Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918
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Class, gender, generation, and confession all combined to structure basic communities of experience in wartime Germany. These communities provided frames of collective identity, as well as several different cultural vocabularies for making sense of the war. The common experience of combat defined one such community at the front, while the home front played host to several others. These were nurtured in routine encounters among people who faced common problems, shared common lifestyles, lived in the same neighborhoods, and knew one another personally.
The most durable communities of experience on the home front were those that were best organized; and these were defined historically by class and confession. They reflected the basic cleavages in German society and their institutionalization in rich networks of clubs and other kinds of voluntary associations, which the Germans called Vereine. Organizations of many descriptions had sprouted during the decades before the war, in order to serve a bewildering variety of purposes. They included chambers of commerce and local political organizations, trade unions and professional associations, women’s groups, church auxiliaries, bicycle clubs, sharp-shooting societies, and groups devoted to the collecting of stamps, butterflies, or carrier pigeons. They tended to replicate and reinforce the broader division of German society, however – in the first instance along lines of confession and class. The Kulturkampf drove the mobilization of German Catholics into their own organizations, which served the practical defense of Catholics’ interests, as well as their spiritual needs and sociability. Then, in the 1890s, the spread of the German Socialist movement brought the further segregation of these organizations, now by class. Networks of working-class Vereine took shape in parallel with middle-class organizations, both Protestant and Catholic, in which many workers had not felt welcome. Localities throughout the land henceforth hosted multiple gymnastics clubs, women’s auxiliaries, youth groups, and choral societies.
The war profoundly affected associational life in Germany. Many organizations collapsed or withered with the departure of dues-paying members to the front. Groups such as gymnastic societies and bicycle clubs, which appealed to able-bodied young men, were particularly vulnerable, as were trade unions in non-essential sectors of the economy. So were groups that had both male and female members – such as choral societies, which found survival difficult without bass and tenor voices in their ranks. It was a fitting symbol of the problem that club trophies were then sacrificed to war production for their metal. In these arduous circumstances, German organizational life came into flux. Ties of confession and class survived as primary bonds, but the experience of war encouraged new solidarities and patterns of organization, of which military units were merely the most obvious.
Structuring and restructuring these communities of experience constituted a cultural process. It rested on shared meanings, which were constructed, represented, and communicated during the war in a rich variety of symbols and social rituals – the holy sacraments no less than the figures of Luther, Marx, and Hindenburg, the banner of the workers’ glee club “Friendship” no less than the black, red, and white of the Imperial German flag, and the singing of The Internationale no less than the wearing of military uniforms. All these symbols and rituals conveyed representations of the war. They were vehicles in which Germans of all stations confronted the war’s meaning and sought to locate their own experience within some broader interpretive framework, such as the nation’s history and destiny, class conflict, or the promise of Christian redemption.
Defining these communities of experience was, finally, also a political process. The war raised deep issues of social equity and the distribution of power, which could not long be hidden in the rhetoric of patriotic unity. Patriotism spoke to the most comprehensive of these communities – the one that united all Germans as Germans. The language of patriotism represented the war as a supreme moment of crisis, challenge, and opportunity for every German. Patriotism provided the official interpretation of the conflict. The scenes of celebration early in the war suggested its power to accommodate diverse aspirations and to define the meaning of the war for groups of people who otherwise disagreed with one another about fundamental questions, such as those that related to class and confession. As the war dragged on, however, the power and credibility of this language diminished – in some communities more than others. Consensus thus eroded in misery, as the meaning of the war became itself the object of a bitter contest. Opposition grew.
Culture
This broad understanding of “culture,” which stresses the symbolic construction and representation of shared meanings, is more familiar to anthropologists and cultural historians today than it was to Germans who endured the war. To them the term Kultur referred instead to a phenomenon that was symbolized in the figures of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven. German culture meant in the first instance “high culture.”1 It comprised the country’s distinctive achievements in art, music, literature, and scholarship, as well as a set of collective virtues – such as diligence, order, and discipline – that were thought to be characteristically German. This culture tended to find expression in the creative media and the scholarly treatise. It denoted a specific kind of cultural undertaking in the broader sense of the term. Its practitioners, too, sought to represent meanings; they did so, however, in specialized forms and languages of expression, such as painting, poetry, music, or academic scholarship, that normally required technical training.
