3 GERMANY
以下是〈戰敗文化：德國〉一文的條列重點與主要問題整理：
🧩 一、文章重點摘要
1️⃣ 一戰失敗的特殊性：未被感知的戰敗（）
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德國於1918年11月投降時，社會普遍未感覺「真正失敗」。
😄😄（俄烏戰爭的俄羅斯）
😄🤣（1945-1949國共內戰）
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戰事主要發生在境外，國內秩序相對穩定，軍隊並未被徹底摧毀。
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「背後捅刀（Dolchstoßlegende）」成為普遍信仰：德軍未敗，是被政客與革命者出賣。
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這種「否認戰敗」阻礙了民族反思，也孕育出後來😄😄納粹的復仇心理。
2️⃣ 戰敗敘事的兩種方向
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右翼敘事：戰敗為「背叛」所致，強調復仇與民族純潔。
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左翼敘事：戰敗是舊帝國主義的崩壞，機會在於建立民主與社會正義。
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兩者都在🤣「民族重生」的語言中競逐道德高地，導致魏瑪共和分裂。
3️⃣ 魏瑪共和的戰敗記憶與文化創傷
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社會出現「雙重分裂」：
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現代派（理性、民主） vs. 傳統派（榮譽、戰士精神）
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城市菁英 vs. 退伍軍人團體（如自由軍團 Freikorps）
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文學與藝術呈現「敗而未敗」的焦慮，如恩斯特‧榮格（Ernst Jünger）的戰爭美學化。
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電影《大都會》《藍天使》反映戰敗後的頹廢與虛無。
4️⃣ 二戰後的徹底崩解：罪與贖的轉折
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二戰失敗後，德國不再能逃避失敗的現實：國家毀滅、領土分裂、道德破產。
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德國面臨「雙重失敗」：軍事上敗北，道德上也成為加害者。
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去納粹化與戰爭審判（紐倫堡）促使戰敗被制度化為「道德教育」。
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「記憶文化（Erinnerungskultur）」成為新德國的民族核心。
5️⃣ 德國式的「戰敗文化」特色
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從否認 → 面對 → 內化 → 反思的長期過程。
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「罪責教育」與「歷史博物館」取代了復仇敘事。
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德國以「記憶」取代「報復」，將戰敗轉化為公民道德基礎。
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將「絕不再戰」（Nie wieder Krieg）變為新的國家信條。
❓二、文章提出的主要問題
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為何德國的一戰戰敗沒有立即產生反省，而是導向更大的災難？
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「戰敗否認」如何使復仇主義再起？
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是誰塑造了「背後捅刀」神話？
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戰敗與民族性之間的關係是什麼？
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戰爭精神（Kriegsideologie）是否深植於德國文化？
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德國人是否以戰敗作為重建民族榮耀的契機？
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魏瑪共和的失敗是否源自戰敗的心理創傷？
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為何民主政體無法承受戰敗創痛？
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「美學化戰爭」如何使暴力成為浪漫象徵？
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二戰後的德國如何將「罪」轉化為「責任」？
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去納粹化與戰爭審判如何改變民族敘事？
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「反省文化」能否取代民族自豪感？
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戰敗是否能成為現代國家的道德起點？
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德國如何從「加害者」變為「和平倡導者」？
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記憶政治是否真的防止了歷史重演？
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是否希望我接下來幫你把這份德國篇與前一份〈戰敗文化：法國〉整合成一份「歐陸戰敗文化比較表＋核心問題分析」？這樣可以作為你後續寫「戰敗文化三國比較」或評論稿的基礎資料。
😀🥰😀😅😭😃🥰🥴🥴
Ten years after the end of the First World War, a French marshal, an English minister, and a German historian reflected on how things might have turned out differently. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, former commander in chief of the Allied forces, was convinced that Germany, instead of capitulating, “could have held the line on the other side of the Rhine in November 1918.”1 Winston Churchill, then chancellor of the Exchequer, further developed this train of thought, speculating that it would have cost the Allies six months of heavy casualties to reach the Rhine. For Germany, he argued, that period of time would have been
sufficient for strong positions to be selected and prepared, and for the whole remaining resources of the nation to be marshaled in defense of its territory. But far more important than any military advantage was the effect which Germany, by admitting defeat and withdrawing completely from France and Belgium, would have produced upon the cohesion and driving power of the Allies.… Had Germany … stood with arms in her hands on the threshold of her own land ready to make a defeated peace, to cede territory, to make reparation; ready also if all negotiation were refused to defend herself to the utmost, and capable of inflicting two million casualties upon the invader, it seemed, and seems, almost certain that she would not have been put to the test.2
In the view of Weimar historian Arthur Rosenberg, the decisive date was August 8, 1918, that “black day” on which General Erich Ludendorff, faced with the Allies’ Amiens offensive, realized that the absolute military triumph he had envisioned could not be achieved. At that moment, Rosenberg argues,
