While apprehension about separation and fears for the safety of sons and husbands account for much of the anxiety, there were also other good reasons to be tearful in August 1914. The start of war precipitated an economic crisis threatening many families’ material existence. In the countryside, farmers’ wives wondered in despair how they could bring in the harvest when their husbands, workers and horses had been taken by the army. In the cities, by contrast, there was sudden mass unemployment. Around 5 per cent of the workforce in Austria and a mere 2.7 per cent of that in Germany had been without a job in July 1914, but in the following month the proportions jumped respectively to 18.3 and 22.7 per cent.86 Small businesses closed down as owners were called up, leaving workers on the streets. Larger firms, expecting war to suppress demand, downsized, put employees on short time, or abruptly cut wages by, on average, 10 per cent for men and up to 25 per cent for women.87 Domestic trade was disrupted by military takeover of the railways, export industry laid low as customers became enemies and contracts were cancelled; Siemens, for example, lost foreign orders for 5.8 million light bulbs.88 The dismissals and wage reductions caused very severe hardship for working-class families. So too did conscription itself. Even once so-called ‘Family Aid’, a benefit given to German soldiers’ families, was added, the drafting of a husband decreased income to a third of its pre-war level for the wife and child of an unskilled labourer, and to less than a quarter for those of a skilled worker.89 The difficulty many families had in paying their landlords explains why a rumour that rents could not legally be demanded for the war’s duration, although false, spread like wildfire. In Berlin, police were already reporting in late August material misery and growing desperation among the proletariat.90 The same was true elsewhere. A secret report on Austrian Galicia at the start of September described ‘the pauperization of our society’ and warned that official aid was urgently needed. ‘Hunger,’ it warned menacingly, ‘can be a bad adviser.’91
Beyond these individual worries, there was a pervasive sense of threat; a fear, frequently refracted inwards, that the community was under attack. In Austria-Hungary that feeling had, as we have seen, developed in many of the Crownlands immediately after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. It was heightened further by the war’s outbreak. The newly established ‘War Supervision Office’ complained already on 8 August about the ‘avalanche-like spread’ of ‘all manner of totally uncontrollable rumours’ unsettling the Austrian population.92 Similar panic gripped Germany once hostilities began. There, fears were inflamed by a government warning on 2 August that ‘Russian officers and agents are underway across the land.’ The warning implicitly appealed for vigilantism: ‘the safety of the German Reich requires that . . . the entire people cooperate without fail to neutralize such dangerous persons’.93 Stories circulated of enemy attempts to poison the water supply and of attacks on railways and telegraph lines. There were fears of air raids; phantom flyers were reported over Berlin. The country was seized by ‘spy hysteria’. The Reichstag deputy Hans Peter Hanssen described how on the capital’s Potsdamer Platz on 3 August he saw an enraged mob beat a man ‘unmercifully with clubs and umbrellas’. This, he was told, was the fourth ‘spy’ that they had caught in the last half hour.94
The anxiety was greatest in places close to frontiers and with ethnically mixed populations. The fortress city of Posen, fifty-five kilometres inside Germany’s eastern border, offers a good example. There, the outbreak of war was exceptionally fraught. As their city was situated within a ring of forts guarding one of the key approaches into the Reich, the Polish and German inhabitants were warned already on 1 August that if the Russian army approached, any people without sufficient provisions to withstand a siege would be evacuated. All households were ordered to register with the police and state their preferred destination.95 Nervous about the external threat, the German minority quickly came to regard their Polish neighbours, with whom peacetime relations had not been warm, with similar trepidation. Terrorism was feared. Already on 3 August, there was a bomb scare and the military was called after somebody left a travel hamper in a bank.96 Some even imagined that local Poles were planning insurrection. One zealous non-commissioned officer sent the police a letter, bizarre even for those anxious times, cataloguing a list of suspicious incidents which, he argued, indicated that preparations for a Polish uprising were well underway. Women were, he claimed, pushing prams containing child-sized dolls through the city, always along the same route. Waiting at a tailor’s workshop, he had seen six civilians come in, all of whom had ordered tunics in the rank of Feldwebelleutnant (a junior officer rank) and then argued with the tailor over the price. Girls, the soldier worried, were entering the barracks and leaving with packages; he was sure that they must contain rifle cartridges. Perhaps what most concerned him was the last point in the letter: ‘I am often asked by Polish girls whether I am Polish. I request urgently that measures be taken.’97
