertaining mainly to domestic politics. But they had known one another since 1909 at the latest, when ­Troeltsch had been elected as the representative of the University of Heidelberg to the First Chamber of the Parliament, or the Assembly of Estates, in Karlsruhe, the royal capital of the Grand Duchy of Baden.196 ­Troeltsch had stayed in contact with the prince after he had moved to the University of Berlin and forwarded copies to the prince of some of his publications concerning the “culture war” – his contributions, as ­Troeltsch wryly put it, to the “peaceful war effort.”197 In that letter, from the summer of 1915, ­Troeltsch explained that he saw his first obligation regarding the “culture war” in trying to “understand it correctly” so that such an understanding would be a means for our correct behavior, which cannot be led merely by outrage and indignation, as well-founded as they are. I continue to consider it my duty to apprise the broadest circles of the difficult and serious task of not allowing ourselves to be impressed by these forces and that we must also carefully find and preserve a tone of dignity and level-headedness.198

It was in that same calm, judicious vein that two years later, in June 1917, ­Troeltsch approached the even more difficult and serious task of advising the man who was already being talked about as a viable candidate for the highest civilian office in the country. The very first letter ­Troeltsch sent to him in that semi-official capacity already concerned an extremely delicate matter. In response to a query put to him direct194 Meinecke,

Autobiographische Schriften, 306. Ibid., 242. 196  Cf. the editor’s introduction to KGA 21, 17. 197  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, July 29, 1915; KGA 21, 127. 198 Ibid. 195 

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ly by Max von Baden concerning a certain Hans-Georg von Beerfelde, ­Troeltsch wrote that “the question is very difficult for me to answer.”199 Beerfelde, then forty years old, was the scion of an old and illustrious Junker family from the Mark Brandenburg with extensive ties to the Prussian military and the Hohenzollern dynasty. In line with family tradition, Beerfelde had received his officer’s commission in 1897 and as a lieutenant joined the Alexander-Garde-Grenadier-Regiment No.  1 in Berlin, a unit of the 1st Guards Division, which belonged among the elite of the Prussian army.200 After August 1914, Beerfelde served as a company commander on the Western Front and had taken part in the Battle of the Marne. For the next two years, nothing seemed to indicate that he was anything other than the kind of loyal servant to the Emperor that one would expect from someone with his pedigree, and he even appeared sympathetic to the Pan-­ German cause.201 However, during the summer of 1917, Hans-Georg von Beerfelde seemed suddenly and completely to have changed, experiencing what he himself referred to as his “political Damascus.”202 Having come into possession of a private memorandum by the former Ambassador to Britain, Prince Lichnowsky, in which Lichnowsky argued that the Central Powers bore the principal responsibility for the outbreak of the war, Beerfelde became convinced that he had been living a lie. As a result, he spent the next several months trying to recruit liberal and social democratic allies to endorse a peace initiative based on a Russian proposal from April 1917.203 After being arrested several times and eventually arraigned on charges of treason, Beerfelde was finally admitted to the “Institution for the Supervision of the Insane” in Moabit Prison in Berlin, where a psychiatrist declared him mentally incompetent. According to an affidavit signed by one Dr. Friedrich Leppmann in May 1918, Hans-Georg von Beerfelde was “not a mentally normal person” but rather a “mentally-ill troublemaker.”204 And for some reason, Prince Max von Baden wanted Ernst ­Troeltsch to tell him what he knew about this disconcerting, even scandalous figure. 199 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, June 18, 1917; ibid., 303. Lothar Wieland, “Hans-Georg von Beerfelde und die ‘Revolution der Wahrheit’,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 11 (2018), 900. See also Lothar Wieland, In drei deutschen Staaten verfolgt: Hans-Georg von Beerfelde (1877–1960) und die Revolution der Wahrheit (Bremen: Donat, 2019). 201  Wieland, “Hans-Georg von Beerfelde,” 901. 202 Ibid. 203 The memorandum in question was published as the war ended: Die Denkschrift des Fürsten Lichnowsky. Der vollständige Wortlaut. “Meine Londoner Mission 1912–14” von Fürst Lichnowsky, ehemaliger deutscher Botschafter in London. Zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1918). 204  Wieland, “Hans-Georg von Beerfelde,” 902. 200  See

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Although ­Troeltsch had admitted that he found the subject awkward – and obviously knew it was dangerous – the observations about Beerfelde he communicated to Max von Baden are noticeably temperate, if circumspect, and largely favorably disposed toward the former officer’s cause, if not toward the man himself. “Herr von Beerfelde,” ­Troeltsch wrote to the prince on June 18, 1917, “has gained a very serious view of the situation on the basis of discussions with various personalities and is of the opinion that decisive steps by the Prussian and Imperial government to validate the Easter Message are absolutely necessary.”205 Although ­Troeltsch said he did not agree with all the measures being proposed by Beerfelde and by his “informants” to achieve that goal, ­Troeltsch explicitly acknowledged that “I share, however, this perception of the state of affairs.”206 Moreover: “If the view of Herr v. Beerfelde is correct, then his further conclusion is also correct that everything must be done in order to convince those in high places finally to bring about energetic action instead of mere promises.”207 Rather alarmingly, ­Troeltsch also indicated that Beerfelde, “with his very great energy, has also pulled me into the matter.”208 Five days later, in another letter to Prince Max on June 23, ­Troeltsch reported on several disquieting developments that had taken place in the meantime concerning the renegade Prussian Junker. Most explosively, Beerfelde had told ­Troeltsch that while he was still serving in the field he had had a long conversation with his stable hand and had come away with a deeper and devastating insight into “the mood of his troops.”209 Beerfelde revealed to ­Troeltsch, who then relayed the report back to Max von Baden, that his men felt they were “being sacrificed” for a cause that did not go beyond the immediate objective of merely winning the war, whatever the cost of doing so. ­Troeltsch commented that the effect of this revelation on Beerfelde had been transformative: With that, there awakened in him a skepticism regarding the semi-official and official expectations of victory and the belief in the obligation and possibility of a rapprochement. […] Under these circumstances, however, he was seized by the harrowing idea that the soldiers were fighting for illusions and impossibilities that no one had the courage to expose, and that what mattered now was to identify at whatever cost the means capable of bringing peace based on a factual and realistic assessment of the situation and to present them to the responsible authorities.210

205 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, June 18, 1917; KGA 21, 303.

206 Ibid. 207 

Ibid., 305. Ibid., 306. 209  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, June 23, 1917; KGA 21, 308. 210 Ibid. 208 

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Somehow, Beerfelde had also persuaded ­Troeltsch to lead several conferences to that end, inviting others who were so inclined to discuss the matter together and to try to come up with some solutions. The largest, and last, such meeting even involved a number of journalists, among whom, ­Troeltsch said, were included some “very important ones.”211 The entire affair was, ­Troeltsch implied, a hopelessly naive and pointless undertaking, with no real chance of a meaningful outcome, and the conversation proceeded “as it had to.” The participants debated the probable effects of the continuing submarine campaign, speculated that the war would probably go on much longer, and they talked about the possibility of a beneficial effect of democratization on the attainability of peace, about comments on the constraints placed on the efforts of the Chancellor directed toward these latter goals and means by Ludendorff and by some of the high generals who are closely connected with the Pan-Germans, Conservatives, and heavy industry.212

The discussion ended, inevitably, inconclusively. But it also took a dramatic turn when Beerfelde, infuriated that those present could not agree on a plan of action, stormed out of the meeting “in protest” saying that “civilians apparently did not know how to die for anything and could only speak sagely about eternal difficulties.”213 It would be easy to discount this whole episode as trivial and somewhat bizarre, but it is important in several respects. First, the very fact that ­Troeltsch communicated the complex sequence of events in such detail to Max von Baden and framed it the way he did, especially given who the recipient of his letter was – and more crucially would quite likely soon become – is in itself significant and suggests that he considered the matter weighty enough to warrant such attention. (Without the prince’s letters, which do not survive, we do not know how Max responded to ­Troeltsch’s report or how he asked the original question.) Too, and no less relevant, although ­Troeltsch wanted to distance himself diplomatically but decidedly from Beerfelde personally – whom he indulgently judged, “as a military man, completely uneducated politically”214 – ­Troeltsch made a point of affirming his basic agreement with Beerfelde’s views, not to speak of the fact that Beerfelde was also obviously convinced enough of ­Troeltsch’s agreement with those views that he had asked him to moderate the conference to address his concerns. But the Beerfelde affair also reveals something important about ­Troeltsch’s own practical sense of Realpolitik. ­Troeltsch clearly understood that the values 211 

Ibid., 309. Ibid., 309–10. 213  Ibid., 310. 214  Ibid., 308. 212 

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and aims he avowedly shared with Beerfelde, as well as any chance of realizing them, would be undermined by the former officer’s rash or imprudent – or in a word impolitic – behavior and, conversely, that ­Troeltsch’s own handling of the matter would signal to the Max von Baden that the prince could count on him in the future to act with similar tact and discretion in sensitive circumstances. Finally, and perhaps most subtly, ­Troeltsch’s retelling of the experience hints at his own pedagogical method, as it were, of indirectly arguing for the rightness and necessity of a certain point of view, making it seem in the way he communicated the ideas he advanced that their validity was not at issue, only how best to implement them. That this all reflected a conscious, intentional approach on ­Troeltsch’s part emerges more visibly in the next letter he sent to Prince Max, on June 30, 1917. Significantly, that was one day before the so-called Berlin Declaration that was issued and signed by nine eminent men, including ­Troeltsch himself, demanding an immediate reform of the Prussian franchise, which precipitated the second July crisis that led to Bethmann’s departure. “The situation,” ­Troeltsch gravely began, referring to the turbulent state of affairs in the capital, “is in many respects very difficult and urgently demands decisions.”215 While there were many uncertainties obscuring the full picture, ­Troeltsch said he could state with confidence that “what is certain is the English will to destroy Germany and the American will for a radical democratization of it, including a democratic solution to the ‘question’ of Alsace-Lorraine.”216 Those hard, evident facts dictated to ­Troeltsch’s mind a number of what he would have called realpolitisch measures: Since we cannot count on a complete military victory, we are forced to take our opponents into account. They – Wilson, Lloyd George, and Kerenski – are fanatical democrats who are whipping up the whole world with the democratic slogan and in the eyes of many upright and ignorant people have turned the war into a moral campaign. I have no doubt that the first two are working toward nothing less than the demise of the dynasty. Under these circumstances, a thorough democratization that would proudly offer itself as such and appear as a personal act of the Kaiser preempting all of that is the most important of all the possible gambits. Here I personally have no inclinations or theories, I have here only a sober, objective calculation. The Easter Message came, like everything, too late and it is a mere promissory note whose credit, given the opposition by the Conservatives and the Pan-Germans, is already exhausted both at home and abroad. Now rapid and voluntary action is necessary in the interest of the endangered state and dynasty.217

The message ­Troeltsch was sending to Max was complex. While saying he was not personally invested in the matter, ­Troeltsch was also presenting the “thor215 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, June 30, 1917; KGA 21, 323. Ibid., 323–24. 217  Ibid., 325. 216 

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ough democratization” of Germany as unavoidably necessary in both offensive and defensive terms. But it would be too superficial to infer from this passage and especially from his reference to “fanatical democrats” who were “whipping up” others with “the democratic slogan,” that ­Troeltsch was somehow, and paradoxically, conveying his actual disinclination toward the very thing he was simultaneously advocating. We remember that ­Troeltsch was writing this letter at the cusp of a crisis in Germany over the very question of democracy itself, which would soon become a word that even those people pressing for it would assiduously begin to avoid. Looked at from that angle, ­Troeltsch could be seen as trying to make his argument stronger by portraying the matter not as his own subjective or personal opinion but as a matter of absolute, incontrovertible necessity, as an issue about which there could be no reasonable doubt or debate, and on which the very existence of the nation and its institutions depended. Such a way of arguing might have been especially effective, in fact, if one were addressing someone who was himself skeptical of the very idea of democracy, someone who had personal reasons to want reassurance that the imperial dynasty would not be destroyed but preserved by the adoption of democracy, and someone who found aspects of democracy itself off-putting or, worse, thought that it even contained an “inner untruth” – someone, that is, like Prince Max von Baden. We do not know for certain if ­Troeltsch was aware of the prince’s private reservations about democracy. But in view of ­Troeltsch’s own acuity and his extensive personal connections to people who would have had such knowledge, it seems unlikely that ­Troeltsch was entirely in the dark about Max von Baden’s conflicting proclivities or harbored any illusions about the prince’s commitments. (In a later letter to him, ­Troeltsch went out of his way to stress that the “sources of information” for his political reports to the prince consisted “essentially in delegates and high officials within the imperial ministries.”218) And ­Troeltsch’s letter itself offers further evidence that he felt his royal correspondent needed additional persuasion. “I consider the matter to be a simple, absolute necessity of state,” ­Troeltsch reiterated concerning thoroughgoing democratic reforms in Germany, adding that he viewed them as “the sole means for taking some of the wind out of the enemies’ sails.”219 ­Troeltsch went on to enumerate the many specific changes such “absolutely necessary” democratization would have to entail, above all cooperation between the “parliament, i.e. Reichstag and Imperial government.” That meant, as he spelled out, that the Prussian ministers would be forced to leave the cabinet and in their place “well-known party leaders have to

218  219 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, November 8, 1917; KGA 21, 384. Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, June 30, 1917; KGA 21, 325.

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be appointed to the Imperial administration.”220 Such adjustments, ­Troeltsch advised, would “draw the parties together, establish the relationship between the people and the government, and strengthen the people’s trust that had greatly diminished.”221 These recommendations made at the end of June 1917 essentially rehearsed a condensed version of the argument ­Troeltsch would deliver six months later before the the assembly of People’s League in January 1918, where he laid forth the need for the genuine participation of the people in all the affairs of state. And, Troeltsch explained to the prince, for external observers as well, preemptively undertaking certain actions would help dispel suspicions about German “opportunism.” Such measures included instituting Alsace-Lorraine as an independent federal state; allowing neighboring peoples to exist within “independent states;” “oversight of munitions production;” and the “reestablishment of international law, strengthening the role of the Court of Arbitration in The Hague.”222 With perhaps slightly exaggerated modesty, ­Troeltsch admitted to Prince Max that the catalogue of changes he had drawn up for a future German government represented “only an amateurish draft. But something of the sort is necessary and must occur in connection with democratization, the latter of which would appear to those abroad as the guarantee of the sincerity of such intentions.”223 Throughout, then, ­Troeltsch was above all concerned to present the measures he outlined as being intrinsically and unavoidably necessary while also taking care to underscore that they would have the added salutary effect of enhancing the German position vis-à-vis the Allies. Realpolitik? Certainly. But as ­Troeltsch would also elaborate in his speech before the Volksbund in early January 1918, and repeat in his multiple defenses of it thereafter, there was more to his conception of Realpolitik than the cynical conclusion that even ethically defensible ends justified any and all available means. Although it is unspoken here, beneath or between his words designed to convince the one man who might actually one day have the power to act on them that democracy was both imperative and unavoidable, there was also the conviction that convictions mattered, that politics, like life, required an ethical content and not just an ethical rationale. The very fact that ­Troeltsch yet again emphasized at the end of his letter to Prince Max in June 1917 that he considered “domestic democratization and the commitment to a nationally and internationally expounded idea of peace” to be “a logically rigorous consequence of the situation” – and then wrote once more for good measure that everything he was sug220 

Ibid., 326.

222 

Ibid., 327

221 Ibid. 223 Ibid.

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gesting “is only a deduction from the military and diplomatic situation”224 – would all seem to suggest that the person ­Troeltsch was most worried about with respect to his actual commitment to the ethical ideals of democracy was the ­potential future leader of the country himself. Given such doubts, and on the evidence of ­Troeltsch’s repeated protestations that he was merely representing the dictates of reason, the prince’s private tutor must have resigned himself to the thought that where conviction was lacking, logic alone would have to suffice. The three remaining extant letters to Max von Baden – from early August, early November, and late December 1917 – all display a similar determination to maintain an unblinking objectivity and neutrality while still arguing for the necessity of implementing certain practical political measures. The August letter concerns Bethmann’s inept successor, Georg Michaelis, who, ­Troeltsch wrote, “as Your Highness will know, was installed by Ludendorff” and was chosen, “as one can assume with certainty,” because Michaelis had “made definite promises to the Army Command with respect to halting ‘democratization and parliamentarization’.”225 In November, there was already a “new very serious crisis” that ­Troeltsch felt he needed to explain to the prince. Michaelis’s bungling efforts to govern had led both to the “concentration of the agitators in the ‘Fatherland Party’” and to Michaelis’s own undoing.226 But the final letter is the most important one of the three, focused as it is on the complicated machinations being performed by various players in and out of the government to advance or forestall “parliamentarization.”227 As always, ­Troeltsch’s tone is calm and dispassionate, his analysis of the needed structural changes deeply informed and penetrating. But he stressed yet again that “I must also say for my part that this organization of the domestic affairs of the Empire seems to me at the moment for the same reason absolutely essential.”228 It would all not be easy, ­Troeltsch acknowledged, and “there might be terrible battles, perhaps strikes and riots, but I consider it inevitable that this logical result of the general state of the people and the world will come to pass.”229 And as a concrete example of how he thought foreign policy should be conducted, ­Troeltsch told Max that a few weeks previously he had visited Belgium for the first time since the war had begun. His verdict was unsparing. “The idea of annexing this people – which is seething with quiet hostility toward us and accustomed to a 224 

Ibid., 328. Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, August 4, 1917; KGA 21, 345–46 226  Ernst Troeltsch to Max von Baden, November 8, 1917; KGA 21, 384. 227  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Max von Baden, December 27, 1917; KGA 21, 401. 228  Ibid., 402. 229 Ibid. 225 

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political role on the world stage, and, despite all of their differences, in both ­respects unified against us – is impossible and ghastly.”230 There was another event, however, that had served as the immediate occasion for what would be ­Troeltsch’s final letter to the prince. On December 14, 1917, Max von Baden had delivered an official proclamation before the First Chamber of the Parliament of Baden in which he laid out something like his political credo. It was the first time in the prince’s life that he had publicly spoken (or written) about such matters, and since he was widely known to be a contender for the Chancellorship, his address predictably attracted extensive scrutiny.231 The speech can only have come as a bitter disappointment to ­Troeltsch. Despite all of his careful arguments about the iron-clad necessity of political liberality and democratic reform, Max von Baden demonstrated a belligerent impatience with those very issues bordering on reactionary intransigence. In his speech, the prince spoke harshly about the “campaign of our moral discrediting” by the Allies, baldly accusing Woodrow Wilson of unvarnished hypocrisy. And in general Max scoffed that “the democratic slogan in the mouths of the Western powers had become a gigantic lie.”232 He did not even deign to mention the Prussian franchise, and he implicitly questioned the necessity of constitutional reforms of any sort. “Institutions alone,” the prince stated, “cannot guarantee the freedom of a people. There is only one actual guarantee, and that is the character of the people itself.”233 If all that were not bad enough, Max von Baden sent a copy of the text a few days later to his confidant, Johannes Müller, with a note summarizing his broader intentions. “For once I had to lay into the ‘democratic-humanitarian-pacifistic suggestion,’ as ­Troeltsch calls it, and I think that we do that much too little. […] but I hope that one can feel my rejection of parliamentarianism come through.”234 It was a private message meant for Müller’s eyes only but, as Prince Max had intended, anyone with ears could hear the same message clearly enough in the speech itself. ­Troeltsch bravely tried to make the best of it. Thanking the prince for the copy of the address he had been sent and which he termed “a political event of high importance,”235 ­Troeltsch diplomatically highlighted the points of consensus between them. He said he welcomed their shared embrace of freiheitlich politics (back to that safe euphemism), their commitment to a strong military defense, and the robust repudiation of the “moral war.” But there could be no glossing over the 230 

Ibid., 403–04. Cf. Machtan, Prinz Max von Baden, 334–40. 232  Cited from footnote 5, KGA 21, 405–06. 233  Ibid., 406. 234 Ibid. 235  Ibid., 401. 231 

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vast areas of disagreement between them, especially – and now raising the issue explicitly for the first time with Max von Baden – the difference regarding the fundamental political principles, or values, on which their visions of the state rested. “A firm stance toward the questions of principle, and a principle in general, is absolutely necessary,” ­Troeltsch insisted, addressing that issue head-on: The crude blather about power, in its mindlessness and brutality, leads our own hopes astray and pours oil on the flames of the moral war. It is not merely in human terms refreshing to hear from such a significant voice that kind of commitment to the moral justice and meaning of our fight, but also politically of the greatest importance that for once a moral platform should be established.236

Perhaps less than helpfully but revealingly, ­Troeltsch at this point even mentioned by name Wilhelm Solf, “who has also spoken about the colonies from this perspective,”237 as a model of what he meant. ­Troeltsch further pointed to the creation of the Volksbund as a similarly inspired effort, saying that, with it, “in the same spirit we tried to oppose something to the Fatherland Party.” But the ultimate concern that underlay all of these individual endeavors, the driving reason that ­Troeltsch and his confederates were engaged in their struggle against the forces of violence, war, and oppression, were the German people themselves. And the people, ­Troeltsch bluntly told the man who had just publicly announced that the answer to their plight was not to be found in institutions and laws designed to protect them but in their individual efforts to improve their character, badly needed their help: The desperation is great among broad circles of the population who believe that economically the future for them is lost, and it is less the desire for power than this terrifying prospect that the Fatherland Party is exploiting. But no conquests and annexations will help here, but rather only favorable economic agreements, which cannot be obtained without the mutual willingness to agree. To acquire this disposition and insight, and not annexations, must in my opinion be the goal of further military successes. Possible military border improvements would certainly be very desirable. But without working toward a system of economic agreements and colonies the most important goals seem to me to be unattainable. Annexations could only provide the preparation for a more favorable position in a second war, which would seek to achieve anew what is not achievable in this one. That is surely how many of the Svengalis of the Fatherland Party think. But to me that seems in every sense a false calculation and a dangerous deception.238

Here in this undisguised, principled statement, ­Troeltsch was not engaging in any more real-political indirection, no longer proffering studied impartiality or sober claims that he was merely bowing before impersonal exigencies compelled by irrefutable logic. Rather, it conveyed a sincere, earnest appeal to basic compas236 

Ibid., 405–06.

238 

Ibid., 408.

237 Ibid.

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sion and human decency, culminating in an overt plea for relieving the German people of their desperation, and for giving them the opportunity to lead productive lives in peace. And with that final, personal entreaty, Professor ­Troeltsch’s attempts to educate his most consequential pupil came to an end. When Max von Baden did then become Imperial Chancellor almost a year later, on October 3, 1918, there could have initially been little hope, for ­Troeltsch at least, that the solution to all of the problems cascading down upon Germany had finally been found. Nevertheless, it must have been encouraging, to put it mildly, that the new Chancellor’s first official act was to give an address to the Upper House of the Reichstag on October 5 in which he formally accepted President Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the basis for further negotiations and affirmed that the Peace Resolution passed by the Reichstag more than a year earlier met with the “unconditional approval” of his administration.239 And in the same speech in which Max von Baden made those announcements, he also declared that representatives from the majority parties would be included in his cabinet, that the Prussian electoral law would be reformed along democratic lines, and that all other states were expected to democratize their systems accordingly.240 It was not “full parliamentarization” – yet – but it was close enough to cause those who had expected something different to begin to have second thoughts. It had been clear that once Ludendorff’s hand was lifted, the dam blocking any significant reform was removed as well. What Ludendorff apparently had not foreseen was how quickly the long pent-up reserve of political will would rush forward and soon become unstoppable. The full scope of the changes appeared to catch even their ostensible author off guard, and Max von Baden later admitted that the content of his speech before the Reichstag that day had actually been foreign to his own convictions.241 It would be only the first of many such “accidental” tectonic shifts that would upend the German political landscape over the coming weeks.

Levée en masse There was another, even more urgent matter that had arisen in the interim that made the epoch-making deliberations in the Reichstag, which in any other con239 

Huber 5, 560. Prinz Max von Baden, 400–01. 241  Cf. Huber 5, 559. 240 Machtan,

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text would have been the sole focus of riveted attention, recede into the background as if they were no more than the proceedings of a provincial municipal council. As early as September 8, the German Supreme Army Command had received information that indicated the Allies were planning “to bring the war into German territory” as soon as military conditions allowed.242 There was no need to explain to anyone who had witnessed the devastation in Belgium and northern France – or, for that matter, on the Eastern Front – what it would mean if millions of Allied troops, backed by heavy artillery, airplanes, and tanks, were to stream across the border into Germany, which apart from the odd aerial bombing had been spared any significant damage. On September 29, when Ludendorff announced to his staff that Germany had to seek an armistice in order to prevent “catastrophe,” Admiral Paul von Hintze, Secretary for Foreign Affairs, expressed his own idea of what kind of catastrophe would befall them all if the army completely collapsed: it would bring, Hintze anticipated, a “breakthrough with decisive defeat.”243 With the regular army demoralized and in disarray, there would be no barrier between a defenseless Germany and hordes of vengeful invaders who he feared would lay waste to the land. The only solution Hintze saw was to “bring together all forces of the nation for defense in the final battle.” The sole remaining means of protecting the German homeland, Hintze said, would be to organize a general, popular uprising “that would place every last man on the front.”244 It would be necessary, in other words, to organize a levée en masse – a phrase and concept borrowed, ironically enough, from the mass conscription ordered in 1793 by the French Revolutionary government to shore up its army to fend off loyalists to the ancien régime – as a last resort to prevent the physical destruction of Germany.245 Against the backdrop of such heightened fears, and in the confused succession of domestic political events at the end of September and the beginning of October in the search for a new Chancellor, the formal petition Max von Baden submitted on his first day in office to the Allies seeking a ceasefire suddenly seemed to present a dire threat to what could have been Germany’s last line of defense. The proponents of a levée en masse not insensibly thought that it would be impossible to rouse the people to form a mass popular fighting force if they believed that peace was imminent. And even those who wanted to end the war by any 242 

Nebelin, 456, citing Der Weltkrieg, 14, 595. Ursachen und Folgen, 2, 320. 244 Ibid. 245  Cf. Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham: Duke UP, 1990); and by the same author, “L’armée de l’an II : la levée en masse et la création d’un mythe républi­ cain,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 335 (2004), 111–30. 243 

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reasonable means were terrified by the prospect that Germany might be rendered impotent and unprotected against an armed invasion by the massed Allied armies. Walther Rathenau was one such frightened citizen. Max von Baden wrote in his memoirs that Rathenau “cried like a child on October 2” when he heard of the prince’s plan to accept Wilson’s Fourteen Points unconditionally and to make an unqualified bid for peace.246 In response, Rathenau published an anguished but defiant article on October 7 titled “A Dark Day” in the center-right Vossische Zeitung, Berlin’s oldest newspaper and the voice of the liberal, which is to say right-of-center, bourgeoisie. “We all want peace,” Rathenau wrote, but “negotiations should not have begun by yielding, but by first securing the front.”247 Otherwise, Rathenau warned, the victors may very well impose various conditions on Germany that could be politically and economically devastating. The Allies might force Germany to forfeit not just all of its colonies and foreign possessions, but also parts of the Empire itself, or to pay as much as 50 billion marks to restore Belgium as a kind of disguised war reparation. To avert such a horrific scenario, “the national defense, the uprising of the people must be initiated,” Rathenau urgently advised. “Whoever feels called upon may sign up, there are enough older men who are healthy, full of passion and prepared to help their tired brothers at the front with body and soul.”248 Interestingly, Rathenau had tried to enlist Ernst ­Troeltsch as his coauthor for the article, but ­Troeltsch declined. ­Troeltsch later explained that although he “was of the same opinion” as Rathenau at the time about the need to provide for Germany’s defense, the lack of any credible leaders to head such an effort meant that “there was less than ever to hope. He thus published the appeal alone.”249 Rathenau’s agitated call for a levée en masse created a sensation of its own, and it was immediately taken up at the highest levels within the government.250 The day after his article appeared, on October 8, the full cabinet discussed it. A mass appeal of the sort he envisioned would have obviously required coordination across multiple agencies and would present a variety of logistical as well as 246 

Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, 382. The full text of Rathenau’s article, “Ein dunkler Tag,” is reproduced in ibid., 380–82. 248  Ibid., 381. 249  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Dem ermordeten Freunde,” KGA 15, 472. 250  See the excellent article by Michael Geyer, “Insurrectionary Warfare: The German Debate about a Levée en masse in October 1918,” The Journal of Modern History 73/3 (2001), 459–527. As Geyer points out, 460, this whole episode has been largely ignored in the research, writing that “Rathenau scholars are mildly embarrassed by his call to arms, while military historians tend to brush it aside.” Geyer mentions merely that “­Troeltsch refused to cosign it;” 482, note 100. 247 

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political challenges. One cabinet member, Heinrich Schëuch, Chief of Staff of the War Ministry in General Headquarters, was delegated to explore the military implications of the question.251 That same day, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, the Minister of Culture, also convened a small group of people, including Adolf von Harnack and Ernst ­Troeltsch, to discuss how best to proceed.252 They decided to hold a larger, formal meeting two days later in the newly constructed Royal Library on Unter den Linden, a majestic neo-Baroque structure just completed in 1914 – and to be renamed a few weeks later the Prussian State Library. A total of fifteen men attended. They were invited in their capacities as representatives of three groups: the nationalist Independent Committee for a German Peace, the closely aligned Fatherland Party, and the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland. Thus it came to be that in October 1918, in the face of a possible general invasion of Germany, and for what was presumably the first and only time, Dietrich Schäfer, Alfred von Tirpitz, and Ernst ­Troeltsch, the three most important protagonists within their respective political organizations, came to sit at the same table to try to determine if their vastly different visions for their country could somehow be harnessed together for the preservation of them all. What followed on October 10 was one of the most extraordinary confrontations to take place during that already highly agitated time, involving a tense discussion of some of the most serious challenges facing the country by some of the most prominent men of the day. There even exists a stenographic transcript of the increasingly heated conversation, granting unusually intimate access to this remarkable but almost entirely forgotten encounter. And apart from every­ thing else, the mere fact that the government-sponsored discussion occurred at all and involved these particular participants demonstrates an official recognition of the importance of the Volksbund, and hence of ­Troeltsch himself, as the leaders of a significant portion of the German population whose cooperation would be essential in any contemplated organized popular uprising. That the discussion degenerated almost immediately in bitterness and acrimony on all sides was probably foreseeable and just as surely not a promising sign for the future. After a brief word of welcome from Harnack, who as Director General of the Royal Library officially presided over the meeting, the attendees turned to the central question of how to motivate the entire people to rise up and engage in a “last decisive battle.”253 Heinrich von Gleichen-Russwurm, a conservative pub251 

Cf. Rathenau, Tagebuch, 226. Schmidt-Ott. Erlebtes und Erstrebtes, 162, who mentions the meeting in passing without giving any particulars. 253  The minutes are reproduced in Günter Brakelmann, Der deutsche Protestantismus im Epochenjahr 1917 (Witten: Luther, 1974), 297–308, here 298. 252  Cf.

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licist, read aloud a prepared statement that sounded conciliatory and proposed that “the task of national defense makes a fundamental agreement among the large patriotic organizations appear to be desirable and necessary.”254 Ernst Francke, the Chairman of the Volksbund, then opened the discussion by acknowledging that it was “possible that we still face a battle between life and death” and that, should such a necessity present itself, all differences of opinion would become immaterial. But Francke also said that, invasion or not, it was “simply everyone’s duty to stand behind the people’s government, which, supported by the majority of the Reichstag, is obligated to lead the people’s cause.”255 Whether it was with a deliberate intention to goad his interlocutors or simply a coincidence, the German phrase Francke used to describe what a popularly supported government represented was die Sache des Volkes, which in Latin would be the res publica, or, in a word, the “republic.” If Francke had indeed wanted his phrase to be provocative, the ensuing discussion indicated that he was successful. Doubling down, Francke went on to insist that, if the nation were to face such extreme existential peril as an armed invasion, then there could be no wavering or partisan grandstanding. “Rather, the government must demand unconditional support. Unfortunately, the fact exists that a fierce opposition is already here. I have read the most strident criticisms of the government; that has to hamper the government’s actions.” It was a clever, although perhaps also consciously inflammatory tactic: the best way to defend the country, Francke was saying, would be to defend and not try to tear down the government – which, not incidentally and as everyone around the table knew, was already the most democratic one Germany had ever seen. Rising to the bait, Tirpitz was the first on the other side to respond and he did so in classic fashion. “I would have wished for a consolidation against the external enemies from the beginning,” he began, more than implying that such national unity had never existed, thereby making a mockery of the supposedly hallowed “spirit of 1914” and thus impugning the millions who had supposedly fought and died in its name. “The consolidation of all forces would have provided the most favorable conditions for our defense,” he continued, still using the same insulting subjunctive mood. “If our people now resolutely reject any condition that would injure its honor, then that can be only advantageous to the result.”256 Despite being packed in nebulous obfuscation, that was an insidious argument: Tirpitz was asserting that not just life but also “honor” was now at stake, and that to preserve the former might well require sacrificing the latter. That ob254 

Ibid., 299.

256 

Ibid., 300.

255 Ibid.

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viously left open the not trivial question about whose life was supposed to be given up for whose honor. It got worse. “The German Fatherland Party,” Tirpitz intoned, “is fundamentally uninterested in domestic politics. It always advocated only a strong foreign policy. It is impossible for us to accept the demand by Professor Francke to stand behind the government and every one of its actions.” That, too, was an example of towering insolence: besides the first statement being a lie, the second one basically amounted to a rejection of the legitimacy of the government. At this point, Dietrich Schäfer chimed in, backing Tirpitz by also belittling the government, dismissively saying that “supporting every given government in all of its measures would be a hindrance in the activity of our association,” and in this particular instance doing so might very well result, Schäfer said, in “the annihilation of the German Empire.”257 Carl Legien, Social Democratic member of the Reichstag and deputy to the Advisory Council to the Volksbund, now joined the discussion, sarcastically asking what, precisely, would be annihilated, hinting that the destruction of what Schäfer identified as “the German Empire” might not be such a bad thing. “The working classes doubt, however,” Legien said, “whether we are fighting for a Germany in which everyone receives his rights, and the working classes make up the people in arms – das Volk in Waffen – in the field.” Everyone knew that morale was terrible, Legien added. But even though everyone had also known for a long time how to fix it, “the causes have not been remedied ever since. The dissatisfaction has thus become greater.”258 So as not be misunderstood, Legien specified that “the reform of the Prussian franchise, which has been delayed for over a year, must therefore be immediately implemented.”259 By now, the temperature in the room had risen markedly as the discussion had devolved from what everyone had hoped would be a serious consideration of the options for organizing the national defense at a time of supreme emergency into futile bickering over old and well-worn policy issues. Dietrich Schäfer did not help matters when he reacted to Legien by parroting Tirpitz’s prevarications. “Excellency Tirpitz declared that the German Fatherland Party has never taken a position against the electoral law reform,” Schäfer said. “The Independent Committee also never expressed itself against the electoral law reform. Now, as well, we have no reason to do that.”260 Following these brazen un- or half-truths, Schäfer then went on the offensive himself, saying: “We must completely reject the suggestion that we have contributed to the depression of the mood in the 257 Ibid. 258 Ibid. 259 

Ibid., 301.