the majority in the Reichstag should have relieved Ludendorff of command … and formed a parliamentary government. The bourgeois democratic revolution that followed in October could equally well have taken place in August. The new German government could then have stopped the Military High Command’s ventures in the East, unilaterally canceled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and recalled all German troops from the occupied eastern countries. An understanding and a political alliance with Soviet Russia would thus have been possible. During August and September, Germany might have initiated the transformation of Austria-Hungary into a working confederation of states, reached an understanding with Poland and turned Alsace-Lorraine into an autonomous state. Had Germany and Russia moved closer, the situation in the Balkans, Rumania, and Bulgaria would also have been altered. Finally, a strong political coalition composed of Germany, Russia, and Austria would have been in a much better position to wrest favorable peace terms from the Entente than Germany, isolated and defenseless, was later able to negotate at Versailles.3
These ex post facto speculations accurately reflect the thoughts running through the heads of those in power at the time. Everyone from Prince Max von Baden, the last imperial chancellor, to the military leaders of the Entente was convinced that the German situation was anything but hopeless. Responding to a query by Prime Minister Lloyd George, the British commander in chief, Douglas Haig, suggested that the Germans were certainly capable of organizing a retreat to within their own borders and “holding that line if there should be any attempt to touch the honour of the German people.”4 Among the French, the old dream of revanche, which saw French troops marching on Berlin, still held sway among some, but no one within the military leadership thought such a thing likely. The only leader to take a different view was the American general John J. Pershing. Like Philip Henry Sheridan, who in 1870 had advised the Prussians to wage total war against France, Pershing argued for the necessity of an unconditional German surrender since, without it, lasting victory was impossible. “Accepting the principle of a negotiated peace rather than a dictated peace,” Pershing wrote, “the Allies would jeopardize the moral position they now hold and possibly lose the chance to actually secure world peace on terms that would insure its permanence.”5
The German capitulation of 1918 was historically unique not only in its suddenness but also because no nation had ever laid down arms while its forces were still so deep within enemy territory. As late as summer 1918, Paris was under siege from German artillery less than sixty miles away and London was coming under zeppelin attack in what later became known as the first battle of Britain. In contrast, not a single bomb had fallen on Berlin, which was about six hundred miles from either front. According to all accepted military and historical wisdom, German-dominated territory was vast enough to absorb even major frontline defeats. The distances between Berlin and the battlelines were almost as great as those involved in colonial or expeditionary wars, which, when lost, rarely led to the colonizer’s collapse. As the classic examples of Athens’s Sicilian expedition in the Peloponnesian War and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 show, dramatic defeats abroad are softened by the time and distance word of them has to travel before reaching the home front. In both Athens and Russia, it took a massive defeat on home territory—by Sparta and Germany, respectively—to bring about the final collapse.
When Germany’s military leaders suddenly called for a cease-fire on October 4, they were naturally thinking not of capitulation but of a defensive strategy similar to the one Foch, Churchill, and Rosenberg later outlined. Ludendorff’s actions were not the result of a nervous breakdown, as is often assumed; he was planning to launch a new attack with replenished strength, once the truce had expired. He had not calculated, however, that the Allies would easily figure out and thwart his plans, nor did he foresee that the mood in Germany would turn so decisively against resumption of hostilities. With unmatched purity, Ludendorff embodied two characteristics typical of the Wilhelminian power elite: organizational and technical brilliance coupled with an utter lack of political, social, or psychological acumen. His inability to compromise can only partly be explained by his military background, evident in his modification of Clausewitz’s famous axiom: “The maxim ‘War is foreign policy by other means’ must be followed by the statement ‘But all politics are only a means in the service of war.’”6 Ludendorff’s intransigence was equally the product of the education and socialization of his whole generation.
