The Central Powers at War: Politics and Society, 1914

The Central Powers at War: Politics and Society, 1914

Germany

Excerpts from Max Horkheimer,The Days Recounted: 1912-1919 (Leipzig-Dresden Collective, 1932)

It is difficult for the historian to write honestly of the heady days of 1914, substantially more difficult than it is to ask him to write of 1789 or 1848; for though the motivations of the participants in the events of 1914 are more intelligible to us than those of centuries past, the events themselves are clouded in such a thick and variegated crust of historical mythology that piercing through it inevitably unveils something far too weighed down with the verdict of the present and the weight of the past to constitute anything like the bare and unadorned matter of reality.

The days of 1914 were the times of Illusion and times of conviction. The Spirit of 1914 bound the nation together in a new and organic social compact; and the Spirit of 1914 was a bad solidarity, a wholly ideological unity engineered by the state and by imperialist rivalry rather than genuine class consciousness, national community, or the reciprocal recognition of human dignity (take your pick). This was the time when the working class temporarily found itself reconciled with the national mission of Germany, or, alternatively, the time when the representatives of the German working class betrayed their historic mission of proletarian internationalism.

Perhaps one could adjudicate more easily between the competing myths and the historical accretions piled atop them were it not for the fact that the myths were not imposed upon the past from a distant future but emerged from the self-understandings of the historical actors themselves. 1914 was a time when myth irrupted into and consumed reality. We may inquire more or less into the particular material conditions which gave rise to the myth, which allowed it to be mobilized and exert a decisive influence on the course of history. We may inquire, too, into the extent to which the Zabern affair had already conditioned a large number of Germans to awaken from this myth once it was shattered by the hard glare of industrial war-fare. But in a final sense, it is man’s fatal susceptibility to myth which made the days of 1914 possible.

Excerpts from Fritz Stern,The Great War: A New History (University of Berlin Press, 1955)

In 1914, the German war effort had broad but not unanimous support among the Reich’s population. For Prussian conservatives and the haute bourgeousie, there was little question of supporting the war. More liberal elements in Germany felt at least some sense of patriotism in the “rechtstaat”, and wished to defend it from Russian despotism in the east and British imperialism in the west. Even the leaders of the worker’s movement in the SPD hoped that the “Spirit of 1914” would be translated in the post-war era into a wave of social reforms that would entrench social democracy in the German state.

In the month or so leading up to the declaration of war, fear of a Tsarist invasion of the east did much to dissolve class and ethnic tensions between Germans. The central casus belli of the Central Powers, the claim that Russia had begun a mobilization in Poland, was accepted without much question. The Committee for the Protection of National Minorities, which would serve throughout the war as a bell-wether of sorts for progressive opinion in Germany, endorsed any coming war effort the same day that German mobilization was declared.

Both Bethmann Hollweg and the German military attempted to mobilize the broadest front of popular opinion possible in favor of the war. This effort was complicated by the “Shweitzer affair” of August 3rd, when news broke in several Munich papers of the death of the the Alsatian Lutheran Minister and doctor Albert Shweitzer, who was shot in a motor-car after the driver refused to pull over. Inebriated students in the town of Landau had created a series of make-shift roadblocks with the intention of searching for a rumored “French motorcade” carrying gold and arms to aid Russia in its war effort. The relatively modest coterie of vehicles accompanying Schweitzer’s was not an escort of any sort, but simply an ad hoc assortment of those academics, judges, and local dignitaries who could afford passage out of an area that many expected to be a war zone in the coming weeks. Their decision to travel together had been precipitated by rumours of cars being waylaid by rural villagers, but the full details of the “French motorcade” conspiracy do not appear to have been known to them (otherwise, they may have guessed that traveling in such a group would only increase the likelihood of an altercation).

