Even Social Democratic deputies, in a spontaneous show of patriotism, cheered the Chancellor’s speech; a first for the Reichstag, where no Socialist had ever applauded a government official. The Reichstag President, Dr Johannes Kaempf, a member of the bourgeois Progressive People’s Party, echoed the Chancellor in stressing both that this was a ‘war for the defence of our country’ and that ‘never before have the people been more united than they are today’.111 After an intermission, it was Haase’s turn to get up and speak for the SPD. He had not wanted to do this. It was Haase who had composed the SPD’s appeal of 25 July for mass peace demonstrations, and he had remained true to his anti-war convictions to the end, voting in the party’s own discussions a day earlier as one of the fourteen deputies opposed to passing the war credits motion. Socialist discipline, however, demanded not only unanimity but also a display of party unity, and for this reason members of all opinions had wished Haase to make the agreed statement. In this statement, a compromise between the different party factions, he condemned past imperialist policies, emphasized how the SPD had striven for peace ‘in cordial agreement with our brothers in France’, and expressed the hope that the horrors of war would ‘awaken in millions . . . abhorrence . . . and win them over to the ideal of socialism and of peace among nations’. The statement also, however, warned against the danger posed by Tsarist Russia ‘for our people and its freedom’, insisted on ‘the right of every people to national independence and self-defence’ and, crucially, agreed to the requested war credits.112 The speech met with frosty silence from the right-wing parties, but the centrist Progressives along with SPD deputies applauded, and that was sufficient for newspapers to report general acclaim. There was another small hint of divisions to come during the voting, when two minor SPD deputies left the chamber unnoticed in order to avoid having to vote. Nonetheless, the war credits were passed unanimously, and the Burgfrieden, the ‘fortress peace’ in which all internal quarrels were suspended for the duration of hostilities, was thus very publicly demonstrated. The session closed with another, and again unprecedented, display of unity when the house, including reformist Socialists, gave three cheers for ‘Kaiser, Volk and Fatherland’.113
The Reichstag session of 4 August strengthened and institutionalized at a national level the solidarity that had started to develop within German society once Russian general mobilization became known. Hanssen, after being released from his brief imprisonment, noted already on 2 August, the first day of German mobilization, that reservists’ ‘grave anxiety’ was accompanied by ‘a determination to do one’s duty’.114 Others made similar observations. A doctor inspecting draftees in Weiden, a Bavarian town not far from the Austrian border, was impressed: ‘from the reserve year groups all appear,’ he jotted in his diary on 4 August. ‘No man missing. None is ill or wants to be ill. From the Landwehr group [of older reservists between twenty-eight and thirty-eight years old], all come. Some are seriously ill (lung and heart complaints), but no one wants to shirk.’115 Everywhere, men obeyed their call-up orders conscientiously. Moreover, as the first weeks of war passed, an overt patriotism became more prominent, especially where troops were departing. On their trains, the soldiers scrawled self-confident, aggressive ditties. There was the ubiquitous promise ‘Every shot a Russian, Every punch a Frenchman, Every kick a Brit.’ More imaginative was a rhyme addressed to the Russian Tsar which went ‘Nikolaus, be afraid, / From you liver sausage will be made.’ Food was, apparently, very much on the minds of the departing soldiers. ‘Menu’ stated another piece of troop-train graffiti: ‘French Goulash with Tsar Compote’ or ‘Poincaré Soup, Russian Salad, English Sauce’. Another morbid humourist chalked a mock advertisement on the side of his wagon for ‘Quarter litre of Russian blood – 30 Pfennigs’.116 The crowds seeing off soldiers also became more festive and patriotic by the middle of August. ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ frequently rose up across station platforms in these days, although nostalgic songs for home, ‘Home, Oh Home, I Must Leave You’, ‘Tomorrow I Must Leave, Lovely Berlin’, or ‘Cologne on the Rhine, You Pretty Little City’ were also often heard, and it was these that men sung themselves once on their journey to the front.117