Heinrich Mann was one of the few who were not surprised by Germany’s sudden collapse, confirming as it did his views on authoritarian Wilhelminian culture; defeat, he said, “came in the appropriate fashion, not as an act of self-defense but as the conclusion to the last in a series of misguided wars of aggression.”7 Mann’s intuitive understanding was supported by the English social psychologist Wilfred Trotter in Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. Although written during the war and thus hardly free of partisan overtones, the book remained an authoritative text for many years. Trotter explains the German collapse in terms of a presumably characteristic German psychological aggressiveness that, while capable of achieving overwhelming triumphs at the outset, was unable to adjust to setbacks. As Trotter puts it, “German morale proved throughout extremely sensitive to any suspension of the aggressive posture, and showed the unsuitability of its type in modern conditions by undergoing at the mere threat of disaster a disintegration so absolute that it must remain a classical and perfect example in the records of psychology.”8
Mann’s further remark that Germany’s collapse “could have been a heroic saga had it not in fact been a pathology report” concisely sums up opinion not just in Germany but also in the enemy camp and in the neutral world.9 All agreed on its lack of tragic-heroic greatness. Germany was neither Hector nor Achilles; at most, it resembled Paris, who, on finally being confronted by Menelaus, flees the battlefield with the help of his patron goddess, Aphrodite. National feelings of honor, which Douglas Haig had expected to provide the basis for tenacious resistance, proved—much to everyone’s consternation—nonexistent. Frederick Maurice, the English general to whom the German right would later attribute the phrase stab in the back, commented: “There was no precedent for a great and powerful nation, which was fighting for its existence, surrendering while it still had the means to resist.” His view was echoed by Churchill: “Such a spectacle appals mankind, and a knell rang in the ear of the victors, even in their hour of triumph.” The English journalist George Young added: “It would have been better for Germany had it shown more courage and collapsed less completely last autumn. A few weeks’ patient endurance under punishment in a losing fight would have gone far towards restoring it some measure of the sympathies of the civilized world.” Henri Lichtenberger, writing with the ressentiment of the aggrieved party whose malefactor has withdrawn precisely at the moment when retribution was at hand, seconded these sentiments: “The Germans, in laying down arms before they experienced firsthand the suffering and destruction of an invasion, have withdrawn profitably from the bloody affair into which they have plunged the world.”10
The action Lichtenberger characterized as profitable could also be seen as “inspired by clever calculation rather than heroic greatness,” which is how the German military machine was viewed by the moralists of the day. The Austrian writer Richard von Schaukal, for example, saw the defeat not as a tragedy in the classical sense but as the banal result of miscalculation: “Ludendorff, the master tactician and all-too-clever intellect made a mistake in his reckoning.… [He] was an organizer and a tactician, a boss and a commander, but not, despite lording over a political system enthralled by militarism, a true leader. His only leadership qualities were those of a director of a large modern-day bank or corporation, an anonymous collective endeavor drained of all soul and become mechanical. Such an endeavor has no guiding idea at its core, just an externally defined goal. If it does not attain that goal, as a result of its own erroneous calculation it will inevitably fall apart.”11 The crassest confirmation of this characterization was provided by Ludendorff himself when, a few weeks after his sudden call for a cease-fire, he had another change of heart and tried to continue the war, arguing, with no apparent awareness of his inconsistency, that national honor demanded a prolongation of hostilities: “A nation which accepts humiliation, allowing conditions to be forced upon it that threaten its existence, without having fought to the uttermost, is doomed to destruction. If the same things happen to it after it has made every possible effort, it will survive.”12
Ludendorff’s shortcomings as a strategic and political realist were not, however, the only revelations during the weeks of collapse. The “pathology report” of the whole generation of Germany’s wartime leadership was put on display. Born between 1853 and 1865, this generation was too young to have taken part in the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War but old enough to have experienced the founding of the German empire as the most significant event of modern history. In short, it was a classic “postheroic” generation of inheritors: victors’ sons, “epigones” and “literati,” as Max Weber dubbed them, vacillating between the duty to preserve their fathers’ achievements and the pressure to produce great deeds of their own and developing, in the process, their own unique forms of “infirmity.”13 The American historian George B. Forgie, who investigates the generational question in a psychological interpretation of Abraham Lincoln and his age, shows how seductive the idea of destructive heroism is for epigonal generations. Where there is no space left to build, the only option is to tear down. This option, of course, remains confined to the unconscious and is projected onto the enemy, whom the “good” son then challenges as the savior of the nation.14 Just as Lincoln’s generation saw its task in 1860 as rescuing the republic of 1776 from destruction by the South, thus saving the inheritance of the founding fathers, so the Wilhelminian generation in the 1890s saw its own historical mission as the expansion of its inheritance, the Bismarckian empire, into a Weltmacht against the opposition of the other great powers. The old enemy France seemed insignificant in this larger context. The obstacle to be overcome was England. The victory at Sedan, so the logic went, would remain incomplete as long as it was not supplemented by a German Trafalgar.