It has been considered something of a minor miracle that the story was published at all, given the rather harsh censorship regime that existed throughout much of the war. Several circumstances conspired together to make this possible. Firstly, the censorship regime in Bavaria was always relatively more liberal than that in Prussia, particularly in the eastern districts. Secondly, the machinery of war-time censorship was not fully in place. Thirdly, the details of the story itself superficially appeared to militate against Alsatian regionalism: the primary figure in the case, Albert Schweitzer, spoke a German dialect, was a protestant pastor, and was not politically active. Ironically, it was also these facts which rendered Schweitzer such a useful figure to rally around for the Alsatians and those sympathetic to their plight.

Perhaps most importantly, the military itself was trying to wind down the number of road-side attacks. There is some evidence that the rumour of a French motor-cade was intentionally dispersed by the military to encourage patriotic sentiments, but that the degree of disturbance it caused led to the desire to suppress it. If this is so, the publication of the story was successful: the number of road-side shootings and attempted seizures of motor vehicles decreased considerably over the next few days before completely subsiding.

The story had such an immediate and electrifying event that newspapers which were proscribed from publishing it nonetheless dropped hints about a “Bavarian affair” in next days papers’, prompting a buy-up of the small circulation of the southern papers in the northern cities of the reich. The government immediately feared a “repeat of Zabern” , particularly after the committee on national minorities announced a call for a “thorough and complete investigation of the vile murderers of Dr. Schweitzer”. Thus far, the strategy of Bethmann Hollweg’s government had been to reach out to the trade unions and catholic organizations while suppressing the national minorities in the west and east; the announcement of the SDP that it sympathized with the calls for investigation drew this strategy into question.

In the SDP itself, the majority of the party’s members were prepared to vote for war credits, but many in the organization’s center also hoped to use the issue of national minorities to extract additional concessions from Bethmann Hollweg. On August 3rd, only 19 delegates voted against the war in an internal meeting. One of these, however, was Hugo Haase, a co-chairs of the party. On the 4th, the day when the government was scheduled to vote for war credits, Haase called for another meeting of the party, forcing a delay of the war credits vote. Haase and a number of newly sympathetic delegates in the center of the party called for the party to only support the war credits vote if “verbal guarantees” were publicly made by Bethmann Hollweg of “political and social reforms”. The motion narrowly failed. Shortly thereafter, Haase himself was forced out of a leadership role, which was now captured by a right-wing clique around Ebert and Scheidemann which endorsed war credits “without conditions”. Ebert and Scheidemann’s decision to align themselves unreservedly with the war would have important consequences for the social-democratic movement…

The next day, voting began on war credits. The social-democratic members of the Reichstag voted 71-16 to approve the war credits. Of note here is the large bloc of 23 members who did not vote at all. Composed overwhelmingly of delegates from the party’s revisionist Marxist reformist center, they believed in the cause of the war but did not believe in endorsing war credits until the Kaiser’s government made a commitment to national reform. Later that day, Hugo Haase gave a speech imploring “Social democrats of every stripe” to take up arms to defend the fatherland from Russian invasion.

With the left’s support secured, Bethmann Hollweg now set his foot down on the minority question. After announcing that a state police investigation would commence into the killing of Schweitzer, orders were issued to military district commanders in charge of censorship to institute a strict press embargo on any news that could incite “regionalist sentiments”. Public gatherings and memorials for Shweitzer were carefully monitored, and over the next few weeks, a great many Alsatian citizens suspected of conspiring against the state were arrested and detained by military courts. The Committee for National Minorities was forced to conduct its meetings under the shadow of a military inspector.

The victories of August and the mania that swept the nation under general mobilization did much to at least temporarily calm both ethnic and class resentments. A wave of volunteerism demonstrated that there was quite genuine enthusiasm for the war effort among traditionally social-democratic constituents. If a traditional opinion poll was possible at the time, it is unclear that Ebert’s line would have been markedly less popular than Haase’s. Among the liberal bourgeoisie, there is little evidence that the Schweitzer Affair reduced in any real measure the amount of enthusiasm for war. In short, even if “The Spirit of ‘14” was something of a myth, arising more out of the fantasies of wounded middle-class melancholia than genuine historical scholarship, there is substantial truth to the notion that the initial months of the war saw a temporary social truce in the midst of a felt need for collective self-defense.