There was no contradiction between these public displays of patriotism and bravado and private fear and sorrow; they went hand in hand. Cheering and singing were means for soldiers and civilians, however upset, to express solidarity, temporarily quash anxiety, and cope with the painful emotions of departure. They did indeed help. One man described how the ‘enthusiasm on the railway stations . . . literally swept us along, so that soon the somewhat depressed mood to be seen on several faces on our transport made way for an enthused and confident atmosphere’.118 Some, deeply moved by the scenes, believed themselves to be living through a national rebirth. Middle-class men like Eugen Mortler, a bank trainee, grasped for the Kaiser’s rhetoric to explain what they saw: ‘no differences, no parties, everyone helps, Germany is united’.119 While the hope of many intellectuals – that the sense of community they later mythologized and venerated as the ‘spirit of 1914’ would be made permanent – was illusory, that sense itself was widely felt and expressed in the first weeks of the war; and not merely as a strategy for suppressing anxiety.120 There was a widespread unity of purpose and identification with Germany’s cause which, especially after the SPD voted for war credits, extended even to the working classes. The Chief of the Berlin Police remarked with surprise a month after the mobilization that his men ‘who through their job have much to do with the worker milieu can scarcely believe that these are the same people who just recently cheered the Internationale in protest gatherings and now bubble over with patriotism’.121
The most spectacular manifestation of patriotic unity was the flood of volunteers rushing to serve in the German army. Newspapers reported excitedly that over a million men had joined from ‘all levels of society and age groups, all occupations and classes’.122 The true figure was smaller but still highly impressive: 250,000 men volunteered for military service in August 1914, and in total around half a million came forward during the course of the war. Prussian units alone accepted 143,922 volunteers in the first ten days of hostilities; by comparison, only 40,000 Frenchmen volunteered for their national army during the whole of 1914. Not only was the German volunteering movement’s speed and size remarkable but so too was its spontaneity. These men acted on their own initiative; the government issued no appeal, and the army was unprepared for the queues that suddenly appeared outside its barracks. They had to go to considerable effort to be accepted for service, as most regiments met all their manpower needs from the draft. Many volunteers travelled long distances, some visiting as many as six or seven depots before finding a unit willing to recruit them.123
The volunteers were not, contrary to the claims of the papers, representative of German society. They were young; over half were under twenty, the age of conscription, and almost 90 per cent were less than twenty-five years old. The majority, around two-thirds, came from a broad urban middle-class background. Students, secondary-school pupils and academics, the types of people who had participated in the ‘war enthused’ processions at the end of July were particularly well represented, but just as many lower-middle-class men, such as craftsmen, tradesmen and office workers, came forward. Industrial workers, although a little under-represented in terms of their share of society, still accounted for around three-tenths of the volunteers. Some joined up to escape unemployment, but others had impeccably patriotic motives. The SPD set an example: 783 of its youth group leaders volunteered as, most famously, did the forty-year-old Reichstag deputy Ludwig Frank, who was killed fighting on the Western Front on 3 September 1914. He saw the conflict as a chance to prove the SPD’s loyalty to Germany, and thereby hasten political reform; ‘we are undertaking a war for the Prussian franchise,’ he once wrote. However, he was insistent that his enlistment was not a political tactic but, like the vote of 4 August, ‘arose from an inner necessity’; an act undertaken becaus