Heinrich von Treitschke, the historian who most embodied Germany’s transformation from liberal secularism to aggressive imperialism, pointed a whole generation of students toward this bright future.15 He spoke of Germany as a “young” nation, an image enthusiastically embraced by this generation. England, the “old” global power, was past its prime. A firm shove was all that was needed to topple the clay-footed colossus, in whose shadow another “young” nation, the United States, was already lurking as the next probable adversary. Although Treitschke himself saw the youthfulness of the German nation as a guarantee not of victory but of difficult trials to come (“The German empire,” he wrote, “like the Prussian state before it, will not be spared its Seven Years War”), the generation of his disciples succumbed to a kind of denial or revision of reality that has been fittingly called “symbolic inflation.”16 The term refers to the grandiose theatrical representations of empire and nation common under Wilhelm II, productions whose persuasive power began to affect the judgment of those engaged in organizing them. The diagnosis usually made of the inner circles around the kaiser—“they had enclosed themselves in a world of symbols”—can be extended to the entire ruling elite.17 Even as these elites were loudly proclaiming Bismarckian Realpolitik to be the guiding spirit of their global ambitions, they were essentially acting symbolically. The great gesture replaced the great deed, or rather the two merged into one. Realpolitik was no longer understood as action on the basis of a realistic calculation of one’s strength as well as that of the enemy but instead as the drive toward complete subjugation of the enemy. For this generation, all that remained of Bismarck’s and Helmut von Moltke’s victories—the result of careful planning, organization, diplomacy, and Realpolitik in the old sense—was the image of triumph, of success that had to be equaled or, if possible, exceeded. A relatively minor example of Wilhelminian inflation of, indeed addiction to, symbols was the award to Hindenburg of the highest German military distinction after he launched the spring offensive of 1918 (soon revealed as a disaster). Prussian general Gerhard von Blücher had been awarded the same distinction after his victory at Waterloo. Still stranger was the bestowing of the “black eagle,” which had been given to Moltke for his victory over the French in 1871, to his son shortly before World War I for having successfully participated in a military exercise.18
In many respects, the psychology of the Wilhelminian generation resembled that of the Bonapartists of the Second Empire. Both were heirs to and prisoners of a heroic past that they sought to emulate with gestures and rhetoric. Both used modern technology to develop a highly romanticized style of public presentation and both lost any sense of realistic political proportion in the process. The most important difference between the two was that the collapse of 1870 did not leave France in a free fall. France’s safety net was its sense of national pride, which had developed over the course of two centuries of European hegemony. The vanquished Germans of 1918 lacked any comparable heritage. The memories of centuries of national inferiority, supposedly relegated to the past by the victory of 1870–71, by the founding of the empire, and by forty years of power politics, now reappeared like an unwelcome guest on Germany’s doorstep.