Among the many fearful fantasies that swept through central European populations in that first week of August 1914, the most disruptive was the myth of the ‘gold cars’. This began on 3 August with two separate but simultaneous reports of enemy automobiles driving through the Central Powers’ territory. The first, originating with the Prague gendarmerie and referring to forty Russian cars attempting to enter Bohemia via field tracks, quickly dissipated. The second, which claimed that a convoy of French cars was attempting to bring gold for the Tsarist Empire’s war effort across Germany, spread far more widely. It started with a story told by an officer – killed shortly afterwards – which reached second hand the Administrator of Geldern, a Prussian district bordering the Netherlands. He notified his superior, the County President in Düsseldorf, who in turn informed the Prussian Interior Minister. Warnings were issued to other government offices and published in newspapers. The German public, already alarmed by alerts over the previous days about spies and agents, responded with alacrity. Civilians armed themselves and set up roadblocks. By 6 August frustrated officials were complaining that ‘it has already gone so far that every village considers itself obliged to halt every automobile at two or three places. Every farmer takes part in the search and criticizes the identity papers presented – in short it is now utterly impossible to travel through the country with a car.’98 The French convoy was first numbered at twelve, later eighteen, twenty or twenty-five cars, and was said to be carrying Frenchmen dressed as Prussian officers or impersonating women. After a day of fruitless hunting, it was suggested, on 5 August, that the personnel had changed their disguises to labourers and unloaded their 80 million gold francs onto bicycles. At this point, some did pause; one newspaper calculated that this amount of money would weigh around 26,666 kilograms, and needed at least 1,066 cyclists to transport it. The people at the barricades were, however, unfazed. The searches were extended to anyone riding a bike.99
The delusion did not remain within the confines of the Reich. It also jumped across the border via the German District Administrator at Ratibor, as well as other German authorities, to Bohemia, Austrian Silesia and Galicia, prompting frantic searches by police, false sightings and general chaos. There was even a report that one of the imaginary cars had been stopped after a fire-fight at Cracow, its occupants, French officers dressed as women, arrested, and 30 million (or, in one telegram, 60 million) francs captured. Sentries in Austria not only halted cars and bicycles but also farm carts and even, in some areas, river rafts. If vehicles failed to stop at a challenge, they were shot at; a particular problem for the rafts because, as was eventually pointed out, they were dragged along by currents. Trigger-happy sentries killed at least twenty-eight people in the Reich and many others in Austria. Already by 7 August, the German military, whom some suspected of planting the story in the first place with the intention of whipping up patriotic fervour, began trying to de-escalate the mood, and the following day the command went out to dismantle roadblocks. Austrian authorities too ordered that traffic controls be relaxed. Anxious communities an
d local police proved resistant, however. Only gradually during August did the barricades disappear from central Europe’s roads.100
The public reaction to the ‘gold car’ fantasy, the willingness to suspend disbelief even as the stories became ever more absurd, might now seem amusing, but it reflected the extraordinary stresses of the time. These people, and indeed their police, soldiers and civil authorities, were living through an event for which no experience in the past half-century of peace had prepared them; the stuff of fiction could seem possible when set within the disorientating, terrifying context of the outbreak of a European war. The response to the ‘gold cars’ was revealing in other ways too. It demonstrated how people sought to cope with the new situation. The frantic activity offered both a diversion from more personal worries and an apparent means of taking control and contributing to warding off the danger. Above all, it showed a natural instinct to seek safety through solidarity with the community. The ability of governments to guide and cement this solidarity would be critical in determining the durability of the Austro-Hungarian and German war efforts.