260 Ibid.

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army by our stance. In this respect a unified opinion between us and the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland cannot be achieved.” Ernst Francke could not let this additional equivocation stand. “If the German Fatherland Party and the Independent Committee continued to insist on their annexationist attitude,” Francke shot back, “and do not exercise influence on the newspapers with which they are affiliated to stop antagonizing the government, then the chasm between the various parts of the people will become ever greater.”261 Tirpitz then jumped in again and escalated the debate even further, saying: “If I understand correctly, Herr Francke and Herr Legien reject cooperation with us. They demand the unconditional surrender of our views and sentiments.” Acting as if he hoped his words would gain credibility through repetition, Tirpitz then added once more with breathtaking audacity: “We have never spoken of annexation.” Moreover, Tirpitz added, “the electoral law question has now been solved,” which was true only in the sense that there was a renewed commitment to solve it, but false in the sense that the law itself had still not changed. Schäfer, again playing the part of loyal second, threw out that “the Independent Committee has never paid homage to annexationism,”262 whatever that was supposed to mean. Having already let things get out of hand, Harnack remembered his role as moderator and finally intervened by observing that “I don’t believe that Francke and Legien wanted to say that one has to accept, sight unseen, every step of the government.” Indeed, Harnack offered, it could often be useful for the government to be made aware of its “errors.” This attempted mollification seemed only to irritate Legien, who burst out: “I was not making an accusation but only giving the reason for the breakdown as I see it. But the adherents of the Independent Committee and the German Fatherland Party will simply have to relearn just as much with regard to the question of war aims as they will have to do regarding domestic politics.” At this direct attack, Tirpitz returned fire: “It is my view that even if one is convinced that one cannot succeed by weapons, one may not say that one cannot be victorious as long as weapons are deciding, and especially then.” Since ­Troeltsch was the only person in the room who had publicly expressed the opinion that Germany could no longer win militarily, everyone had to know whom Tirpitz had placed in his crosshairs with that comment. Tirpitz then resumed with an even more outlandish equivocation: “We have not been able to obtain peace until now,” he said, “because it has not occurred to our opponents to conclude peace with us.”263 261 

Ibid., 302. Ibid., 303. 263  Ibid., 305. 262 

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It was hard to know where to start with such an assertion. Tirpitz was trying to make it sound as if the Fatherland Party and those behind it had wanted peace all along and only the intransigence of the Allies had stood in the way of obtaining it. The problem was that Tirpitz had left out the not minor detail that his conception of peace entailed the complete subjugation of his enemies, which may have had something to do with the Allies’ reluctance. But then Tirpitz swung back toward his domestic opponents. “The demand to stand behind the government,” he said, “makes sense only for everything that helps to win the war, but cannot be fulfilled for a policy that no longer has anything to do with that.”264 In other words, Tirpitz was asserting in his typically oblique and disingenuous way, but unambiguously enough, that the entire Imperial government was defeatist and thus unworthy of his, or anyone else’s, support. Clearly an impasse had been reached. Eduard Meyer, already speaking of the meeting in the past tense, interjected that “it was at least useful that we had this debate and thereby completely illuminated the positions of the various associations on the question of common action. Further discussion seems superfluous.”265 And it was only at this juncture, when it was all but over, that Ernst ­Troeltsch, who had so far remained silent, spoke up. “I wanted to say the same thing as Meyer,” ­Troeltsch said: The fundamental discussions conducted thus far show that the differences that have existed until now remain unchanged. But in the event of an extreme emergency we can meet again and work cooperatively together. However, the desire for peace is so great that a revolution is almost guaranteed to occur if the door to peace were to be shut again. It will thus be a matter of a hairsbreadth that will separate us from the loss of our future.266

Alfred von Tirpitz, the Chairman of the Fatherland Party and a perpetual favorite among the right for the Imperial Chancellorship, whom his opponents had long identified as the “Father of the Lie,” had once more proven by his duplicity during the meeting in the Royal Library that he fully earned his epithet. Dietrich Schäfer, the Admiral’s faithful stalwart, still seemed to want to demonstrate in his published memoirs eight years later that he had fully absorbed the lessons from his master. “It became glaringly obvious,” Schäfer wrote there of the meeting, how the blind partisan rage that had become typical of our Social Democracy over the experience of two generations made them entirely incapable of objective discussion. No result was forthcoming. Instead, it became completely clear that one half of those gathered no longer even thought about a national defense, but rather was prepared to enter into any peace with blind trust in Wilson’s fairness and truthfulness.267 264 Ibid. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid.

267 Schäfer,

Mein Leben, 227.

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By contrast, ­Troeltsch’s calm and equanimity stand out vividly against the mendacity, bad faith, and small-mindedness put on display by almost everyone else present. But what seems most impressive was his focus on the paramount importance of peace, on the overriding necessity of bringing the war to an end as quickly as possible, especially compared to all the other relatively insignificant matters that, without peace, would have no meaning or future at all. As opposed to Tirpitz and the organization he headed, for whom the abstraction of the “fatherland” was in reality only a cynical cover for the concrete material interests of power, wealth, and influence, ­Troeltsch remained devoted to the people themselves without whom no fatherland of any kind would be possible. So great was the composure he displayed that one could have almost overlooked his dark prediction at the close of the meeting that, if the prospect of peace were taken away from the people, it would almost certainly lead to a revolution. Three days after the encounter in the Royal Library, ­Troeltsch reported to Friedrich Meinecke what had transpired. “Tirpitz tried to lie his way out if it in an unbelievable manner,” ­Troeltsch told him, with Tirpitz claiming that he never thought about annexations, had only wanted to bluff the English, never took money from heavy industry, never fought against franchise reform, had always wanted to join forces with the People’s League, etc. Concerning the levée en masse, Legien had finally said: the workers would fight to the last in order to receive tolerable economic living conditions from the enemy, but no longer for other things.268

As for himself, Meinecke recalled, ­Troeltsch said he now felt that the whole idea of “a heroic uprising now was nonsense.”269 In a letter ­Troeltsch wrote a few days later, on October 19, to another colleague, the theologian Heinrich Weinel, ­Troeltsch said that Rathenau’s article calling for a levée en masse had “been written on the basis of an agreement with me and at the time seemed to me to be good (apart from the title and beginning), but not today.”270 It was a further sign of the rising and accelerating inundation of unmanageable events that the terrifying idea disappeared again almost as soon as it had been raised. Notably, since the attendees of the meeting in the Royal Library never even got around to discussing the actual occasion for bringing them together, no one had been able to consider whether such a coordinated uprising could have even been pulled off at that point or not. There were good reasons to doubt it. As Legien had observed, the working classes no longer wanted to fight except for their own interests and could not be expected to put their lives on the line anymore for 268 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 309. See also the comments on the levée en masse and ­Troeltsch’s role in Weisbach, Geist und Gewalt, 179. 269 Meinecke, Autobiographische Schriften, 309. 270  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Heinrich Weinel, KGA 14, 564n15.

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their erstwhile overlords. Vice Chancellor Friedrich Payer, whose duties encompassed overseeing the “Homeland Intelligence Service” – in essence, the civilian office of domestic propaganda – later commented that “the mood of the German people in 1918 was a very decisive factor” in governmental decision making. And the popular mood at that time basically consisted in “depression, pessimism, and fear before further shared and personal sacrifices.”271 To Payer, who was obviously in a position to judge such matters, it was purely chimerical to imagine that in the autumn of 1918 the German people would have followed the command to rise up en masse, or to do anything else their superiors ordered. In that context, Payer related a revealing anecdote. During the summer of 1918 he had traveled through his native Southern Germany (Payer was Swabian), exhorting people to “persevere” in bearing their hardships and to continue to support the regime. In response, Payer reported, the people he spoke to “only laughed.”272 Similarly, ­Troeltsch recounted having been in the Allgäu in southern Swabia himself that August. ­Troeltsch said he attended an assembly of “farmers and cheese producers, where I was startled by the downright fanatical hatred that burst forth there generally against the officer corps as the incarnation of all injustice and privilege.”273 What is more, ­Troeltsch added, when “the phrase about a popular uprising and the final battle was launched, experts on the army and the people told me that it would only trigger a revolution in the army itself.”274 And during the conference in the Royal Library itself, Alfred Baumeister, a union representative serving on the working Committee of the Volksbund, had indicated that just being seen to be cooperating with the Fatherland Party could have severely compromised their own cause. If it merely become known that we have confidentially negotiated with leading men of the German Fatherland Party, that might already risk losing control of the masses and lead to revolution. The union leaders still have the confidence of the workers and, despite all the difficulties, have always been able to overcome the strikes. The workers simply view the German Fatherland Party as their worst domestic enemy.275

Given such profound popular anger and mistrust, an orchestrated popular insurgency would almost certainly never have gotten off the ground even if it had been attempted. Ludendorff, who initially seemed agreeable to the plan, also quickly 271 

Friedrich Payer, Von Bethmann Hollweg bis Ebert. Erinnerungen und Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 1923), 255, 257. Erhard Deutelmoser, Chief of the War Press Office, reported directly to Payer. 272  Ibid., 255. 273  Ernst ­ Troeltsch, “Das Ende des Militarismus,” Deutscher Wille des Kunstwarts, Der Kunstwart 32/6 (1918), 177. 274 Ibid. 275 Brakelmann, Der deutsche Protestantismus, 306.

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grew skeptical of it. During a meeting on October 17, Max von Baden spoke with Ludendorff about the possibility of an Allied invasion and organizing a levée en masse to oppose it. When the general downplayed that risk, the Chancellor nervously raised the prospect of their enemies “breaking into Germany and ravaging the country.” Ludendorff coolly responded: “We’re not that far yet.”276 But neither one of these two men, arguably the two most powerful figures in Germany, seemed to realize fully that the traditional authorities were no longer in any position to issue a mass directive of any sort in the expectation that it would be dutifully obeyed. In addition to the sense of suspicion and disillusionment already observed by Payer, ­Troeltsch, Baumeister, and others, there were many objective reasons why a levée en masse ordained from above would never have gotten off the ground. Compounding the hunger and fatigue overwhelming the regular army and the people at home, the Spanish flu had also begun to spread in September, which would end up killing as many as 100 million worldwide. Those fortunate enough to survive it were often incapacitated for days and weeks. Apart from everything else, a levée en masse would have probably failed to materialize for the simple reason that the people were too weak and sick to stand, much less to fight. But the most important obstacle of all to any domestic uprising was a subjective one. The inescapable fact was that the German people had changed. They were no longer the same people they had been in 1914. The experience of four years of war itself had done what so many others, from the Kaiser on down, had so often tried and failed to do: it had brought together the German people as one and united large parts of a heterogenous population. But it had done so by alienating those people from the small minority that had previously ruled over them. The war, as ­Troeltsch had already said in his speech on “The Ideas of 1914,” had taught the people that they could, in fact had to rely on themselves and on themselves alone to survive the predations of the war, and that experience had in turn given them increasing confidence that they could manage by themselves in other arenas of life as well. The January strikes earlier that year had demonstrated to hundreds of thousands of workers that their grievances, anger, and fears were shared by many others throughout the Empire, proving that solidarity and collective action were not just possible, but that they also provided the best and perhaps only means of defending their interests. But it was not just another sign of the ignorance on the part of the Obrigkeit about the real state of mind among the German people that the military thought it could mobilize them. It also proved to be a fatal miscalculation: suggesting to 276  “Protokollauszug der großen Sitzung beim Reichskanzler am 17. Oktober 1918,” Amt­ liche Urkunden des Weltkriegs 1918, 128–29; cited from Sawelski, 330.

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the people at home that they should rise up in their own self-defense only increased their sense of their own power. Foreign Secretary and Admiral Paul von Hintze had called his plan of a levée en masse a “revolution from above.”277 Unfortunately for Hintze and the other members of his caste, many people realized that they could employ the same method to initiate their own revolution from below. Sometime in mid-October, the Spartacus League, the extreme radical wing of the breakaway Independent Social Democratic Party that two months later would rename itself the Communist Party of Germany, issued a public notice proclaiming “The Beginning of the End.”278 “The German military state is teetering,” it read. New men have been enlisted into the government in order to continue the old politics or to save what can be saved. There is not the slightest thing that we workers can expect from a new bourgeois government, not even now, after this government has fitted itself out with a few government socialists and decked itself out with a few pseudo-democratic concessions.279

Thus, the statement demanded: “The spontaneous mutinies among soldiers are to be supported by all means to shift over to an armed insurrection.” And: “The beginning of the German revolution is the beginning of the victorious world revolution.”280 In the last week of October, Reinhard Scheer, the Chief of Staff of the German navy, prepared an order that was put into effect on October 30 commanding the entire High Sea Fleet to set out for a final “decisive battle.” On November 1, sailors and stokers in Kiel, no longer interested in battling, started to disobey orders in large numbers. With that, the mutinies began that would first swamp the navy and then everything else.

Parliamentarization and Peace at Last Meanwhile, a series of telegrams sent back and forth during the middle weeks of October between the new German Chancellor and the American President were stoking fears that Wilson would not be satisfied merely with the military capitulation of Germany but that he would accept nothing less than the complete transformation of its entire political structure. After an initial round of exploratory notes, Wilson wrote a second time on October 14 demanding the “unqualified 277 

Ursachen und Folgen, 2, 320. Ibid., 354. 279 Ibid. 280  Ibid., 355. 278 

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acceptance” of American conditions, including the evacuation of occupied territories and the suspension of “the illegal and inhumane” submarine war.281 But Wilson’s note closed with a new expectation. The President called for “the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at least its reduction to virtual impotency.”282 Wilson’s reference to “arbitrary power” could have only been interpreted as applying to the Emperor, which seemed to indicate that a precondition of peace would be the elimination of the monarchy. The German response, dated October 22, was signed by Wilhelm Solf, whom Prince Max had brought into his cabinet as his Foreign Secretary on October 4 – replacing, as it happened, Paul von Hintze, the advocate and now the victim of another kind of top-down revolution. In Solf’s answer to Wilson, he sought to assure the American President that “a fundamental change” had already taken place in the German system of government that should allay any concerns about who now wielded authority there: The new government has been formed in complete accord with the representation of the people, based on the equal, universal, secret, direct franchise. The leaders of the great parties of the Reichstag are members of this government. In future, no government can take or continue in office without possessing the confidence of the majority of the Reichstag.283

Too, Solf pointed out that the first act of the new government had been to pass a bill altering the constitution so that, henceforth, “the consent of the representation of the people is required for decisions on war and peace.” And to ease concerns that these changes may be only temporary or constitute a false front, Solf’s letter concluded by insisting that the “permanence of this new system” was guaranteed not only by appropriate “constitutional safeguards, but also by the unshakeable determination of the German people, whose vast majority stands behind these reforms and demands their energetic continuance.”284 Germany’s commitment to democracy, Solf was saying as explicitly and clearly as he could, was not superficial or fleeting but now fixed in its political structure and supported by the popular will. Wilson’s answer reflected the uncertainty about what was happening inside of Germany and the suspicions, disappointments, and betrayals that had accumulated over the preceding four years on all sides. While acknowledging that as “sig281  “Correspondance Between the United States and Germany Regarding an Armistice,” The American Journal of International Law 13/2 (1919), 88–89. 282  Ibid., 89. 283  Ibid., 91. 284 Ibid.

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nificant and important as the constitutional changes seem to be,” the American President nevertheless sternly responded that “it does not appear that the principle of a government responsible to the German people has yet been fully worked out,” nor, he added, did there appear to be any reliable guarantee those changes already effected “will be permanent.”285 In addition to doubts about the scope and longevity of the reforms already enacted, Wilson was adamant about one thing: it was still the case that control of foreign policy and of the armed forces remained solely in the hand of the monarch. That was unacceptable: “It is evident that the German people have no means of commanding the acquiescence of the military authorities of the Empire in the popular will; that the power of the King of Prussia to control the policy of the Empire is unimpaired.” Wilson said he did not regard Wilhelm or his generals as legitimate negotiating partners for the simple reason that “the nations of the world do not and cannot trust the word of those who have hitherto been the masters of German policy.” Wilson also made it appear non-negotiable that, for any peace deal to go forward, the world would not tolerate Wilhelm playing any part in it. “If it must deal with the military masters and the monarchical autocrats of Germany now, or if it is likely to have to deal with them later in regard to the international obligations of the German Empire, it must demand, not peace negotiations, but surrender.”286 The far-reaching implications of Wilson’s demands for the entire German state were obvious. Stunningly, Max von Baden seemed to be prepared to acquiesce to every one of them. Now Ludendorff realized that time was quickly running out, and if he did not intervene soon there would quite possibly be no Germany left to save. On October 24, he enlisted the aid of Hindenburg in issuing a proclamation of their own, which they wanted to be “sent to all the troops,” declaring Wilson’s politics a feint and demanding for “a fight to the finish” against him: Wilson says in his answer that he wants to suggest to his allies that they enter into armistice negotiations. He said that the armistice must, however, make Germany militarily so defenseless that it cannot take up weapons anymore. He said he would negotiate with Germany over peace only if it completely acquiesces to the demands of the Allies concerning its domestic organization; otherwise there could be only unconditional subjugation. Wilson’s answer demands military capitulation. It is thus unacceptable for us soldiers. It is proof that our enemies’ will to annihilation, which unleashed the war in 1914, continues undiminished. It is, further, proof that our enemies utter the phrase “peace under the law” only in order to deceive us and to break our power of resistance. Wilson’s answer can thus be for us soldiers only the invitation to continue our resistance with our utmost strength.287

285 

Ibid., 93.

287 

Cited from Nebelin, 49o.

286 Ibid.

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Although Ludendorff may have been disappointed by the apparent development of his appointee, by thus openly defying the Chancellor he made a serious miscalculation of his own. On learning of the joint proclamation, Max von Baden, according to his own account in his memoirs, concluded that the situation “had to end only with the discharge of General Ludendorff.”288 In reality, though, the driving force behind the removal of the powerful dictator was Wilhelm Solf. The same day the proclamation by the two generals appeared, Solf sought to convince his ministerial colleagues in the cabinet that “Ludendorff’s abdication” – the word was undoubtedly chosen carefully – would demonstrate to the German people and to the outside world that the civilian government possessed control over the military. “If we can agree to both,” Solf wrote, “then we have a good armistice and a good peace.”289 The next morning, in an audience Solf had sought with the Kaiser, who was still the only person who had the power to dismiss the general, Solf pressed home the argument that to maintain any hope of a tolerable peace “it is impossible to sever the connection with Wilson” and “if Ludendorff goes, then it would be a great advantage to our politics.”290 The following day, on October 26, Wilhelm summoned Ludendorff to Bellevue Palace in Berlin and informed the stunned general that he was relieved of his command. When Ludendorff returned home, his wife Margarethe watched him as he “came into the room as pale as death and let himself fall heavily into a chair.”291 After explaining to her what had happened, he suddenly sprang up and declared: “You will see, in fourteen days we will have neither an Empire nor an Emperor anymore.”292 With no more obstacles blocking the path, the German government briskly moved forward to complete the formal transformation of the state into a full parliamentary democracy. As Solf’s letter to Woodrow Wilson on October 22 had stated, legislation was passed stipulating that the Imperial Chancellor would henceforth serve only with the confidence of the Reichstag, the military was placed under civilian authority, and the equal franchise was introduced throughout the country.293 When all of these changes were legally ratified and went into effect on October 28, Germany officially ceased being a constitutional monarchy and its new existence as a parliamentary state began. 288 

Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, 500. Prinz Max von Baden, 422. 290 Ibid. 291  Margarethe Ludendorff, 203. 292  Ibid., 204. 293  Cf. Huber, 5, 584–600. 289 Machtan,

Parliamentarization and Peace at Last

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Not least among the many perplexities surrounding the final month of Imperial Germany’s existence is that what for many should have been the occasion for joy and celebration, or should have at the very least attracted fleeting attention, seemed instead to go essentially unnoticed. As Arthur Rosenberg put it with considerable understatement, “the actual meaning of this peaceful revolution was not at all clear to the masses.”294 Ernst ­Troeltsch also referred to the events of those weeks as a “peaceful” revolution, but one that was “too late.”295 And it was true: as of October 28, 1918 Germany had become a democracy in every technical sense of the term. But no one appeared to care or even to notice – or, if they did register what had happened, to believe it. Werner Weisbach wrote of the final days of October that “one would not have noticed by the night life in Berlin that the country stood in its worst catastrophe. In the western part of the city streams of people moved up and down the Kurfürstendamm; the cafés were overcrowded and music played on in them.”296 There remained one last major piece of unfinished business. When President Wilson’s second note from October 14 had been given to the Kaiser to read, Wilhelm construed it as usual solely as it pertained to himself. “That fellow is demanding the removal of me and all the other monarchs in Germany,” he indignantly told those in his entourage. “Now he has let his mask slip, he is going to get a surprise. The man doesn’t have a clue about things in Germany.” Wilhelm then let loose an outburst that demonstrated that he had become so estranged from his own country that he saw things no more clearly than that “fellow” from the other side of the ocean. “I’m not going,” the Kaiser flatly said: If I did, the Empire would fall apart, thus it is my duty to stay where I am and, if that is the way it has to be, go under with the people. We can’t give in this time; if the government wants to anyway, it has to go. Then either a new government with another majority or a military dictatorship; simultaneously a summons to the people, strengthening of the army, and then we’ll fight.297

The people already had other plans. On the momentous but quietly revolutionary day of October 28, Philipp Scheidemann sent a letter to Max von Baden making it clear that it was not the government but rather the Kaiser who had to go. Scheidemann, stating that he spoke on behalf of the majority of the State Secretaries in the Imperial cabinet, unequivocally demanded “the resignation of the Emperor.”298 Everyone had come to the conclusion, Scheidemann wrote, that the issue 294 

Rosenberg, 239. “Nach Pfingsten (Juli 1919),” Spectator-Briefe; KGA 14, 109. 296 Weisbach, Geist und Gewalt, 178. 297 Röhl, Wilhelm II., 1241. 298 Philipp Scheidemann to Max von Baden, October 28, 1918; in Scheidemann, Der Zusammenbruch, 201. 295 ­Troeltsch,

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had become “one of the burning questions concerning the fate of the German people,” and since the military censor had forbidden a public airing of the matter, the cabinet had decided it could be resolved only if the Chancellor himself would personally “recommend to His Majesty the Kaiser that he abdicate voluntarily.”299 The reason was plain: “the majority of the population of the German Empire had gained the conviction that the prospect for achieving tolerable conditions in the armistice and the peace are worsened by the Kaiser remaining in his high office.” Further, “it can no longer be doubted that the peace negotiations offer considerably more favorable prospects if the executed rearrangement of the system in the German Empire is made clearly visible at home and abroad by a change in the highest position in the Empire.”300 It would be better, Scheidemann suggested in closing, “if the Kaiser would now draw the consequences as quickly as possible from the entire situation that, in the estimation of numerous German statesmen, must be drawn.”301 The following day, October 29, Wilhelm unceremoniously departed Berlin, where, unusually, he had been in residence since the beginning of the month, and he returned to General Headquarters in the Belgian town of Spa. He seems to have been encouraged to leave the capital by members of his court, who hoped that if he were to spend time among his generals it would stiffen his resolve against the intensifying calls for his abdication.302 To those left back in the capital, the Emperor’s sudden decampment seemed more like a furtive escape. As Friedrich Payer recalled, “the impression that this seemingly hurried change of location left on everyone who knew the circumstances was extremely depressing. Fortunately,” Payer added, without perhaps realizing the incongruous pathos of his words, “it received relatively little attention from the general public.”303 As it happened, after his flight from Berlin at the end of October, Wilhelm II never stepped foot on German soil again. Although Max von Baden had also become convinced by no later than October 31 that “the Kaiser must abdicate!”304 the neurasthenic prince could not bear the thought of confronting the mercurial monarch with such a demand himself. Wilhelm Solf, continuing to work stealthily in the background to dismantle the buttresses still propping up the teetering edifice of the Empire, let it be known in a meeting of the war cabinet that day that he had it on good authority that even one of the founders of the Fatherland Party – Solf declined to identify his source 299 

Ibid., 202.

300 Ibid. 301 

Ibid., 203. Wilhelm II., 1242. 303  Payer, 148. 304 Machtan, Max von Baden, 435. 302 Röhl,

Parliamentarization and Peace at Last

531

by name – had agreed that it was necessary for the Emperor to resign.305 Unable to resist the rising tide against the Kaiser anymore but still unwilling to take the step himself to seek the monarch’s renunciation of the throne, on November 1 Max von Baden sent his Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Drews, to Spa. Drew’s explicit mandate, reflecting the Chancellor’s irresolution, was not to try to convince the Emperor to step down but merely “to describe the current state of the discussion concerning his abdication.”306 Wilhelm was not impressed by this timid approach. “I am not abdicating,” he flatly told Drews: That would be incompatible with the duties I have as the Prussian king and successor of Frederick the Great before God, the people, and my conscience. I cannot and may not leave my post at the most dangerous moment. My abdication would be the beginning of the end of all German monarchies.307

Wilhelm, whose relationship with Max von Baden had always been strained, now suspected the Chancellor harbored ambitions of his own to the imperial throne and that he, the Kaiser, was being made the victim of a sinister plot. “Prince Max is a traitor,” he told Drews; “he wants to be the Imperial Regent, then become Emperor himself.”308 When Drews delivered the report of his interview with the defiant Kaiser later that same afternoon of November 1, Max von Baden suffered a nervous breakdown. The doctor sent to tend to the “completely broken and indecisive” prince noted that he was “moaning” and “crying,” even saying at one point – and threatening an action that his predecessor Bethmann Hollweg had also once considered in a similarly desperate situation – “I am going to shoot a bullet through my brain.”309 Another observer overheard Max say “no one can endure this.”310 By November 4, government officials were whispering that the Chancellor was “lying in bed due to nervous exhaustion,”311 and rumors circulated that he was taking tranquilizers and morphine.312 He did not emerge from this catatonic state and reappear in public until November 7.313 Astonishingly, and adding to the already considerable confusion and disarray, during the Imperial Chancellor’s extraordinary week-long retreat from his duties 305 

Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962), 448. Ibid., 436. 307 Röhl, Wilhelm II., 1242. 308 Machtan, Max von Baden, 434. 309 Machtan, Prinz Max von Baden, 442. 310 Ibid. 311  Ibid., 444. 312 Ibid. 313  Ibid., 445. 306 

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at the height of the most critical emergency the German Empire had ever experienced, the Reichstag went into recess as well. Immediately after having received the new Chancellor on October 5, when Prince Max had presented his government and announced his foreign and domestic objectives to the Reichstag, the entire parliament had adjourned. “There was not a soul in the Reichstag,” Conrad Haußmann wrote on October 8 in his diary; “it was like a morgue.”314 The Reich­ stag did not reassemble again until October 22, when it briefly came together to change the German constitution in a flurry of activity. Their historic work accomplished four days later, the delegates then dispersed once more and did not reconvene until November 9.315 Thus, for most of the last two weeks of its existence, which also happened to be the first two weeks of its formal constitution as a parliamentary democracy, there was quite literally no one left in charge of the swiftly imploding German Empire. An absent, disempowered sovereign, a defeated and disgraced supreme commander, a psychologically incapacitated chancellor, and a dormant parliament: they had all left behind a hollowed-out center, effectively abandoning the country to the forces of fate at its greatest hour of need. But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The people, having been deserted by the individuals and institutions that were supposed to be committed to their welfare, rushed into the void. The uprisings in Kiel that had begun on November 1 grew steadily each day in size and intensity, spreading rapidly to manufacturing cities throughout the Empire and building into an uncontainable movement that far surpassed the January strikes in their magnitude and power. Eventually, the revolution many had feared and had tried to avoid engulfed the entire land.

From Volksbund to Völkerbund At the very end of October there had been one final concerted effort to stave off utter political and moral ruin and to redeem a situation that already seemed beyond salvation. On Sunday, October 27, just over two weeks after the encounter had taken place in the Royal Library about the possibility of organizing a popular uprising against a feared foreign invasion, the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland worked toward more peaceful ends by staging one last public assembly for its members from all over the country and opened it to anyone else who wished to join. The meeting was scheduled to begin at noon in the main auditorium of the Sing-Akademie (which today houses the Maxim Gorki Theater), 314  315 

Haußmann, 243. Rosenberg, 241.

From Volksbund to Völkerbund

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standing just behind the Zeughaus, or the Arsenal, on Unter den Linden. But so many people unexpectedly showed up that the organizers hastily had to improvise a second assembly in the nearby Handelshochschule, located on the Spandauer Straße just across the River Spree, where Hugo Preuß was serving as Rector. Even then, “the crowd was so enormous that several hundred visitors could not be admitted.”316 The announced topic of the meeting was the “League of Nations and Peace,” chosen in part because it responded to the proposal advanced by the American President to form such an international association – in German, a Völkerbund – to promote and preserve peace. But it was obviously an appropriate theme for the Volksbund in particular, and not only because it fortuitously coincided with the name of their own organization.317 The “enthusiastic applause” that greeted the words of the six speakers who addressed both of the assemblies that afternoon also provided evidence, as Martin Wenck subsequently wrote, of the strong and emphatic acknowledgement of the League of Nations given by the thousands of men and women in attendance, and the hundreds of new membership declarations to the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland likewise attest to the affirmation it finds among a broad segment of the German people, without regard to social status, profession, party or conviction.318

Ernst ­Troeltsch, for whatever reason, did not address this last meeting of the Volksbund held during the declining days of the German Empire. But his ideas and values suffused the speeches of those who did. The featured speaker was Bernhard Dernburg, the former Secretary of Colonial Affairs until 1910, when he had been succeeded by Wilhelm Solf. Like Solf, during the war Dernburg had also become a committed proponent of a negotiated peace, and by 1917 at the latest he was a champion of parliamentarization in Germany.319 In the Sing-Aka­ demie, Dernburg gave a stirring address approving Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen

316  Martin Wenck, “Einleitung,” in Völkerbund und Frieden. Dritte Veröffentlichung des Volksbundes für Freiheit und Vaterland (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1919), 6. 317  The idea of a “league of nations” was the subject of one of the last major publications of the war in Germany, by Matthias Erzberger, Der Völkerbund. Der Weg zum Weltfrieden (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1918); the preface is dated September 1918. On December 27, 1918, Erz­ berger gave a speech on the same subject, which was published as Matthias Erzberger, Der Völkerbund als Friedensfrage (Berlin: Bund deutscher Gelehrter und Künstler, 1919). 318  Wenck, “Einleitung,” 6. See the comprehensive bibliography compiled by Fritz Juntke and Hans Sveistrup, Das Deutsche Schrifttum über den Völkerbund. 1917–1925 (Berlin: Struppe & Winckler, 1927). 319 Cf. Schiefel, Bernhard Dernburg, 155–61. Schiefel mentions, however, neither the Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland, nor, therefore, Dernburg’s involvement in it.

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Points, which Dernburg argued “completely correspond” to “the demands that German thought had established through Kant.”320 Dernburg was followed by four other speakers, including Carl Legien and Baron Hartmann von Richthofen, the latter a diplomat and liberal politician who in his speech praised the “democratic ideas” underpinning the notion of a League of Nations, arguing that “these ideas are absolutely not foreign to us Germans but rather innate to us.”321 Felix Waldstein, a member of the Royal Judicial Council and a representative to the Reichstag as a member of the Progressive People’s Party, said a few words as well about the “transition from a bureaucratic state to a popular state” that had just been completed in Germany and that effectively erased the division between the people and their government. Now, Waldstein triumphantly announced, “we are the state.”322 And Waldstein said, in the same way and when viewed from a global perspective, the notions of “national and international complement each other like individual and people” and provided the ideational foundation for the Völkerbund. Finally, Waldstein issued an appeal of his own for a “demobilization of minds,” or at least for an unhardening of hearts to provide the basis for such cooperation. “We want to begin,” he said, “with the dismantling of hatred and take only one hatred with us out of this terrible war into a time of hopefully lasting peace: the hatred against war.”323 It was surely not lost on the organizers of the gathering, or irrelevant to the larger message they wanted to send, that Felix Waldstein and Bernhard Dernburg were both Jewish, and it is likewise hardly coincidental that both would be among the founding members of the German Democratic Party that was constituted just over three weeks later. At the conclusion of the rally on October 27, the Chairman of the Volksbund, Ernst Francke, read aloud a resolution that had been prepared a few days before. It proclaimed that the organization he headed expresses its complete confidence in the new people’s government. It views the measures taken in the arenas of foreign and domestic policy to be necessities that serve the welfare of our people and are required by the gravity of the hour and the danger threatening our fatherland. The People’s League demands that the Imperial government breaks, with a strong hand, all open and hidden resistance that oppose the fulfillment of its task. In establishing the new Germany, the People’s League will support the government with all its powers and in this expects the energetic cooperation of all its associated organizations.324

320 

15.

321 

Bernhard Dernburg, “Völkerbund und Frieden,” in Völkerbund und Frieden, 9–24, here

Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen, “Ansprache,” in Völkerbund und Frieden, 30. Felix Waldstein, “Ansprache,” in Völkerbund und Frieden, 31. 323  Ibid., 34. 324  Ernst Francke, “Schlußansprache,” in Völkerbund und Frieden, 35. 322 

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Finally, Francke closed the meeting by exhorting the thousands present to “preserve the words you have heard here and act according to them when you leave and return back to your lives. Work with the Volksbund for the League of Nations and Peace, for an honorable peace that affords and ensures life and freedom.”325 To the very end, then, the People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland was far from being the insignificant or marginal factor that most historians have assumed it to have been.326 Rather, the People’s League stood as one of the last and only beacons of hope for an untold number of the German people across a wide political spectrum at the very moment they were being forsaken by almost everyone else, from the Kaiser on down. Equally conspicuous by its total absence during these final weeks, by contrast, was its once formidable rival, the German Fatherland Party. The collapse of the military in late summer necessarily entailed the collapse as well of the aspirations motivating the organization that saw its raison d’être in military power. Reflecting that reality, as early as August, public support for the Fatherland Party had already dramatically dissipated. “In general, a lack of interest has taken hold,” one regional representative in Frankfurt lamented. “I don’t think that today a public assembly of the Fatherland Party in Frankfurt am Main, whoever the speaker might be, would find a filled hall, much less any dissent. The initial enthusiasm of broad classes has made way for a regrettable indifference.”327 By the autumn, the German Fatherland Party no longer even dared to hold public gatherings anymore out of fear of attracting only opposition and protest. The last meeting of the national committee took place on October 20, 1918. It was a desultory affair, filled with mutual recriminations and apocalyptic predictions. The next meeting, set for November 10, was indefinitely postponed and all official publications were suspended. On November 23, Wolfgang Kapp sent a last circular to its membership: “The spirit that lives in us all will remain, even if the form disintegrates. Even under the current circumstances we will serve the fatherland with our entire soul.”328 It was a promise, and a warning, that, although the organization would be no more, its prime movers would live on to fight another day. But on the other side, no one was in the mood to gloat. For that the situation was far too serious. Shortly before the last meeting of the Volksbund, Ernst ­Troeltsch had written a reflective letter to his old friend, Gertrud von le Fort. “Now everything is happening that I have always demanded as a political neces325 Ibid.

326  Characteristically, this final meeting of the Volksbund during the war has never been discussed in any of the scholarly literature I am aware of. 327  Hagenlücke, 375. 328  Ibid., 385.

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sity, but too late.”329 He went on: “I am still not giving up hope for the possibility of survival. The people are basically too healthy and vigorous. But a thorough rethinking and complete reconstruction will be necessary. The old system is over.”330 Noting that, with the exception of France and Germany, all the other major states of Europe had already fallen in on themselves, ­Troeltsch wondered “will the collapse stop before us? I hope so with all my heart and yet also consider it probable.”331 Between 10 and 11 in the morning of November 9, 1918, three members of the Reichstag, Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and Otto Braun, appeared as representatives of the Social Democratic caucus in the Imperial Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse. Accompanied by several state secretaries from his cabinet, Prince Max von Baden received the delegates in his office. Friedrich Ebert, standing before these last custodians of Imperial Germany, explained in his grave, dignified manner that the workers and soldiers had seized power and that it was not possible for the previous authorities to remain in office. In Otto Braun’s recollections of that pivotal moment, he observed that the gentlemen, in whose faces one could see the agitation of the last days and hours over the armistice and the abdication of the Kaiser, were very distraught, even though they should have reckoned with this direction of the political development after the events in Kiel and other cities.332

After briefly retiring to an adjoining room, Max von Baden returned to his waiting visitors. As a further sign of how unfamiliar the new governing practices were to everyone, without any constitutional provision authorizing him to do so, Prince Max perfunctorily transferred the power of the Imperial Chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert’s hands. When Otto Braun walked back to the Reichstag after that brief but epochal meeting, a similarly transformed scene outside presented itself to him: The streets of Berlin had changed their appearance. Trucks filled with soldiers and workers waving weapons and red flags raced through the streets proclaiming the end of the Hohenzollern empire, and the Prussian policeman, before whose omnipotence the average Prussian citizen usually trembled, anxiously slinked away and finally disappeared entirely from the streetscape. I was beset by peculiar thoughts, a heavy worry filled me. Had the centuries-old Hohenzollern regime, which had appeared so powerful, really collapsed so helplessly, so completely and miserably? Who was supposed to accept the inheritance? An inheritance that was terrible. Two million dead, millions of widows, orphans, and war invalids, an economy drained by four years of war – undernourished children lying in their beds with paper shirts, the metal 329 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Gertrud von le Fort, October 24, 1918; KGA 21, 496. Ibid., 497. 331 Ibid. 332  Otto Braun, Von Weimar zu Hitler (New York: Europa, 1940), 9. 330 

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from almost every last church bell and door handle having been shot up – and a people emaciated by hunger and malnutrition, who were now being joined by millions of more or less wild soldiers streaming back from the fronts, begging for work and bread. And in addition to all of that, a heavily indebted empire with a falling currency.333

The constitutional historian Ernst Rudolf Huber has written that, “in order to realize completely the system of a parliamentary-democratic constitutional state that observed the separation of powers, no revolution was necessary.”334 Such a new governmental system, the first democracy to be instituted in Germany, had already been achieved, fully and formally, on October 28, 1918. It was the result of reforms long planned and tirelessly pursued by many individuals and organizations that had seen democracy as the best and even sole hope for the future of their country. But the radical left, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, saw those reforms as a distraction and a dilution, even a perversion of “true democracy,” which they viewed as being possible only through the complete overturning of all previous social and economic relations and establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” “A ‘democratization’ of this sort,” Huber allowed, “could in fact not be achieved on the path of reform, but only on the path of revolution.”335 But, for the majority, who wanted neither a new dictatorship from below nor a continuation of the old one from above, the revolution provided at least some assurance that whatever the future may bring, there could be no going back to the ways of the past. Or, in the more succinct phrase of another historian of the period, “the revolution may have been constitutionally unnecessary, politically it was not.”336 True to form, the Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia evaluated the convulsions shaking the country as they affected only himself. Writing to his consort, Empress Auguste Viktoria, on that momentous day of November 9, Wilhelm petulantly complained: “Max has fully executed his treachery, which he had been concocting for weeks with Scheidemann. Without asking me and without expecting one step from me, he deposed me. Ebert is residing in Bismarck’s room, perhaps soon in the palace.”337 It was not until nineteen days later, on November 28, that Wilhelm finally bowed to reality and formally renounced his throne. By then he had moved into new rooms of his own in Dutch exile, where he would eventually settle down in a tidy country manor in the village of Doorn, near Utrecht. There he remained until the end of his long life, not dying until June 4, 1941, and never giving up hope that he might one day return. 333 

Ibid., 10. Huber, 5, 619. 335 Ibid. 336 Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack, 461. 337 Machtan, Prinz Max von Baden, 462. 334 

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But Wilhelm’s abject decampment and his fantasies of rehabilitation were the product of a typical misjudgment. In January 1919, Wilhelm Solf, the man who might have been the last Imperial Chancellor, offered this keen analysis of the emperor’s self-imposed predicament: “The fate of our imperial rule was not sealed by the Kaiser’s journey to Holland but rather by his flight from Berlin, from the connection with his responsible civil advisors, by the flight to the military front, to General Headquarters.” Solf concluded: “A Kaiser who had stayed in Berlin would have been respected, at least treated carefully; the one who absconded to the troops was considered an enemy of the people and was ostracized as an outlaw.”338 Had Wilhelm stayed in Berlin, he almost certainly would not have been able to preserve his throne, but he might have managed to save his reputation. Leaving it, he permanently forfeited both. * * * Just as the the war had exceeded anyone’s ability to understand it when it began, when it ended and brought down a whole world with it, it was still no easier to comprehend how or why the war had happened or what its ultimate consequences would be. One thing was certain: the old political order had been wiped away, and as Ernst ­Troeltsch exclaimed in a public address on December 16, 1918, in place of the venerable system of authoritarian, monarchical rule in Germany, “we have become the most radical democracy in Europe.”339 That was true, and it was in no small part because of him that it was.