e he and his fellow Socialists ‘take the duty of defending the homeland bitterly seriously’.124 The only groups largely absent from the volunteers’ ranks were farmers and rural workers. Such men were particularly favoured by the army as deferential soldiers, and therefore were over-represented among conscripts. The dire labour shortages in the countryside and the urgent need to bring in the harvest go far to explain why few of the remainder volunteered (see Table 2).125
The middle-class Germans who volunteered, although not summoned by any call to arms, were following a deeply embedded cultural script. The memory of the 1813 Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, in which urban middle-class volunteer Freikorps, or ‘Free Corps’, had played an important role, was venerated in imperial Germany, and above all in its Prussian heartlands.126 At a time of national emergency, when the Reich’s cause appeared so obviously just, and when much of the language used to explain the war self-consciously echoed the idealism of 1813, it was only natural that middle-class men should instinctively follow their forebears’ example and volunteer for military service. For southern German Catholics, who possessed different historical traditions, volunteering could be a demonstration of regional loyalty or, conversely, understood as an act of national solidarity, symbolizing the healing of rifts left by the ‘Culture War’ between the state and the Catholic Church in the 1870s. Jews volunteered in particularly large numbers; a post-war investigation calculated that over 10,000 came forward, meaning that a community which made up less than 1 per cent of the Reich’s inhabitants supplied around 2 per cent of its war volunteers. They enlisted to express their close identification with the German Fatherland, and often in the hope that by visibly participating in its defence, they would end the informal discrimination that they had suffered in peace.127 Prussian Poles, who volunteered in far smaller, but not negligible numbers, may have had similar considerations, although Russophobia and the immediate danger posed by the Tsarist army to their own homes were probably more important factors.128 Not all middle-class volunteers were influenced by higher ideals. Some young men were swept up in the excitement of the war’s outbreak, attracted by the soldierly ideal of manliness and motivated by ‘thirst for adventure’; others went because their peers were going, and they felt that they could not stay at home. However, contrary to the patronizing assumptions sometimes voiced later that educated men in their teens or early twenties were too naive or stupid to recognize that armed conflict was likely to involve hardship, suffering and death, very few expressed ‘war enthusiasm’. Volunteers insisted that they had ‘known from the beginning that a modern war is an unparalleled tragedy and a crime against humanity’. The overriding point for the majority, and the single most important cause of the volunteering movement’s speed and spontaneity, was that as soon as war broke out, the homeland with which they identified and to which they felt an obligation was under threat of invasion. This was the conclusion reached by a survey of volunteers’ motivations undertaken by psychologists at the beginning of hostilities. ‘Patriotic feeling,’ it argued, ‘was there to a great degree – as an impulsive, categorical imperative: we have a duty to protect the Fatherland. War has been declared, weapons are our only remaining resort.’129
Table 2. Social composition of German volunteers, 1914–18 (sample size: 2,576)
The figures in this table diverge slightly from those in the source. The original table misclassified 59 students as professionals and academics (48), white-collar workers (7) or farmers (4). This error is corrected here.
Source: A. Watson, ‘Voluntary Enlistment in the Great War: A European Phenomenon?’, in C. Krüger and S. Levsen (eds.), War Volunteering in Modern Times: From the French Revolution to the Second World War (Basingstoke and New York, 2011), p. 170.