The German people entered the First World War remarkably united. Differences of class and confession, region and race, seemed to many who lived through these times suddenly to melt away in the national emergency. The Russian general mobilization decisively shifted popular opinion, turning war from an unthinkable horror into a defensive necessity. The fear at the outbreak of hostilities was important in promoting readiness to suspend domestic quarrels and seek safety in solidarity. The Reich government also acted skilfully, however, in building consensus and cultivating unity. The distrust between Germany’s conservative authorities and its largest political party, the Social Democrats, should not be underestimated; on 30 July, after German mobilization was mistakenly reported in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Friedrich Ebert, one of the party’s two chairmen, and Otto Bauer, its treasurer, fled with the party finances to safety in Switzerland. As late as 31 July its leaders reckoned that if war broke out, they would be arrested.101 It was thus little short of astounding and of immense importance for Germany’s war effort that less than a week later, the party would vote unanimously for war credits, and its other chairman, Hugo Haase, announce to the Reichstag that ‘in the hour of danger we do not leave the Fatherland in the lurch’.102
The government, and above all Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, had worked hard to make this possible. From the start of the crisis, it had shown respect for the Social Democrats. On 26 July, Haase had been called to the Prussian Interior Ministry and told that the SPD’s anti-war protests would not be suppressed. An invitation from the Chancellor had followed three days later, but as neither Haase nor other SPD leaders were in Berlin another Socialist, Albert Südekum, attended. Bethmann stressed to him the peaceful intentions of the Kaiser’s government, and was assured by Südekum that the party had no intention of initiating strikes or sabotage. The Chancellor reported the following day to the Prussian Ministry of State that there was ‘nothing particular to fear’ from the SPD. The government was also sufficiently confident of the Socialist unions’ patriotism once war broke out that on 2 August their leader Carl Legien was informed that there was no intention to repress his organization.103
The Prussian military, belying its reputation as reactionary and politically unsavvy, also played its part. This was crucially important. Once the ‘State of Siege’ was declared late on the afternoon of 31 July, wide-ranging powers had passed, under the provisions of Prussia’s 1851 ‘Law on the State of Siege’, to the generals who headed the twenty-four Army Corps Districts that covered the Reich. They or, once they had mobilized their units and left for the battlefield, their deputies were responsible for the maintenance of public security during the emergency. They could suspend constitutional rights and had the authority to issue orders to the civilian administration within their Corps Districts. The army’s view in peacetime, based on studies of insurgencies, had been that early and decisive action was the key to maintaining internal order in a crisis. Yet the soldiers also understood that repressing organizations which possessed the loyalty not only of many reservists but also of the railway workers essential for a successful mobilization would be both risky and damaging for national morale. As early as 25 July, after discussion with the civilian government, the Prussian War Minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn, issued Army Corps District generals with guidelines recommending vigilance, but warning against overly hasty or strict action: ‘It is not desirable,’ the generals were admonished, ‘for political parties, through the suppression of their press and arrest of their leaders, to be pushed from the beginning into sharp opposition to the government.’104
The Army Corps District generals could be given orders only by the Kaiser. Yet although under no obligation, they did follow the War Minister’s guidelines towards the Social Democrats and unions. Interestingly, however, this was less true of their treatment of the other major suspect groups in Germany, its minorities. Even in 1914, race posed a greater barrier than class to entry into the national community. In West Prussia and Upper Silesia, Polish-language newspapers were temporarily banned, although admittedly in the former so was the SPD press. Many Poles, including some minor community leaders, were arrested. So great was the suspicion that there were even searches of Catholic churches for weapons or for the entrances to tunnels leading to Russia. Local military commanders were responsible for these actions. Disgruntled provincial civil authorities, who generally had not been consulted, later pointed out that the arrests did not result in even a single