338 

Wilhelm Solf to Otto Hammann, January 23, 1919, in Hammann, Bilder aus der letzten Kaiserzeit, 135–36. 339  Ernst ­Troeltsch, Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923), KGA 15, 211.

Conclusion

Spectator On November 30, 1918, Ernst ­Troeltsch wrote a brief sketch in which he tried to convey in direct and simple terms how the upheavals convulsing his country felt to him personally, how everything appeared to him as an individual who, admittedly, was not exactly an average onlooker but who was nevertheless in many respects an ordinary citizen who happened to be living through extraordinary times and found himself privileged to observe those events from up close: The revolution, long feared and long foretold, has broken out. Germany now has its victorious revolution, as England, America, and France once had theirs. It comes at the most disastrous moment of a universal military, economic, and nervous collapse. One can still hardly fathom the enormity of the events, although we have truly become accustomed to enormous things during these years. One still fears for one’s basic personal existence. No one can yet predict its meaning for Germany and for the world, one hardly has the tranquility to think about it. When one goes outdoors, one is surprised that houses and trees still stand. Amidst their calm, one finds one’s way back a bit toward reflection and, whoever has the talent for it, toward an enjoyment of nature, which regards the madness of human beings with an unchanging indifference, as it has done all these years and will do for many more.1

Beyond his slightly detached wonderment over the improbability of it all, what is most striking about these words – and for any historian should be most humbling – is the degree to which Ernst ­Troeltsch, who saw and knew as much as anyone else and far more than most, was apparently so unnerved by his own inability to grasp, often even to register, the significance of what was happening often right in front of him. “It is strange,” he continued, “how one can live side by side, as it were, with the most immense events and still notice almost nothing about them.” Speaking more specifically about himself, he said that it was astounding to him that

1 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Was man vor einem Jahre in Berlin von der Revolution persönlich erleben konnte,” Spectator-Briefe und Berliner Briefe, KGA 14, 200. This text, although written at the end of November 1918, was not published until December 1919, because ­Troeltsch originally felt that it was filled with too many “trivialities and coincidences.” But he later reconsidered that, for that same reason, his reflections might in fact shed useful light on the incidents he described.

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Conclusion: Spectator

even a man who is well acquainted with the most important people in the government, and was generally informed about the situation by labor leaders, knew almost nothing about decisive things, which leads to the conclusion that they, too, did not know all that much.2

It was this jarring, confusing contrast between what he thought he knew and what turned out actually to be the case that appeared to have unsettled ­Troeltsch the most. To illustrate the sense of unreality surrounding the series of events that had brought one era to an abrupt end and just as swiftly inaugurated another, ­Troeltsch described how that unanticipated transition had looked to him as it unfolded during the decisive days of early November. On the 8th, which was a Friday, he had stayed at home in his apartment on the Reichskanzlerplatz in Charlottenburg and, presumably like virtually everyone else, had “noticed nothing at all.”3 The next day, the “notorious 9th of November,” was thus a Saturday and the start of a weekend, with its typically slower pace and customary household errands. The first indication that morning that something unusual was afoot came when an acquaintance jokingly hailed him as a “Bavarian republican.” Unbeknownst to ­Troeltsch, in Munich the day before, Kurt Eisner had declared Bavaria to be a “free state.” As a native of Augsburg – hence the teasing appellation – ­Troeltsch was intimately familiar with the south and its mores. But for that very reason he assumed that the events in Munich were no more than a localized putsch and “in any case could only be something temporary. In the west of Berlin one still noticed nothing.” Around noon, the midday newspapers were inexplicably reporting that the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert had become Imperial Chancellor, which ­Troeltsch said he found to be “an entirely incomprehensible announcement.”4 That evening, the late editions proclaimed no less bewilderingly “the victory of the revolution in Berlin as well as the naval mutinies in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. On Sunday morning,” he continued, following an anxious night, the picture became clear from the morning papers: the Emperor was in Holland, the revolution victorious in most centers, the federal princes were engaged in abdicating. Not one man had died for Kaiser and Empire! The civil service had gone over to the new government! The continuation of all obligations was secured, and there was no run on the banks!5

The chasm separating the largely uninterrupted routines of normal life and the complete breakdown of the symbolic order, between the ordinariness of every2 Ibid. 3 

Ibid., 205. Ibid., 206. 5 Ibid. 4 

Conclusion:  Spectator

541

day existence and the cataclysmic but mainly invisible transformations overturning centuries of political habits and beliefs, made everything difficult to assimilate, much less comprehend. The surreal disparity between the mundane and the momentous was particularly pronounced the next day, marking the first full twenty-four hours of the new reality: Sunday, November 10, was a wonderful autumn day. The citizens went en masse to take their walk as usual in the Grunewald. No elegant outfits, only average citizens, many probably intentionally simply dressed. Everyone was somewhat subdued, like people whose fate is being decided somewhere far away, but still untroubled and reassured that things were going so well. The streetcars and subway were running on time – the guarantee that everything was in order for the immediate requirements of life. On everyone’s face was written: the salaries will continue to be paid.6

As it happened, Hans Delbrück, the doyen of the Mittwochabend and a central figure in some of the most significant political battles that had occurred in Germany over the previous four years, turned seventy years old on the following Monday, November 11. To mark his birthday a reception was held at Delbrück’s house, and ­Troeltsch was invited to attend. Because he had to walk through some forested land to reach it, and highlighting that it had been no mere hyperbole when he had said that people were fearing for their personal safety, his wife made him carry a revolver. “But in truth everything was absolutely calm,” ­Troeltsch reported. On arriving at the Delbrücks, ­Troeltsch encountered a solemnly emotional affair, reflecting a mood that was probably being experienced in countless other households all over Germany. “I met there all sorts of leaders from the worlds of academia, government, and finance,” he wrote. It was an odd celebration, similar to a funeral ceremony. Everyone spoke in muted tones. The congratulatory speaker was unable to talk because of his tears. Delbrück responded poignantly that it was the end of the monarchy established by Frederick the Great, with which his entire political thought and every belief in Germany’s future were intertwined. […] He said his faith as an historian in all of his previous criteria and assumptions was tottering.7

­ roeltsch himself left the gathering unswayed by the general despondency. Ever T the political realist and principled optimist, he was also a philosophically minded historian who had thought a great deal about the mutability of all human “criteria and assumptions.” He had not been led by the outcome of either those reflections or the war itself to doubt his fundamental convictions; if anything, they had only been confirmed by events. There was no denying that ­Troeltsch continued to be deeply worried about the future and he knew that whatever was coming would be 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

542

Conclusion: Spectator

extremely difficult and demand great sacrifices from everyone. But he remained dedicated, as he had been throughout the conflict, to helping his country and its people in any way he could, which was all the more important now that they needed to adjust to disorientingly different circumstances and to find their way in a new, unfamiliar world. And ­Troeltsch believed that what was required above all else in meeting the innumerable challenges confronting them all, and what had been in such short supply in the past, was the truth – even, or especially, when the truth was painful: In the following days, details about the conditions of the armistice were then made public, which taught us that we had been absolutely out of the picture about the military situation when we thought that a democratized Germany would still be able to obtain a tolerable peace with the help of a secure defensive line. For this armistice is a veiled capitulation, not an armistice. I knew that Prince Max and our diplomats did not believe in such a desperate military situation and that they counted on a month of a solid military posture during which the war could be liquidated, with high losses, but in honor and in maintaining the Empire and the monarchy. Here, too, we thus knew and noticed next to nothing. The military events and the revolution are both opaque. Only terrible consequences are probable. Most of us, in truth, still do not know what has occurred.8

There was clarity about one thing, however. Germany was a democracy: formally, unequivocally, and even, as ­Troeltsch had memorably put it, radically so. But it was not the revolution that had been responsible for delivering that remarkable outcome, nor had it been brought about by the abdication of the Kaiser – more like the opposite was the case – nor had democracy been merely the inadvertent consequence of the cynical schemings of Ludendorff and his cohort. Instead, it was the result of years of highly complex developments and of deliberate, conscious struggles, many long predating the war. And as ­Troeltsch would and often did say, it was the product of vast social, economic, and cultural forces that were not fully susceptible to anyone’s control. Yet just as the new republic, as a parliamentary democracy, was not the issue of the revolution, opposition to the new order also did not spring up only in its immediate aftermath. Rather, that resistance represented a continuation of the antagonism toward democracy that had always characterized the right, or had been woven into the very fabric of the German, and especially Prussian, Obrig­ keit, itself, only to grow and intensify during the war. And once the war had ended in the way that it did, the committed and now radicalized adversaries of democracy and all that it represented did everything in their power to exact revenge for their humiliating defeat. Over the next four years, ­Troeltsch continued to comment frequently on major developments taking place in Berlin and, as his sources of information allowed, 8 

Ibid., 207.

Conclusion:  Spectator

543

in the rest of the country and the world as well. His sometimes anguished, sometimes bemused, but always astute reflections on current affairs reached a large and appreciative audience. They appeared monthly in Der Kunstwart, a reform-minded journal aimed at a broad readership and attracting at least 23,000 subscribers throughout the entire country.9 Usually focused on some notable person or incident, but often expanding into larger questions of general relevance, ­Troeltsch’s essays were designed to inform his readers about the state of current political, social, and cultural life. Ideally, they were intended to help prevent a repetition of the dangerous, and often deliberately imposed, ignorance that had been partly responsible for the inability of the German people to make informed decisions regarding their own fate. At first, ­Troeltsch did not identify himself as the author of these dispatches, signing them instead with the pseudonym “Spectator.” That alias was apparently in homage to the early-eighteenth-century publication by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, whose popular pamphlet, The Spectator, had also been aimed at enlightening and instructing readers who were not part of the small circles formed by the educated urban elite. The combined result of ­Troeltsch’s efforts, his so-called Spectator Letters, fulfilled a similar function for his widely dispersed readers, and for us they provide the most fascinating and perceptive eyewitness testimony we have from the earliest phase of the Weimar Republic. Even though ­Troeltsch attempted to provide a panoptic survey of the contemporary scene, he did not pretend to offer an unbiased or disinterested point of view. Instead, he vigorously argued that democracy offered the best, indeed the only means for tackling their endemic political problems. But it would have been out of character for ­Troeltsch, who had always been careful to distinguish between “private” and “state morality,” who had insisted on the historical contingency of all abstract ideas, and who had thought deeply about various manifestations of Realpolitik, to have abandoned his scruples and profess that democracy in itself provided an automatic remedy to all their ills. Democracy represented in his view the best means to achieve other goals, but did not represent an absolute end in itself. At one point, ­Troeltsch even went so far as to confess in a letter from September 1919 that “I am not an actual democrat. I am merely a rational democrat” – Vernunftdemokrat.10 9 

See Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebil­ deten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 133. 10  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Rudolf Paulus, 23 September, 1919; cited in Drescher 466n137. In the obituary he wrote for Max Weber, ­Troeltsch said in words that he could have equally well applied to himself that Weber “was no dogmatic democrat. To him democracy was a fate of the modern world.” Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Max Weber,” Frankfurter Zeitung 64/447 (June 20 1920), 2.

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Conclusion: Spectator

That was taking intellectual fastidiousness to a perhaps extreme degree, but it does convey something of the intentional attitude ­Troeltsch thought it necessary to take toward any political endeavor. There was no question in ­Troeltsch’s mind, however, that democracy had given Germany a political framework that allowed it to survive the upheavals of the war and revolution. “Democracy,” he wrote in October 1919, became the savior of order, it created as quickly as possible out of the ruins of the army a mercenary force that carried out its implementation and finally achieved the democratic constitution with its extremely parliamentarian character; all things that, if one considers the dangers that threatened, represent a great achievement in the salvation and self-preservation of society.11

That fact, and the conscious, collective effort that had made it possible, likewise gave the lie to the myth that the German people were congenitally somehow unsuited to or unfit for democracy. In that vein, ­Troeltsch brushed aside the suggestion, “which one can hear so often: we are supposed to be a people that is used to authority, that is not capable or willing to govern themselves, a democracy without democrats, a republic without republicans.”12 That was not just nonsense, ­Troeltsch thought, but deliberate, pernicious nonsense as well, precisely because it concealed a vested interest in its being believed. But democracy did take effort, and like all political activity it would demand compromises and would inevitably experience setbacks. ­Troeltsch brought the same sense of sober, pragmatic realism to democratic party politics as well. In response to a survey circulated in May 1920 asking prominent figures in Germany “Why Do I Pledge Myself to Democracy?” ­Troeltsch wrote that, in his opinion, the German Democratic Party was the only party that had the size and resources to protect the interests of “liberal culture” alongside the large groups coalesced around the Center Party and the Social Democratic party. However: “that an individual cannot condone everything that a caucus does or often must do […] is self-evident but has nothing to do with the necessity of the party.”13 As with everything else, politics for ­Troeltsch was not a matter of absolutes, but rather one of measure, balance, accommodation, and above all a commitment to a common future.

11  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Aristokratie,” Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923); KGA 15, 272. 12  Ibid., 273. See the excellent comments on this aspect of ­Troeltsch in Jens Hacke, Exis­ tenzkrise der Demokratie. Zur politischen Theories des Liberalismus in der Zwischenkriegs­zeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), 69–73, 278–79. 13  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Warum bekenne ich mich zur Demokratie?,” Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923); KGA 15, 374.

Conclusion:  Spectator

545

Part of the task of preparing for the future is trying to learn from the past. Shortly before he began regularly contributing his “Spectator” columns to the Kunstwart, ­Troeltsch had delivered a scathing postmortem of the German Empire published on November 16, 1918 – the day, as it happened, on which the German Democratic Party was founded. Called “The End of Militarism,” it hands down an unsparing indictment of the old system in Germany, which, ­Troeltsch made clear, had been largely responsible for its own demise. Although ­Troeltsch said that he had hoped until the end that his own country would be spared the fate that befell the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires, “the collapse of Germany as well is a fait accompli” and that it represented a “collapse of the political system that had long been hollowed out.”14 The German Empire had buckled from within because those responsible for leading it had failed to act early or decisively enough in implementing what the people demanded. In ­Troeltsch’s estimation, “there was little hope left after our ruling classes had disdained preventing the inevitable results of a radicalizing mass war in a timely fashion through democratic reforms and through concluding a peace of great moderation at the height of military victories.”15 Thus everything happened as it had to, and “the only result that has been clear up until now is the revolution.” And the revolution represented for ­Troeltsch less a beginning than an absolute end: it marked the end to “militarism, the structure of the state and society on the basis of the previous Prussian military constitution and of its corresponding spirit.”16 ­Troeltsch was emphatic that the existence of a strong army and imperialistic policies did not by themselves constitute German “militarism” – “all of that existed in the other states as well,” he insisted. Rather, Germany’s peculiar brand of militarism consisted in a specific social constellation that prevailed within the “German dominant class,” a social and economic elite that had been maintained by the peculiar form of the “German-Prussian Imperial constitution.” That is to say, in ­Troeltsch’s view German militarism had been primarily political in its nature and most especially in its effect. What is more, in order to complete its hegemony, the spirit of the new heavy industry and high finance aligned itself with it, placing business and connections on the same footing with this class and in the closest proximity to it, which, ennobled by land ownership and prestigious military service, in league with these forces kept down democracy and socialism both factually and morally.17

The ruling classes had clearly seen democracy as a danger to their interests and also judged the very idea and the values it embodied in class terms: “For them, 14 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Das Ende des Militarismus,” 172.

16 

Ibid., 173. Ibid., 175.

15 Ibid. 17 

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Conclusion: Spectator

democracy, socialism, pacifism, popular state, etc. were also indecent, plebeian notions of the insubordinate masses.”18 Class prejudice, social and economic privilege, as well as an arrogant belief that facts, and history, could be safely ignored or manipulated, had all led to the determined suppression of the rights and wishes of the majority, who were systematically and intentionally deprived of democracy and peace. That had been the essence of German militarism and, once the people had awakened to their own power, that had also been the cause of its implosion. Now that the former overlords had been deposed and the state upholding them abolished, ­Troeltsch concluded that “there is salvation only through the principles of pure democracy, after a reform and continuation of existing law and institutions had been denied by the ruling class and then made impossible by the revolution.”19 By “pure democracy” ­Troeltsch meant an absolute adherence to the principles of popular sovereignty in all matters affecting the state. But he also added that such formal measures by themselves were not sufficient. “Above all, political thought must be closely combined with social knowledge and ideas of social reform; for a merely political democracy, which realizes only principles and forms, has absolutely no meaning and no effect.”20 A “social democracy,” then, organized in strict accordance to mechanisms guaranteeing freedom, equality, and justice for all citizens could alone hold out a genuine promise for Germany and its future. But, once more, ­Troeltsch stressed that such a society would not happen by itself. To achieve and sustain such a state would require the active, vigilant effort of all involved: There is one thing we can say for certain: whoever does not want to give up on life itself and does not want to mourn and waste away alone, must take active and lively part in the new, emergent forces. There is an endless foundation of strength and ability in the German people. One must believe in it and one must increase it through one’s own labor. Then a light may again arise after all out of this darkest hour of our national history that is so endlessly rich in suffering.21

If unquenched, such a “light” – the light of reason, the light of hope, the light of life – might be able, ­Troeltsch wrote, to shine the way “through the new time of suffering in our endangered political existence toward the strength and freedom of spirit. If that spirit stays alive, then nothing is lost.”22 18 Ibid. 19 

Ibid., 178.

21 

Ibid., 179.

20 Ibid., 22 Ibid.

Conclusion:  Spectator

547

In that same hopeful but vigilant spirit, then, ­Troeltsch unabashedly used his platform in the Kunstwart over the next several years to encourage the German people as a whole, and in particular the recalcitrant, all-too-comfortable middle classes, to adopt democratic values and behavior and to support democratic institutions as the best way to preserve and protect their own “freedom of spirit.”23 For that to occur, he insisted, they had to understand that “the German democracy of today, or the democratic political order, is in no way the result of the revolution, it was rather in the main the antidote to the revolution.”24 As he had already said during the war, the true threat to freedom came from both above and below in the form of both a “military and workers’ revolt.” “However, these plans were immediately opposed on all sides by the democratic idea, that is, the idea of the equal and just participation of all groups of the people in the governance and organization of the state that had been deprived of its previous leadership.”25 Beginning in February 1919 up to November 1922, ­Troeltsch, alias “Spectator,” wrote what became monthly installments from his vantage point in Berlin, trenchantly commenting on the significant events of the day while always placing them within a larger historical, political, and cultural context, and explaining what they meant for the country and its people. There was certainly never any chance of running out of useable material. In June 1919, the “Spectator” announced the results of the Versailles Treaty conference with the sardonic exclamation: “the ‘peace conditions’ are here!” only to have to report that “the effect within governmental circles was devastating”26 and that among “the populace the effect was a visible consensus of pain, wrath, and an offended sense of honor.”27 The harsh stipulations of the Versailles Treaty also put extraordinary pressure on the National Assembly, which had been meeting in the provincial town of Weimar since February 6 in order to shield the proceedings from undue external influence in the capital. As people absorbed the full impact of the Versailles Treaty, and especially the infamous Article 231 assigning sole responsibility to Germany and its allies for all losses and damages that occurred as a result of the war – popularly understood as placing the entire guilt for the war on Germany alone – shock and disbelief soon turned into resentment and fury. Inevitably, those feelings also intensified the search for people in Germany to blame for having allowed it to be subjected to such disgrace and humiliation. As ­Troeltsch already wrote in September 1919: “the foundations of the counterrev23 

See the editor’s introduction to the Spectator-Briefe und Berliner Briefe, KGA 14, 18. “Aristokratie,” KGA 15, 270. 25 Ibid. 26  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Die Aufnahme der Friedensbedingungen (Juni 1919),” Spectator-Briefe und Berliner Briefe; KGA 14, 99. 27  Ibid., 100. 24 ­Troeltsch,

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olution, which have been partly methodically laid and have partly instinctively emerged, are becoming visible.”28 Even worse, it was a counterrevolution that in particular “wants revenge on Jews and Jewish associates for the lost war and for the lost position of supremacy by the previously dominant classes and that, in addition, is gathering around it all of the ideologues of the heroic world view and of the Germanic ascent.”29 In January 1920, ­Troeltsch repeated that conservatives and nationalists are making opposition to Jewishness a primary instrument of their battle in order to supply it with popular instincts and passions. Anti-Semitism of all shades is being fundamentally harnessed in this battle and the blame for the revolution and defeat are being put on the Jews and the Social Democrats.30

One of the “ideologues” ­Troeltsch specifically had in mind was Wolfgang Kapp. After the German Fatherland Party had been disbanded, Kapp had returned to Königsberg to devote himself to the task, as Kapp put it, of “putting an end to the tragedy of the revolution and then to pursue the incremental liberation of East Prussia from the tyranny of revolution.”31 When the National Assembly accepted the conditions of the Versailles Treaty in the summer of 1919, Kapp, freshly outraged, was no longer satisfied with a merely regional solution. He wanted nothing less than a violent overthrow of the entire government.32 The so-called Kapp Putsch would last only five days, from March 13–18, 1920.33 But ­Troeltsch realized it was merely the symptom of a larger and deeper problem. The next month he reminded his readers that “in earlier letters I pointed to the constantly growing danger of counterrevolution.” In the meantime, it has broken out as a coup d’état by the Praetorian Guard, the Junkers, and the Pan-Germans; it quickly collapsed, but it cost billions in national wealth and placed nearly everything that has so far been achieved into question again.34

For ­Troeltsch, as he had already grown convinced in May, “with the Kapp Putsch the class struggle […] has become a civil war.”35 No less ominously, as early as 28  Ernst ­ Troeltsch, “Der Enthüllungssturm (September 1919),” Spectator-Briefe und Ber­ liner Briefe; KGA 14, 152. 29 Ibid. 30 Ernst ­ Troeltsch, “Vorherrschaft des Judentums? (Januar 1920),” Spectator-Briefe und Berliner Briefe; KGA 14, 212. 31  Hagenlücke, 395. 32  Ibid., 396. 33  See the standard account by Johannes Erger, Der Kapp-Lüttwitz-Putsch. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Innenpolitik 1919/1920, (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1967). 34  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Der Putsch der Prätorianer und Junker (April 1920),” Spectator-Briefe und Berliner Briefe; KGA 14, 255. 35  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Klassenkampf und Bürgerkrieg (Mai 1920), Spectator-Briefe und Ber­ liner Briefe; KGA 14, 271.

Conclusion:  Spectator

549

November 1921, ­Troeltsch reported on a new constellation that had entered the political arena and represented a “German fascism, what we call swastika-ism.”36 Although he was one of the first to notice their emergence, ­Troeltsch would not live to see the rise of this group of right-wing radicals who liked to brandish the “hooked cross” and who in late 1923 contemptuously timed their own putsch attempt in Munich to coincide with the anniversary of the November Revolution. Just around that time, The Spectator Letters were collected and published as an independent book shortly after ­Troeltsch had died in the recognition that they constituted not just valuable firsthand accounts of the nascent democratic state, but that they also offered incisive political commentary in their own right. The resulting volume was even seen as being potentially useful in the continuing political struggles within Germany. The Imperial Ministry of Interior Affairs ordered 100 copies from the publisher, explaining that it viewed the Spectator Let­ ters as a vehicle with which “propaganda of a distinguished variety can be made for the new form of government of the German Empire.”37 In the preface Friedrich Meinecke wrote for the book, he also stressed its political significance, expressing the hope that it would increase the stature and influence of its author in the same way that a similar volume had recently elevated Max Weber in the public consciousness. “Thus,” Meinecke explained, the eminent significance of Max Weber as a political thinker came fully into view only through the collection of his political writings. We hope that Ernst ­Troeltsch will also have a new and more concentrated effect through the collection of political essays that we offer here.38

In presenting the work of his deceased friend to the reading public, Meinecke praised ­Troeltsch’s “critical sobriety,” his “absolute honesty,” and his “deep faith in the eternal lodestars of life,” which allowed him, Meinecke wrote, “to dive deeply into the “chaotic super-abundance of modern culture” and still surface “with new productive ideas and discoveries.”39 Acknowledging that ­Troeltsch had been far from alone in his efforts and was always part of other groups, organizations, and institutions pursuing similar goals, Meinecke described the Specta­

36  Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Auf dem Weg zur neuen Mitte (November 1921),” Spectator-Briefe und Berliner Briefe; KGA 14, 456. ­Troeltsch thus became one of the first to use the word for “fascism” in Germany. He referred to it here as “Faszistentum.” 37  Letter from Oskar Siebeck to Marta ­Troeltsch, July 24, 1923; cited in Silke Knappenber­ ger-Jans, Verlagspolitik und Wissenschaft. Der Verlag J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2001), 234. 38  Friedrich Meinecke, “Einleitung,” to Ernst ­Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe. Aufsätze über die deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik 1918/22, ed. Hans Baron (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1924), iii. 39  Ibid., iii-iv.

550

Conclusion: Spectator

tor Letters as having arisen from a shared political vision that had been forged in the crucible of the war: Saving Germany, because with Germany our intellectual world stood and stands in mortal danger, and then, within Germany, saving the great vital forces of our culture, and the social stratum that carries it, through the upheaval of the revolution, became the guiding thought of a small circle of kindred spirits that even during the war collected around Hans Delbrück and ­Troeltsch and came together once a week. Out of this circle arose several statesmen of the new democratic Germany. We became democrats because we realized that the national popular community, together with the viable aristocratic values of our history, could be preserved in no other way. Out of the exchange of ideas and information within this circle came much of what ­Troeltsch set down in the Spectator Letters.40

Johannes Rathje, a journalist and liberal politician, wrote in his obituary of ­Troeltsch that among the best that had been written about our political situation in the last years was to be found again and again in the political letters of the Kunstwart. Ernst ­Troeltsch was their author from the start, even when they still appeared under an alias. The deep historical learning that distinguished him was expressed here in a simply brilliant manner. With what strong arguments did he seek to reconcile the German educated class with the democratic development in the state and society – the credit surely also belongs to him that we are seeing the fruits of such labor slowly ripening today!41

Politician Perhaps even more remarkably, however, even as ­Troeltsch devoted himself to explaining the political fortunes of his country with such force and skill, he did not confine himself merely to commenting on them. As Rathje also emphasized in his necrology, “the political passions of those days did not keep him in the scholar’s study – he had to go out in order to be able to exert an influence on wider circles.”42 Although ­Troeltsch had always been politically active, once the war ended he immediately threw himself into party politics with all his considerable energy. He did not just endorse the German Democratic Party, he was among the earliest participants in founding it on November 16, 1918 and he also ran for office as a member of the party. On January 1, 1919, the Berliner Tageblatt ran an article commenting on the races for various seats in the city: 40 

Ibid., v.

41  Johannes

Rathje, “Ernst ­Troeltsch,” Kieler Zeitung, 56 (February 3, 1923); cited from Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 225. 42 Ibid.

Politician

551

The democratic lists for the three voting districts of Greater Berlin feature a series of very wellknown names. At the top of the list for the city of Berlin stands University Professor Dr. Ernst ­Troeltsch. As the successor of Pfleiderer, the scholar enjoys an impeccable academic reputation. His theological-philosophical writings breathe a liberal spirit. Up until now, he has not publicly emerged in politics. But whoever followed his political activity during the last years knows that even during the era of Bethmann Hollweg, to whom he stood close for a time, he stood up for a wholehearted politics of understanding and already then publicly championed the equal franchise in Prussia. As a speaker he appeals to his listeners through the ethical force and the rhetorical power of his delivery.43

Having gone on to win the election, ­Troeltsch served for the next year and a half as a representative for the German Democratic Party in the constituent Prussian assembly, where he acted as the State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, and he also took regular part in caucus meetings of his party in the Reichs­ tag. Alfred Weber, the brother of Max and also a founding member of the German Democratic Party, sent a slightly amused letter to Else Jaffé following a trip to Berlin in the spring of 1920, where, Weber wrote, I also saw ­Troeltsch – I was forced to think of Balzac’s milieu theory. He is now truly a consummate expressive type of his milieu: the way he sat there in his blue heavy jacket and wrist warmers, with his cubic figure, displaying the vital, but somewhat coarse expression of a ‘successful’ politician – he made a damned ‘democratic’ Berlin-Bavarian impression.44

Yet despite all of these time- and energy-consuming pursuits as a publicist, politician, and general public presence, Ernst ­Troeltsch’s true calling remained that of a scholar. More than most, and perhaps uniquely among his contemporaries, he managed to balance the different demands of the vita activa and the vita con­ templativa. But, in the end, what suited him best was the role of a critical “spectator.” He was, to be sure, an exceptionally perceptive, eloquent, and engaged spectator, but his greatest gifts were more for analytic reflection – as well as for exhorting and admonishing – and less so for the practical business of active political life. In the spring of 1919, apparently responding to concerns about how he could reconcile his responsibilities in the public sphere with those of the lecture hall and study, ­Troeltsch reassured the Dean of the University of Berlin that by his serving in the Ministry of Culture, I can at least hope in this way to be useful to the schools, to Wissenschaft, and to the universities and above all to protect established institutions. I can also assume that the new office will not last all too long. It goes without saying that I am not to be regarded as a representative of the Ministry of Culture and will therefore essentially remain in my main capacity as a professor and member of the faculty.45 43  Cited in Gangolf Hübinger, “Ernst ­ Troeltsch in Berlin. Im ‘Bund der Intellektuellen’,” ­Troeltsch-Studien 11 (2000), 176n39. 44  Ibid., 174. 45  Ernst ­Troeltsch to the Dean, April 23, 1919; cited in Drescher, 472.

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At his core, as ­Troeltsch recognized, he remained a man of the word, not of the deed; his talents and his passion were for thought, not action. Both words and deeds are necessary in political life, of course, but only rarely does the ability to shape them both coalesce at the highest potency in the same person. ­Troeltsch realized that, with his particular talents, he could be more effective, and most useful, if he devoted himself to the effort to understand and explain the world around him rather than try to affect it directly. But even within the relatively decorous halls of academe, life was often less than easy during the early years of the Republic. The political battles nearly everyone had engaged in during the war had left deep scars on all of the participants, and many of ­Troeltsch’s old colleagues and former friends now regarded him with suspicion, resentment, or worse. Many felt that ­Troeltsch, by virtue of his open endorsement of democracy and his repeated insistence that higher human values existed that transcended any particular nation or state, had betrayed his patriotic duty to his own country. In early 1920, ­Troeltsch wrote to Friedrich von Hügel, the Austrian-born private scholar living in Britain: “I have no more contact with Eucken,” referring to Rudolf Eucken, the Nobel prize-winning philosopher at Jena who had been one of the most prolific German commentators during the war. ­Troeltsch added that “Gierke,” too – the eminent legal scholar Otto von Gierke, a professor and former Rector of the University of Berlin – “is hostile toward me.”46 ­Troeltsch went on: In many ways, I have quite a difficult position with my work colleagues. But one must be able to bear such things if one is sure of oneself. These are simply tragic and terrible times, when one has to follow one’s sense of duty and discernment and let people do what they want. I know best myself that I never disowned my patriotic sense, no animosity from any quarter can confound me in that regard. That I followed the modern intellectual development everywhere, and here at home as well, with great concern and openly discussed it, is something you know and was true before the war. Now the revolution has created harrowing circumstances: people are insane and destroying the rest. In truth, starvation has only just begun and the situation will soon become a very desperate one. People are living off of old, saved-up possessions, such as clothes, shoes, and so on. The future is unimaginable. Perhaps the time will come when people will have to sell everything they have left of any value. Well, misery must be borne, and the soul must be able to prevail. But the most terrible dangers for the soul exist now more than ever, universal, pure egoism, the poisonous squabbling of everyone against everyone else, attempts to reduce all education to the lowest niveau, exorbitant prices for books, and the unaffordability of foreign literature. Difficult days are coming for intellectuals. For the time being, we are using all means to defend against proletarianization, but unfortunately as a result students and colleagues have become even more nationalistic and reactionary, which does not make the defense easier.47 46  Ernst

101.

47 

­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, January 31, 1920; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel,

Ibid., 101–02.

Politician

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Naturally, next to his extracurricular activities, ­Troeltsch also continued to perform the regular duties of a university faculty member. But those, too, had become even more burdensome as his fame, or notoriety, grew. In the winter semester of 1922–23, he held twice-weekly, four-hour lectures on the “History of Modern Philosophy” before several hundred auditors; one student at the time even spoke of counting “nearly one thousand” listeners in the audience.48 On Fridays, he conducted “tutorials” in the department of philosophy attended by more than a hundred students, and the office hours he held twice a week seem to have also attracted large numbers of people seeking advice or merely wanting to bask in the renowned professor’s presence.49 Gertrud von le Fort heard from a Berlin friend who reported that ­Troeltsch was being swamped by work: “the overcrowded office hours, the accumulating doctoral examinations, and all of the daily travails and annoyances.”50 As if all that were not already enough, in August 1922, ­Troeltsch became Dean of the philosophical faculty of Berlin University, which meant that he assumed administrative responsibility for a total of 80 professors and 5,000 students. “My colleagues voted for me as a kind of sign of reconciliation,” ­Troeltsch told Friedrich von Hügel, “after having largely caused me nothing but difficulties for six long years because of my ostensibly unpatriotic attitude. In that respect,” ­Troeltsch drily conceded, “the deanship represents progress.”51 All the while, he also worked steadily on what would become his last, great scholarly work, Historicism and its Problems, which he would finish and publish at the end of 1922. “I have to talk, write, and read an endless amount,” he wrote to Hügel, summarizing the content of his days. “In short, I am fighting for reason, prudence, order, work, and unavoidable concessions to the masses as bravely and assiduously as I can. I am not spared hours of complete despair, but inwardly I have remained calm and, to a certain degree, serene.”52 In those last few words there may have been more wishful thinking, or simply putting on a brave face, than a strict adherence to the truth would have dictated. For despite the seemingly boundless vitality and inexhaustible optimism that he had always exuded, despite his “infinite receptivity and constant will to create,” 48 

Wilhelm Pauck, Harnack and ­Troeltsch. Two Historical Theologians (New York: Oxford 1968), 46. 49 Cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Polymorphes Gedächtnis. Zur Einführung in die ­Troeltsch-Nekrologie,” in Ernst ­Troeltsch in Nachrufen. T ­ roeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 47. 50  Marie Kaiser to Gertrud von le Fort, July 20, 1922; cited from ibid. 51  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, December 7, 1922; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel, 143. 52  Ernst ­ Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, January 31, 1920; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel, 103. UP,

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as Meinecke put it, and his “objective, even brutally honest sense of reality and devout idealism,”53 there was a limit to even ­Troeltsch’s ability to remain hopeful and believe that everything would ultimately turn out for the better. He seemed to reach that limit in the summer of 1922, when Walther Rathenau was assassinated.