The urge to participate in the nation’s defence, to be, as contemporaries put it, ‘allowed to take part’ in the momentous events of August 1914, was not confined to male youth. Older men served as sentries in their community’s home guards (Bürgerwehren), guarding railway lines and bridges.130 Women too felt the need to contribute. Some thought that the national emergency demanded a rethinking of rigid gender roles. One Berlin girl, Margarete Bäckmann, wrote to the Kaiser on 6 August 1914, entreating him ‘from the bottom of my heart’ to allow her to join the army: ‘Should a German girl not be permitted to give her blood?’, she appealed. ‘Should I not be allowed to fight for the homeland?’131 Most, however, were content to accept the more traditional auxiliary tasks permitted to them; their mission was not to arm themselves but rather, as the Kaiserin framed it in an appeal to the womanhood of the Reich, perform a ‘holy work of love’.132 In the war’s first months, middle-class girls, usually supervised by an older lady both for the sake of organizational efficiency and to hinder ‘immoral’ activities, could be seen on every station serving refreshments to troops passing through. Others assisted in charitable efforts to alleviate the economic distress suffered by soldiers’ families and unemployed working-class women. For many bourgeois girls, however, the ideal was nursing, which seemed to epitomize ‘feminine strengths’ of love and care. One of the earliest wartime first-aid training courses, intended for 3,000 participants, attracted 40,000 applications.133 Those who did get work in hospitals were very quickly confronted by war’s horror. Wounded were streaming back from the front already in late August. In Freiburg, one volunteer, Elisabeth Stempfle, reported that schools had been converted to field hospitals and that all were already nearly full. The girls were thrown into the daily drudgery of cleaning and caring for ill soldiers. They saw awful wounds and amputations. The job also made immense emotional demands. One friend, she recorded in her diary, had been alone all night comforting a dying reservist. For such women, the switch from peace to war was sudden and shocking.134
A vast network of women’s organizations underpinned this activity. The ‘Patriotic Women’s Association’ (Vaterländischer Frauenverein), along with other women’s groups affiliated to the Red Cross, had half a million members already trained in first aid by 1914. Other organizations offered their services to the authorities. Already on 1 August, Gertrud Bäumer, chairwoman of the 300,000-strong League of German Women’s Associations’ (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine), which in peacetime had campaigned for the extension of female rights in education and the professions, female suffrage and the banning of prostitution, offered to take some of the burden of war welfare from the Prussian Interior Ministry. The initiative was followed by a Burgfrieden among women’s organizations. The League joined with Protestant and Catholic groups and with Socialist women to form the National Women’s Service (Nationaler Frauendienst). At the local level, this resulted in sudden cooperation between groups that had been either in competition or, in the case of bourgeois and Socialist women, in milieus which had previously been almost totally apart. Needless to say, their members had very different expectations of what might come out of the war. Many of Bäumer’s women hoped that their patriotic efforts would be rewarded with an extension of women’s rights, while Catholic and Socialist female activists shared their menfolk’s aspirations for the full political integration of their communities into the Reich. Women from circles of Protestant intelligentsia, like their male counterparts, sometimes wished for the moral renewal of society. For most, however, the experience of unity at the war’s opening was heady. As Bäumer herself declared, ‘today we are not individuals, today we are solely a people’.135
General Helmuth von Moltke had predicted in 1911 that ‘the German people would take up arms unitedly and enthusiastically in a war that was forced upon them’.136 In the summer of 1914 the Reich’s population proved him right. The abrupt change from the anxiety, depression and dread of July to the solidarity of August nonetheless requires some explaining. The first step was the Russian general mobilization, which was intended, and understood, as a threat. From this point, Germans saw the coming war as defensive, and feared Tsarist invasion. In reaction, a panicked solidarity asserted itself. The government’s skilful harnessing of
this mood was the second step. The Kaiser’s promise of ‘no more parties’ and the unanimous Reichstag vote for war credits on 4 August 1914 were immensely influential. The political Burgfrieden resonated widely. It was repeated at the level of local government, and in society, as the women’s groups demonstrated.137 The SPD’s cooperation cemented workers’ support for the war. Across society, a cult of unity was embraced, which took different expression in different milieus. Rural people expressed it when they tried to stop ‘gold cars’, workers did so when they hung out imperial flags or cheered at train stations. The middle classes were its greatest advocates; possessing the financial security and time, as well as the greatest stake in imperial society, bourgeois men and women volunteered for the army or for patriotic work in large numbers. These August days did not, as some middle-class people like Bäumer believed, change Germans. They remained individuals with personal fears and private lives, and they continued to be part of sub-national communities, class-conscious, religious, regional, with their own particular aspirations. Yet crucially, all parts of the Reich’s society were sufficiently integrated and felt enough self-interest not to make such change, the dropping of all other identities, necessary in August 1914. Fear of invasion and communal solidarity in the face of threat, channelled and cultivated capably by their rulers, brought Germans together to defend their country. This struggle was to be a people’s war.
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