To those who were most immediately associated with it, Kultur defined the central issue of the war.2 The great majority of Germany’s leading writers, artists, composers, and scholars were passionately engaged in support of the war effort, which they portrayed as the defense of German culture as they themselves understood it. They affixed their signatures to manifestos that invoked German cultural superiority in order to justify the country’s cause and claims, including the pursuit of expansive war aims.3 One such document, which defiantly dismissed accusations of German atrocities in occupied Belgium, was addressed early in the war “To the cultured world” and was decorated with the names of close to 100 of the country’s leading intellectuals and artists, among them the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, the painter Max Liebermann, the biologist Ernst Haeckel, the theologian Adolf von Harnack, the economist Gustav von Schmoller, the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and the composer Engelbert Humperdinck.4
These and other figures were likewise prominent fixtures in the campaign to mobilize morale on the home front. As the war stripped German universities of students and younger faculty, the scholars who remained at home offered their services to the war effort.5 Many invoked their academic expertise to help make sense of the war, notably in public lectures, brochures composed for mass circulation, and articles in the popular press. Scholars from the University of Freiburg lectured around the region. The (Catholic) historian Heinrich Finke presented lectures on the idea of “holy war,” the geologist Wilhelm Deecke on the military significance of coal and other natural resources, the philosopher Martin Heidegger on “Culture, national consciousness, and war.”6 Elsewhere, scholars from the young discipline of physical anthropology offered services of a different kind in making sense of the war. In hopes of demonstrating the relevance of their discipline to the war effort, they visited German prisoner-of-war camps, where they claimed to document racial distinctions between Germany’s friends, such as Flemish-speaking soldiers, and its enemies, such as Russian Jews.7
For all these German “culture carriers” (Kulturträger), the war offered an occasion for extended public meditation on the distinctive nature of German culture and their own social identity.8 From the start they cast the struggle between Germany and the Western democracies in a set of dichotomies, which pivoted – to the great disadvantage of the latter term – on a polar opposition between “Kultur” and “Zivilisation.” In this reading, “culture” represented the civic virtues that had found collective expression in the “ideas of 1914” at the outbreak of the war. Atop the lis
t of these virtues were German creative idealism, heroism, self-sacrifice, and the willing subordination of the individual to a national community that bound its members by organic ties. “Civilization,” by contrast, connoted the cause for which Britain and France had gone to war. It was linked to the ideals of the French Revolution, to the “ideas of 1789”; and these, in the German reading, implied superficiality, materialism, the pursuit of selfish interest, and political systems that gave primacy to the individual over the community. The dichotomy between “community” and “society,” Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, which had figured centrally in the “ideas of 1914,” modulated in this way into the basic motif of the wartime discourse on culture.
The German rhapsody to Kultur took many variations, as famous scholars elaborated on the contrast in idioms specific to their fields. According to the economist Werner Sombart, the contest pitted Helden against Händler. The Germans, he explained, were a nation of heroes, committed to the great deed, animated by Faustian drives; the English, by contrast, were a nation of traders, whose collective inclinations were practical, hedonistic, calculating, and base. The historian Karl Lamprecht portrayed the war as a conflict between a vibrant young German culture, whose historical moment had arrived, and the tired, decadent values embodied in Anglo-French civilization. The richest and most perverse exploration of this theme came from the pen of Germany’s greatest writer of the era, Thomas Mann, whose Reflections of an Unpolitical Man dwelt on the ethical, political, and aesthetic preferences (such as a predisposition for musical creativity) that putatively distinguished German culture from the civilization of the West. In all its erudition, Mann’s treatise reformulated the popular stereotypes of this war. Even its title was perverse, for, in nearly all its forms, the dichotomy between culture and civilization was supremely political, a thin veil in defense of Germany’s semi-authoritarian constitution against the claims of all democrats, whether abroad or at home.9
These arguments appealed above all to the Protestant-educated upper middle class, the so-called Bildungsbürgertum, whose relationship to German Kultur was thought to be special. The distinguishing mark of this group was the experience of university education, which counted as the badge of being “cultured” (gebildet). Because academic credentials were also required for prestigious careers in the professions, education, and the upper public service, the Bildungsbürgertum supplied most of the country’s elites. The group comprised the Protestant clergy and teachers in the humanistic secondary schools (Gymnasien), who numbered among the most ferocious patriots in Germany. Portraying the conflict in the language and media of Kultur resonated with particular force in these cultured circles, in which patriotism included patronizing local theaters and concert halls, where the dramas of Schiller and Hebbel testified, like the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, to the righteous superiority of the German cause.