The Murdered Friend On the morning of Saturday, June 24, three young men riding in an automobile overtook the open convertible in which Rathenau was being driven to work and killed him with a volley of bullets from their semi-automatic weapons, tossing a hand grenade in the open passenger compartment for good measure.54 It was a spectacular, shocking murder: that January, Rathenau had been named the Foreign Secretary of Germany and was thus one of the highest-ranking officials in the country. His violent death in what everyone realized, even before the culprits had been identified, could only have been a politically motivated assassination sent a wave of fear and revulsion through the nation. Gustav Mayer, the journalist and historian of the German workers’ movement, witnessed the following emotional scene the next day: On the Sunday after the murder of Rathenau, when the perpetrators were not yet known, we were at Meinecke’s house in Dahlem for a tea party. ­Troeltsch sat in a circle of men and women on the veranda and, as so often, he shouldered the majority of the conversation. It was naturally devoted to speculation about the political camp the murderers of Rathenau may have belonged to. To the scholar of canon law Ulrich Stutz, who in spite of his Swiss origins was a rabid German nationalist, it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that only communists could have been the suspects. ­Troeltsch then slammed his fist so furiously on the table that the cups and plates rattled and a few ladies jumped up in fright. “Who has domesticated political murder in Germany?” he shouted. “Were Kurt Eisner and Rosa Luxemburg murdered by communists? Who constantly agitated against Rathenau’s policies? Who relentlessly maligned his person? It was always those from the right, it was always, again and again, the enemies of the new state. It did not take many days before it emerged that ­Troeltsch, and not Stutz, had made the correct assumption.55

As heinous as the deed itself was, and as disturbing as its broader political implications obviously were, Rathenau’s death also dealt a powerful personal blow to ­Troeltsch from which seems never to have fully recovered. He had known Rathenau at least since the beginning of the war, when both became early and active 53 

Meinecke, “Einleitung,” Spektator-Briefe, iv-v. For further details, see Schölzel, 370–72. 55  Gustav Mayer, Erinnerungen. Vom Journalisten zum Historiker der deutschen Arbeiter­ bewegung (Zurich: Europa, 1949), 333. 54 

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members of Wilhelm Solf’s “club,” the German Society 1914, and they had grown increasingly close over the years. Even though ­Troeltsch had decided not to sign Rathenau’s panicky call for a levée en masse of the German people on October 8, 1918, the fact that Rathenau had asked Troeltsch to join him in issuing it indicates an intimacy between them that went beyond a merely cordial professional relationship. Meinecke recorded a telling episode that took place just a few days after the Kaiser had abdicated.: Rathenau and ­Troeltsch called together a small gathering to consult about an appeal that was supposed to exhort the bourgeois elements in Germany to grasp the hand of the working classes and, in common cause against Bolshevism, create the new German republic.56

Meinecke recounted that the draft of the appeal they were writing contained the phrase “that we should ‘endorse’ the revolutionary change.” For Meinecke, the quintessential Vernunftrepublikaner who had only gradually made his way to an acceptance of the new democratic state, to formally approve the revolution itself went a step too far and he said he could never sign an appeal to “endorse” it. “But then ­Troeltsch excitedly exclaimed that it would be deplorable if the German bourgeoisie would not understand during this difficult hour how to come together.”57 Not surprisingly, given such an inauspicious start, the “Democratic People’s League,” as Rathenau and ­Troeltsch called their joint political project and which they formally founded on November 16, 1918, did not even last until the end of the month.58 They abandoned that stillborn effort in order to concentrate their energies on the much larger and, it seemed, more promising German Democratic Party, which Rathenau also helped to found and went on to serve as its elected representative.59 Before Rathenau became Foreign Minister in early 1922, he had assumed the post of Minister of Reconstruction in May 1921, after which he and ­Troeltsch were able to socialize only occasionally. Gertrud von le Fort recalled a “gathering at the ­Troeltschs’ home that gave me the opportunity to meet many of the new men in the government, among them the brilliant and gracious Walther Rathenau.”60 But otherwise, as ­Troeltsch himself later regretfully said, “I saw him 56 Meinecke,

Autobiographische Schriften, 300. Ibid., 301. 58 See Hans Martin Barth, “Der Demokratische Volksbund. Zu den Anfängen des politischen Engagements der Unternehmer der Berliner Elektrogrossindustrie im November 1918,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 16/17 (1968), 254–66. 59  See Werner Stephan, Aufstieg und Verfall des Linksliberalismus 1918–1933: Geschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Partei (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973). 60  Von le Fort, Hälfte des Lebens, 144. 57 

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only rarely.”61 Yet for ­Troeltsch there was no question either about Rathenau’s importance to his country or about the likely consequences of his murder for its future, which created yet another crisis that ­Troeltsch laid explicitly at the feet of “German fascists”: He was the most brilliant man in the government, a representative of the highest intellectual and financial aristocracy, disposed in the highest degree toward social progress, a world-famous author, a fervent patriot, and to a certain degree a successful minister. […] He was, with his standing and his connections around the world, the only suitable man for the post at that moment, he knew the rules of the game in the exclusive diplomatic world, and he was a fearless, upright man, who made no secret before his opponents of what he considered the true ultimate reasons for the terrible situation in Germany and the world. And it was precisely this man, a last pillar of credit, whom the murderous organization of German fascists had to bring down! No wonder that the impression is shocking. Behind this murder threaten civil war and chaos. Now, a dispersal of the Reichstag and every election rally becomes a battleground with hand grenades and machine guns.62

In the eulogy he delivered on June 29, five days after Rathenau’s death and held before a “silent circle” in the German Society 1914, ­Troeltsch displayed a “desolation beyond compare,” as one of those present put it, and in his speech he painted the image of a “bleakly darkened future.”63 The following month, ­Troeltsch admitted how hard it had been for him to speak that day and to utter words out loud “which one can write down but which were almost impossible for me to say because of a burning, choking sensation in my throat.”64 Later that August, still under the effect of his friend’s death, ­Troeltsch explained in a letter to Friedrich von Hügel, who was then trying to arrange for him to come to England to lecture at the University of London, why such a trip would be physically, financially, and even psychologically difficult for him: The murder of Rathenau, who was a close friend of mine, the threatening disintegration of the Empire, the orgies of viciousness and stupidity, the continuing difficulties of one’s own financial situation, the fear of the winter: all of that, together with overwork and my worries about my wife, which I hope are now over, have put me into a dismal and depressed state of mind in which I cannot even think of such major things as traveling to London. For the way I feel now is like a mountain that I can hardly surmount. Still, those are depressive states that pass with physical reinvigoration. A deep sorrow will probably never leave me as long as I live. Insofar as I lived for earthly things, I have lived for my fatherland, and I now see a hopeless degradation; I am also at odds with a substantial percentage of the people of my class and profession 61 

Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Gefährlichste Zeiten (August 1922), Spektator-Briefe; KGA 14, 564. Ibid., 563. Indicating that the word for fascist had not yet become standardized, ­Troeltsch here also spelled it Faszisten. 63  Heinrich Spiero, Schicksal und Anteil. Ein Lebensweg in deutscher Wendezeit (Berlin: Wegweiser, 1929), 299; cited from editor’s introduction to Ernst ­Troeltsch, “Dem ermordeten Freunde;” KGA 15, 459. 64 ­Troeltsch, “Gefährlichste Zeiten,” Spektator-Briefe; KGA 14, 563. 62 

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because I do not believe in a restauration and also do not wish for it. Entirely new paths would have to be taken, and no one wants to see them.65

While the grief over Rathenau’s death and everything it entailed would continue to weigh heavily on ­Troeltsch, as his letter to Hügel makes plain he was also constantly beset by many other worries. In mid-1921, his wife Marta had developed gall bladder disease and had to be confined to her bed for long stretches of time; in October she underwent an operation to remove the organ and she only slowly recovered.66 With the steadily rising inflation in Germany, money also became an acute concern. Although ­Troeltsch received one of the highest salaries at the University of Berlin, “the financial circumstances for German professors are extremely unfavorable today,” he told Hügel in August 1921. “We hardly have enough beyond what’s needed for a house, clothes, and food.”67 To compensate for the devalued currency and to bring in extra income, he began to accept ever more offers to write and lecture for honoraria, adding further to his already Herculean workload. He confessed he even took on the deanship partly because of the additional salary it gave him: “it is a colossal amount of work,” he revealed to Hügel, “but it brings in some money. And the latter is unfortunately so terribly important now.”68 Despite her own difficulties, Marta also expressed concern about her overburdened spouse. “I hardly even see my husband now,” she had written already in March 1919 to Gertrud von le Fort, “he is doing an incredible amount, and I am often worried how he bears the enormous workload.”69 In a letter from the previous month, ­Troeltsch had lamented to Paul Natorp that he was already “half-dead from proceedings, writing, meetings, lectures, correspondence,”70 and the general situation seemed to become only more desperate. Even so, it was still possible – and, as ­Troeltsch assured Friedrich von Hügel, it was “absolutely necessary”71 – to restore body and mind by taking short holidays in his native Bavaria, particularly on Lake Starnberg southwest of Munich at the foot of the Alps. There ­Troeltsch liked to spend his free summer days swimming in the cool waters of the lake.72 With plenty of food, fresh air, exercise 65 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, July 25, 1922; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel, 131–

66 

Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, August 13, 1921; December 31, 1921; ibid., 112,

32.

117.

67 

Ibid., 110. On his salary, see Graf, “Polymorphes Gedächtnis,” 51. Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, July 25, 1922; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel, 133. 69  Graf, “Polymorphes Gedächtnis,” 51. 70  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Paul Natorp, February 3, 1919; cited in KGA 15, 12. 71  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, August 13, 1921; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel, 110. 72 ­Troeltsch was known to be an impassioned swimmer, and when he lived in Heidelberg, he could often be seen in the summer months at a public bathhouse on the Neckar river. The philosopher Erich Rothacker recalled going to the Neckarbad as a student on a hot summer day 68 

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and, above all, peace and calm, ­Troeltsch was finally able to return to the things that mattered most to him – but only all too briefly. “At the beginning of September I have to speak in Kiel,” he wrote to Hügel in late August 1922, regretting that his much-needed vacation “will thus soon be over.”73

Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics The lecture ­Troeltsch casually mentioned he was scheduled to give in Kiel – and which he would hold a second time in October in Berlin, and then once more in Düsseldorf – would turn out to be the last major address of his life. The resulting, posthumously published text, Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics, is also one of the most ambitious and intellectually exciting works that he produced in a career that had overflowed with prodigious feats of scholarly imagination.74 Combining a sweeping overview of two millennia of European political, philosophical, religious, and legal thought with an acute analysis of the turbid state of the contemporary world, Natural Law and Humanity also contains the distillation of the painful lessons he had learned during the war about how abstract thought could be mobilized, and misused, as a weapon of cultural destruction. The final product is an enthralling, panoramic portrait of how the most distant past continued to shape the immediate present, and how that present demanded urgent decisions about the future, resulting in a riveting account that was as compelling as it was distressing – and prophetic. It is uncertain who had invited him to speak at the University of Kiel on September 7. Otto Baumgarten, an old acquaintance and a professor of theology in Kiel as well as the sitting President of the Protestant Social Congress, may have been partly behind it. In any event, following the revolutionary upheavals there, Kiel had unexpectedly become a good place to talk about world politics, and ­Troeltsch delivered his speech in the main auditorium of the university with his customary “powerful vividness and great rhetorical temperament.”75 As was also often the case, however, his dense train of thought, filled with recondite allusions and witnessing “a stocky man spring off of the diving board with great force. It was a classic head dive. The man was Ernst ­Troeltsch.” See Erich Rothacker, Heitere Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1963), 57. 73  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, August 24, 1922; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel, 134. 74 ­Troeltsch had an abiding interest in the concept of natural law; see the excellent essay by Christopher Adair-Toteff, “Ernst ­Troeltsch and the Philosophical History of Natural Law,” Brit­ ish Journal for the History of Philosophy 3/4 (2005), 733–44. See also Austin Harrington, “Ernst ­Troeltsch’s Concept of Europe,” European Journal of Social Theory 7/4 (2004), 479– 498 75  See the editorial report in KGA 15, 480.

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to thinkers and ideas that would take libraries to explicate, was not easy for everyone to follow. One anonymous reporter for the Kieler Neueste Nachrichten found it “very interesting, almost always captivating, although the terribly hackneyed topic of the contradiction between the ‘civilization’ of the West and the ‘culture’ of the middle of Europe” had formed the center of the talk.76 That was about as illuminating as saying that Dante’s Inferno is about hell. ­Troeltsch met with a more appreciative audience the second time he delivered the lecture in Berlin on October 24. The speech was held in the beautiful redbrick Bauakademie that had been designed in the 1830s by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and stood opposite the royal palace on the other side of the River Spree. The occasion for the address was the second annual celebration of the founding of the German College for Politics – Deutsche Hochschule für Politik – which had been established in 1920 as a means of promoting the kind of political education that many had felt had been so disastrously lacking in Germany and, by its absence, had contributed to the catastrophe of the war. The original board of trustees had included Ernst Jäckh, Friedrich Naumann, Friedrich Meinecke, Hugo Preuß, Max Weber, Gertrud Bäumer, and Moritz Julius Bonn. Some – most prominently Naumann and Weber – had died since its founding, but the institution was a stalwart supporter of the new state. With as many as 2,000 listeners in attendance for ­Troeltsch’s lecture in the Bauakademie, it was not the largest audience he had ever enjoyed, but it was surely one of the most illustrious. Former Chancellor Friedrich Ebert, and since August 1919 the first democratically elected President of Germany, was present, as were “numerous representatives of the imperial and state ministries, of the academy, politics, and commerce.”77 Carl Heinrich Becker, a deputy of the Prussian Ministry of Education, attended in his official capacity, as did Adolf Köster, who spoke a few words of introduction representing the Ministry of the Interior, followed by Arnold Brecht who spoke in the name of the entire government.78 Then, finally, standing in front of these assembled dignitaries of the new democratic Germany, Ernst ­Troeltsch told them how they had all arrived there, what perils still lurked in the shadows, and to suggest, however tentatively, how they might all stay on the path on which their country had improbably embarked. ­Troeltsch began his lecture on Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics by recalling one of the most agonizing and damaging experiences of the entire war, namely the “cultural and moral propaganda” that, ­Troeltsch was careful to em76 

Ibid., 481. the preface to Ernst ­Troeltsch, Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik. Vor­ trag bei der zweiten Jahresfeier der Deutschen Hochschule für Politik (Berlin: Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1923), 2. Now in KGA 15, 493–512. 78  Cf. the editorial report in KGA 15, 485–86. 77  From

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phasize, “both sides engaged in.”79 Those verbal campaigns between the warring nations had demonstrated the paradoxical phenomenon that abstract ideas originally drawn from the realms of ethics and the philosophy of history could acquire an exceedingly destructive force when they were used offensively as “instruments of war.” For, in that process, and precisely because they were employed to motivate enormous masses of people to fight and kill, those ideas had become coarsened into crude weapons designed not to promote calm reflection but rather only to incite the elemental feelings of “love or hate, admiration or contempt, moral right or moral wrong.”80 At the same time, ­Troeltsch noted, the values embodied in those ideas never seemed to undergo a critical examination, particularly with respect to the question of whether they were compatible with the ways they were being implemented. “In general,” he explained, in another observation that applied to all participants in the culture war, both inside and outside of Germany, “in today’s terribly intensified struggle for existence, it has become the role of morality, at least of public and political morality, that it essentially serves as a weapon for the moral devaluation of one’s opponents, but not as the rule of one’s own behavior.” There had certainly been hypocrisy at work in the generalized character assassinations of whole nations perpetrated during the war. But those were, so to speak, merely surface phenomena that concealed something much more important and disturbing. And there, behind or below those “current and practical” realities of intellectual warfare, ­Troeltsch said, stood, “an abiding and theoretical problem.”81 That “problem” consisted in the difference between the assumptions within the “political, historical, and ethical thought” shared by the peoples within the larger “Western European and American” sphere and those held by those within the narrower German orbit.82 It was a problem, of course, that ­Troeltsch himself had spent a good deal of the previous six years trying to understand and explain, and which he, more than anyone else, had elevated into public consciousness as a problem. But while most thinking people were aware that this problem existed, they had mainly misunderstood it, usually confusing cause and effect, which meant that they also misconstrued both its origins and its true nature. The war had not initially arisen, as so many subsequently came to believe, out of a clash of opposing ideologies. On the contrary, ­Troeltsch argued here, as he had repeatedly done before, the gruesome conflict between the two great intellectual and cultural spheres of Western and Central Europe had started not as a result of the differ­ ences between them but rather because of their similarities. The war had occurred 79 ­Troeltsch, 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 

Ibid., 494.

Naturrecht und Humanität, KGA 15, 493.

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because the fundamental desire for power could not be equally satisfied for all involved, and it was a desire that was common to all of the major states – expressed primarily, but not exclusively, in their mutual striving for economic superiority backed and secured by military might. The deeper differences among them, ignored or suppressed before, emerged only after the fact, when they were all trying to exterminate each other in their quest for supremacy, as did the true importance of those differences, especially regarding the political systems prevailing in each domain. Eventually, the war then did become not just a struggle for survival but also a contest between competing conceptions of the world and how it should be politically organized. But it also became clear that all sides were operating under different sets of premises even when the same words were being used, and the war had destroyed the will and, moreover, the ability to assume enough good faith – and even sufficient humanity – on the part of all the combatants to incline them toward any treatment of their enemies other than their total annihilation. “Even entirely leaving aside the question of will,” ­Troeltsch said, “people could not mutually understand one another.” And, with no other apparent solution available to this total breakdown of understanding, a failure in which each side demonized the other because of their real or, more often, their merely perceived differences, they all sought instead their complete and mutual eradication.83 All of those ideas would have been familiar enough to anyone who had attentively followed ­Troeltsch’s career thus far. But then he introduced a new and dramatic insight. He proposed that the same diabolical logic that had governed the destructive dynamic of intellectual warfare that had played itself out among the warring states had subsequently and insidiously been reproduced within Germany itself, turning its own internal political battles into a miniature version of that larger ideological confrontation. As the war stalled and the proponents of peace and democracy in Germany began to take an increasingly public stand, they were met with equally determined resistance by those of their compatriots who viewed those goals as a threat not just to their material interests but to the very existence of Germany as they knew and wanted it. In the “intellectual battle” that ensued inside of the country, ­Troeltsch explained, the domestic “democratic, pacifistic directions that favored centralized national government, were inclined toward the league of nations, and sought international rapprochement”, were duly regarded, and denounced, by their German opponents as “Western,” against which those antagonists promoted instead “a specifically German, historical, and organic way of thinking.”

83 Ibid.

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Conclusion: Spectator

The inimical result of this internecine intellectual struggle was that “the campaign slogans that split the masses of people in the world war have been transferred today into our own midst.”84 ­Troeltsch was arguing that the savage “culture war” originally waged on Germany by the Allies had perversely been imported into Germany itself and, once domesticated there, had become profoundly self-destructive. In a slightly bizarre turn of events, the transnational dispute between “the West” and German culture had thereby become a thoroughly German affair, pitting Germans against one another in a bitter ideological conflict that imitated or mirrored that larger one. Within Germany, both opposing sides championed incompatible visions for their country and its future, one representing ostensibly “Western” ideals within the German context and the other defending supposedly more “native,” homegrown values. And, even more disastrously, the Germans carried out this “intellectual civil war” on themselves with the same ferocity and ruthlessness as the international “war of minds” that had first instigated it. “Where does that come from?” ­Troeltsch asked, and more particularly: “What is the coherent essence of Western European thought?”85 It was to the attempt to answer those two apparently simple questions – first to elucidate the essential intellectual elements of European culture and then to throw light on its antagonistic German counterpart – that he devoted the remainder of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics. And what followed was a stunning tour de force of intellectual compression and synthesis, combining a lifetime of learning and thinking into a tightly packed survey of cultural history improbably wedged within the confines of a single lecture. In it, ­Troeltsch sought to outline no less than the “basic concepts of the European intellectual world and religiosity,” which, furthermore, had “their roots not just in the modern zeal for revolution, but rather in an intellectual history stretching over millennia.”86 At the core of that protracted development he would identify two basic concepts, to wit “natural law and humanity,” which he said found their modern expression in “the idea of progress.” But it is crucial to keep in mind that the focus for ­Troeltsch remained on how these fundamentally European ideas, recognized and shared by all the peoples who existed within a common cultural sphere, had taken on a specific meaning within the German context, where certain counterforces had arisen much later that sought to overturn or abolish the shared values those ideas expressed.

84 Ibid. 85 

Ibid., 495.

86 Ibid.

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The first point ­Troeltsch insisted on was that those common ideas were neither new nor indeed distinctly “Western” at all, but instead represented deeply rooted, “ancient European ideas that emerged from Antiquity and Christianity” and formed the general foundation of all continental thought. Those ideas had persisted ever since, although they also had constantly undergone modification and refinement for over two thousand years as they were adapted to changing circumstances and applied to unforeseen ends. The contrasting “German concepts,” on the other hand, were relative latecomers, like the state itself in which they took root; they were, ­Troeltsch said, “new, modern, unproven in world-historical terms, and theoretically unfinished.” That realization produced the first enigma: although of more recent vintage, “German thought presents itself as conservative, aristocratic, and authoritarian,” whereas Western European thought, while resting more solidly on a much older, common inheritance, is “progressive, democratic, and open to revolution.” “It is this paradox,” ­Troeltsch said, “that we must understand.”87 For it fed into the further paradox that, whereas the revolutionary energies of the West had been tamed over time and channeled into social and socialist movements, with the democratic constitutional state that emerged from them reflecting a thoroughly bourgeois character, the more recent German political and historical thinking was in thrall to the still volatile ideas of the Romantic counter-revolution, which sought to demolish the foundations of Western European thought, extending even into the mathematical, mechanistic natural sciences, and to erect in state and society the ‘organic’ ideal of an aesthetic, religious common spirit filled with a very anti-bourgeois idealism.88

On the one side of the debate, then, “whoever believes in the eternal, divine natural law, the homogeneity of human beings, the uniform destiny of man, and therein the essence of humanity, perceives the German doctrine as a strange mixture of mysticism and brutality.” On the other side, however, “whoever sees an abundance of individual entities in history that establishes eternally vital, individual formations out of a constantly new law, views the Western European world of ideas as empty rationalism and egalitarian atomism, as shallowness and hypocrisy all at once.”89 Having staked out the broadest parameters of the ideological clash that had taken shape within Germany during recent years, ­Troeltsch then set about uncovering the deeper currents that had informed and guided it. And it was here that he delivered a virtuoso performance of condensed intellectual historical reconstruc87 Ibid. 88  89 

Ibid., 496. Ibid., 496–97.

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tion, looking back into the furthest reaches of occidental culture to trace the evolution of some of the central elements within the “common European tradition” that had nourished the “Western European political and moral ideology” from its primordial beginnings and against which the “German Romantic” one had only very recently risen up in opposition. In ­Troeltsch’s reconstruction, the ideas of natural law, humanity, and progress – in his view, the quintessential building blocks of the European understanding of itself – all had their basis in the intellectual world of Late Antiquity, in Greek and particularly Roman stoicism – he singled out the pivotal role played by Cicero and by certain aspects of Roman law – that were then combined with the emergent tenets of Christianity. “The fundamental idea” that stood at the heart of this fusion “is the dignity of universal human reason in every individual, which can be traced to the universal natural and worldly law of the divine rational order that is expressed and refined in the ranks of individual beings.”90 According to this conception, the true nature of humanity consisted in the divine reason working within individuals, which allowed them to exert mastery over their sensuality and emotions, reproducing in the individual person a hierarchy of reason, or spirit, over matter that reflected the greater macrocosmic order. From there flowed the notions of an individual’s rights and duties, constituting the essential feature of all legal systems and coinciding with the rudiments of morality. “Ever since,” ­Troeltsch claimed, “human dignity is the ideal of natural law.”91 However, through the Christian doctrine of original sin, the conception of natural law grew to be more conservative and, in contrast to the constraints imposed by the repressive mechanisms of positive law, grew ever more sacrosanct and even deified. Given that our own human nature, in the Christian understanding, remained tarnished by sin, the Church placed significant controls on individual autonomy and on any rational self-realization that threatened to exceed acceptable limits. “Out of this amalgamation there arose the Christian natural law, which ruled for a thousand years, dominating the theology, jurisprudence, the theory of the state, politics, and history in the Middle Ages.” The authority of Aristotelian thought helped to integrate the corporatist, estates-based character of medieval society within a doctrine codifying the notion of an organic inequality among the constituent parts of a larger whole, but the purely individualistic natural law still remained in effect, if in somewhat attenuated form. Further modifications came from William of Ockham’s secularizing political ideas, as well as from the “Jesuitical theory of the right to revolution,” which obviously lent the

90  91 

Ibid., 497. Ibid., 498.

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idea a latent practical force.92 And on the basis of this modified Christian natural law, the “modern profane” notion of natural law was established, ­Troeltsch said, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, Johannes Althusius, and “many other more minor” thinkers. However, throughout this protracted, complex process, the duality of natural law continued to subsist in that, on the one hand, the essence of rulership and sovereignty in the community, the necessity of an authority regulating a sinful humanity, or even of a transference of popular rights to the governing power were taught and complemented by the entire theological doctrines of authority and providence, and, on the other, by counter movements against this absolutism basing themselves on innate, inalienable human rights resting on the divine world order.93

With the humanistic rediscovery of Antiquity during the Renaissance and the beginning of the scientific revolution that took place in the second half of the 1600s, several “new ideas and means” entered the mix. Although the terminology and basic ideas remained intact, these more recent innovations manifested themselves in a new progressive element that overlaid the absolutist natural law with what ­Troeltsch called a “radical bourgeois” iteration. As the dogma of original sin faded, a fundamental optimism regarding human nature and reason took its place, allowing the ideal of the rational self-formation of the individual, society, and the state to ascend during the Enlightenment. Even though Rousseau performed the “most radical application” of the “profane” idea of a progressive natural law, it was not until the French Revolution, ­Troeltsch argued, that it entered its “pure and radical” phase and culminated in the “unconditional popular sovereignty in a modern major state.”94 It was the French, then, who had first fully achieved the practical realization of the idea of humanity based on natural law, namely, “direct self-governance and fundamental political equality, the shared government of all.”95 Thus, ­Troeltsch was able to show that the development of what he called “democracy in the strict sense” – as opposed to the “system that should really be designated as liberalism,” which he deemed prevalent principally among “the Anglo-Saxons” who stressed “personal independence,” the “selection of leaders,” and who demanded “control by the people of the businesses run by these leaders”96 – occurred as the natural result of historical processes extending back to the very beginnings of European civilization. Hard upon this whirlwind tour through some of the predominant stations in the long genesis of modernity and its characteristic political expression as, or in, 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 

Ibid., 499.

95 Ibid. 96 Ibid.

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democracy, ­Troeltsch shifted focus slightly by raising the question of how its key components could have remained so remarkably resilient over such a long span of time against the powerful forces that had constantly opposed it. Essential to the robust longevity of this European legacy, he said, was that its constituent “conceptual mass” had always managed to retain its integrity by remaining essentially “homogenous,” preserving its ideational core that had enabled it “to consolidate into a relative unity in the case of a struggle against fundamental or politically dangerous antagonists.”97 The ability displayed by all those disparate but kindred intellectual elements to remain intact or to quickly regroup if momentarily ruptured was, in fact, exactly what that central conceptual integrity had demonstrated at the outbreak of the war. Despite all the “slackening and fragmentation” it had experienced over the years among the various countries of the West, “this entire world of ideas, when it was necessary, fused together against the German ideology and whipped up the enthusiastic instincts of all those who believed in universal human goals, humanity, natural law, and the moral law of nature against German barbarism.”98 In order to explain the emergence of this contrasting “German ideology,” and how it could have posed such a grave menace, ­Troeltsch then trained his attention on the origin and nature of that newer, potent, and specifically German phenomenon. “At first,” ­Troeltsch insisted, meaning for most of its historical existence, “German intellectual life” was not inherently distinct from that characterizing the rest of Europe, and for the longest time it naturally resided within the same larger “world of ideas.” “The German Middle Ages,” he claimed, “were of course just as suffused by Christian natural law as the rest of the Occident, and in German Catholicism it continues up to this day.”99 But in the early nineteenth century something happened, a decisive break occurred, veering away from that shared European continuity, when Romanticism took hold of the German imagination. In its totality, the Romantic movement represented, ­Troeltsch argued, a complete and real revolution, a revolution against respectable bourgeois sensibility and against a universal, uniform morality, and above all against the entire Western European mathematical, mechanical scientific spirit, against the concept of natural law that combined utilitarianism with morality, and against the barren abstraction of a universal and equal humanity.100

In ­Troeltsch’s conception of it, German Romanticism represented, in other words – and here he used another phrase for what may have been the first time that would later become notorious – a “conservative revolution,” a revolt on the right 97 

Ibid., 500.

99 

Ibid., 501. Ibid., 501–02.

98 Ibid. 100 

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against the spirit of the European Enlightenment, one fed by “metaphysical,” even “mystical and poetic” sources, privileging the “creative, spiritual, organic, transpersonal intellectual whole.”101 And out of this amalgam there then arose within Germany an entirely new idea of humanity: not the universally identical dignity of reason and the fulfillment of a uniform law, but rather the entirely personal and idiosyncratic total expression of the mind in all directions, first and foremost in the individual person and then in the community. But a different idea of community also emerges: it is not a contract or an instrumentally rational construction that create the state and community on the basis of individuals, but rather the transpersonal intellectual forces emanating from the elemental individuals, the popular spirit – Volksgeist – or the religious, aesthetic idea.102

In the same way, a peculiarly German “idea of development” came to supplant the older pan-European “idea of progress,” producing a worldview in which “not the homogeneous increase of reason, prosperity, freedom, and practical organization striving ever higher toward the unity of humanity” furnished the common framework for understanding all human life and social interaction, “but rather a hierarchy of qualitatively different cultures, where the respective dominant people hands the torch on to the following one, and where the totality of life is represented only through the mutual complementarity of them all taken together.”103 This tendency not just to privilege difference over equality, but also to establish a comparative system of value among such real or perceived differences, wherein certain individuals, and therefore certain societies and cultures, were considered innately superior – or inferior – to others, led to fateful political consequences for the Germans. It meant that “the presumed inequality of individuals,” while not inevitably entailing “their disenfranchisement and the curtailment of their autonomy, did [involve] the necessity of segmentation, supplementation, gradation, and the transferal of leadership onto great men, from whom fundamentally the spirit of the whole emanates and is organized.”104 That is one of the most chilling insights in ­Troeltsch’s entire essay: the shift he saw beginning in the German Romantic era away from an adherence to the venerable European tradition upholding a unified conception of humanity with equal rights and dignity had simultaneously given rise to a specific model of political leadership. The new, alternate German notion of intrinsic and, above all, qualitative differences among human beings entailed the logical corollary that at the top of society there should be a correspondingly exceptional figure, a “great man,” a preeminent leader who represented the epitome of the people he supposedly em101 

Ibid., 503.

102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 

Ibid., 504.

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bodied and around whom everything ought to revolve. The disastrous example of Wilhelm II provided an obvious warning about the perils of such a model, but the type clearly contained the ongoing potential for future dangers as well. Those risks had been compounded by the further debasement and coarsening of the Romantic “German ideology” as the nineteenth century progressed, in which the “original idealism” out of which Romanticism had first sprung gradually devolved into what ­Troeltsch called a “hard realism” that displayed “contempt for the universal idea of humanity,” a “mindless respect for success and violence,” and “the same imperialism as everywhere else in the world.”105 Finally, ­Troeltsch said, the originally ethereal German strain of thought, when it commingled with the grubby sphere of practical politics, absorbed the same vulgar form of “Darwinism” that – although it “accorded very little with the intention of its originator – devastated the political and moral ideas in various parts of Western Europe as well”: Ever since, German political thinking has displayed a strange ambivalence that strikes everyone who stands outside of it: on the one hand imbued with the remnants of Romanticism and a sublime intellectuality, on the other realistic to the point of cynicism and complete indifference toward all intellect and morality, but above all inclined toward mixing both in an odd fashion, brutalizing Romanticism and romanticizing cynicism.106

These were all arguments, as we know, that ­Troeltsch had refined in his engagements with various domestic opponents during the latter part of the war. But here he lent them an even broader and deeper historical relevance. And by portraying the internal political struggle within Germany as reflecting the larger clash between the older European conceptions of universal natural law and humanity and the newer revisions, or inversions, of those ideas that had taken root among the purveyors of German exceptionalism, ­Troeltsch was able to enlist that greater European tradition as a formidable intellectual ally against those “brutal” and “cynical” national particularists within Germany. It was an inspired rhetorical move: in making it, ­Troeltsch was able to portray the conflict between the left and the right in Germany as something more than merely a struggle between the local forces of progressive democracy and conservative reaction. Rather, he showed it was also, or in actuality, a fundamental clash between an abiding set of ideas residing at the heart of European identity against which more narrowly German concerns were pitted as their virulent antithesis. ­Troeltsch had thus deftly turned a localized political battle into a more fundamental existential choice: the Germans could opt for an exclusively nativist vision of themselves and of their place in – or, rather, against – the world, or they could seek to reintegrate 105 Ibid. 106 

Ibid., 505.

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themselves within the comprehensive European community. They faced the choice, put bluntly, between Germany or humanity. In order to be able to choose the party of humanity, ­Troeltsch conceded, the Germans would have to learn how to overcome what he referred to as the “intellectual crisis” that was currently afflicting their nation. It would require “self-reflection and self-criticism,” and demand the “sustained work of our historical and ethical sciences.”107 Achieving the “cultural synthesis” – Kultursynthese – that he felt was necessary to reconcile the dichotomies that had divided not just Germany from Europe but also Germans from themselves would not, he acknowledged, be easy nor would it happen quickly; indeed, “it can be accomplished only through the work of generations.”108 But ­Troeltsch was convinced that such an inner reorientation would not require some “categorical reversal” or a “disavowal of our intellectual character, but rather only the revitalization of ideas that have been lost and the extension and adaptation of our tribal notion to world circumstances that today have enormously changed.”109 ­Troeltsch frankly admitted that there were major challenges standing in the way of that task. They were exemplified perhaps most alarmingly by the phenomenal success experienced by Oswald Spengler’s book, The Decline of the West, the second volume of which had just appeared in 1922 and had quickly gone through numerous editions:110 A work like Spengler’s book on decline, which derives mainly from Nietzsche, and the colossal impression it has made, points in precisely the opposite direction, toward the sharpest articulation of all the skeptical, amoral, pessimistic, and cynical implications of the politics of violence, Romantic aestheticism, and the idea of individuality. From all of that Spengler also very logically draws decline as a necessary consequence. For, with such ideas, one cannot exist and fight for the future. It acts like an ultimate confirmation of all the accusations by the Western Europeans and, faced with such an irresolvable conflict, simply surrenders the side of life. Whoever wants to live – and our people want to live – may not go down this path.111

In concluding Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics, ­Troeltsch advocated, as opposed to Spengler’s darkly determinist vision of inescapable general 107 

Ibid., 507. Ibid., 510. 109 Ibid. 110 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Welt­geschichte, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1920–22). 111 ­Troeltsch, Naturrecht und Humanität, 510–11. ­ Troeltsch also wrote critical but even-handed reviews of both volumes of Spengler’s book, cf. KGA 13, 446–59 and ibid., 636– 46. While acknowledging the achievements of Spengler’s book, ­Troeltsch also emphasized its “dangerous traits” and cautioned that following its prescriptions too literally would mean that “the book and the tendencies it represents would themselves be an active contribution to the downfall of the West;” KGA 13, 458. 108 

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obsolescence and cultural doom, that the “idea of fundamental personal maturity, responsibility, and the autonomy of personality” offered instead a powerful intellectual antidote for staving off such pessimism and complacency in the face of inevitable-seeming developments. And ­Troeltsch viewed the fact that such ideas had an origin and reach that extended well beyond any particular national sphere constituted an essential element of their power: In the idea of human rights that are not granted by the state, but rather themselves serve it and all of society as ideal prerequisites, therein lies a kernel of truth and of demands by the European ethos than must not be neglected, but must be incorporated into those ideas.112

By affirming that “European ethos” and firmly (re)naturalizing it within the German context, ­Troeltsch felt that some of the danger emanating from the German-nationalist propagators of a “Darwinistic-amoralistic” Realpolitik he had already excoriated back in August 1918 might be mitigated.113 For, he said in closing: Contained within all of the ideas about a League of Nations, the organization of humanity, the limitation of the forces of destruction and of egoism, there is an inalienable moral core that we absolutely must not forfeit, even if we are so painfully aware of its difficulties and misuse.114

The “moral core,” the “kernel of truth,” that ­Troeltsch saw contained within the two-thousand-year history of European culture and were encapsulated in the ideas of natural law and humanity did not offer a panacea for the ills besetting Germany. But they would, he believed, provide the best safeguard against a repetition of the paroxysms of chaos and violence from which the continent and the world were only just beginning to emerge. Thus, in a way and in the end, ­Troeltsch did diagnose something like a German Sonderweg, a special path leading away from the long, broad highway of European – and not just Western – history and culture, a divergence that could take Germany ever further away from common notions of human freedom and dignity, dangerously deviating from what he had called the “moral core” defining the center of the European conception of itself. However – and this is the decisive, often overlooked point – it was not inevitable that Germany go down that path. For most of its recorded existence, Germany had been, ­Troeltsch had argued, an integral part of that larger European development, different of course in many of its particulars, as were all of the other major participants in their own particular ways. But Germany had nevertheless always been a recognizable member of the same cultural community. It 112 ­Troeltsch,

Naturrecht und Humanität, 510. “Zweierlei Realpolitik,” Der Tag, 18/184 (August 8, 1918), 1. 114 ­Troeltsch, Naturrecht und Humanität, 510. 113 ­Troeltsch,

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was only within the previous one hundred years, after the rise of what ­Troeltsch had identified as a separatist, “Romantic” German self-conception, that a genuinely aberrant alternative had emerged, one that prized not reason and light, but rather mystery and darkness, one that glorified power and even violence, and ultimately did not serve life but exalted death. The German Romantic ideology elevated the individual, but only as the exceptional, “higher” or “superior” exemplar of its kind, be that on the level of discrete human beings, entire nations, or even so-called “races.” And it flaunted the willing embrace of such distinctions defining a supposedly natural rank with the sometimes tacit, sometimes overt, suggestion that such inherently superior beings should assume their rightful place over all the others they regarded as beneath them. But this anomalous, German-bred conception, in addition to having materialized only very recently, maintained an uneasy coexistence alongside that older, deeper strain of the European inheritance that had also continued to persist within Germany itself, enduring despite the various challenges it had faced up to ­Troeltsch’s own day. During the war, once the Kulturkrieg had been ignited within Germany and turned Germans against themselves, these two mutually antagonistic self-definitions – one identifiably European, one more parochially and defiantly German – had engaged in an increasingly ferocious battle against each other to determine the future of the country. Almost miraculously, and thankfully, the proponents of a more European Germany had won – at least for the moment. But, as the assassination of Walther Rathenau only five months earlier had forcibly demonstrated, the advocates of a more narrowly German solution were unappeased and persisted as a mortal threat. The crucial point remains, however, that it was not preordained that either side would ultimately prevail, and the outcome would in any event depend on the private decisions made by millions of individual citizens. Whether Germany continued to hew to the path of a common European tradition or choose to deviate from it to follow its own idiosyncratic course was, in the autumn of 1922, far from certain. But in either case, as ­Troeltsch had emphasized with stark urgency, the future would necessarily be the result of conscious, deliberate choices on the part of individual Germans themselves. Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics was instantly recognized as a major statement, even a definitive summation of the current intellectual and political situation in Germany. It has been aptly called “­Troeltsch’s political testament to the German people.”115 As we have seen, it was also an insistent warning, calling on his fellow Germans not just to reflect on the general state of affairs, but also 115 

Schwarz, “Deutschland und Westeuropa bei Ernst ­Troeltsch,” 539.