prosecution.105 Unsurprisingly, the measures were demoralizing for a community that was overwhelmingly obedient in August 1914; they signalled clearly, as one disgruntled Polish-speaker noted in his diary, ‘you are the enemy’.106 In the west of Germany, Alsace-Lorrainers were treated even more harshly. Civil-military relations in this area had been poisonous before the war, and the army, which suspected the population of French sympathies, did not hesitate to take around 400 people into custody, including nineteen clergymen and two deputies from the regional parliament. As with the Polish minority, the soldiers were unfamiliar with local conditions and, relying on denunciations, ended up unjustly detaining many loyal subjects.107 These peoples lived on enemy frontiers, which goes some way to explaining the nervousness and repression. This was not true of Germany’s Danish minority, however, whose press was also closed and its leaders arrested. Some 172 people associated with the Danish national movement, including Reichstag deputy Hans Peter Hanssen, were imprisoned. A further 118 German Danes were deprived of their freedom solely because of their knowledge of the coastal waters; it was feared that they might help men not wishing to be drafted flee across the Danish border or even assist in a British naval attack.108
The SPD’s leaders were brought to support the war not by persecution, which was never likely to give satisfactory results, but by persuasion. As late as 31 July, most of the party’s Reichstag deputies had been unwilling to vote in favour of war credits, but thereafter a shift in opinion rapidly took place. This was influenced in part by the government’s new readiness to enter a dialogue, albeit on unequal terms, and still more by the implicit promise of political reform and a better future contained in the Kaiser’s declaration of 1 August that he saw ‘no more parties . . . only Germans’. The shift was also a response to the war’s outbreak. While plenty of Social Democrats considered the Reich government at least partially responsible for hostilities, it was clear to most that opposition at this point would be not only senseless but potentially catastrophic for party and country. At best, it would likely lead to the suppression of the SPD. At worst, it would facilitate an invasion of Germany by the Tsarist army, a force that served Europe’s most reactionary and brutal regime. Modern historians tend to underestimate just how realistic and frightening this prospect was, dismissing the fear as primarily a product of German Socialists’ deeply ingrained Russophobia. Ludwig Frank, who was convinced already from 25 July of war’s unavoidability, succeeded
in gaining from at least twenty-five other deputies, around a quarter of the Reichstag fraction, an undertaking that they were prepared to defy party discipline and vote for war credits. In the event, such drastic action proved unnecessary, as by the afternoon of 3 August, when the SPD’s deputies gathered to decide their stance in the following day’s parliamentary session, most wanted to support the government. In a vote, seventy-eight declared themselves in favour, and only fourteen were opposed to passing the war credits motion.109
The Reichstag session of 4 August 1914 was in consequence an immensely powerful piece of political theatre. It was carefully choreographed in order to project a message of German unity. The Chancellor met all party leaders, including Haase and his colleague Philipp Scheidemann, at midday on 3 August in order to prepare and, although their deputies had not yet settled on their stance, the Social Democrats agreed several symbolic compromises that assumed a unanimous acceptance of war credits. The day of the vote began with a Mass in Berlin Cathedral, followed in the early afternoon by the Reichstag opening ceremony at the imperial palace. Although, as was usual, SPD deputies attended neither, in both the theme of unity was stressed. The Kaiser spontaneously repeated his celebrated promise: ‘I no longer recognize any parties. I know only Germans.’ An amnesty for those convicted of political crimes such as lese-majesty, which above all benefited Social Democrats, was announced on the same day. The Reichstag session, the day’s centrepiece, was attended by all the parties, the democratically elected representatives of the German people. The first speech was given by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg and outlined the official explanation of the war’s causes. Russia had acted duplicitously and aggressively, and France was accused of having attacked without warning. ‘The great hour of trial has struck for our people,’ he ended. ‘Our army is in the field, our navy is ready for battle – behind them stands the entire German nation, the entire German nation’, and here he turned pointedly to the Socialists, ‘united to the last man.’110
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