The forms of high culture percolated as well into the more popular media. The initial celebration of the war found expression in an explosion of poetry. During the first six months several million war poems appeared in newspapers or popular anthologies. Most of the authors were amateurs, who lacked both talent and training, so their feat was remarkable principally for its enthusiasm and abundance. Although he was a poet of some distinction, Richard Dehmel fed this flood of patriotic verse that carried German soldiers (Dehmel among them) into battle. The wooden opening lines of his poem Der Feldsoldat (The Frontline Soldier) typified the genre:
Da alles ruht in Gottes Hand;
wir bluten gern fürs Vaterland
As all is safely in God’s hand;
we’re glad to bleed for the Fatherland
The war invaded music halls, popular novels, and the fictional offerings in the feuilletons. “War theater” took over the stages of the big cities, presenting dramatic portraits of soldiers in adventures and misadventures and of civilians as they coped loyally with the burdens of war. Later in the war the staging of operettas such as The House of the Three Maidens (Das Dreimäderlhaus) offered relief from these burdens in escape.10 The cinema, which had already become the most frequented medium of popular culture in Germany, also accommodated the war. A spate of propaganda films bestrewed the first year of the war – to quote Siegfried Kracauer – with “rubbish filled to the brim with war brides, waving flags, officers, privates, elevated sentiments and barracks humor.”11 As this genre waned along with the initial enthusiasm for war, feature films reverted to providing popular entertainment with titles such as Detective Joe Deebs, The Dowry Hunter, and Nanunta, the Rose of the Wild West. Newsreels from the frontlines were ritual preludes to these diversions from the pressures of wartime, however. Film figured centrally in the propaganda of this war, although the Germans were slower than their enemies to realize the power of the new medium. Only in 1917, after Ludendorff had provided the stimulus, did the government impose central controls on the distribution and production of moving pictures. The most significant result of this official interest in the cinematic representation of the war was the founding, under the army’s auspices, of the Universal Film Company (UFA), a private company that henceforth produced feature films, as well as newsreels, for consumption in Germany and abroad.12
The regimentation of the cinema late in the war brought a culmination to the campaign to manage cultural expression. The principal powers of censorship in cultural affairs resided throughout the war in the hands of the deputy commanding generals; and these powers encompassed not only movie houses but other theaters, concert and music halls, libraries, bookstores, and art galleries. Although a succession of central offices attempted to impose uniform guidelines, different standards prevailed in the military districts, so some diversity of artistic expression survived. Films made outside Germany after the outbreak of the war were everywhere banned (a boon for the German film industry). Works by “enemy” authors met the same fate in most parts of Germany, unless the author in question had, like Shakespeare or Tolstoy, died before 1914 and securely entered the pantheon of high culture. Even works by German authors that were set in England or France were vulnerable.13 Traditionalists used the opportunity to step up an attack, which had begun before the war, against the art of French impressionists and post-impressionists that hung in German museums.
The censors were as a rule less concerned about “elevated” works of art, however, which the educated classes tended to patronize, than they were about what the masses consumed. As pulp fiction and movies embraced adventure on the battlefield (and above the battlefield) as a staple feature, the authorities seized the opportunity to renew an assault on what they had long called “smut” (Schundliteratur or Schundfilm). As it had before the war, the campaign reflected powerful social anxieties. It was calculated to prevent the cultural subversion of Germany’s youth – in the first instance, working-class youth. The military censors thus imposed stringent controls on the sale of cheap, sensationalist literature, much of which was easily available through colportage; movies – and the posters that advertised them – were objects of a similar battery of regulations.
Because culture, high and low, was so allied to the mobilization of morale during the war, its political implications were both heavy and transparent. Perhaps for this reason, the creative output of Germany’s established cultural leaders was meager. Max Liebermann’s most productive period lay behind him. The great dramatic and literary representations of the war (including Mann’s The Magic Mountain) awaited the aftermath of the conflict.14 German composers produced few remarkable pieces, with the exception perhaps of the Variations for Orchestra by Max Reger (who died in 1916), Richard Strauss’ opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Hans Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina, in which Mann extolled the German national moment, the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner, the “essential qualities” of Dürer and Faust.15
Another, more fundamental reason for the meager creative output was that the upheaval of war seemed to defy representation in the artistic idioms that these established figures had mastered. T
he avant-garde was not handicapped in this way. Several years before the war the movement known loosely as German expressionism had gathered young writers and artists in feverish revolt against prevailing styles, conventions, and modes of artistic expression. From centers in Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Cologne, and Hanover, they hurled challenges in verse, oil, and collage at established institutions. Whether they were poets, such as August Stramm and Gottfried Benn, or painters, such as Franz Marc and Max Beckmann, their works exuded a fascination with the primitive, violent, emotional, and irrational, which they portrayed in tension-filled language, drastic metaphors, jarring colors, and abstract imagery. This was the language of apocalypse and regeneration. In fact, a number of expressionist works, such as Georg Heym’s chilling poem War (1911), or Ludwig Meidner’s canvas Apocalyptic City (1913), prefigured the First World War better than did the Schlieffen Plan.16
The outbreak of war in 1914 boded fulfillment.17 Apocalyptic expectations adapted easily to the patriotic exhilaration of the first hours. Many of these artists and writers joined the colors – among them Stramm, Benn, Beckmann, Meidner, Otto Dix, Georg Trakl, August Macke, and Erich Heckel. The militant accents in their work soon modulated in the terrible tedium of war, but the creative language of expressionism proved well matched to the disorientation and periodic tumult of the front-line experience. Stramm set the horror and excitement of combat effectively to verse. The paintings of Beckmann and Dix, which were devoted to the same theme, are among the most enduring cultural documents of the war. “Almost breathtaking,” writes Wolfgang Mommsen of “the intensity with which [these painters] attempted to represent the extraordinary, the unimaginable artistically.”18