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to make a decision and to act on that decision. One of its most perceptive contemporary readers, and someone who realized its message required a purposive ­response, was Thomas Mann, who had just experienced his own remarkable political conversion from the stance he had articulated just a few years before in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, published in 1918. In many respects, that work read like an extended essay written in the spirit of the Romantic “German ideology” as described by ­Troeltsch. But to the surprise of many, and to the dismay of more than a few, Thomas Mann had changed his mind in the meantime. On October 13, 1922, Mann spoke out in bold affirmation of the new democratic state in his lecture “On the German Republic,” which he held in Berlin eleven days before ­Troeltsch delivered his own address on related subjects. Despite some similarities in their themes – “I will openly say,” Mann announced to his surprised listeners, “that my intention is to win your support for the republic and for what is called democracy and what I call humanity”116 – there is no evidence that Mann had been directly influenced by ­Troeltsch in making his decision to switch his own allegiances to the side of democracy. But as soon as ­Troeltsch’s speech was published, Mann recognized in ­Troeltsch a kindred spirit and an important ally, and Mann energetically proselytized for the widest reception of ­Troeltsch’s essay, saying that “I recommend its study to everyone.”117 Thomas Mann’s endorsement was published in September 1923, too late to give ­Troeltsch the hope that his message, and his warning, were being heard. As we know, ­Troeltsch had if anything redoubled his own efforts in the immediate aftermath of the war, shouldering the responsibilities of formal political office and the role of public preceptor on top of his already demanding obligations as a professor, scholar, and academic administrator. On top of everything else, in late December 1922 he somehow managed to complete the massive first volume of his book on Historicism and its Problems, which ran to over 770 closely printed pages. But he confessed to Friedrich von Hügel that the push to finish it left him feeling “half-dead.”118 Under the combined weight of worry about both the present and future fortunes of Germany, which he had so incisively analyzed in Nat­ ural Law and Humanity, not to mention the burdens of the many other mundane 116  Thomas

Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” Essays II 1914–1926. Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, eds. Hermann Kurtzke et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2002), 15.1, 522. 117  Thomas Mann, “Briefe aus Deutschland [IV],” ibid., 706–16, here 714; Mann recycled the passages on ­ Troeltsch, mainly verbatim, for several other purposes, including “[Die Schweiz im Spiegel],” ibid., 699–705, and “Naturrecht und Humanität,” ibid., 723–26. 118  Ernst ­Troeltsch to Friedrich von Hügel, December 29, 1922; Briefe an Friedrich Hügel, 147.

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concerns associated with the rapidly escalating inflation and the just as rapidly dwindling ability to afford even the most basic necessities of life, ­Troeltsch began to succumb to an unaccustomed sense of resignation and even hopelessness as the year drew to a close. Charles Wooten Pipkin, an American student studying on a Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford, visited ­Troeltsch a few days before Christmas 1922 and, after their conversation, came away with the impression that ­Troeltsch was “a broken man.”119 Even earlier, and more alarmingly, his old friend Gertrud von le Fort had noticed a change in ­Troeltsch’s demeanor during their final encounter. As she wrote in a letter to Friedrich Gogarten, their last meeting was filled with a shadow in which, looking back, I am forced to recognize a premonition of what has now occurred. I found ­Troeltsch, despite his great physical vigor and energy, so strangely altered, tired, and actually hopeless, worn down by the prospect of German decline, which he experienced so powerfully that other, particularly religious and metaphysical, questions awakened almost no interest in him. He told me several times that he frequently wishes for death and that he was only bringing his work to an end, and that everything else did not matter to him much anymore. I firmly believe that there was a vague feeling for the nearness of death in him and at the same time a great readiness.120

On January 13, 1923, the same day French troops marched into Germany to occupy the industrial Ruhr region along the Rhine in reprisal for the German failure to fulfill the reparations requirements stipulated by the Versailles Treaty, ­Troeltsch fell ill with a severe case of flu that developed into a lung infection, accompanied by a series of heart attacks.121 At the end of the month, he received a visit from his friend, the art historian Werner Weisbach, who described the encounter in his autobiography: I learned that ­Troeltsch was seriously ill and his life was in danger as a result of a thrombosis. I immediately went to his apartment on the 28th. I saw the once so vigorous man, whose liberating and victorious laughter had often given joy to those around him, lying pale, listless, and gaunt in his pillows. He focused one of his kind glances on me that come from the depths, and from the few words that he produced with a weak voice I could tell that he knew how things stood with him and that he was prepared for death. He spoke of the physical pains he was suffering and said: “If I were not worried about what will become of my wife and son after my death, I would gladly and willingly die. To live in a world as it has now become no longer has any appeal or value for me.”122

Four days later, on February 1, 1923, a little more than two weeks before his fifty-eighth birthday, Ernst ­Troeltsch died. 119  Charles Wooten Pipkin, “‘Days that are Beyond Remembering’. ­Troeltsch’s Death and the Tragedy of Germany,” in Ernst T ­ roeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 437. 120  Cited in the Foreword to Ernst T ­ roeltsch in Nachrufen. ­Troeltsch-Studien 12 (2002), 109. 121  Ibid., 57. 122 Weisbach, Geist und Gewalt, 246.

Postscript Over the course of the next several decades, the German people would learn through bitter experience to be wary of the idea of a “hero” or a “great man.” ­Troeltsch himself had feared that one of the gravest dangers posed by the new German ideology as he had described it in Natural Law and Humanity was that it encouraged a belief in an absolute hierarchy of values, that it espoused the view that there were certain cultures, and certain people, that were by their nature superior to others, and he clearly saw, and rejected, both the ethical and political implications of such a belief. It would thus be contradictory to his own thinking to want to turn ­Troeltsch into a “hero” of any kind. But his current obscurity among the general population, and particularly in Germany, is hardly justified either. Commemorating the more recent German past is a complicated matter, and for good reason we have paid sustained attention to the failures and tragedies of that past. Such a critical focus has been, on balance, both necessary and welcome. Yet over the course of the last two hundred years of German history there have also been events and persons to celebrate, or at least worth remembering, as representing not the worst but the best of their country and time. As I hope the preceding book will have demonstrated, such a distinction applies uncontroversially, even supremely, to Ernst ­Troeltsch, who spent most of the last decade of his life tirelessly arguing and fighting for democracy and human decency, often in painful opposition to his own compatriots, and who devoted his final years to warning about the mortal dangers of straying from the common path of European culture and life. His principled and courageous actions, emanating from a profound moral conviction, deserve not just our recognition but also, even if it is belated, our gratitude. And today, when the values he championed have come under renewed assault, his ideas and example have if anything only grown in relevance.

Acknowledgements This book was written during a period of tremendous turmoil and uncertainty, both for me personally and for the world at large. Although I had been reading and thinking about Germany’s role in the First World War ever since my biography of Stefan George and his Circle appeared in 2002, I did not begin writing the current work until the fall of 2016, as the American presidential campaign entered its final phase. The outcome of that election and everything that followed made many of the themes explored in these pages appear to be more than merely historical, and our collective political life during the last four years has inevitably colored how I view the German struggle for democracy that took place over a century ago. In addition to the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020 and the subsequent social and economic upheavals it caused, painful personal circumstances also overshadowed the completion of this book. I want to express my sincere thanks to my many friends and colleagues who generously offered their kindness and support as I suffered my own trials during this time. In particular, I am especially grateful to Sonja Asal, Warren Breckman, Stanley Corngold, John Deak, Denise Della Rossa, David Gasperetti, Dirk Hohnsträter, Joel Isaac, Michael Khoda­ khorski, Robert Kispert, Daniel Mattern, Thomas Meyer, and Martin Ruehl. My friend John McCormick read the entire manuscript, providing helpful suggestions and much-needed encouragement; the title of the book was also his inspired idea. Others, such as Gary Herrigel, John Levi Martin, John McGreevy, John Duke Raimo, and Brent Sockness read portions of the manuscript and gave me positive feedback. Still others, such as Nicholas Rodger and Kendrick Clements, supplied useful bibliographic information, while some – Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, David Hollinger, Hans Joas, David O’Connor, Fred Rush, and Helmut Walser Smith – demonstrated through their interest in the project that it mattered not just to me. Finally, I thank Nancy Gerth for furnishing the published volume with a meticulously crafted index for which future readers will also be thankful. I am deeply honored that my book is being published by Mohr Siebeck and very grateful for the efforts of my editor, Katharina Gutekunst, and of the series editor, Albrecht Beutel, to make that happen. The press, founded in 1801 and formerly known as J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), is one of the oldest and most

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Acknowledgements

distinguished academic publishers in Germany. Its list includes many of the most consequential books that have appeared in German over the last two hundred years, including, not incidentally, the first edition of the collected works by Ernst Troeltsch. Even more important, from early on, even during the war, and particularly in the 1920s and early 1930s, it provided a home for books by those German thinkers, many of them Jews, who were able and willing to champion the democratic cause. That this book, by an American and in English, can join their ranks especially during these unsettled times is an extraordinary privilege and in itself testimony to the ongoing commitment of the press to that same cause. But most of all, what has given me solace even in the bleakest moments are my three beautiful children, whose love and very existence are all the reason I need to carry on. To them I dedicate this book. Chicago, September 2020

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Index of Names Adler, Max  347 Adorno, Theodor W.  25 Albert, Heinrich  187 Albert I, King of Belgium  68 Albrecht, Johann  427, 469 Althoff, Friedrich  83 Althusius, Johannes  565 Angell, Norman  135 Anschütz, Gerhard – annexation and 211 – Burgfrieden and  226 – censorship and 119 – German democracy and  3, 6, 333 – outbreak of war and  67 – People’s League and  434 – on possibility of WWI  45–46 – on Prussian franchise  223–226, 227–228, 333 – works – – Labor Force in the New Germany contribution  217, 333 – – “Thoughts on Future Reforms of the State” (1915)  223–226, 227–228 Arndt, Ernst Moritz  58–60 Asquith, Herbert Henry  305, 368 Auerbach, Erich  25 Ballin, Albert  369 Balzac, Honoré de  551 Barker, Ernest  31 Barth, Karl  26, 26n72 Bauer, Gustav  434 Bauer, Max  417, 418–419, 457–458 Baumeister, Alfred  523 Bäumer, Gertrud  435, 447, 559 Baumgarten, Otto  105–106, 118, 558 Becker, Carl Heinrich  559 Beerfelde, Hans-Georg von  505–508

Below, children of  483 Below, Georg von – on authoritarian state  482–483 – H. Delbrück and  485n118 – Fatherland Party and  426 – on Prussian franchise  481, 482 – Troeltsch and 481–485 – works – – review of Germany and the World War 186 – – review of Labor Force in the New Germany  482, 482n103 – – “The Stance of University Professors toward Questions of the War”  484 Below, Maria (Minnie) (née von der Goltz)  483, 484 Benjamin, Walter  25 Bergson, Henri  101, 182, 244 Berlepsch, Hans Hermann von  226 Bernstein, Eduard  161, 233, 234 Bernstorff, Johann Heinrich von  373–374 Bethmann Hollweg, Friedrich von  124 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von. See also Burgfrieden; Prussian franchise; reorientation (reform) – on annexation  153–158, 207–208, 210, 212n150, 215, 220, 286–288, 293, 324 – on atrocities 124 – Battle of the Marne and  117 – Burgfrieden and  149, 151, 156, 158, 210– 211, 219, 221, 318, 320, 321, 332, 363, 371 – Central European block and  283–287, 288–294, 294n225, 297n239, 297–298, 313 – death and reputation of  370–374 – on defensive war  70, 73–74 – domestic crisis of  1916–1917 and  303– 304, 320–326, 358–374

606

Index of Names

– economic war aims and  287 – on freedom 228 – on German atrocities  124 – German dominance and  299–300 – Goschen and 75–76 – Harnack and 413 – imperialism and 166–167 – industrialists/conservatives and 220 – Industrialists’ Petition and  208 – “Intellectuals’ Petition” and  208–209 – on invasion of Belgium  73–76, 76n120, 110 – Kapp and 317–319 – Meineke and  303, 373 – military leadership and  358–360, 372–373 – National Committee for an Honorable Peace and  324, 325n106 – opposition to  303–304, 326, 335, 380, 415, 421–422, 423, 426, 428, 463 – Pan-Germans and  150, 158, 158n227, 163n247, 210–211, 215–216, 323–324, 326, 370 – peace and  76, 157, 315–316, 364, 367–369, 375–376 – People’s League and  433 – Prussian franchise and  363–365, 367, 371, 379–380, 380n18, 380–381, 381n2, 381n21, 393, 448 – public opinion and  210–211, 317–318, 321, 369, 371 – reorientation and  150, 218, 219, 220, 224, 228, 362–368, 379–381, 402, 414n171, 415 – resignation of  423, 468, 508 – rights and 374 – Seeberg Address and  209, 210–211, 215–216, 303–304, 321 – September Program and  287 – Social Democrats and  219–220 – Solf and 258 – speeches – – on domestic opponents (Reichstag) (1916) 323–324 – – peace negotiations message (Reichstag) (1916) 367–368 – – to Reichstag (March 1917) 379–380 – – on reorientation (Reichstag) (1916)  364

– – on submarine warfare (Reichstag) (1916) 315–316 – submarine warfare and  306–307, 309–310, 313–316, 321, 343, 358–359, 372, 372n284, 372–373 – supporters of  303, 320–326, 332–333, 334–335, 358, 362–363, 371–372, 385, 415, 459 – Tirpitz and  74, 76n120, 314, 463 – Troeltsch and  28, 327–333, 330n119, 334, 370–372, 373, 422–423, 423n212, 441, 551 – war aims and  149, 156–157 – on Wilhelm II’s mental health (August 1914)  237–238 Bismarck, Otto von  46, 487 Bode, Wilhelm von  84 Bodin, Jean  565 Boehm, Max Hildebert  376 Bonn, Moritz Julius  2n7, 2–3, 559 Borchardt, Rudolf  340 Borsig, Ernst  252 Bosch, Robert  28, 258 Bottomley, Horatio  111 Bousset, Wilhelm  174 Braband, Carl  67 Braun, Otto  536 Brecht, Arnold  559 Brentano, Lujo  84, 118–120, 121, 128, 215, 297, 377, 434 Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich von  498, 498n169 Bruck, Moeller van den  376 Bruendel, Steffen  15–16, 439 Buch, Leopold von  366 Buchwald, Erich  121 Bülow, Bernard von  28, 237, 301 Bülow, Karl Ulrich von  81, 81n141 Bülow, Maria Princess von  81 Butler, Nicholas Murray  126 Capelle, Eduard von  263, 307, 469 Capus, Alfred  126 Cassirer, Ernst  23 Cecil, Eustace  499 Chamberlin, Houston Stewart  501 Churchill, Winston  112, 305 Claß, Heinrich. See also Industrialists’ Petition; Pan-German League

Index of Names – annexation and  153–158, 207–208, 220, 286–288 – Anti-semitism and 156 – British and German culture compared by  107 – Burgfrieden and  154n210, 156, 157–158, 209–210, 270–271 – negotiated peace and  326 – peace and  150, 153–154, 207 – Rohrbach and 163n247 – Troeltsch compared  168–169, 327 – works – – Position Paper on German War Aims  151–159, 168–169, 207, 208, 209, 220, 270, 286 – – Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’. Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendig­ keiten 107n23 Clemenceau, Georges  126 Cohen, Hermann  23 Cornicelius, Max  83–84 Cramb, John Adam  185 Curtius, Ernst Robert  25, 104n10 Czernin, Ottokar  239 Dante Alighieri  203 Darwin, Charles  106, 160, 271, 570 Delbrück, Clemens von  117, 220, 285, 287, 288–289, 433 Delbrück, Hans. See also “Berlin Declaration”; Delbrück-Dernburg Petition; Preußische Jahrbücher; Wednesday Evening (Mittwochabend) circle (H. Delbrück) – on annexation 152–153 – Below and 485n118 – Bethmann Hollweg and  258, 335 – Bethmann Hollweg and submarine warfare and  321, 373 – Burgfrieden and  153, 220, 255, 335 – on end of monarchy  541 – Free Patriotic Association and  252, 255–256 – liberal conservatism and  206 – Max von Baden and  502, 503 – on military leadership  359–360 – Pan-German League and  151–153, 158 – People’s League and  434

607

– on Prussian franchise  397 – reorientation and  220, 349–350 – Rohrbach and  163, 163n249 – Seeberg and 210 – speeches – – against Industrialists’ Petition 213–214 – Troeltsch and  27, 171, 540 – Weber and 311–312 – works – – “Die Alldeutschen” 151n194 – – “The Future Peace”  152–153, 162 – – “The German Military System”  177 – – Government and the Will of the People 349–350 – – review of Germany and the World War 186 – – review of Labor Force in the New Germany 226 Dernburg, Bernhard  212–213, 434, 461, 533n319, 533–534. See also Delbrück-­ Dernburg Petition Deutelmoser, Erhard  126–127, 375–376, 523n271 Diederichs, Eugen  347 Diels, Hermann  84 Dilthey, Wilhelm  142, 171 Doehring, Bruno  51 Dove, Heinrich Wilhelm  212 Drescher, Hans-Georg  26, 41n127, 55n45, 65n71, 95n194, 148n181, 340n149, 423n212 Drews, Wilhelm  531, 533 Droysen, Johann Gustav  398 Ebert, Friedrich  XIII, 416, 536, 537, 540, 559 Einstein, Albert  25, 214, 248, 467–468 Eisenhart-Rothe, Ernst von  496 Eisner, Kurt  540, 554 Emmich, Otto von  68 Erzberger, Matthias. See also National Committee for an Honorable Peace; Peace Resolution (Friedensresolution) (Erzberger) (1917) – on annexation 286 – assassination of 485 – on Belgium  286, 286n198 – Bethmann Hollweg and  158, 320–321, 423

608

Index of Names

– league of nations and  533n317 – naval expansion propaganda and  113–114 – on peace  419–422, 423, 424, 429 – on public opinion  418–419 – speeches – – before Reichstag (1918)  469 – – to Reichstag (July 6, 1917)  419–420, 424 – on submarine warfare  320–321, 418–420, 423, 424 – on Tirpitz and Capelle  469 – on Wilhelm II 96 – works – – Der Völkerbund. Der Weg zum Weltfrieden 533n317 Esebeck, Baron von  237 Eucken, Rudolf  28, 30, 84, 244, 552 Falkenhayn, Erich von. See also Battle of Verdun (1916) – on Battle of the Marne  117 – Central European block and  289, 291–294, 294n225, 298, 339 – dismissal of  339, 358–359 – munitions report of  132 – submarine warfare and  308–309, 310 – Western Front and  359 – Wilhelm II and  239 – Wolff on  360 Fegter, Jan  67 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  61, 203, 275 Fischer, Fritz  14–15, 19, 148, 148nn181,182, 283n182, 286n198 Fischer, Kuno  27 Flasch, Kurt  13, 13n47, 64n69, 65n71, 148n181, 163n247, 340n149 Fort, Gertrud von le  173, 552, 555, 573 Francke, Ernst  433n241, 434, 518–519, 520, 534–535 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke and wife Sophie  43, 44–45 Frederick II (the Great)  46, 57, 93, 94, 145, 174, 531 Freud, Sigmund  65 Friedländer, Max  241 Friedrich II, Grand Duke of Baden  52, 138 Fulda, Ludwig  121–122

Gebsattel, Konstantin von  216, 326. See also Pan-German League Gentzmer, Felix  212–213 Geyer, Michael  516n250 Gierke, Otto von  84, 552 Giesberts, Johannes  431n238, 436–438 Gleichen-Russwurm, Heinrich von  517–518 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  7, 123, 322, 327, 353 Goltz, Colmar von der  54n41 Goschen, Edward  74–76 Gothein, Eberhard  12, 27, 52, 52n35, 60, 61, 64, 173 Grabowsky, Adolf  334n129, 431, 431n218, 439–440, 440n268, 440–441, 451–452, 487 Graupner, Christoph  241–242 Grotius, Hugo  565 Grotjahn, Alfred  455, 456, 456n13, 459 Gutmann, Herbert  28 Gwinner, Arthur von  252 Haas, Ludwig  362 Haase, Hugo  72, 233, 234 Hacke, Jens  4n12, 544n12 Haeckel, Ernst  106, 109, 120, 126 Hagenlücke, Heinz  433n242, 440n271, 443n285, 447n297 Haig, Douglas  453 Hamilton, Alexander  399–400 Hammann, Otto  125, 224 Hampe, Karl  11n41, 330n119, 372n284, 377–378, 455, 456n13, 459, 466 Hannover, Ernst August von  469 Harnack, Adolf von – on annexation 336 – Bethmann Hollweg and  321–322, 373, 413 – constitutional reform and  336–337 – on equal franchise  336–338 – on feared Allied invasion (1918)  517 – Free Patriotic Association and  252 – on German democracy  414–415 – on German freedom  336, 385 – on German government  520 – on Imperial Chancellors  498 – on intellectual civil war  412–415 – justification of war and  59

Index of Names – Max von Baden and  503 – memoranda – – “The Requirement of the Hour” (1917)  412–415 – National Committee for an Honorable Peace and  325 – on peace  336–338, 386–387, 413 – on Prussian franchise  413 – Prussian House of Representatives debate (1915) and  211 – Schmidt-Ott and 178 – speeches – – “Introductory Words” “German Freedom” (lecture series, Prussian House of Representatives, 1917)  385, 386–387 – submarine warfare and  321–322, 373 – on To the Civilized World! (An die Kulturwelt!) 120 – Troeltsch and  27, 28, 171–172 – turn inward and  190 – Wilhelm II’s speech to the Reichstag (1914) 70 – on Wilson 387 – works – – Germany and the World War article  178 – – Internationale Monatsschrift contribution (1914)  84 – – “The Tasks of Peace and the Work of Peace” 336–338 Hatzfeldt, Hermann von  211, 213 Haußmann, Conrad  67, 70–71, 73, 80, 240, 367, 532 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm  28, 142, 165, 203, 264, 265, 275 Helfferich, Karl  368n260, 457 Heller, Hermann  3, 3n8 Hellingrath, Philipp von  421–422 Herder, Johann Gottfried  142 Herkner, Heinrich  205, 434 Herre, Paul  486–487 Hertling, Georg von  90, 431, 456–459, 483, 490 Heyn, Immanuel  67 Hindenburg, Paul von. See also Tannenberg victory – Bethmann Hollweg and  358–359, 369, 373, 423

609

– Ludendorff and  470n63 – Michaelis and 424 – on peace proposal  421 – Valentini and 459 – victory of 90 – Wilhelm II and  358, 421, 497 – Wolff on  360 Hintze, Otto. See also Germany and the World War (Hintze and Meinecke, eds.) – German democracy and  9–11 – on internationalism 84–87 – parliamentarianism and 11n38 – Realpolitik and  10 – speeches of – – “Imperialism and German World Politics” (Prussian House of ­Representatives, 1917)  385 – transition from monarchism and  11n41 – Troeltsch and  27, 185n45, 198 – walks in the Grunewald and  204–205 – works – – “The Democratization of the Prussian Constitution”  9, 9n32, 10 – – “Germany, the War, and the Interna­ tional Community”  84 – – “Germany and the System of World States” 177 – – “The History of the Prussian Constitution and Administration”  87 – – The Hohenzollern and Their Creation, Five Hundred Years of Patriotic History  9, 9n32 – – “The Meaning of the War”  177, 185 – – “Tax Reform of 1891” 87 Hintze, Paul von  515, 525, 526 Hirsch, Paul von  217 Hirschfeld, Magnus  102 Hitler, Adolf. See National Socialism Hobbes, Thomas  565 Hohenborn, Adolf Wild von  293–294, 309 Hohen-Schillingsfürst, Gottfried zu  454 Hohenzollern, Friedrich von (Fritz) (second son of Wilhelm II)  96 Hohenzollern, Viktoria Luise von  469 Holtzendorff, Henning von  211–212, 308, 309 Hötzendorf, Conrad von  77 Huber, Ernst Rudolf  72, 537

610

Index of Names

Hübinger, Gangolf  26n74 Hügel, Friedrich von  31, 99n204, 174, 485n119, 552, 553, 556–58, 572 Hugenberg, Alfred  151 Isenburg-Birstein, Franz Joseph Prince zu  456n13 Jäckh, Ernst  295n227, 559 Jaffé, Edgar  217 Jagow, Gottfried von  314–315 James, William  23 Jellinek, Georg  27, 36n109 Kahl, Wilhelm  212, 213, 252–255, 275, 325 Kant, Immanuel  36, 40, 165, 247n43, 247–248, 275, 461, 499, 534. See also neo-Kantianism Kapp, Wolfgang – anti-Semitism and 548 – Bethmann Hollweg and  317–320, 323, 426 – Burgfrieden and  318, 320 – Fatherland Party and  326, 426–427, 428, 435, 535 – on invasion of Belgium  74 – Kapp Putsch and  548–549 – Troeltsch on 327–328 Keegan, John  79 Keim, August  425 Kelsen, Hans  2, 2n5 Kerenski, Alexander  508 Kessel, Gustav von  115 Kitchener, Lord  112 Kjellén, Rudolf  265–267, 267n127, 269, 271, 281 Kleist, Georg von  380 Kluge, Günther von  435–436 Körte, Siegfried  426 Köster, Adolf  559 Kühlmann, Richard von  458 Lamprecht, Karl  120 Lansing, Robert  461 Lasswell, Harold  112 Legien, Carl  217, 217n169, 434, 464, 518, 519, 520, 522–523, 534. See also The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.)

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  28 Leppmann, Friedrich  505 Lerchenfeld, Hugo Count von  263 Lichnowsky, Karl Max Prince von  505, 505n203 Liebermann, Max  120 Liebknecht, Karl  71, 316, 412, 485, 537 Liszt, Franz von  96–97 Llanque, Marcus  5–6, 6n20, 402n110, 439n267 Lloyd George, David  279–280, 368, 418, 508 Loebell, Friedrich Willhelm von  156–157 Löhlein, Heinrich  113 Louis XIV, King of France  82 Lübbe, Hermann  31–32 Ludendorff, Erich von – armistice and 515 – Bethmann Hollweg and  358–360, 369, 373, 421–422, 423 – death threats of  486 – educated elite and  373, 376 – Fatherland Party and  427, 428n228, 463 – Hindenburg and 470n63 – –  on Battle of Amiens 492 – –  on military victory 493–494 – levée en masse and  523–524 – Max von Baden and  500, 502–503, 507, 527–528 – Michaelis and  424, 511 – parliamentary democracy and  495–498, 514 – peace and  417, 421, 495–498 – personal losses of  496 – revolution and  417, 495 – Solf and  500, 528 – on Spirit of 1914  376 – submarine warfare and  418–419 – Troeltsch and  463–464, 511 – Valentini and 459 – Wilhelm II and  380, 421, 427, 463, 497, 528 – Wilson and 527–528 Ludendorff, Margarethe  496, 496n161, 528 Luxemburg, Rosa  485, 537, 554 Lyncker, Moriz von  237 Machtan, Lothar  501, 503n190 Mackel, Emil  102–103

Index of Names Mann, Anka  121 Mann, Thomas  572, 572n117 Marcks, Erich  27, 291 Marcuse, Ludwig  29 Mas, Ezéchiel du Mas, comte de Mélac  82 Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney  112– 113 Max, Prince von Baden – appointment as Chancellor and  500–503, 514 – breakdown of 531–532 – ceasefire and  515 – on “To the Civilized World!” (An die Kulturwelt!) 125 – on feared Allied invasion (1918)  524 – German democratization and peace and  507, 509, 514 – homosexuality of  502, 503n190 – integrity and 498 – Ludendorff and  500, 502–503, 507, 527–528 – parliamentary democracy and  500–501, 503, 514 – peace and  207, 500–503, 507, 514 – Prussian franchise and  503, 514 – Reichstag and  532 – reorientation and 500 – resignation of 536 – speeches – – proclamation by (Parliament of Baden) (1917) 512 – Troeltsch and  28, 503, 504–514 – Wednesday evening circle and  206–207 – Wilhelm II and  239, 529–531, 537 – Wilson and  512, 514, 516, 527 Mayer, Gustav  205, 554 Meinecke, Friedrich. See also Germany and the World War (Hintze and Meinecke, eds.); monarchy, social – on annexation 222–223 – on authoritarian state  389 – Bethmann Hollweg and  303, 373 – on Bethmann Hollweg’s submarine policy 373–73 – censorship restrictions and  179n27 – defeatism and 378 – defensive war and  60n57 – demobilization of minds and  471n68

611

– on Fatherland Party  427 – on Franco-Prussian war influence  131–132 – German College for Politics and  559 – on German democracy  394–396, 395n75 – German Society 1914 and 263 – Grabowsky and 431n218 – on ideas versus material forces  272n143 – on imperialism 408 – on Isenburg-Birstein 456n13 – on Kjellén 267n127 – Labor Force in the New Germany and 217 – Max von Baden and  503 – on militarism  390, 392–393 – on monarchism  1n2, 333 – parliamentarianism and  394–395, 395n73 – on peace  388, 395, 413 – People’s League and  431, 434, 452 – on Prussian franchise  393–394 – on Rathenau  205, 555 – reorientation and  393–394, 438 – revolution and 393 – on social democracy  7 – on Spectator Letters (Troeltsch)  549–550 – speeches – – “German Freedom” (lecture series, Prussian House of Representatives, 1917)  385, 387–396 – – at People’s League inauguration (“Um Freiheit und Vaterland” (1917)  437n256, 437–438 – support for Bethmann Hollweg and  303 – Troeltsch and  27, 378, 390, 408 – on Troeltsch’s limit of hope  554 – University of Freiburg and  481 – walks in the Grunewald and  204–205, 378 – works – – “Culture, Power Politics, and ­Militarism”  177 – – “The Reform of the Prussian ­Franchise”  7 – – “Social Democracy and Power Politics” 222–223 – – “What Goods are We Fighting For?”  60n57 Meineke, Stefan  7 Metternich, Paul Graf Wolff  258, 259

612

Index of Names

Meyer, Eduard  106, 109, 120, 377, 521 Michaelis, Georg  423–425, 431, 511 Mill, John Stuart  35n105, 410, 410n148 Milton, John  108 Miquel, Walter von  87 Moltke, Helmuth von  68, 77, 116, 117, 176, 239, 259–260, 263, 288, 427–428. See also Battle of the Marne Mommsen, Theodor  398 Mommsen, Wolfgang J.  14–15, 476nn85,86 Mühsam, Kurt  126–127 Muir, Ramsay  111 Müller, Georg Alexander von  237, 240, 309, 423, 427 Müller, Joachim  265 Müller, Johannes  512 Müller, Karl Alexander von  60n57, 105, 108 Napoleon  53, 58, 152–153, 244, 319, 386, 438 Natorp, Paul  23, 217, 557 Naumann, Friedrich – biography of 295n229 – Central European block and  295–298, 338 – German College for Politics and  559 – Ludendorff and  493 – Manifesto of the 93 and  120 – National Committee for an Honorable Peace and  325 – People’s League and  434 – Rathenau and 295n229 – on revolution 493 – social liberalism and  163 – social monarchy and  395 – Troeltsch’s democratic Protestantism and 40–41 – M. Weber on 297n240 – works – – Democracy and Emperorship 40, 40n125, 40–41, 227 – – Mitteleuropa  163, 295–298, 297n240, 338 Neumann, Carl  27 Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia  379 Nietzsche, Friedrich  160, 267, 271, 569 Nipperdey, Thomas  432n240, 500

Nitschke, Paul  466 Norton, Kurt  56 Noske, Gustav  217, 228–229 Ockham, William of  564 Oncken, Hermann – on Central European block  290–291 – on domestic crisis of  1916–1917 321 – on Britain  106, 109 – Labor Force in the New Germany and  217, 223 – People’s League and  434 – works and speeches – – “The Germans on the Path toward a United and Free Nation”  221–222 – – “On the Threshold of the Third Year of War” (National Committee for an Honorable Peace, 1916)  325, 335 – – “Outbreak” 177 – – “Prologue” to Germany and the World War  176, 177, 188 – – on World War I  53, 106, 177 Oppenheim, Franz  45 Oren, Ido  383n25, 407n132 Otte, Thomas  148 Paulsen, Friedrich  171 Payer, Friedrich  457, 483, 523, 523n271, 530 Pernerstorfer, Engelbert  346–347 Pernet, Erich  496, 496n161 Pernet, Franz  496, 496n161 Peschel, Andreas  271n141, 443–444 Pfleiderer, Otto  171 Pipkin, Charles Wooten  573 Planck, Max  120, 171, 214 Plenge, Johann  103n7, 264–268, 269, 269n136, 277, 281, 288 – works – – Marx and Hegel  264 – – The War and the National Econo­ my 264–65 Plessen, Hans von  239 Plessner, Helmuth  344 Plettenberg, Karl Baron von  123–125 Pohl, Hugo von  306 Preuß, Hugo – on authoritarian state  6, 94n189, 345–348, 349, 351, 383, 482

Index of Names – Burgfrieden and  6, 346, 347 – on competitive envy  57n50 – domestic crisis of  1916–1917 and  345–346 – on duty 351 – on general conscription  94n189 – German College for Politics and  559 – on German democracy  3, 6, 103n8, 346 – on German freedom  351–352, 356–357 – on German state  383, 482 – on hatred of Germans  102 – international opinion and  102 – parliamentarianism and  349, 394n70 – People’s League and  434, 533 – power of public opinion and  278n170 – Scheler on 103n8 – Troeltsch and  6, 347–348 – works – – “Deutsche Demokratisierung” 394n70 – – The German People and Politics (Das deutsche Volk und die Politik)  6n20, 6–7, 57n50, 103n8, 278n170, 343n155, 345–347, 482 – – “Innere Staatsstruktur und äußere Machtstellung” 351n185 – – “Volksstaat oder verkehrter Obrigkeits­ staat?”  6, 6n21 Pufendorf, Samuel von  565 Radbruch, Gustav  3 Rade, Martin  172 Ranke, Leopold von  4, 165, 487 Rathenau, Walther. See also levée en masse – assassination of  485, 554–558 – Bethmann Hollweg and  283–284 – Central European block and  283n185, 283–286, 289 – Meinecke and 205 – Naumann and 295n229 – peace and  285, 516 – revolution and 555 – Troeltsch and  28, 516, 516n250, 522, 555–557 – working classes and  555 – works – – Of Coming Things 377 – – “A Dark Day” (1918)  516, 516n250 Rathje, Johannes  550

613

Reicke, Georg  122 Reinhardt, Max  120 Retzlaw, Karl  460, 464–466 Reventlow, Ernst Count zu  108, 163n247, 370 Richthofen, Hartmann von  534 Rickert, Heinrich  23, 244 Riezler, Kurt  124, 219, 237–238, 248, 286, 287, 290, 297, 297n239, 306, 306n16, 314, 367 Ritter, Gerhard  49n26, 71, 186 Rive, Richard Robert  426 Röhl, John C. G.  238 Rohrbach, Paul  163–64, 249, 322–323, 359, 377, 415 – works – – The German Idea in the World  163n249, 163–164 – – “The Peace, Foreign Countries, and the Pan-Germans”  322–323 Röntgen, Wilhelm  120, 126 Rosenberg, Arthur  97, 420, 458–459, 497, 498, 529 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  565 Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria  453, 498–499 Salomon-Delatour, Gottfried  25 Saunders, George  110–111 Sayce, Archibald  101 Schäfer, Dietrich. See also Royal Library Meeting (1918) – on annexation 520 – covert activities of  303, 310–311 – on defensive war  521 – Fatherland Party and  427, 483 – on feared Allied invasion (1918)  517 – German government legitimacy and  518 – Independent Committee for a German Peace and  326 – levée en masse and  519 – on peace 311 – submarine warfare and  310–311, 313–314 – on territorial seizures  208 – on Wilson 521 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von  93–94, 145 Scheer, Reinhard  525

614

Index of Names

Scheidemann, Philipp – assassination attempt and  485–486 – on democratization 416 – January Strike (1918) and  466 – Labor Force in the New Germany and 217 – Max von Baden’s resignation and  536 – people’s government and  365 – on Social Democrats (1915)  234 – “troops rid of fear” and  229 – Wilhelm II abdication and  529–530 – Wilhelm II on  537 – works – – “On the Reorientation of Domestic Politics” 228 Scheler, Max  103, 103n8, 104, 146 Schëuch, Heinrich  317, 435, 517 Schiffer, Eugen  206n121, 252 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  61, 203, 204, 204n114, 275 Schmidt, Gustav  334n130, 340n149, 343n156, 345n160, 432n240 Schmidt, Robert  217 Schmidt-Ott, Friedrich  176–79, 186, 188–89, 517 Schmitt, Carl  2, 3, 4n11 Schmitz, Oskar A. H.  105–112 Schmoller, Gustav von  119, 120, 121, 321, 434n245 Schröer, Arnold  107 Schulze-Gaevernitz, Gerhard  159–160 Schumacher, Hermann  176 Schwabe, Klaus  13, 15–16, 63n67, 64n69, 135n126, 414n171 Schwerin-Löwitz, Hans Graf von  71 Seeberg, Reinhold  84, 208, 256 Seeckt, Hans von  293 Sering, Max – on American democracy 397–400 – on authoritarian state  396 – on British democracy  397, 409 – on French democracy  397–398 – on Prussian franchise  401 – Seeberg Address and 211 – speeches of – – “German Freedom” (lecture series, Prussian House of Representatives, 1917)  385, 388

– – “The State and Social Structure Among the Western Powers and in Germany” (Prussian House of Representatives, 1917) 396–402 Shakespeare, William  108 Siebeck, Paul  468 Siehr, Ernst  67 Siemens, Carl Friedrich von  252 Simmel, Georg  22, 84, 244 Simon, Helen  434, 434n245, 447 Sloane, William Milligan  398 Solf, Wilhelm. See also German Society  1914 (the “Club”) – on annexation  259, 499, 500 – on Bethmann Hollweg’s submarine policy 370 – on colonialism  177–178, 499n172, 513 – considered as candidate for Imperial Chancellor 498–500 – Dernburg and 533 – detractors of 469 – on German democratization  439, 526 – Ludendorff and  500, 528 – on peace negotiations  259 – on reorientation 370 – speeches of – – on foreign policy (German Society  1914) (1915)  499–500 – – Rede zur Gründung der Deutschen Gesellschaft 1914 260–262 – Troeltsch and 499 – Wilhelm II and  263, 530–531, 538 – Wilson and  526, 528–529 – works – – “German Colonial Politics”  177, 258 Sombart, Werner  22, 30, 30n89, 65, 84, 184n41, 200, 200n103, 265, 266, 281 Sösemann, Bernd  32n97, 212n51, 432n240 Spengler, Oswald  569, 569n111 Steffen, Gustaf  7, 7n25 Stegmann, Dirk  283, 432n240, 439, 439n267 Stern, Fritz  32 Strachan, Hew  18, 18n57 Stresemann, Gustav  421 Stuck, Franz von  120 Studt, Conrad von  241 Stutz, Ulrich  554

Index of Names Sudermann, Hermann  121–122, 126 Süskind, Hermann  99, 99n206 Thaer, Albrecht von  495–496 Thimme, Friedrich  186, 216–217, 217n169, 234, 434. See also The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.) Thoma, Hans  120 Thoma, Richard  3 Thyssen, August  286, 325 Tirpitz, Alfred von. See also Royal Library Meeting (1918); Tirpitz Plan – on annexation 520 – Bethmann Hollweg and  74, 76n120, 314, 463 – ceasefire (1917) and  460 – on defeatism 521 – on educated elites  376 – Erzberger on 469 – Fatherland Party and  427, 436 – on feared Allied invasion (1918)  517 – Holzendorff and  309 – as candidate for Imperial Chancellor  427, 427n224 – Imperial Navy Office and  113 – on invasion of Belgium  74, 76n120 – levée en masse and  518–519 – lies and  306, 306n16, 313n45 – on military victory  304, 520–521 – on peace negotiations  520–521 – on Prussian franchise  520 – resignation of  314–316, 319 – should be shot  469 – Solf and 469 – submarine warfare and  304, 307–308, 313–320 – Troeltsch and  330n119, 463–464, 522 – M. Weber on 430 Tönnies, Ferdinand  22, 30, 217, 276 Tocqueville, Alexis de  39, 410 Traub, Gottfried  167 Treitschke, Heinrich von  34 Treutler, Karl Georg  308 Troeltsch, Elise (sister)  378, 422–23 Troeltsch, Ernst. See also Berlin period; educated elites, German (Bildungsbürger­ tum); German culture; German democracy; German freedom; historical develop-

615

ment and inevitability; ideas of 1914; internationalism; political ethics; Volks­heer (People’s Army) (Volk in Waffen) – character of  31–32, 88, 93, 140, 549 – daily life of (1922)  66, 553, 556–558, 557n72 – death of 573 – education and career of  27–32, 171–175 – as example postscript – neglect by scholars of  26–27, 52n37, 148 – obituaries of  28, 29, 31, 550 – personal finances and  173, 558, 572–573 – personal losses  98–99, 99nn204,206, 132, 455, 552 – political activities of  29–32, 53, 55n45, 235–236, 550–552 – as polymath 21–27 – reputation of  28–32, 171, 205, 440, 551 – scholarly activities of  551–554 – speeches and lectures – – After the Declaration of Mobilization (Nach Erklärung der Mobilmachung)  53n37, 53–66, 55n45, 221, 281 – – The Culture War (Der Kulturkrieg) (Berlin) (1915)  191–202 – – to Democratic Student Union of Berlin (1918)  5, 538 – – “Ethics and Cultural Philosophy” (Berlin) (1915)  203 – – The German Essence (Das Wesen des Deutschen) (Karlsruhe) (1914)  129, 138–147, 181, 182, 241, 278–279 – – “The German Idea of Freedom” (“Die deutsche Idee von der Freiheit,”) (Vienna) (1915)  129, 129n103, 251, 251n54, 338–357, 340n149, 391, 392, 405 – – “History of Modern Philosophy” (University of Berlin) (1922–1923)  553 – – “The Ideas 1914” (“Die Ideen von 1914”) (German Society 1914) (1916)  251, 268n132, 268–282, 301, 341, 357, 446 – – “The Inner Connection of Political Demands” (“Der innere Zusammenhang der politischen Forderungen” (Prussian Landtag) (1918)  440n271, 440–451, 441n274, 443n285, 463, 467, 470, 471–472, 473, 478, 510

616

Index of Names

– – Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics (Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik) (Kiel, Berlin, Düsseldorf)  558–572, postscript – – “The Onslaught of Western Democracy” (“Der Ansturm der westlichen Demokratie”) (Prussian House of Representatives, 1917)  402–411, 403nn111,113, 405n123, 445 – – “On the Criteria for Judging Historical Matters” (“Über Maßstäbe zur Beurteilung historischer Dinge”) (Kaiser’s birthday address) (1916)  142–143, 241–251, 341, 406 – – “Political Ethics and Christianity” (Politische Ethik und Christentum) (Protestant Social Congress) (1904)  32–40, 95, 276, 350, 355, 405n118, 446 – – “Private Morality and State Morality” (“Privatmoral und Staatsmoral”) (Berlin, January 1916)  251, 251n54, 378–379, 379n14 – – on Industrialists’ Petition (1915)  212, 212n51 – – “Unser Volksheer” (Mannheim) (1914) 89–98 – works – – The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religion (Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religions­ geschichte)  24, 243 – – analysis of 32n97 – – “Die Aufklärung” (“The Enlightenment”) 24n65 – – Augustine, Christian Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter) 203 – – Bethmann Hollweg’s obituary 370– 372, 373 – – “Church and Religious Politics in Relation to Social Democracy” (“Die Kirchen- und Religionspolitik im Verhältnis zur Sozialdemokratie”)  229–235 – – collections of 26n74 – – The Culture War (Der Kulturkrieg)  191–202

– – “Denunciations of Defeatism” (“Anklagen auf Defaitismus”)  473– 475, 477–481, 489 – – “The End of Militarism” (“Das Ende des Militarismus “)  545–546 – – German Faith and German Custom (Deutscher Glaube und Deutsche Sitte)  131, 132–138, 135n126, 139, 140, 181 – – German Future (Deutsche Zukunft)  251 – – Historicism and its Problems (Der Historismus und seine Probleme) 22, 25, 27, 35n105, 249, 482n103, 553, 572 – – Das Historische in Kants Religions­ philosophie. Zugleich ein Beitrag zu den Untersuchungen über Kants Philosophie der Geschichte 203n113 – – “Imperialism” (“Imperialismus”) (1915)  158–169, 201, 341 – – “The Inner Connection of Political Demands” (“Der innere Zusammenhang der politischen Forderungen”)  440nn268,271, 440–451, 443n285, 463, 467, 470 – – “Der Krieg und die Internationalität der geistigen Kultur”  87–89 – – “Meine Bücher” 24n65 – – “Moderne Geschichtsphilosophie” 204n114 – – “On Several Peculiarities of Anglo-­ Saxon Civilization”  405n123 – – “Politics of Courage and Politics of Sobriety”  327–334, 334n129, 422, 423 – – The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (Die Soziallehren der christ­lichen Kirchen und Gruppen) 22 – – Spectator Letters (Spektator-Briefe) (1918–1922) 542–550 – – “The Spirit of German Culture” (“Der Geist der deutschen Kultur”) (1915)  129, 178–186, 184n41, 189– 190, 198, 201, 250, 333n127, 339, 341 – – “Two Kinds of Realpolitik” (“Zweierlei Realpolitik”) (1918)  487–492 – – Unser Volksheer 89–98 – – “Was man vor einem Jahre in Berlin von der Revolution persönlich erleben konnte”  539n1, 539–546

Index of Names – – “Why do I Pledge Myself to Democracy?” (“Warum bekenne ich mich zur Demokratie?”) (1920)  544 Troeltsch, Ernst, Senior  98, 455 Troeltsch, Eugenie (mother)  98, 455 Troeltsch, Marta (wife)  172, 173, 556, 557 Troeltsch, Wilhelmine (sister) (m. W. Weber)  99 Trott zu Solz, August von  241 Valentini, Rudolf von  156–157, 358, 459, 502 Vico, Giambattista  25 Vierkandt, Alfred  205 Vietinghoff-Scheel, Leopold von  151 Volkelt, Hans  470–475, 484–485, 489 – “Denunciations of Defeatism” (“Denun­ ciations of Defeatism”) (Troeltsch) and  472–481, 489 Wahnschaffe, Arnold  220, 360, 363–364, 416 Waldstein, Felix  534 Wallenstein, Albrecht von  463 Walz, Ernst  52, 57 Wartenburg, Heinrich Yorck von  366 Webb, Clement  128–129 Weber, Alfred  240, 434, 551 Weber, Marianne  27, 172, 214 Weber, Max – Below and 481 – Delbrück-Dernburg Petition and  214 – on democracy 543n10 – Fatherland Party and  429–430, 431, 435 – German College for Politics and  559 – Herrenvolk and  476n86, 476–477 – memoranda – – “The Intensified Submarine War” (1916) 311–313 – National Committee for an Honorable Peace and  325 – on Naumann 297n240 – People’s League and  434 – on Prussian franchise  430 – speeches – – inaugural address of  1895 271 – Tirpitz and  313n45, 315 – Troeltsch and  22, 27, 30, 172, 442, 476–477, 543n10

617

– on will of the people  346 – works – – “Parliament and Government in the Reordered Germany”  5–6, 476–477 – – Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus 30n89 – – “Voting Rights and Democracy in Germany” 5–6 Weber, Wilhelm  99 Weisbach, Werner  45, 205, 206, 467, 522n268, 529, 573 Weizsäcker, Karl von  422 Wells, H.G.  110 Wenck, Martin  440, 487, 487n125 Werner, Anton von  258 Westarp, Kuno Count von  8, 8n26, 262, 365, 366 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Tycho  485 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von  84, 120, 128n101, 171, 485 Wile, Frederic William  51, 69, 80, 105 Wilhelm I  46, 54 Wilhelm II – abdication of  XIII, 5, 529–531, 537–538, 540 – barbarism/brutality and  78, 111 – Bethmann Hollweg and  371, 423 – birthday celebration of (1916)  241–251, 341, 406 – Central European block and  283 – change of Imperial Chancellors and  423 – conquest and  70, 92 – flight to front of  238–240, 538 – German armed forces and  239–240 – on German collapse  537 – German democracy and  96, 494 – German High Seas Fleet and  304–305 – German offensive of 1918 and  494 – German Society 1914 and  263 – God and 91 – Hindenburg and  421, 463 – ideas of 1914 and  237–240 – intellectual civil war and  71–72 – July Crisis (1914) and  45 – Ludendorff and  421, 463, 528 – Manifesto of the 93 and  122 – mental state of (August 1914)  237–238 – military victory over democracy and  494

618

Index of Names

– “My army and My navy” and  94–95 – peace and  43, 70, 76, 84, 122, 238, 305, 358 – “people in arms” and  92 – on political elite  497 – Prussian franchise and  380–381, 381n21, 393–394 – public mood and  360, 371, 538 – Realpolitik and  238 – reduced role of  237–242 – Reichstag and  69–71, 457–458 – speeches and declarations of – – of 1914 69–71, 92 – – declaration of mobilization (1914)  50n29, 50–51, 57 – – Easter Message (1917) 380–381, 381n21, 393, 415, 417, 506, 508 – – to mass gathering (1914)  43–44 – – “State of Imminent Danger of War” (1914)  43, 43n3 – – “State of Siege” (1914)  43 – Tirpitz on 427 – on unity 70–71 – Wilson and  526, 527, 529 Wilson, Woodrow. See also Allies (Entente); Fourteen Points (Wilson); League of Nations – democracy and  11–12, 381–402, 407, 512, 525–527 – entry into war and  373, 381–384 – Fatherland Party on  429 – on French democracy  398 – “German Freedom” (lecture series, Prussian House of Representatives, 1917) 385–402 – German versus British democracy and 397 – Harnack on  386–87, 414 – ignorance of Germany and its affairs  11– 12, 381–384 – Ludendorff and  527–528 – Lusitania and  309n29 – peace and  12, 382–383, 386 – Russia and 462 – Schäfer on 521 – Sering on 397–98 – submarine warfare and  309n29, 373, 381–382, 525–526

– Troeltsch and  403, 407, 467, 508 – Wilhelm II and  527, 529 – works – –  Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics 398 Windelband, Wilhelm  23 Winkler, Heinrich August  1–2, 500–501 Winning, August  217 Wolff, Theodor. See also Berliner Tageblatt (newspaper) – on annexation  211, 212, 212n148 – Bethmann Hollweg and  327, 363–364, 367, 368 – Burgfrieden and  125, 362, 467 – censorship and 80–81 – Delbrück-Dernburg Petition and  214–215 – on demonstrations 362 – on destruction of Louvain  81–82 – Deutelmoser and 375 – on Erzberger’s address to Reichstag (1917) 420 – Falkenhayn and Hindenburg and  360 – France and 82 – on German atrocities  81–82, 124 – hope for Germany and (1917)  454 – January Strike (1918) and  467 – Manifesto of the 93 and  214 – on peace negotiation offer  368 – “Political Society of 1915” and  261 – on reorientation 363–65 – on Scharnhorst 94 – shortages and 361 – Troeltsch and 28 – on Wilhelm II 360 – works – – “The Burning of Louvain”  81–82 – – Der Krieg des Pontius Pilatus 49n23, 94n190 – – Der Marsch durch zwei Jahrzehnte  212n148 Wortmann, Karl  439 Zangwill, Israel  273, 273n148 Zechlin, Egmont  148n182, 283n185 Zedlitz-Neukirch, Octavio Freiherr von  322 Ziegler, Theobald  484 Zimmermann, Arthur  187

Index of Subjects Africa, Central  284, 287 Alldeutsche Blätter (Pan-German League newspaper)  108, 150, 154, 167 Allies. See Entente and Allies Alsace-Lorraine  54, 377, 508, 510 America (United States). See also Allies (Entente); Fourteen Points; Lusitania; Western culture; Western democracy; Western Front; Wilson, Woodrow and other Americans – Bethmann Hollweg and  307, 309 – Central European block and  283, 283n182, 297 – constitution of  36, 399–400, 409–410 – democracy and  8, 160, 273, 397–401, 409–410, 508 – diplomatic relations with Germany and 373 – entry into war of  307–308, 373, 381–384, 386, 387, 402, 403–405 – French equality compared  351 – German freedom and  381–384 – Germany and the World War and  176 – historical development of democracy and 8 – imperialism and  160, 299, 408 – “melting pot” and  273 – Pan-German agitation and  323 – public opinion and  213 – separation of church and state and  232 – Sering on 397–401 – submarine warfare and  307–308, 309, 311–­312, 335–336, 373, 381–384, 387, 403 – Troeltsch on  30, 30n89, 160, 271, 273, 350–351, 403–405, 408, 409–410 – M. Weber on 311–312 ancient world (antiquity)  22, 131, 185, 203–204, 215, 563, 564, 565

Anglo-Saxon democracy  199–200 Anglo-Saxons  143, 147 annexation, conquest and expansionism. See also Belgium; Central European block (Mitteleuropa); Claß, Heinrich and other educated elites; Delbrück-Dernburg Petition; imperialism; Seeberg Address (“Intellectuals’ Petition”); self-determi­ nation; Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities); world domination – Belgium and  155, 211–213, 259, 286, 511–512 – Bethmann Hollweg on  153–158, 207–208, 210, 212n150, 215, 220, 286–288, 293, 324 – Bethmann Hollweg versus Claß on  153– 158, 207–208, 220, 286–288 – Burgfrieden and  151, 161, 221, 270–271 – Central European block and  287, 288, 293 – defensive war versus 70 – educated elites and  211–213, 212n148 – Fatherland Party and  435, 520, 522 – Industrialists’ Petition and  207–208 – Manifesto of the Three and  233 – negotiated peace and  449 – Pan-Germans and  115, 151, 215–216 – Peace Resolution and  425 – political ethics and  211 – Realpolitik and  492 – reorientation and  220, 414n171 – self-determination versus 499 – Social Democrats and  72, 234 – Troeltsch on  92, 212, 212n51, 270, 449, 511–512, 513 – working classes and  465 Anti-German Union (British Empire Union) 111 anti-Semitism  156, 501, 501n185, 548

620

Index of Subjects

anti-war protests  49, 71, 102, 304, 316, 324–325, 325n106, 362, 424. See also January Strike (1918); revolution; strikes and mutinies aristocratic idea  7, 12, 38, 41, 41n127, 348, 409, 502. See also monarchism armistice of  1918 495–497, 515, 525–526, 528, 536, 542 assassinations  43, 463, 485–486, 554–556, 571 atrocities. See barbarism, brutality, and atrocities Austria-Hungary  46–48, 49, 55, 174, 178, 187, 289, 291, 346–347, 355, 408, 461, 470, 495. See also Central European block (Mitteleuropa); Hötzendorf, Conrad von and other Austrians – Austro-Prussian war (1866)  174, 291 – balkanization of 408 – blamed for causing war  49 – defeat and 495 – defensive war and  55 – ethnicities and 355 – Fourteen Points and  461 – Germany and the World War and  178 – Italy and 187 – “likened to a cadaver”  289 – Obrigkeitsregierung and  346–347 – outbreak of war and  46–48 – strikes and 470 authoritarian state (Obrigkeitsstaat). See also imperialism; militarism; military elites, German; patriarchy; Preuß, Hugo and other educated elites – autonomy and 389 – constitutional state and  346 – democracy and  343, 347–350, 383, 542 – historical development and  280 – people’s army and  94n189 – popular state versus  345–347, 538 – Romanticism and 563 – Troeltsch on  280, 345, 347–350, 383, 538, 563 autonomy  183, 333, 353, 389, 564, 567. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; human rights; imperialism; self-determination; self-formation (Selbstbildung); individual freedom

– Troeltsch on  183, 567 backwardness (Zurückgebliebenheit) of Germany  344–345, 347, 379, 389, 414 Baden, Grand Duchy of  53, 138, 503–504, 514. See also Heidelberg – Troeltsch and  29, 172, 175, 504 Balkans  355, 461 Baltic  456n13, 493 barbarism, brutality, and atrocities. See also Battle of Verdun (1916); Belgium, invasion of (1914); civilization; Louvain (Belgium); militarism; Romanticism, German – Allies and 474 – annexation and 154–156 – culture war and  139 – economic future and  449 – international opinion and  101 – Manifesto of the 93 on  123 – power and 513 – Prince Isenburg-Birstein in Lithuania and 456n13 – Realpolitik and  489 – Romanticism and  563, 568 – Troeltsch on  132, 139, 449, 474, 489, 513, 563, 566, 568 Battle of Amiens (1918)  492 Battle of Cambrai (1917)  454 Battle of Galicia (1915–17)  96, 97 Battle of Leipzig (1813)  59 Battle of the Marne (1914)  90, 97, 98, 116–119, 125, 131, 154–156, 239, 288, 372, 493, 505 Battle of the Marne, Second (1918)  483 Battle of Peoples (Völkerschlacht) (Battle of Leipzig) (1813)  53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 174. See also spirit of 1813 Battle of the Somme (1916)  330, 359, 453 Battle of Verdun (1916)  330, 359 Battle of Ypres, Third (Passchendaele) (1917)  453, 454 Bavaria  158, 315, 360, 453, 540, 557. See also South Germany Belgium. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; Belgium, invasion of (1914); Western Front – Central European block and  287

Index of Subjects – as collateral 212 – Fatherland Party and  435 – Fourteen Points and  516 – Germany and the World War and  178 – Industrialists’ Petition and  207–208 – nationalism and 355 – Pan-German agitation and  323 – Prussian House of Representatives and 212–213 – Seeburg Address and 216 – Troeltsch on  355, 511–512 Belgium, invasion of (1914) – Bethmann Hollweg and  73, 74 – British justification for war and  75, 85, 110 – censorship and  80–81, 81n141, 118 – Central European block and  287 – described 66–69, 76–82 – destruction of Louvain and  77–79, 81–82, 123 – German censorship and  115, 119 – international law and  73–74, 76, 110, 118, 123, 461 – international opinion and  101, 109–110 – killing civilians and  77–79, 124 – Manifesto of the 93 and  120, 122, 128–129 – reaction to 66–82 – response to 76–80 – Troeltsch on 139 “Berlin Declaration” (1917)  415–416, 419, 422–423, 429, 444–445, 508 Berliner Abend-Zeitung (newspaper)  241 Berliner Neueste Nachrichten ­(newspaper)  416 Berliner Tageblatt (newspaper)  28, 81, 82, 121, 203, 325, 363, 365, 366, 467, 500, 550–551. See also Wolff, Theodor Berlin period (Troeltsch’s). See also culture war (Kulturkrieg); Germany and the World War (Hintze and Meinecke, eds.); Realpolitik; reorientation; walks in the Grunewald; Wednesday Evening (Mittwochabend) circle (H. Harnack); Wilhelm II, birthday celebration of – assassination of Rathenau and  554–558 – Heidelberg compared to  74–75 – transfer to 27–28

621

– Troeltsch on 171–175 – Troeltsch’s activities and  203–205, 235–236, 551–554 Berlin University. See University of Berlin Bildung  28, 353 Bildungsindividualismus 391 blame for causing war. See also defensive war; World War I, causes of – of America 527–528 – of America and Germany compared  402– 411 – of Austria 49 – of Central Powers  505 – of France 54–55 – of Germany 198 – Louvain and 81–82 – of Russia  54–55, 60, 70, 72 – Troeltsch on 402–411 blockade, British  131–132, 240, 251, 277, 291–292, 304, 315, 330, 361, 403. See also starvation and shortages blockades, moral  139 Bolshevism  465, 493, 555 bourgeoisie  7, 46, 71n65, 229–230, 363, 409, 482, 488, 516, 555. See also economic factors bourgeois liberal center  217, 226. See also Thimme, Friedrich bravery  62, 91, 229, 378 Brest-Litovsk Treaty (1918). See Treaty of Brest-Litovsk  454, 493 Britain (England). See also blockade, British; Entente and Allies; international opinion; naval power and freedom of the seas; Oxford University and others; propaganda; war of words (international opinion); Western culture (European and American); Western democracy; Western freedom; Western Front – Belgium and  78–80, 85, 223 – blamed for causing war  106, 196–197 – Central European block and  283, 284, 293 – declaration of war of  66 – Fatherland Party and  520 – franchise and 397n81 – freedom and democracy and  33, 80, 182, 183–185, 342, 343n155, 352–353, 390 – German imperialism and  162, 168

622

Index of Subjects

– Germany and the World War and  178 – imperialism and  160–161, 405, 408 – individual and the state and  390 – internationalism and 82–83 – mobilization of opinion and  112–113 – national individualities and  181, 299 – Pan-German agitation and  323 – peace negotiations and  495 – political ethics and  109 – Seeburg Address and 216 – Sombart and  184n41, 200, 266, 281 – Troeltsch on  31, 55, 130, 132–133, 179, 181, 408 – world domination and  84–86, 109, 159– 160, 162, 184, 185, 196, 199, 405, 508 British Expeditionary Force  98 British War Propaganda Bureau  112–113 brutality. See barbarism, brutality, and atrocities Bulgaria  308, 309, 495. See also Central Powers Burgfrieden and military censorship. See also Belgium invasion and other sensitive issues; Delbrück, Hans and other elites; freiheitlich; information; Social Democrats; war of words (international opinion) – defensive war and  120–121 – Delbrück-Dernburg Petition and  214 – educated elites and  84, 401–402 – equality and 268 – freedom and democracy and  96 – Free Patriotic Association and  255 – Germany and the World War and  177, 179, 179n27 – ideas of 1914 and  268 – intellectual civil war and  149, 151, 251, 468 – internationalism and 83 – international opinion and  101, 114–115 – Labor Force in the New Germany and  226, 235 – Manifesto of the 93 and  125 – Manifesto of the Three and  234 – military leaders and  101, 120–121 – peace and 318 – People’s League and  436 – public opinion and  80, 115, 121 – reorientation and  219–220, 379

– Seeberg Address and  210, 211 – spirit of 1914 and  18–19, 21, 318–319 – Troeltsch and  89, 179, 327–28, 329, 332 – Troeltsch on  89, 92, 96, 201, 202, 327–328, 332, 371, 379 – weakening of  251, 252, 320 Cambridge University  31, 82–83 capitalism  30n89, 270, 300, 344, 405, 410. See also free-market theory casualties. See deaths and casualties Catholicism  12, 22, 566. See also Center Party; religion; South Germany censorship. See Burgfrieden and military censorship Center Party  96, 286, 419, 425–431, 436, 544. See also Erzberger, Matthias; Weimar Coalition Central Africa  284, 287 Central European block (Mitteleuropa) – Bethmann Hollweg and  283–287, 288–294, 294n225, 297n239, 297–298, 313 – ethnicities and  338–339, 354–358 – Falkenhayn and 292–294 – German dominance/leadership and  296– 297, 299 – German freedom and  338–339, 341, 354– 356, 357–358 – German military leadership and  293–294 – international opinion and  297 – Naumann’s book and  295–298 – obstacles to 287–292 – organizations supporting  295, 295n229 – peace and  285, 293 – political ethics and  298–299 – public opinion and  294, 297–298 – Rathenau proposal and  283–286 – reorientation and 284 – Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and  493 – Troeltsch on  282, 298–302, 330, 338–339, 341, 354–356, 357–358 – Völkerindividualitäten and  254–256, 299, 354–358 – Wilhelm II and  283 Central Powers  186, 404, 454, 459–460, 505. See also Central European block (Mitteleuropa)

Index of Subjects chauvinism  14, 88, 130, 142, 315 Christianity. See also God; political ethics; religion – bankruptcy of 265–266 – democratic ideals and  37, 399 – European culture and  24, 180–181, 480, 564–566 – German culture and  131 – historical examination and  24, 243, 477 – human rights and  472 – idealism of freedom and  275 – natural law and  564–565 – political ethics and  32–41 – reorientation and 232 – science and history and  24 – Troeltsch on  32–41, 472, 477, 480, 564–565 – war and 136 The Christian World (journal)  172 civilians at home. See also the people (the masses) (das Volk); starvation and shortages – freedom and  274, 438 – levée en masse and  524–525 – mobilization and 66–67 – morale and 117 – People’s League and  472 – political status and  331 – unity (1918) and  493 – Volkelt on 470 civilization  14, 101, 104, 104n9, 111, 123, 129, 140, 343n155, 559 civil war  556. See also intellectual civil war class interests. See also aristocratic idea; educated elites; elites; military elites; political elites; power elites; Prussian franchise; working classes – British blockade and  361 – conservatives and 224–225 – electoral reform and  224–225 – fatherland and 522 – Fatherland Party and  437, 442–443, 463 – German culture and  181 – German government and  491 – Meinecke on 393 – militarism and 545 – overcoming of 64 – peace and 545–546

623

– political parties and  34 – political representation and  224 – Prussian franchise and  381 – rights and 546 – Troeltsch on  276, 347, 491 – war aims and  166 class warfare  36, 220 the “Club.” See German Society  1914 colonialism  37, 161, 284, 461, 499n172, 513, 516. See also imperialism communication  114, 160, 174 Communist Party of Germany  525 community spirit (Gemeinsinn) 351 compassion 513–514 compromise. See Realpolitik conquest. See annexation, conquest and expansionism conscription, general or universal  11, 54, 94n189, 515 Conservative Party  365, 367, 417, 421–422, 425, 438, 507, 508 “conservative revolution”  566 conservatives and conservatism. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; industrialists; Junkers; military power/ victory; nationalism; Pan-German League; Schäfer, Dietrich and other conservatives; Seeberg Address ­(“Intellectuals’ Petition”) and its organizers; Die Tägliche Rundschau and other newspapers – abstract ideas and  37–38 – anti-Semitism and 548 – Bethmann Hollweg and reorientation and 380 – class interests and  224–225 – conservative theologians  24, 188, 208, 232 – democracy and  35–41, 41n127, 95–96, 563–564, 568–569 – Easter Message (1917) and  415–416, 506 – German democracy and  8, 38–41, 41n127, 416–417 – history and  24, 38 – history of 8 – inequality and 37–38 – Labor Force in the New Germany and  48, 226–227, 257, 370, 376, 517–518

624

Index of Subjects

– moderate 436 – natural law and  564 – reorientation and  220, 380 – Romanticism and 566–567 – Social Democrats and  218 – Tirpitz resignation and  316–317 – Troeltsch on  36–41, 41n127, 95–96, 186, 556–557, 568 constitutional state  346 Construction Workers Union  226 cosmopolitanism. See also internationalism; liberalism and liberals – Bildung and  353 – democracy and 37 – German historical development and  86 – independence of others and  166 – liberalism and 166 – national ideal versus 266 – national loyalty versus 234 – peace and 154 – World War I and  265 counterrevolution 547–549 courage  61–63, 327, 332 Court of Arbitration in The Hague  510 crucible (Schmelztiegel)  21, 97, 272–273, 550 “crusade against the German spirit”  139– 140 cultural disarmament (demobilization of minds)  470–473, 471n68, 534. See also mobilization of minds; Volkelt, Hans – Troeltsch on  449–450, 472–481, 485–486, 489 culture  86, 138, 140–142, 245–246, 549, postscript. See also civilization; culture, unified theory of (Kultursynthese); German culture; human (common) culture; liberalism; relativism, cultural; Sonderart (“special nature”); Sonder­ bildung; Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities); Western culture culture, unified theory of (Kultursynthese)  23n64, 23–25, 27, 29, 41, 96, 245–246, 276, 344, 569. See also historical development; relativism, cultural; Völkerindividu­ alitäten culture war (Kulturkrieg). See also barbarism, brutality, and atrocities;

German culture; German freedom; ideas of 1914; militarism; nationalism; self-­ examination (introspection); spirit of 1914; war of words (international opinion); Western freedom; world domination – British propaganda and  86, 104, 110, 115, 115n57, 139–140, 178, 192–193, 196–199, 278n170, 278–281, 405 – German self-examination and  139–140, 274, 278–281 – illusory common culture and  140–141 – overview  21, 98, 180–181 – political ethics and  559–561 – political factors and  191–202, 278n170, 340, 343 – scholarship and  12–16, 58–60 – Troeltsch on  12, 57–58, 98, 128–129, 139–141, 178, 180–181, 186, 189, 191–202, 272, 274, 278–281, 340, 343, 404, 405, 481, 504, 559–569 – unwinnable 189 customs union  222–223. See also Central European block (Mitteleuropa) deaths and casualties. See also Battle of the Marne and other battles; Volksheer (People’s Army) – American 373 – annexationist propaganda and  92–93, 211 – British 98, 453–454 – Central European block and  292–293 – fall  1917 453, 455 – French  98, 292, 453–454 – German  97–98, 127, 453–454, 494–495 – government lies and  126–127 – ideas of 1914 and  251–252 – 1914 to  1916 359, 412 – 1917 455 – popular mood and  240 – reason and logic and  189–190 – shortages and 362 – submarine warfare and  373 – Western Front (1914–1915) and  98, 98n200, 235 – World War I and  536 “Declaration of University Professors of the German Empire”  128n101 declaration of war. See World War I

Index of Subjects defeatism, accusations of. See also demobilization of minds (cultural disarmament) – Below on 484–485 – Bethmann Hollweg and  157, 469 – H. Delbrück and  153 – demobilization of minds and  471–472 – German government and  521 – Harnack on 322 – Independent Committee for a German Peace and  326 – People’s League and  471 – submarine warfare opponents and  321 – Troeltsch and  471–472, 484 – Troeltsch on  473–475, 480 defensive war. See also Belgium, invasion of (1914); Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von and other elites; blame for causing war; culture war (Kulturkrieg); Manifesto of the  93 – censorship and 120–121 – Central European block and  292–293 – Delbrück-Dernburg Petition and  214 – democratic ethics and  195–198 – German culture and  209 – German democracy and  196–198 – German unity and  198, 209, 260, 281 – Germany’s “innocence” and  60, 60n57 – human culture and  56, 65, 169 – ideas of 1813 and  53 – ideas of 1914 versus  14, 281 – peace and 194, 420 – the people and the state and  394 – Social Democrats and  72, 74 – Troeltsch on  53, 55–56, 59–60, 65, 92, 131, 136, 137, 169, 194, 379, 516 Delbrück-Dernburg Petition  213–215, 214n159, 216, 252, 288, 396 demobilization of minds (cultural disarmament) (intellectual armistice)  471n68, 534. See also mobilization of opinion; Royal Library Meeting (1918) – Troeltsch on  449–451, 471–481, 485–486, 489 democracy, idea of. See also equality; freedom, idea of; German democracy; liberalism; mass culture, democratic; peace; Völkerindividualitäten (national

625

individualities; Western democracy; will of the people – authoritarian state and  343, 347–350, 383, 542 – conservatism and  35–41, 41n127, 95–96, 563–564, 568–569 – democratic principles and  34–41, 546 – German democracy and  XIV–XV, 2–5, 7, 21, 334, 348, 546 – historical development of  XIII, 3, 5, 8, 36–37, 331, 408–409, 410, 445, 446, 543n10, 565–566 – ideals and idealism and  225–226, 228, 337–338, 405 – peace and  38, 194, 217, 219, 220, 383, 385, 388, 439 – political ethics and  32–38 – power and 194–196 – Troeltsch on  XIV, 5, 29, 32–38, 193–194, 196, 333n127, 334, 348, 451, 546 – world 404 “democracy of beggars”  411 Democratic People’s League (1918)  555 Democratic People’s Party  29, 70–71 Denmark  286, 287 Der Tag (newspaper)  486–487 Deutscher Kurier (newspaper)  466–467 Deutsche Tageszeitung (newspaper)  466– 467 dictatorship of the proletariat  537 dies nefastus  317, 317n63 dignity – cultural synthesis and  246 – European culture and  567 – Germans and  281, 353 – German science and  88 – ideas of 1914 and  281 – individual and state and  137, 225, 301, 351, 391, 478 – internationalism and 450 – Pan-Germans and 149 – popular sovereignty and  447 – Realpolitik and  40 – Romanticism and 567 – Sonderweg and  570 – Troeltsch on  40, 55, 447, 450, 478, 481, 564, 567, 570 – universal 481, 564

626

Index of Subjects

– as war aim  55, 281, 301 direct ballot  225. See also franchise, equal; Prussian franchise discipline, order and organization  35, 94, 96, 119, 121, 145, 229, 264–265, 277–278, 280, 332, 346, 502. See also militarism – Troeltsch on 64 diseases 361 diversity, individual. See also relativism, cultural; individual freedom; pluralism – Christian natural law and  564–565 – cultures and 141–142 – decrease of 276 – fatherland and 260 – German freedom and  147 – inequality and 567 – monarchy and 145 – right to 142 – unity and  145, 260–261 – Volksheer (People’s Army) and  96–97, 145 diversity of peoples (cultures). See Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities) division of labor and  277–278 domestic crisis of 1916–1917. See also Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von and other elites – American entry into war and  307–313 – Central European block and – constitutional reform and  335–338 – German idea of freedom and  338–357 – National Committee for an Honorable Peace and  324–335 – submarine warfare and  304–320 – Troeltsch on  321, 326–358 Donau monarchy  46 Dreyfus Affair  82 duty  351, 352–353 Eastern Europe  208, 493, 499 Eastern Front  49, 51, 90, 98, 124, 235, 239, 308, 460, 490, 492–493, 515. See also deaths and casualties; Russia; Treaty of Brest-Litovsk “economic dictator”  319–320 economic factors. See also Central European block (Mitteleuropa); class interests;

imperialism; industrialists; naval power; Plenge, Johann; starvation and shortages; working classes – abstract versus practical  277–278 – Anglo-Saxon freedom and  143 – as cause of war  45, 46, 561 – Central European block and  283 – consequences of war and  536–537 – democracy and 193 – European liberalism and  35 – Fatherland Party and  513 – Fourteen Points and  460–461 – ideas of 1914 and  277 – Industrialists’ Petition and  207–208 – military victory and  479–480 – peace and  55–56, 448–449, 516 – Troeltsch on  135, 277–278, 405, 448–449, 478, 513 – unification and  145–146, 344 – Weimar Constitution and  448n298 – Western franchise and  397n81 – WWI and  45, 46 educated elites, German (Bildungsbürger­ tum). See also culture war; Delbrück Hans and other educated elites; “German Freedom” lectures and other public statements; German Society 1914 and other organizations; Germany and the World War (Hintze and Meinecke, eds.) and other publications; ideas of 1914; intellectual civil war; Royal Library ­Meeting (1918); Wissenschaft – assassination and 485–486 – courage of 402 – future of 552 – internationalism and 82–89 – public opinion and  61–62, 192–193 – spirit of 1914 and  20–21 – Tirpitz on 376 – Troeltsch on  22–26, 27–28, 30–31, 62, 175, 179, 190–202, 491–492, 550, 556–557, 559 – war of words and  100–105, 120–129 educated elites, international  139, 180. See also culture war (Kulturkrieg); internationalism education and cultivation (Bildung) 183, 193, 353, 552. See also Sonderbildung

Index of Subjects elites. See educated elites; military elites; political elites emotions (passions). See also militarism; spirit of 1913; spirit of 1914 – culture war and  65, 65n71, 138–139, 192–193 – Fatherland Party and  442 – Germany and the World War and  176 – nationalists and 488 – reason versus  55n45, 56, 142 – Troeltsch on  55n45, 56, 65, 65n71, 139–140, 146, 564 Enlightenment  11, 24, 86, 208, 267, 281, 472, 473, 478, 565, 567 Entente and Allies. See also America (United States); Britain (England); culture war (Kulturkrieg); deaths and casualties; Eastern Front; France; peace; Russia; war of words (international opinion); Western culture; Western freedom; Western Front – blamed for causing war  527–528 – censorship and 386–387 – freedom and democracy and  386, 436 – “German Freedom” lectures and (1917) and 388 – German militarism and  145 – Germany and the World War and  187 – feared invastion (1918) and  494, 517 – peace and  386, 387, 404, 407–408, 464 – propaganda and 133–134 – Prussian franchise and  444–445 – Seeberg Address and 211 – Troeltsch on 407 – view of Germany of  279–280 – Western Front initiative (1918)  515 envy  43, 57, 57n50, 84, 102–103 equality. See also dignity; equal rights; franchise, equal; German army; inequal­ ity; League of Nations; natural law; individual freedom – abstract 446, 566 – American versus French  351 – Burgfrieden and  268 – Central European block and  287, 293 – Christianity and 143 – democracy and  143, 332, 546–547, 565 – democracy versus conservatism and  37– 38

627

– French idea of freedom and  143, 182, 351 – gender 447 – “German Freedom” lectures and  402 – German state and  219, 348 – individual personalities and  36, 143 – justice versus 267 – new Germany and  265 – of opportunity 409–410 – of other particularities  185, 249–250 – public power and  396–397 – social democracy and  546 – among states  85, 185, 347, 450–451 – Troeltsch on  36, 37, 63–64, 250, 276, 347, 348, 446, 447, 450–451, 546–547, 565, 566 equal rights. See Prussian franchise; rights Ernst-Troeltsch-Gesellschaft 26 Estonians 493 ethics. See political ethics (morality) (values) ethnicities  40, 165–166, 184, 198–199, 338–339, 351, 354–355. See also Central European block (Mitteleuropa); Völker­ individualitäten (nationalities) European culture. See Western culture (European and American) Evening Post (British newspaper)  314 existence of Germany  55. See also defensive war expansionism. See annexation, conquest and expansionism experience versus abstract laws  24. See also Realpolitik farmers  45, 289, 363, 410, 416–417, 434n243, 436, 523 fascism (“Faszistentum”)  549n36, 556, 556n62 fatherland  260–261, 522 – Troeltsch on  442, 556 Fatherland Party, German (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei). See also intellectual civil war – Below and 483 – critics of 431–432 – on feared Allied invasion (1918)  517 – German democracy and  423–430, 435–436

628

Index of Subjects

– German government legitimacy and  518 – German state and  437, 444 – Herre on 486–487 – levée en masse and  513, 517–520 – Ludendorff and  428n228, 463 – manipulation of the masses and  479 – membership statistics 433n242 – Michaelis and 511 – the people and  472 – People’s League versus  432n240, 435– 439, 439n239, 443n285, 443–445, 446, 447n297, 487–492, 513, 517–519, 523 – public opinion and  535 – reorientation and  430, 435–436 – Solf and 469 – Troeltsch on  326, 442–444, 443n285, 445, 448, 463, 467–468, 472, 511 – Max Weber on  429–30, 442 – Wilhelm II abdication and  530–531 Federal Republic of Germany  447 feminism  12, 434n245, 447 Finland 493 Flanders  453, 496 food. See blockade, British; starvation and shortages Fourteen Points (Wilson)  460–462, 463, 514, 516, 533–534. See also Wilson, Woodrow France. See also Battle of the Marne (1914); Entente and Allies; Franco-Prussian War (1870); French Revolution (1789); Heidelberg; Napoleon; Western culture; Western culture (European and American); Western democracy; Western freedom; Western Front – American equality compared  351 – Belgium annexation and  223 – blamed for causing war  54–55 – Central European block and  286, 287 – constitution of 36 – culture war and  104 – declaration of war on  66 – Fourteen Points and  461 – freedom and democracy and  57, 64, 80, 143, 182, 183–185, 266–267, 342, 343, 343n155, 351, 352–353, 390, 397–400 – German hatred and  106 – Germany and the World War and  178

– historical ideas and  300 – individual and the state and  390 – Industrialists’ Petition and  208 – Louvain compared 82 – national anthem of  59 – National Guard militia  95 – national individuality and  181 – occupation of Germany (1923) and  573 – peace negotiations and  368, 495 – Schlieffen plan and  49, 68, 493 – Seeberg Address and 209 – social democracy and  400 – Troeltsch on  54–55, 55n45, 57, 64, 90, 133, 179, 181 – war aims and  162 – War of the Palatinate Succession (1689– 1697) and  56 – wars with Germany and  56–57 franchise, equal. See also parliamentary democracy; Prussian franchise; reorientation – Anschütz on 227–228 – democracy and 445–448 – established 526, 528 – German freedom and  184 – Harnack on 336–338 – historical development and  417, 567 – public opinion and  363, 364 – Troeltsch on  445–448, 567 – Western versus German  396–397, 397n81 Franco-Prussian War (1870). See also Alsace-Lorraine – Belgian invasion and  69, 82 – British blockade and  131–132 – “defeatism” and 474 – Fatherland Party and  426 – as heroic  174, 291 – historical necessity and  57, 82 – 1914 compared  54, 69, 91 – spirit of 1914 and  52 – Troeltsch on 174 freedom, idea of. See also democracy; German freedom; the individual; liberalism; nationalism; rights; individual freedom – abstract versus exercise of  274–276 – historical development and  183–184, 350, 405–407

Index of Subjects – political ethics and  35–36, 298 – Troeltsch on  35, 274–276, 338–357, 411 freedom of ideas or opinion  474 freedom of the press  218–219, 466–467. See also Burgfrieden and military censorship freedom of speech and assembly  465, 466–467 freedom of spirit  546–547 freedom of the seas. See naval power and freedom of the seas free-market theory  320. See also capitalism Free Patriotic Association  252–257, 325, 433, 435 Free Trade Unions  470–471 freiheitlich  438n263, 438–439, 444, 512, 514 “frei von Menschen” (“free of people”)  155 French Revolution (1789)  11, 93–94, 94n189, 265–266, 409, 438n263, 565. See also Levée en masse Führerpersönlichkeiten/Führer­ demokratie 476 future Imperial Chancellor  434 future of Germany (new Germany). See also German democracy; The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.); The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.); peace; reorientation; war aims – cultural differences and  249–250, 559–560 – educated elite on  377 – German College for Politics and  559 – German freedom and  300 – historical thinking and  545 – ideas of 1914 and  265 – the people and  546 – People’s League and  534 – Solf on 260 – Troeltsch on  62–63, 249–250, 276–277, 282, 300–301, 377–378, 490–491, 521, 552, 556–557, 559–560 Gemeinsinn (community spirit)  351 Gemeinwesen (commonwealth)  347 gender equality  447 General Commission of German Trade Unions 217

629

geographical situation  344–345, 390 German army. See also Battle of the Marne (1914) and other battles; Belgium, invasion of (1914); deaths and casualties; Eastern Front; military elites, German; military power/victory; Prussian army; strikes and mutinies; Volksheer (People’s Army) (Volk in Waffen); Western Front – “black day” (August 8, 1918)  492 – crumbling from within (1918)  495 – duty and 353 – equality and  63–64, 362 – equal rights and  218–219 – future of the people and  331 – German navy and  305 – German prisoners voluntarily taken (1918) 495 – German unity and  145 – idea of freedom and  274 – mood of  218–219, 362, 362n232 – Prussian franchise and  337 – rights and  97, 519 – reputation of 79 – submarine warfare and  372n284 – surrender of (1918)  495 – Troeltsch on  61, 64n69 – Wilhelm II and  94–95, 239 – words and 61 German College for Politics  559 German culture. See also culture war (Kulturkrieg); German democracy; German freedom; historical development; ideals and idealism; militarism and other distortions; political ethics (morality) (values); self-examination (introspection); Sonderart (“special nature”) – essence of  140–147, 168 – Germany and the World War and  178, 179–190 – human (common) culture and  48, 65, 86, 131, 562, 567, 570–571, postcript – scholars on 58 – Troeltsch on  35, 65, 129–138, 140–147, 168, 179–182, 245, 480, 560–572 – war of words  129–137 – Weimar Republic and  2

630

Index of Subjects

– Western culture and  35, 65, 86, 107, 131, 140, 142, 168, 179–182, 245, 279–280, 450–451, 475, 480, 560–572 German democracy. See also; Claß, Heinrich and other opponents of democracy; culture war (Kulturkrieg); democracy, idea of; German freedom; historical development; Meinecke, Friedrich and other supporters; monarchism; parliamentary democracy; the people (the masses) (das Volk); People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland and other organizations; political ethics; reorientation (reform); revolution; social democracy; trust; Volksheer (People’s Army) (Volk in Waffen); Weimar Republic – argument for XIII–XV – culture war and  XIV, 12–16, 193–194, 197–200, 279–280, 403–406 – ideas of 1914 versus spirit of 1914 and 16–21 – opponents of  XIII, XV, 1–4, 8–9 – peace and  11–12, 382, 386, 387, 404–405, 407 – possibility of 452 – principles of democracy and  546–547 – supporters of  XIII–XV, 4–7 – Troeltsch on  XIII–XV, 5, 21, 32–41, 58–60, 64, 183–184, 193–194, 197–200, 254–256, 279–280, 334, 348–349, 353–354, 383, 402–411, 451, 452, 478, 507–511, 538, 543n10, 543–544, 546–547, 550–555 – Western democracy compared  93–94, 143–147, 279–280, 348, 396–411 – Wilson, Woodrow and  11–12, 381–402, 525–527 – World War I and  1, 4–5, 95–96 – as World War I cause  80 German Democratic Party  29, 534, 544, 545, 550, 551, 555. See also Weimar Coalition German Empire. See also Bismarck, Otto von; Hintze, Otto; Hohenzollern dynasty; World War I – fall of  1, 535–536, 545 – founding (unification) of  9, 54, 55–57, 184, 230, 260, 344, 451–452

– national anthem of  44 – peace and 52 – Troeltsch on  64–65, 535–536 German essence. See German culture German exceptionalism  568 German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei). See Fatherland Party German freedom. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; Below, Georg von and other critics; domestic crisis of 1916–1917; freedom; freiheit­lich; German democracy; “German Freedom” lectures (Prussian House of Representatives) (1917); historical development; ideas of 1914; Preuß, Hugo and other supporters; rights; spirit of 1813; spirit of 1913; spirit of 1914 – culture war and  279–281, 340 – German democracy and  385–402 – ideas of 1914 and  280–282 – power and  336, 394 – the state versus education and  182–183 – Troeltsch on  55, 59, 64, 129, 129n103, 149, 182–186, 251, 251n54, 338–357, 339n149, 340n340, 345n160, 391, 392, 405, 410, 446, 447 – as war aim  55, 59 – Western freedom compared  147, 182–186, 200, 279, 280–281, 340, 340n149, 344, 350, 352–354, 390–393, 405–411 “German Freedom” lectures (Prussian House of Representatives) (1917)  385– 412, 412n161, 416, 429 German government. See also defeatism; future of Germany (new Germany); military elites, German; monarchism; political elites; Reichstag; reorientation (reform); “republic” – constitution of  222, 239, 335–338, 457, 526–527, 532 – teetering  215–216, 445–446, 525 – Troeltsch and  179, 282, 332–333, 378, 545 German idealism  166, 182, 391 German identity  199 German literature, art, and music  182 German military dictatorship  459–460

Index of Subjects German National Union (1860s)  451–452 German navy  105, 304–305, 525. See also Imperial Naval Cabinet; Imperial Naval Office; military elites, German; naval power and freedom of the seas; submarine (U-boat) warfare; Tirpitz, Alfred von and other naval elites German-Prussian Imperial constitution  545 German Revolution. See November Revolution (1918) German Social Democratic Party  7–8 German Society 1914 (the “Club”)  257– 264, 268, 269, 301, 330, 370, 440, 455, 498–500, 555, 556. See also Solf, Wilhelm and other members – Troeltsch’s address to (1916)  263–282, 301, 342 German state  3, 6, 9, 39, 89, 131, 137, 182, 197, 231, 249, 265, 276, 331, 337, 345, 376, 383, 386, 401, 448, 527. See also authoritarian (autocratic) state (Obrig­ keitsstaat); German democracy; German freedom; German government; popular state (Volksstaat) Germany and the World War (Hintze and Meinecke, eds.)  176–190, 186n53, 189, 198, 258, 339 Gleichberechtigung 347 goal of history  242–243, 247 God  43, 59, 64–65, 70, 91, 140, 157, 390–391 “God punish England” (Gott strafe England)  105, 108 “God Save the Queen” (British national anthem) 44 good will  221 Graeca association  204, 204n114 great men  476–477, 567–568, 571, postscript Greece 292 Großes Hauptquartier (General Headquarters)  132, 239–242, 263, 309, 310, 317, 369, 377, 421, 494, 495, 496, 497, 530 guerrilla war  139 Hamburg 464 Heidelberg  56–57, 82, 91, 172–173 Heidelberg period (Troeltsch’s)

631

– Berlin compared to  74–75 – Heidelberg University public gathering (1914) 52–66 Heidelberg University. See University of Heidelberg “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” (Hail to Thee in Victor’s Wreath) (German national anthem)  44, 44n4 Heligoland clashes  305 Herrenvolk (sovereign people)  476n86, 476–477 Herrschaftsstaat 347 historical development. See also ancient world (antiquity); backwardness (Zurückgebliebenheit); Christianity; culture; culture, unified theory of (Kultursynthese); ideas of 1914; Middle Ages; natural law; progress; relativism, cultural; Roman Empire; Romanticism, German; spirit of 1914; universality; words into deeds; individual spirit – authoritarian state and  280 – class interests and  546 – culture and  245, 264 – defeat and 377 – democracy and  XIII, 3, 5, 8, 36–37, 331, 408–409, 410, 445, 446, 543n10, 565–566 – economic factors 277–278 – equal franchise and  417 – experience and 24 – freedom and  183–184, 350, 405–407, 439 – French-German wars and  56–57 – the future and  545 – German democracy and  XIII, 5, 7, 8–11, 332–334, 353, 394, 396, 408–411, 509–510, 542, 543n10, 545 – German freedom and  183–185, 344–346, 352–353, 388–391 – German objectivity and  146 – goal of  242–243, 247 – historical contingency and  278–279, 341–342, 543, 560 – ideas of 1914 and  273–274 – individual freedom and  342–344 – mobilization of 558 – monarchism and 144–145 – normative values and  23–24, 341 – peace and  55–57, 134–135

632

Index of Subjects

– political ethics and  23, 35–38, 244, 341 – progress versus 567 – Troeltsch on  1, 23–24, 35–38, 182, 242–243, 244–245, 278–279, 331, 445, 446, 540–543, 558, 560, 566 – universality and  242–243, 244–245, 278–279, 341–342, 439, 566 – Völkerindividualitäten and  341 – Volksheer (People’s Army) and  93–94 – Western and German compared  410–411, 560–572 – Western freedom and  342–343 historicism 345n160 Historische Zeitschrift (journal)  11, 87 hoarding 48–49. See also rationing; starvation and shortages Hohenzollern dynasty  97, 174–175, 240, 505, 529–538. See also German Empire; Wilhelm II; Wilhelm II and other emperors – Braun on 536 – Troeltsch on collapse of  535–536 Holland  31, 68, 118, 286, 287, 538, 540. See also Western Front honor  372n284, 446–447, 518–519, 547 human (common) culture. See also civilization; cosmopolitanism; culture; freedom, idea of; humanity; internationalism; relativism, cultural; Western culture (European and American) – annexation and 499 – defensive war and  56, 65, 169 – democracy and 279–280 – domination and  567, postscript – foreign nationalities and  86 – German culture and  48, 65, 86, 131, 562, 567, 570–571, postcript – historical development and  86, 244–247, 341–343, 564 – illusory 137, 140–141 – Troeltsch on  35 , 56, 65, 169 humanitarianism  244, 480, 513–514 humanity. See also barbarism, brutality, and atrocities; emotions (passions); human rights; the people (the masses) (das Volk); reason and rationality – annexation and 208 – common culture and  86, 155, 279, 342

– enemies of 382 – essence of 246–247 – individual freedom and  567 – natural law and  562–563, 565 – Realpolitik and 489–490 – Troeltsch on  146, 246–247, 342, 451, 562–563, 567 – unity of 567 – World War I and  561 human rights – Troeltsch on  35n109, 36–37, 40, 64, 161, 352, 473, 564–565, 567, 570 Idealpolitik 166 ideals and idealism. See also culture war (Kulturkrieg); Enlightenment; freedom, idea of and other ideals; political ethics; Realpolitik; Romanticism, German – democracy and conservatism and  36–37, 38–41 – German culture and  107, 145, 184 – Troeltsch and  1, 32, 66, 84, 137, 195–196, 231–233, 245, 247, 274, 352, 451, 472, 480–481, 554 ideas of 1813 53, 174 ideas of 1914. See also culture war (Kulturkrieg); democracy; equality; freedom; self-examination (introspection); self-examination, German; Sonderweg; spirit of 1914 – Central European block and  282–302 – defensive war versus  14, 281 – feelings and 275 – Free Patriotic Association and  252–257 – German freedom and  280–282 – German Society 1914 and  257–264 – historical thinking and  273–274 – intellectual civil war and  251–255, 265, 273–274, 278–281 – as justification of war death and suffering 251–252 – Kjellén and 266–267 – militarism and  14, 280 – National Socialism and  15–16 – partisan friction and  251–255 – peace and 420 – Plenge and  103n7, 265–266, 267–269

Index of Subjects – political awakening of the people and  275–276, 524 – relativism, cultural and  242–251, 279 – scholarly misinterpretation of  13–19 – spirit of 1914 versus  13–21, 90, 301–302 – Troeltsch on  20, 242–251, 268n132, 268–302, 341, 357, 446, 524 ideological purity  230–233 imperialism. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; Central Africa; colonialism; self-determination; world domination – Allies and 407 – American 160, 270 – annexation versus 270–271 – British  159–160, 185, 270, 271, 405 – as cause of war  269–270 – Central European block and  298 – Claß on 270–271 – democracy and  407–408, 411 – ethics and  165–166, 168 – French 270, 271 – German 159n230, 160–169 – German culture and  163, 164–167 – O. Hintze on  185 – Japanese 270 – liberal or cultural  162–166 – nationalism and 411 – peace and 162–164 – “place in the sun” and  301 – political ethics and  168–169 – Realpolitik and  166, 488 – Romanticism and 568 – Troeltsch on  95n194, 158–170, 181, 270–272, 301, 329, 407–408, 568 Imperial Naval Cabinet  237 Imperial Naval Office  113, 306, 314 independence. See the individual; individual freedom independence of others  166 Independent Committee for a German Peace  326, 517, 519–520 Independent Socialist Democratic ­Party  227, 264, 462, 525 the individual. See also diversity, individual; the people (the masses) (das Volk) – decline of West and  569 – historical development and  22

633

– the state and  137, 147, 182, 301, 351–355, 357, 390–391, 409, 446–447, 478 individual freedom. See also autonomy; equality; France; human rights; liberalism and liberals; rights; Romanticism, German; will of the people – collective freedom and  167, 406–407 – common culture and  571 – German constitutional monarchy and  401 – German essence and  145 – historical thinking and  342–344 individuality. See also Völkerindividuali­ täten (nationalities), 14, 37, 183, 184, 242, 244, 278–279, 353, 569 industrialists  211, 220, 289, 325, 416–417, 433, 463, 466, 488, 507, 545–546. See also AEG and others; Rathenau, Walther and others Industrialists’ Petition  207–208, 213, 233 industrial workers  184, 230–231, 364, 464 industriousness 145–146 inequality. See also great men; Prussian franchise; world domination – conservatism and 37–38 – Troeltsch on  38, 564, 567 information  17–18, 50, 175, 267. See also Burgfrieden and military censorship; mobilization of opinion; propaganda inner life  56, 185, 390. See also self-examination (introspection) “inner victory”  64 intellectual civil war (partisanship and polarization). See also “Berlin Declaration” (1917); culture war (Kulturkrieg) and other causes; demobilization of minds (cultural disarmament) (intellectual armistice); Fatherland Party and other participants; future of Germany (new Germany); peace; reorientation (reform); Volkelt, Hans and other polarizers; war aims; war of words (international opinion); Weimar Republic – Burgfrieden and  149, 151, 251, 468 – culture war and  190–191, 481, 561–562 – future of Germany and  571 – ideas of 1914 and  251–255, 265, 273–274, 278–281

634

Index of Subjects

– as irresolvable 201–202 – morality and 560 – overview 12–13 – as product of economic/political struggles 272 – reorientation and 415–418 – Royal Library Meeting (1918) and  517– 522 – scholarship and 13 – Troeltsch on  12, 179–186, 191–202, 343, 406, 441, 449–450, 462–471, 478–479, 481, 486, 560–572 – winter of 1915 and  254–255 – World War I and  104, 561 intellectual culture (geistige Kultur) 65 intellectual elites. See educated elites, German (Bildungsbürgertum) intellectual fairness  10 intellectual and spiritual life  34, 138 Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissen­ schaft, Kunst und Technik  83–97, 101, 186 internationalism. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; cosmopolitanism; League of Nations; war of words (international opinion) – British 82–83 – culture war and  189–190 – death of 82–89 – German culture and  82–83, 85–86, 179–185 – German freedom and  168, 438 – German pacifists and  561 – peace and 322 – sciences and 87–97 – Solf on 259 – Troeltsch on  37, 84, 87–97, 168, 182, 188–189, 202, 450, 489 international law  74n114, 74–76, 123, 304, 403, 461, 510. See also Peace Resolution (Friedensresolution) (Erzberger) (1917) international opinion. See culture war (Kulturkrieg); war of words intolerance/tolerance  146–147, 232, 300 Italy  46, 47, 160, 178, 187, 188, 287, 323, 474 January Strike (1918)  464–467, 465n46, 468, 469–470, 493, 524

Japan  69, 270 Jewish state  156 Jews 548. See also anti-Semitism John Bull (British journal)  111 jubilee festivities in 1913  135 July Crisis (1914)  44–45, 90 July Crisis, second (1917)  411–423, 508 June Club  376 Junkers  392–393, 427n224, 548. See also Beerfelde, Hans-Georg von justifications for war. See defensive war; World War I, causes of just wars  52, 134–135 Kaisergeburtstagsrede 241–251 Kieler Neueste Nachrichten (news­ paper) 559 Kiel uprisings  464, 465, 525, 532, 536, 540, 558. See also strikes and mutinies Kriegspublizistik (intellectual war journalism) 16 Kulturkrieg. See culture war Kulturwissenschaften (cultural sciences)  25 Der Kunstwart (journal)  543, 547 labor. See working classes The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.)  216–218, 217n169, 221n186, 221–236, 330, 333, 482, 482n103 – Troeltsch on 234–235 Lake Starnberg  557–558 “La Marseillaise” (French national anthem) 59 Latvians 493 League of Nations  36–37, 40, 397, 461, 533n317, 561 “League of Nations and Peace” (People’s League public meeting, 1918)  532–538, 535n126 Le Figaro (French newspaper)  126 Leipziger Volkszeitung (newspaper)  49, 233, 502 Le Temps (French newspaper)  368 levée en masse (1918)  514–525, 522n268, 555 liberalism and liberals. See also cosmopolitanism; Delbrück, Hans and other

Index of Subjects liberals; German Democratic Party and other parties; German Society 1914 and other organizations; The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.); reorientation (reform); Vossische Zeitung (newspaper); Western freedom – German democracy and  3, 565 – imperialism and  159–160, 162–166 – Labor Force in the New Germany and 217 – Max von Baden and  29 – national 324, 367 – Realpolitik and  39–40, 269n132, 490, 544 – reorientation and  219, 438 – social 163, 163n247 – the state and  35, 329 – Troeltsch on  35, 39–40, 147, 269n132, 490, 544, 565 – unification and  344 Liberal Party (Britain)  111 Liège (Belgium)  68–69, 81, 81n141 lies  126–127, 278, 278n170, 306, 306n16, 430 “light” (of reason, hope, life)  546 Lincé (Belgium)  81n141 Lithuania and Lithuanians  456n13, 493 London Society for the Study of Religion 31 Louvain (Belgium)  77–79, 81–82, 123 loyalty. See patriotism and loyalty RMS Lusitania  188, 190, 307–308, 309, 309n29 “Luxembourgization”  222–223, 417 Manifesto of the 93 (To the Civilized World!) (An die Kulturwelt!) 120–129, 126n96, 177, 214 – Troeltsch and  128n101, 128–129, 132 Manifesto of the Three (“The Imperative of the Hour”)  233–234 Marburg School  23 Marxism  264, 265. See also Bernstein, Eduard mass culture, democratic  331 the masses. See the people (the masses) (das Volk)

635

mass events. See also anti-war protests; strikes and mutinies – Berlin (1914) 46–47 – British declaration of war and  105 – against international opinion  102 – invasion of Belgium and  67 – mobilization and 51–52 – songs and 58 – spirit of 1914 origins and  48–51 – Wilhelm II’s addresses (Berlin) (1914)  43–44, 50–51 “master race.” See Herrenvolk “melting pot”  272–273 Middle Ages  564, 566 middle classes  216, 316, 363, 465–466, 547 milieu theory (Balzac)  551 militarism. See also barbarism, brutality, and atrocities; discipline, order and organization; imperialism; military power/victory; police state; violence and destruction; world domination – class interests and  545–546 – Fatherland Party and  438 – geopolitical necessity and  390 – ideas of 1914 and  14, 16, 280 – Meinecke on  390, 392–393 – political moderation and  152–153 – Troeltsch on  58, 64n69, 130, 132, 134–135, 146, 545–546 – Western powers and Germany compared 279 – words into deeds and  61–62 military elites, German. See also authori­ tarian state (Obrigkeitsstaat); censorship; Falkenhayn, Erich von and other military elites; military power/victory; Prussian army – Battle of the Marne and  117 – Bethmann Hollweg and  358–360, 372–373 – civilian authority over  528 – class interests and  491 – H. Delbrück on  359–360 – Fatherland Party and  433 – German democratization and  417 – January Strike (1918) and  466, 467 – levée en masse and  524–525 – lies and 126–127

636

Index of Subjects

– People’s League and  433, 459 – public opinion (1918) and  523 – Realpolitik and  488, 492 – submarine warfare and  358, 369, 372–373, 417–418 – Wilson on 527 military honor  372n284 military power/victory. See also German army; German navy; militarism; military elites, German; naval power and freedom of the seas; Schlieffen plan; Seeberg Address (“Intellectuals’ Petition”) and its organizers; submarine (U-boat) warfare – armistice (1918) and  542 – as cause of war  561 – defeat and revolt versus 327 – economic factors and  479–480 – Fatherland Party and  435, 463 – peace and  43, 70, 76, 156–157, 164, 207, 209, 210, 222, 258–259, 280, 303, 310, 311, 358, 368, 413, 418–423, 435, 456, 493–494 – Troeltsch on  332, 377–378, 411, 448– 449, 454, 463, 470, 475, 479–480, 520 militia  95, 97, 139 Mitteleuropa. See Central European block Mittwochabend (Wednesday Evening circle) (H. Delbrück)  206–207, 211, 252, 324, 377, 396, 433, 434, 459, 503, 504, 504. 541, 541, 550. See also Delbrück-Dernburg Petition mobilization of minds  12, 191. See also culture war (Kulturkrieg); demobilization of minds; intellectual civil war (partisanship and polarization) mobilization of opinion  14, 112–115, 115n57, 133, 192–193, 199–200, 558. See also propaganda monarchism. See also aristocratic idea; German government; patriarchy; Wilhelm II – end of  526, 528–530 – German army and  64n69, 95, 97 – German democracy and  1, 2, 3–4, 7, 219, 226, 227, 277, 279, 333, 365, 366, 413, 494, 508–511 – historical development and  144–145, 146 – parliamentary democracy and  145, 365

– peace and  395, 404, 411 – Prussian  3, 9, 9n32 – Russian 143 – social  277, 346 346, 387, 395, 401, 413 – social democracy and  277, 413 – Social Democrats and  219 – socialists and  227, 387, 413 – Troeltsch on  39, 95, 97, 144–145, 146, 195, 277, 279, 404, 411, 508–510 money  48, 133, 200, 275, 305, 360, 387, 399, 463, 465, 522, 557 morality. See political ethics (morality) (values) Moroccan Crisis, second  149 most-favored-nations treaties  289 “mother earth”  38 “‘My army and My navy’”  94–95 National Committee for an Honorable Peace  324–35, 363 national individualities. See Völkerindivi­ dualitäten (nationalities) nationalism. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; Central European Block (Mitteleuropa); culture war (Kulturkrieg); imperialism; militarism; Pan-German League and other organiza­ tions; patriotism and loyalty; Seeberg Address (“Intellectuals’ Petition”) and its organizers; unity, German; Weltmacht (world power) – anti-Semitism and 548 – Britain and 107 – educated elite and  552, 554 – German national anthem and  44n4 – German democracy and  227–228, 254–256, 355, 416–417 – ideas of 1914 and  14–15 – Tägliche Rundschau and  48 – Troeltsch on  32, 35, 95n194, 130, 135n126, 142, 355, 480, 488 nationalities. See Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities) National Liberal Party  206n121, 212, 252, 421, 425. See also Schiffer, Eugen and others

Index of Subjects National Socialism (Nazism) (rise of Hitler) (swastika-ism)  11, 14–16, 427, 473n75, 549 “national will to power”  210 natural law  558n74, 558–573. See also historical development naval power and freedom of the seas. See also blockade, British; German navy; military power/victory; Royal Navy (Britain); submarine warfare – Britain and  196, 284 – Central European block and  284, 290 – competition between powers and  105, 146, 156, 418 – imperialism/world domination and  84, 160–162, 164–165 – Troeltsch on  133, 167–168, 198–199 Nazism. See National Socialism Near East  461 Neo-Kantianism 22–23 Die neue Rundschau (journal)  67, 147–159, 210, 251n54, 267n127, 269, 338, 405n123 Neue Zürcher Nachrichten (Swiss news­ paper) 499 neutrality and neutral countries  74n114, 75, 178, 187, 292, 307, 309. See also Belgium new Germany. See future of Germany News Bureau of the Imperial Navy Office  113 newspapers and journalism, American  304, 314 newspapers and journalism, German. See also Berliner Tageblatt and other newspapers; censorship; freedom of the press – agitating 57 – Beerfelde and 507 – Bethmann Hollweg and  422 – Bethmann Hollweg on submarine warfare and 313 – Bethmann Hollweg’s peace negotiation offer (1917) and  368 – on democratic revolution  540 – demonstrations and work stoppages and 362 – hatred of Germany and  478 – international opinion and  414 – public response to WWI and  44

637

– shortages and 362n233 – Troeltsch on  30, 468, 478 – on Troeltsch’s address on Kaiser’s birthday 248 – words into deeds and  61 “Nine Upstanding Men”  416 nonpartisanship  41, 144, 188, 252–253, 412. See also Free Patriotic Association November Revolution (1918)  XIII, 432n239, 452, 462, 539–546, 549 – as Troeltsch experienced it  539n1, 539–546 objectivity  24–25, 140, 146–147, 154, 180, 201, 388, 470. See also Realpolitik; Wissenschaft order. See discipline, order and organization original sin  564, 565 The Oxford Magazine 128–129 Oxford University  31, 82–83, 110. See also Sayce, Archibald Palais Pringsheim  257–258, 259, 269, 440 Pan-German League. See also Alldeutsche Blätter; Claß, Heinrich; Reventlow, Ernst Count zu; Seeberg Address (“Intellectuals’ Petition”) and its organizers – annexation and  115, 151, 215–216 – Beerfelde compared 505 – Bethmann Hollweg and  150, 158, 158n227, 163n247, 210–211, 215–216, 323–324, 326, 370 – Central European block and  288 – counterrevolution and 548–549 – Easter Message (1917) and  508 – Erzberger on 419–420 – Germany and the World War and  186 – Hitler and 427 – January Strike (1918) and  466 – obscurity of 149n186 – peace and 322–323 – public opinion and  487n125 – Schäfer and 208 – Solf and 500 – submarine warfare and  370 – Tirpitz resignation and  316–317 – Troeltsch on  159, 167, 168, 202 – war aims and  150–151, 152, 153, 154

638

Index of Subjects

Paris Commune of 1871  95 parliamentary democracy. See also German democracy; Hintze, Otto and other elites; reorientation (reform); Weimar Republic – American democracy versus 398 – H. Delbrück on  349–50 – established XIV, 525–532 – French 409 – German freedom and  11n38, 184 – history of 3 – idea of democracy and  348–350 – monarchy and  145, 365 – Realpolitik and  490 – revolution and  537, 542 – Troeltsch on  145, 184, 340n149, 350, 350n180, 432n240, 463, 475–478, 511 – Weber on 476–477 – Wolff on  365 – working classes and  409, 463 particular character (Sondercharakter) 247, 249–250. See also historical development; Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities) particularism (Kleinstaaterei) 401 partisanship. See ideas of 1914; intellectual civil war; reason and rationality; reorientation; unity, German Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres) (1917)  453, 454 paternalism 267 patriarchy  36, 345, 389, 391 patriotism and loyalty  20–21, 86, 92, 93, 216, 261, 437. See also defeatism, accusations of; fatherland; mass events; Social Democrats; spirit of 1813; spirit of 1914; unity, German – Troeltsch on  35, 552, 553 peace. See also anti-war protests; Berlin Declaration; Delbrück-Dernburg Petition and other petitions and declarations; demobilization of minds (cultural disarmament); Erzberger, Matthias and other elites; People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland and other organizations; Treaty of Versailles (1919) and other treaties; world domination – democracy and  194, 217, 219, 220, 385, 388, 439

– economic factors and  55–56, 448–449, 516 – freedom and 382–383 – German democracy and  11–12, 382–383, 385, 386, 387, 404–405, 407, 411, 507 – ideas of 1914 and  420 – military power/victory and  70, 76, 156–157, 164, 207, 209, 210, 222, 258–259, 280, 303, 310, 311, 358, 368, 413, 414, 418–423, 435, 456, 493–494 – Russia and  454, 490, 493, 505 – Troeltsch on XV, 36–38, 55–57, 65, 128n101, 134–135, 140, 161–164, 169, 185, 194, 280, 335, 404, 407–408, 411, 423, 450, 455, 477, 479, 510–511, 521, 522 – Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities) and  185, 194 – working classes and  459–460 peace agreements. See armistice of 1918; demobilization of minds (cultural dis­arma­ment); Fourteen Points (Wilson); Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; Treaty of Versailles (1919) Peace Resolution (Friedensresolution) (Erzberger) (1917)  424–426, 428–430, 433, 448, 453, 456, 483, 490, 500–501. See also Erzberger, Matthias; intellectual civil war the people (the masses) (das Volk). See also civilians at home; franchise, equal; the individual; January Strike (1918); levée en masse; popular state (Volksstaat); public opinion and mood, German; revolution; rights; Volksheer (People’s Army); will of the people; working classes – American democracy and  398–400 – fatherland and 522 – Fatherland Party and  444 – German freedom and  64, 394 – German state and  182–183, 329–330, 331–332, 386, 394–396 – individual personalities and  36, 147 – Meinecke on  393, 395–396 – peace and  134–135, 448, 522 – People’s League and  433, 436, 439, 444, 479, 490–491, 513–514

Index of Subjects – political awakening of  275–276, 524 – principles (ideologies) and  232–233 – reorientation and  229, 526 – say in peace and  448 – the state and  351, 443–444, 534–535, 565 – Troeltsch on  64, 64n69, 134–135, 275–276, 331, 448, 479–480, 522, 536, 560, 571–572 – unity and 275 – Volkelt on  472, 479–480 – Wilson and 382 “people’s army.” See Volksheer (People’s Army) (Volk in Waffen) People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland (Volksbund für Freiheit und Vaterland). See also the people (the masses) (das Volk) – criticism of  439, 439n267, 471–472 – demise of  490–492, 555 – educated elites and  431n218, 431–435 – Fatherland Party versus 432n240, 435–439, 443n285, 443–445, 446, 447n297, 487–492, 513, 517–520, 523 – on feared Allied invasion (1918)  517 – Fourteen Points and  461 – German democracy and  431–439, 451–452, 459, 489–491 – “League of Nations and Peace” (public meeting) (1918)  532–535 – levée en masse and  517–519, 522–523 – membership statistics 433n241 – military elite and  433, 459 – November Revolution and  432n239 – peace and 533–535 – Prussian franchise and  444–445, 490 – Troeltsch and  29, 431, 431n218, 432, 439–451, 443n285, 452, 462–463, 467–468, 472–476, 486–487, 489–492, 510, 513, 517–520, 535–536 – workers’ groups and  434, 434n243, 465, 470–471, 523 “people” versus “sword”  50n29 personal responsibility  39, 570 philosophical faculty (University of Berlin)  172, 173 philosophy of history  25, 141, 244. See also historical development; relativism, cultural “place in the sun”  238, 301

639

pluralism  246, 255–256, 340–341. See also diversity, individual; relativism, cultural pluralism, cultural  349–350, 354 plutocracy  145, 409–410 Poland  212n150, 287, 313, 461, 493 police  303, 464, 466, 536 police state  345, 389, 401 political elites. See also Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von and other political elites; German government; Wednesday Evening (Mittwochabend) circle (H. Delbrück) – American democracy and  398–399 – blaming Central Powers for war  505 – democracy and 194–196 – German Society 1914 and  263 – “Imperialism” (Troeltsch) and  148 – inequality and 567–568 – lévee en masse and  516–517 – parliamentarianism and 395 – peace offers and  464 – public opinion and  195–196 – reorientation and 220 – Troeltsch on  165, 202, 540, 559 – Wilhelm II on  497 – will of the people and  346 political ethics (morality) (values). See also Christianity; democracy, idea of; equality and other values; freedom; historical development; humanity; imperialism; Kant, Immanuel; peace; propaganda and other issues; Realpolitik; relativism, cultural – “anarchy of”  203, 203n113 – German democracy and  36–37, 143–147 – German freedom and  280–281, 356, 439–440 – Greek culture and  203 – help for enemies and  154 – peace and  36, 37, 404, 449–450 – “place in the sun” and  301 – power elites and  195–196 – principles (ideologies) of  35n104, 232–233 – private versus state  168, 195, 231, 251, 251n54, 378–379, 543 – specter of civil war and  462–463 – Troeltsch on  33–40, 92–93, 142, 233, 439–451, 462–463, 463n37, 479,

640

Index of Subjects

512–514, 551, 552, 559–561, 570, postscript – World War I and  508, 512–514 political parties  34, 39, 70–71, 222, 253–254, 410. See Social Democratic Party and other parties political representation  97, 97n199, 221, 222, 223–224, 226, 255. See also Prussian franchise Political Society of 1915  261 popular state (Volksstaat)  345, 346–347. See also the people (the masses) (das Volk); Volksheer (People’s Army) (Volk in Waffen) population growth  34 Potsdam regiments  97 power  14, 225, 394, 450. See also capitalism; imperialism; militarism; military power/victory; political elites; power elites; Realpolitik (pragmatism) (compromise); the state – Troeltsch on  370, 513, 561 – as World War I cause  404–405, 561 power elites. See class interests; great men; industrialists; military elites, German; political elites; Realpolitik practical idealism  233 practical politics  39, 40 Praetorian Guard  548 pragmatism. See Realpolitik Preußische Jahrbücher (journal)  152, 186, 214, 226, 255–256, 335, 376, 415–416, 419. See also Delbrück, Hans Preußische Zeitung (newspaper)  241, 249, 257 price gouging  49, 63 progress  247, 280, 342, 567. See also historical development Progressive People’s Party  425, 457, 498. See also Haußmann, Conrad proletarianization 552 propaganda. See also censorship; information; mobilization of opinion – Allied  129, 133, 197, 200 – British  86, 104, 110, 115, 115n57, 139–140, 178, 192–193, 196–199, 278n170, 278–281, 405 – German 115n57, 200

– on German naval expansion  288–290 – political ethics and  133, 197, 560–561 – Troeltsch on  129, 200, 559–560 property ownership  223, 397n81 Protestants and Protestantism  12, 22, 40–41, 64, 182, 391. See also Barth, Karl; Reformation; religion Protestant Social Congress  32–40, 95, 105, 161, 167, 276, 350, 404–05n118, 558. See also Baumgarten, Otto protests. See also anti-war protests; strikes and mutinies – against Prussian unequal franchise  46–47 Prussia  57, 93–96, 144–145, 174–175, 182, 284, 368. See also Franco-Prussian War (1870); Hohenzollern dynasty; monarch­ ism; Prussian franchise Prussian Academy of Sciences  171–172 Prussian army  54, 93–94, 94n189, 97–98. See also universal conscription Prussian franchise. See also Anschütz, Gerhard and other educated elites; Berlin Declaration (1917); German army; German democracy; reorientation (reform); working classes – accomplished 458–459 – “Berlin Declaration” and  415–416 – Fatherland Party and other opponents of reform  416–417, 444, 519 – German freedom and  228, 385 – overview 223–225 – protests and  46–47, 362 – response to Wilson and  526, 528 – Troeltsch on  337–338, 444–445, 448, 463, 490, 551 Prussian Guard  96 Prussian House of Lords  217, 223, 366, 380, 426, 514 Prussian House of Representatives (Landtag) (Abgeordnetenhaus) – annexation and 211–212 – Bethmann Hollweg’s speech to (1917) 366–367 – class interests and  224–225 – “German Freedom” lectures  385–412, 412n161, 416, 429 – People’s League speeches (1917) and  432, 440–451

Index of Subjects – Social Democrats and  217, 225 – Troeltsch and 551 Prussian Ministry of Culture  551–552 Prussian Ministry of Religious and Educational Affairs  29 public celebrations  240, 536–537. See also spirit of 1913 public opinion, American  410, 418–419, 443 public opinion and mood, German. See also Heidelberg University public gathering (1914) and other reactions; intellectual civil war (partisanship and polarization); mass events; newspapers; newspapers and journalism, German; Pan-German League; the people (the masses); trust – Bethmann Hollweg and  210–211, 317–318, 369, 371 – Burgfrieden and  80, 115, 121 – Central European block and  294, 297–298 – deaths and causalities and  240 – democratic ethics and  195 – educated elite and  192–193 – equal franchise and  363, 364 – Erzberger’s address before Reichstag (1917) and  420 – Falkenhayn on 117 – Fatherland Party and  535 – Fourteen Points and  461–462 – German democracy and  XIII, XIV–XV, 416, 490 – Germany and the World War and  188 – Hindenburg and  358, 359 – League of Nations and  533 – levée en masse (1918) and  523 – management of 278n170 – Moltke on 176 – 1916 shortages and  361–362 – outbreak of war and  43–51 – Pan-German League and  487n125 – Peace Resolution (1917) and  428, 429–430 – power elites and  195–196 – reforms and 471 – scholars and  13–16, 60, 60n57 – the state and  410n148 – submarine warfare and  304, 306, 310–311, 312, 418–419, 424–425, 430

641

– Treaty of Versailles (1919) and  547 – Weimar and 2 – Wilhelm II abdication and  530, 538 – World War I and  12–13, 16–20 racial identity  135–136, 571 rational democrat (Vernunftdemokrat) 543– 544. See also Realpolitik (pragmatism) (compromise) rational republicans (Vernunftrepubli­ kaner)  1n2, 1–2 rationing  132, 274. See also hoarding; starvation and shortages Realpolitik (pragmatism) (compromise). See also economic factors; sober calculation – German democracy and  490–491, 507–514, 543–544 – idealism and  195–196, 231–233, 479, 489, 554 – ideological purity and  230–233 – Labor Force in the New Germany and 235 – liberals and  39–40, 269n132, 490 – Max von Baden’s candidacy and  502 – peace and 479 – People’s League and  474–475, 487–492 – political ethics and  34, 40, 449, 488–492, 510–511, 543–544, 570 – Troeltsch on  39–40, 166, 195–196, 230–233, 269n132, 329–330, 442, 443, 479, 490, 507–514, 554 reason and rationality  14, 184, 254–255, 259, 370, 372n284, 546, 564, 565. See also emotions (passions); natural law; “rational democrat”; “rational republicans” Red Cross  53 reform. See reorientation Reform Act of 1832 (Britain)  397n81 Reformation 24 Der Reichsbote (newspaper)  466–467 Reichstag. See also Noske, Gustav and other representatives; Peace Resolution (1917) – appointment of Vice-Chancellors and  457, 478 – Claß and 157 – equal franchise  526, 528 – Free Patriotic Association and  252

642

Index of Subjects

– Imperial Chancellor (1918) and  528 – mass demonstrations and  46 – mass religious service and  51 – Max von Baden and  532 – meeting of August 4, 1914  69–76 – meeting of July 6, 1917  419 – People’s League and  433 – People’s League speeches (1917) and 437–438 – Prussian franchise and  366 – recess of (1918)  532 – Social Democrats and  225 – Troeltsch on  509, 551 – Wilhelm II and  69–71, 457–458 relativism, cultural  24, 203n113, 242–251, 278–279, 406. See also historical development; human (common) culture; pluralism; Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities) religion. See also Christianity; God; Protestants and Protestantism – “Americanism” versus 271 – democratic principle and  37 – differences in  48 – German contributions to  182 – German freedom and  280–281 – political ethics and  450 – Realpolitik and  231–232 – Social Democrats and  33, 229, 232 – Troeltsch on  64–65, 450 Renaissance  77, 565 reorientation (reform). See also annexation and other issues; Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von and other elites; future of Germany (new Germany); The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.); parliamentary democracy; the people (the masses) (das Volk); People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland and other groups; Prussian franchise; Realpolitik – annexation and  220, 414n171 – educated elite and  333, 335–338, 401–402 – inner 414, 430 – international opinion and  413–414 – military power/victory and  456 – partisan positions on  415–418 – public opinion (1918) and  471

– Realpolitik and  231–232 – revolution versus 537 – submarine warfare and  335–338, 414– 415 – Troeltsch on  232–233, 277–278, 373– 374, 378–379 – war outcomes and  97n199, 378–381, 438 reparations  155, 449, 463, 465, 516, 547, 573 republic  1–2, 518 revolution. See also January Strike (1918); Kiel uprisings; levée en masse; November Revolution (1918); Umwälzung (revolution); Volks­heer (People’s Army) (Volk in Waffen) – from above  459, 463, 525, 547 – from below  464, 547 – German democratization and  417, 529, 537, 542, 547 – parliamentary democracy and  537, 542 – peace and  448, 521, 522, 529 – Prussian franchise and  336 – reorientation versus 537 – right to 564–565 – Seeberg Address and 216–217 – Troeltsch on  95, 521, 539, 550, 552, 555, 566–567 Rheinische Zeitung (newspaper)  67 Right National Liberals  367, 425 rights. See also feminism; franchise, equal; freedom of the press; German army; human rights; The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.); Ludendorff, Erich von and other elites; property ownership; self-determination; the state, the individual and; individual freedom – annexation versus  220, 425 – Christian 473, 564 – class interests and  546 – German freedom and  184, 342, 351, 352, 395–396 – of nations  382, 384 – natural law and  564–565 – Peoples’ League and  432, 437, 446 – Troeltsch on  64n69, 97, 161, 331, 342, 351, 352, 446, 546, 564–565, 567 Roman Empire  152, 155, 317n63, 408, 564

Index of Subjects Romania  308, 339 Romanticism, German  184, 563–564, 566–568, 571, 572 Royal Library Meeting (1918)  517–523 Royal Navy (Britain)  113, 131. See also naval power rule of law versus raison d’etat 110 Russia. See also Entente and Allies; Treaty of Brest-Litovsk – annexations and 286 – blamed for causing war  54–55, 60, 70, 72 – Britain compared 106 – casualties and 98 – Central Powers (1917) and  454 – Claß’s war aims and  155–156 – democracy and 404 – Fourteen Points and  461 – freedom and 143 – German imperialism and  160 – German public opinion and  54–55, 105 – Germany and the World War and  178 – mobilization of 43 – monarchism and 143 – national individualities and  181, 185, 299 – nationalism and 355 – October Revolution and  454 – Pan-German agitation and  323 – peace and  454, 490, 493, 505 – Serbia and 46 – Solf on 499 – Troeltsch on  54–55, 60, 65, 179, 181 – ultimatum to 49 – world domination and  185 Russian Revolution  362, 366, 379–380, 417, 460, 462, 465 “Schlachtgesang” (Battle Hymn) (Arndt) 58–60 Schlieffen plan  49n26, 49–50, 68, 116, 493 science. See Wissenschaft “scrap of paper”  75–76 secret ballot  225. See also franchise, equal; Prussian franchise Seeberg Address (“Intellectuals’ Petition”) and its organizers – Bethmann Hollweg and  209, 215–216, 303–304, 321 – Burgfrieden and  234, 303–304

643

– Delbrück-Dernburg Petition compared to 214 – overview 208–211 – submarine warfare and  303, 321 – on threatening revolution  215–216 self-determination. See also autonomy; franchise, equal; imperialism; will of the people – annexation versus 499 – conservative principles and  38–39 – historical thinking and  387, 391 – ideas of 1914 and  274–275, 280 – nationalism and democracy and  227, 355 – wars of aggression and  194 – Wilson and  12, 462 self-examination (introspection). See also German culture; historical development; inner life; intellectual civil war; relativism, cultural; Sonderweg – culture war and  102–105, 139–140, 274, 278–281 – German culture and  147 – Harnack and 190 – Troeltsch and  103, 140–141, 144, 147, 192, 199–200, 250, 408, 569, 571–572 – after the war  104n10 – war of words and  103n7, 103–105 self-formation (Selbstbildung) 353 separation of church and state  232 September Program  283n182, 287–288 Serbia  46, 47, 53, 66, 178 Seven Years’ War  56–57 Siegfried Line  395, 395n74 Silver Jubilee of Wilhelm II’s reign (1913)  46, 135, 253 “Slavic malice”  54, 55n45 sober calculation  312, 324, 327, 329, 508, 513 social classes  40, 357. See also working classes and other classes social democracy. See also German democracy; Meinecke, Friedrich and other proponents; socialism and socialists – France and 400 – German unity and  217, 264–265 – monarchism and  277, 346, 346 346, 387, 395, 401, 413 – Troeltsch on  277, 344, 546

644

Index of Subjects

– war of conquest and  234 – Western freedom/democracy and  344, 347, 400–401 Social Democrats. See also; Legien, Carl and other party members; Weimar Coalition – annexation and 234 – anti-war protests (1914) and  49, 49n22 – Bethmann Hollweg and  74, 316, 321, 330–331, 379–380 – bourgeois bedfellows and  230 – Burgfrieden and  228–229, 365 – compromise and  230–231, 233 – culture war and  12 – defensive war and  72, 74 – demonstration strike and  462 – equal rights and  402 – financing of war and  71, 72, 218 – German Democratic Party versus 544 – German Society 1914 and  262, 263 – Independents and 464 – on invasion of Belgium  74 – Jews and 501 – Labor Force in the New Germany and  217–218, 226, 234–235 – loyalty of  71n99, 71–72, 72n103, 234 – Max von Baden’s resignation and  536 – monarchism and 219 – Pan-German League compared  149 – patriotism and  71n99, 71–72, 72n103, 218, 231, 234 – peace and  72, 425 – People’s League and  436 – power and 219 – on Prussian electoral law  333 – Prussian franchise and  458 – Prussian House of Representatives and 225 – reform demands of  365 – religion and  33, 38–39, 229, 232 – reorientation and  218–220, 223, 365, 379–380 – submarine warfare and  316, 321 – Troeltsch on  229–230, 234–235, 330–331, 440n271 socialism and socialists. See also monarch­ ism; social democracy; Social Democrats – America and 30n89

– German freedom/democracy and  391, 545 – German soldiers and (1918)  495 – individual cultivation and  353 – Kapp on Bethmann Hollweg and  319– 320 – monarchy and  227, 387, 413 – Plenge on 264–265 – Russian monarchism and  143 – Socialist law of  1878 and  33 – Troeltsch on  344, 353, 354, 391, 546 Socialist Party  353 social liberalism  163, 163n247 social or welfare policy  400–01, 410 social security  223 Society for Social Reform  226 Sonderart (“special nature”)  141–143, 198–199. See also Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities) Sonderbildung  142, 247 Sondercharakter  247, 249–250. See also historical development; Sonderart (“special nature”); Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities) Sondereigentümlichkeiten (special charac­ teristics) 141–142 Sondersein (individual special beings)  142 Sonderweg  15–16, 141, 400, 570 songs and anthems  44, 50, 58, 59, 61, 67 South Germany  360, 362, 523, 540. See also Bavaria Southwest School  23 Spanish flu  524 Spartacus League  525 special formation (Sonderbildung) 142 spirit of 1813  46, 54, 58, 60, 61, 91, 147. See also Battle of Peoples (Völker­ schlacht) (Battle of Leipzig) (1813) spirit of 1913  253–254 spirit of 1914. See also mass events; militarism; nationalism; patriotism; unity; war enthusiasm – Burgfrieden and  18–19, 21, 318–319 – demise of  375–377, 442 – educated elite and  20–21, 86 – Franco-Prussian War and 52 – Free Patriotic Association and  254 – German freedom and  375–377

Index of Subjects – ideas of 1914 versus  13–21, 90, 301–302 – levée en masse and  518, 519–520 – mass events and  48–51 – Moltke on 260 – political parties and  253–254 – Solf and  260, 261–262 – Troeltsch on 201 – unity and  18–19, 48, 201, 254–255, 256 Srocko (Eastern Front)  124 starvation and shortages. See also blockade, British; hoarding; rationing – British blockade and  132, 139, 277, 361 – Central European block and  295 – civilians at home and  139, 552 – Giesberts on 436 – Hampe on 455 – Harnack on 387 – Kapp on 319–320 – 1917–1918 455n9, 455–456 – people’s money and  48–49 – profiteering and  62–63 – public holidays and  20, 240 – public mood and  361–362 – revolution and 552 – scholarly disquisitions and  402 – submarine warfare and  304, 315–316, 368–369 – Troeltsch on  62–63, 139, 277, 552 – unity and  235, 436 – Wolff on  361 – work stoppages and riots and  362, 463 the state. See also authoritarian state (Obrigkeitsstaat); democracy, idea of; freedom; the individual; liberalism; nationalism; political ethics; popular state (Volksstaat) – human rights and  570 – the individual and  137, 147, 182, 301, 351–355, 357, 390–391, 409, 446–447, 478 – interests of 7 – power and 34 – public opinion and  410n148 – separation of church and  232 – Troeltsch on  34–35, 166, 405n118, 411, 543 – Western and German compared  346, 401 state parliaments (Ständehaus) 401

645

states, European system of  85, 89, 185 St. Louis World’s Fair (1904)  30, 30n89 strikes and mutinies  316, 362, 412, 462, 464, 465, 470, 495, 525, 540. See also January Strike (1918); Kiel uprisings; revolution, from below submarine (U-boat) warfare. See also military power/victory – America and  307–308, 309, 311–312, 335–336, 373, 381–384, 387, 403 – Beerfelde’s conferences and  507 – Bethmann Hollweg and  306–307, 313–314, 315–316, 368n260, 368–369, 372n284, 372–373 – Britain and  308, 312 – Burgfrieden and  313, 320 – economic future and  449 – Erzberger on 418–420 – Harnack on 414–415 – July Crisis, second (1917) and  417–418 – Kapp and 319–320 – Meinecke on 372 – National Committee for an Honorable Peace and  325 – negotiated peace and  335–338 – Preußische Jahrbücher and 335 – public opinion and  418–419, 430 – reorientation versus 414–415 – Schäfer on 310–11 – shortages and 361 – Solf and 469 – support for Bethmann Hollweg and  320– 326 – Tirpitz and 427 – tonnage sunk by  418 – Troeltsch on  377, 403, 403n113, 422– 423, 449 – M. Weber on 310–11 – Wilson and  309n29, 373, 381–382, 525– 526 Sweden  83, 287, 292 Switzerland  31, 205, 284, 286, 292, 368 syntheses. See culture, unified theory of (Kultursynthese) Die Tägliche Rundschau (newspaper)  48, 67, 210 tanks 454

646

Index of Subjects

Tannenberg victory  90, 359 taxes  216, 223–224, 395, 463 The Hague  31 Thirty Years War  56, 463 The Times (London newspaper)  78, 80, 82, 101, 110–111, 314 Tirpitz Plan  113, 305, 310 “To arms! To arms!” – Zu den Waffen! Zu den Waffen!” 58–60 tolerance/intolerance  146–147, 232, 300 To the Civilized World! (An die Kulturwelt!) (Manifesto of the  93)  120–129, 126n96, 177, 214 trade war  405, 408 Transcaucasia 493 transportation 160 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk  454, 490, 493, 499 Treaty of Versailles (1919)  547, 548, 573 trench warfare  228, 229, 235, 274, 362, 422, 494 trust  127, 225, 255, 322, 450, 510 truth and honesty  62, 122, 243, 278, 278n170, 406, 480, 542. See also relativism, cultural Turkey  178, 408, 461, 495 U-boats. See submarine (U-boat) warfare Ukraine  155, 493 Umwälzung (revolution) 491–492 unions  49, 217–219, 231, 330, 352, 400–401, 434, 434n243, 465. See also Giesberts, Johannes United States. See America unity, Central European  298–299 unity, German. See also Burgfrieden; nationalism; spirit of 1913 – Bethmann-Hollweg and 219 – Central European block and  290–291 – civilians at home (1918) and  493 – cooperation and 450 – defensive war and  198, 260, 281 – Delbrück-Dernburg Petition and  214 – diversity and  96–97, 145 – Frederick the Great’s army and  93 – freedom and 62–63 – Free Patriotic Association and  253–254 – geographical situation and  390 – German army/German essence and  145

– German democracy and  194, 226, 475–476 – internationalism and 89 – Labor Force in the New Germany and  217–218, 233 – nationalism and democracy and  227–228 – Oncken on 53 – outbreak of war and  46–51, 275 – partisan friction and  251–252 – political ethics and  95 – public debate and  211 – socialistic organization and  217, 264–265 – Solf on 260–261 – spirit of 1913 and  253 – spirit of 1914 and  18–19, 48, 201, 254–255, 256 – Troeltsch on  201, 202, 281, 478–479, 524 – unification (1871) and  230 – Volksheer (People’s Army) and  92 – Vorwärts and  219 – Walz on 52 – Wilhelm II and  70–71 – Wissenschaft and  83 universal conscription  11, 54, 94n189, 515 universality. See also cosmopolitanism; culture, unified theory of (Kultursyn­ these); franchise, equal; human (common) culture; humanity; natural law; Prussian franchise; relativism, cultural; Wissen­ schaft (science) – German culture and  164 – German idea of freedom and  356, 392 – historical heterogeneity and  242, 243, 341–342 – particular expression of  247 – political ethics and  32, 166, 168, 489 – Troeltsch and  142, 205, 392, 446 University of Basel  31 University of Berlin  27, 45, 87, 106, 119, 151, 171, 176, 208, 241 252, 504, 551, 552, 553, 557 University of Cologne  107 University of Frankfurt  25 University of Freiburg  481 University of Heidelberg  XIII, 12, 27, 29, 52, 61, 172–173, 175, 504 University of Kiel  105, 558 University of Leipzig  486

Index of Subjects University of London  556 University of Manchester  11 University of Marburg  172 University of Münster  264 unser Kaiser (our Kaiser)  95, 238 Untertan  389, 391, 429, 476 values. See political ethics (morality) (values) Vaterland. See Fatherland Party; Free Patriotic Association; People’s League for Freedom and Fatherland Versailles Treaty (1919). See Treaty of Versailles violence and destruction. See also assassinations; barbarism, brutality, and atrocities; Belgium, invasion of (1914); deaths and casualties; militarism; Rathenau, Walther, assassination of – abstract ideas and  560 – culture of 480 – Germany and 181 – human character and  56 – January Strike and  469–470 – Realpolitik and  488 – relinquishing 450 – Romanticism and 568 – Troeltsch on 56 Volk. See the people Völkerindividualitäten (nationalities). See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; Central European block (Mitteleuropa); democracy, idea of; freedom, idea of; Herrenvolk (sovereign people); historical development; human (common) culture; imperialism; individuality; nationalism; relativism, cultural; Sonderart (“special nature”); Sonderweg – Central European block and  254–256, 299, 354–357 – common humanity and  247, 260 – culture war and  279 – decrease of 276 – democracy and  143, 184, 193–194 – France and 181 – freedom and  282, 342 – future of Germany and  249–250

647

– German culture and  42, 146–147, 354 – nationalism and  254–256, 354–355 – peace and  185, 194 Volksheer (People’s Army) (Volk in Waffen). See also German army; the people (the masses) (das Volk) – fatherland and 261 – French democracy and  93–94 – German democratization and  94–98 – German essence and  145 – outbreak of war and  89–99 – the people and  91–92, 261 – political participation and  333 – popular sovereignty and  95 – Prussian elite deaths and  97–98 – Prussian unity and  92, 93, 94n189 – reform and 97 – revolution and  95, 523 – rights and 519 – Social Democrats and  231, 519 – Troeltsch on  54, 91–99 – unity in diversity and  95–97 – war aims and  92–93, 96–97 – Wilhelm II and  94–95 Volkskriege (people’s wars)  194 Volksstaat (popular state)  223–225, 439 Vorwärts (Social Democratic Party newspaper)  217–219, 379–380, 416, 466–467, 499 Vossische Zeitung (newspaper)  74, 249, 516 walks in the Grunewald  204–205, 378 war. See also World War I – Christianity and 136 – glorification of  16 – just 134–135, 194 – laws of 69 – rules of 76–77 – Troeltsch on  134–135, 194 – working classes and  135–136 war aims. See also annexation; Burgfrieden and military censorship; Central European block (Mitteleuropa); Claß, Heinrich; dignity; German freedom; imperialism; nationalism; peace; reorientation (reform); Sonderweg – American 382–384, 388 – Bethmann Hollweg on  313

648

Index of Subjects

– declaration of war and  50 – dread versus 44 – economic factors and  478 – educated elite and  14 – Erzberger and 321 – external versus internal  335–338 – Fatherland Party and  437 – ideas and 251–252 – Meinecke and 378 – Pan-German movement and  207 – political ethics and  92–93 – power elites and  148–149 – public debate and  210–211 – scholars and 148 – Troeltsch on  58, 59–60, 62–63, 147–158, 166, 202, 282 – Volksheer (People’s Army) and  92–93, 96–97 war enthusiasm  14, 16–19, 17n56, 18n57, 44, 44n4, 50, 96, 254, 261 – Troeltsch on  58–59, 62–63, 135n126, 348n171 War of the Palatinate Succession (1689– 1697) 56 war of words (international opinion). See also Belgium, invasion of (1914) and other issues; Burgfrieden and military censorship; educated elites, German; German culture; intellectual civil war (partisanship and polarization); internationalism; militarism and other distor­ tions; mobilization of opinion; propaganda; Wilson, Woodrow – British betrayal and  83, 105–112 – as cause of war  69–76, 98, 561 – reorientation and 413–414 – Troeltsch on  61–62, 144, 406 “war psychosis”  13 wars of 1813 and 1815  174. See also Battle of Peoples (Völkerschlacht); Napoleon Wednesday Evening (Mittwochabend) circle (H. Delbrück’)  205–207, 206n121, 211, 252, 324, 377, 396, 433, 434, 459, 503, 504, 541, 550. See also Delbrück-Dernburg Petition Weimar Coalition  452 Weimar National Assembly  4n12

Weimar Republic. See also German democracy – accomplished 1, 528 – collapse of 2 – constitution of  6, 346, 448n298 – German democracy and  XV – historians and  4, 4n14 – legitimacy and  1–2, 3, 3n8 – parliamentary democracy and  537 – Realpolitik and  1n2, 1–2 – Troeltsch on  5, 348n171, 543, 552 Weltmacht (world power)  14, 271, 286, 336. See also world domination Weltmachtstellung (world power ­posture)  286 Weltpolitik (world politics)  14, 84, 105, 136, 163, 164, 238, 271, 296, 304–305. See also world domination Western culture (European and American). See also Christianity; culture war (Kulturkrieg); human (common) culture; Völkerindividualitäten (national individualities); Western freedom – Central European versus 560–561 – crisis of 249 – educated elites and  376 – German culture and  35, 65, 86, 107, 131, 140, 142, 168, 179–182, 245, 279–280, 450–451, 475, 480, 560–572 – natural law and  564–565 – Troeltsch on  22–23, 130–131, 140, 142, 168–169, 180–181, 480, 560–561, 568 – unity and 140 – universality of 142–143 – war aims and  169 Western democracy. See also France and other countries; Western freedom; Wilson, Woodrow – conduct of war and  85 – German democracy compared  143–147, 279–280, 348, 396–411 – People’s League and  439 – Troeltsch on  333n127, 402–411 – Volkelt and 475 – as World War I cause  80 Western franchise  397n81 Western freedom. See also liberalism and liberals; Western democracy; individual freedom

Index of Subjects – German freedom compared  147, 182–186, 200, 279, 280–281, 340, 340n149, 344, 350, 352–354, 390–393, 405–411 – historical development and  342–343 – social democracy and  344 Western Front. See also Battle of the Marne and other Battles; Belgium, invasion of; deaths and casualties; Schlieffen plan; Siegfried Line; submarine warfare – 1914–1915 winter and  251 – Central European block and  292 – Eastern Front peace and  460 – German offensive of 1918 and  460, 493–495 – January Strike (1918) and  467 – military build-up (1918)  467 – 1915 and  235, 258, 308 – 1917–1918 453–455 – offensive of  1918 and  490 – spring offensive (1918)  493 Westphalian Political News (news­ paper) 255–256 Why We are at War: Great Britain’s Case (Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History)  110 will of the people. See also the people (the masses) (das Volk); political representation; individual and collective freedom; individual and the state – commitment to 526 – Fatherland Party and  442 – Fourteen Points and  462 – German freedom and  357, 401 – Ludendorff and  514 – political elites and  346, 349 – social monarchy and  395 – Troeltsch on  349, 446 – will of government and  351, 382, 406–411 – Wilson on 526–527 will to power  210, 271, 297n239 Wissenschaft (science). See also culture, unified theory of (Kultursynthese); educated elites, German (Bildungsbürger­ tum); Enlightenment; historical development; objectivity; reason and rationality; universality; Wissenschaft

649

– Berlin and the World War and  177, 178 – facts and evidence and  24 – French equality and  143 – German culture and  145, 182, 563, 566 – German freedom and  184 – internationalism and 83 – international opinion and  83, 84, 87–89, 101, 102, 106, 121, 126 – Protestant Social Congress and  33 – “Scholars’ Protest against War with Germany” and  83 – Sering and 401 – St. Louis World’s Fair (1904) and  30, 30n89 – Troeltsch on  23, 29, 56, 87–89, 145, 551, 563 women  36, 40, 52, 60, 66, 77, 79, 90, 123, 124, 188, 274, 307, 316, 320, 331, 447, 447n297, 459, 465, 533, 554. See also civilians at home; feminism words into deeds  29, 61–62, 334n129, 367, 552. See also war of words (international opinion) working classes. See also farmers; industrial workers; January Strike (1918); The Labor Force in the New Germany (Thimme and Legien, eds.); levée en masse; the people; revolution; Social Democrats; strikes and mutinies; unions; Volksheer (People’s Army) – anti-war protests and  49, 71 – cause of WW I and  146 – defensive war and  72 – equal rights and  402 – Fatherland Party and  479–480, 523 – France and 409 – German essence and  145–146 – German state and  202, 331 – levée en masse and  519, 522–523 – Oncken and 222 – parliamentarianism and 395 – peace and 459–460 – People’s League and  434, 434n243, 465, 470–471, 523 – Prussian franchise and  463, 465 – Rathenau and 555 – rebellion and (1918)  463 – rights and  402, 519

650

Index of Subjects

– Solf and 499 – Troeltsch on  463, 464 – war and 135–136 world domination. See also annexation, conquest and expansionism; Central Europe­an block (Mitteleuropa); Herrenvolk (sovereign people); imperialism; Weltmacht (world power) – Britain and  84–86, 109, 159–160, 162, 184, 185, 196, 199 – coexistence of free peoples versus 185 – culture war and  343 – German leadership versus 299–300 – Germany and  84–86, 121, 157, 164, 184–185 – historical development of freedom and  406, 567 – peace and  152–153, 157, 169, 311, 411 – political ethics and  298 – Russia and 185 world economic war (Weltwirtschafts­ krieg) 269–270 world mission (Weltaufgabe)  136, 160 world politics (Weltpolitik). See Weltpolitik world trade war  159n230, 479 World War I. See also deaths and casualties; Eastern Front; German army; German democracy; ideas of 1914; international law; public opinion, German; submarine warfare; war; war aims; Western Front; World War I, causes of; World War I, outbreak of (1914); World War I, outcomes of – ceasefire (1918)  515 – complexity of 138–139 – declaration of mobilization (August 1, 1914)  70, 71, 72 – financing of  71, 72, 218 – internationalism and 82–89 – mobilization and  50–52, 66–67, 218 – modernity and 193–194 – new ideas and  300–301 – social transformation and  4, 91

– Troeltsch on  53–66, 138–139, 300–301 – Troeltsch’s activities and character and 30–32 World War I, causes of. See also blame for causing war; culture war (Kulturkrieg) and other causes; defensive war; economic factors; envy; mobilization of opinion; rule of law versus raison d’état; Sonderweg; spirit of 1914; war enthusiasm – Troeltsch on  54–55, 57–58, 61–65, 98, 140, 196–197, 273–274 – war of words as  69–76, 98, 561 World War I, outbreak of (1914)  43–51. See also Belgium, invasion of (1914); ideas of 1914; July Crisis (1914); spirit of 1914 – internationalism and 82–89 – mobilization and  49–56, 218 – public reaction and  16–20, 43–51 – spirit of 1914 and  46–51 – Troeltsch on  53–66, 89–99 – unity and  46–51, 275 – Volksheer (People’s Army) and  89–99 – war of words and  69–76 – Wilhelm II speech and  442 World War I, outcomes of. See also culture war (Kulturkrieg) and other causes; future of Germany (new Germany); intellectual civil war and other outcomes; peace; reorientation (reform); war aims; Weimar Republic – democracy and 382 – German freedom as  62–63 – the people’s say in  448 – Troeltsch on  55, 63–64, 88–89, 141, 377–378, 448 “world wars, era of ”  85, 86 “world war, second”  438, 513 Ypres, Third Battle of (Passchendaele) (1917)  453, 454 Zeppelin airships  304