The burden of the past helps explain the response to the news of German defeat. People reacted not with manly composure, as the heroic vision would have it, but with everything from bewilderment to literal paralysis and nervous breakdown. At the end of September, when Ludendorff informed his general staff of his impending call for a cease-fire, one participant at the meeting noted: “The effect of these words on the listeners was indescribable! As Ludendorff spoke, there were audible groans and sobs, and tears ran down the cheeks of many, indeed most of those present.”19 The party leaders on the War Committee in the Reichstag reacted similarly on being briefed by Ludendorff’s aide. Eyewitnesses spoke of a “devastating impression” and “great despair,” and one described Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert as “seized with sobbing.”20 Memoirs of the period continue in the same vein, recounting a “sudden plunge of the barometer,” an “instant regression from the fanfares of victory to mournful graveside wailing,” and a “dramatic transition from yesterday’s fanfares of victory to horrified cries of ‘Hannibal ante portas.’” One contemporary lamented, “We thought we were the Romans when we were actually the Carthaginians,” while another recalled “pain, shame, and desperation.”21
These scenes bear comparison with those of the French collapse after Sedan in September 1870. In both instances, there was an initial moment of surprise and consternation. Almost immediately, however, the French began to follow the script from 1789, 1792, 1830, and 1848: the uprising in Paris, the overthrow of the monarchy, the proclamation of the republic, the naming of a provisional government, and the continuation of the nation’s struggle against the external enemy. Under the slogans défense nationale and levée en masse, which called to mind the heroic, revolutionary past, defeat could be cataloged as the responsibility of the previous regime and a new chapter in history could begin. The absence of a revolutionary republican tradition in Germany made such a parade of events impossible. The overthrow of the regime was carried out not actively and confidently but passively. First, on October 6, there was a mutiny—or, as Hans von Hentig called it, a “strike”—by the army, which by this stage was little more than “a mechanically disciplined, rolling mob in uniform that had effectively decided to stop fighting and had concluded, as it were, an internal armistice of its own.”22 Second, the Social Democratic (SPD) opposition, which seemed predestined to assume power, showed a decided disinclination against any sort of revolution. Symptomatic of the German state of mind in the late fall of 1918 was the fact that hopes for salvation were pinned not to a leading national personality like Gambetta but rather to Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points. Wilson was invested with the same unquestioning trust and obedience that had been withdrawn from Wilhelm II and Ludendorff only a few weeks before.
As World War I was nearing its end, a group of Germans had pondered a different approach, one that would never make it beyond the planning stage. This strategy conformed to both the Gambetta model and the scenarios discussed ten years later by Churchill, Foch, Rosenberg, and others—namely, retrenching Germany’s forces along the Rhine and continuing the war. Walther Rathenau was the best-known advocate of a German levée en masse,23 but he was certainly not the only one to voice support for a popular uprising against the foreign enemy. Max Weber thought in similar terms, as did the Hamburg banker Max Warburg, who wrote: “It seems strange to me that I, a civilian, have to encourage today’s military—fight on!”24 The most important figure in this movement was the last imperial chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, who from the very beginning had spoken out against unconditional surrender and for a negotiated peace: “No suing for peace,” he wrote. “Instead, the clearest possible declaration of our war aims, which, while containing the greatest possible concessions to our enemies, must emphasize our absolute determination to fight to the death if they insist on dishonorable conditions of peace.”25
Now, at the end of the Wilhelminian era, these men—who had been outmaneuvered for years by militarists insisting on “peace through victory”—suddenly seemed to have resurrected the spirit of Bismarck and Realpolitik. Prince Max’s thoughts on how to deal with Wilson recall Gambetta’s wartime proclamations: “Our answer to the president must be such that, if Wilson refuses, his refusal will serve as a call to the German people for a national uprising.… Let us assume that we make Wilson sufficient concessions … and let us further assume that Wilson is forced by Allied demands to reject our proposals; the following situation will arise. Our enemies will be forced to fight on, not for Wilson’s just peace but for Foch’s military prestige. The exposure of such truths—and they would be exposed by a Wilsonian refusal—would entail an enormous weakening of the enemies’ will to fight.”26
The idea that a levée en masse in late autumn 1918 would have turned the tide in favor of the Germans has been rejected by historians as hopeless illusion, in part because public support for the war had been strong from the start. As Golo Mann put it, “You couldn’t transform what always was a people’s war into a people’s war.”27 Nonetheless, it would be shortsighted to dismiss the opponents of Ludendorff’s abrupt cease-fire request as quixotic dreamers divorced from reality. The problem was an inability among all concerned to envision a levée en masse operating in truly popular fashion. Rathenau, for example, had distinguished himself as an organizational genius at the beginning of the war by securing Germany’s supply of raw materials and in 1916 by drawing up the Hindenburg Program, which militarized the Germany economy. He made his calculations with deliberate care before he went public with his suggestion to continue the fight. The only thing he failed to take into account was the mood within the army and the populace itself. Neither the fighting spirit of German army divisions, which Prince Max was counting on, nor the tenacious popular nationalism, which Rathenau was hoping to muster, could be mobilized for prolonging the war. In the end, Ludendorff’s sharpest critics and the Wilhelminian system’s most clear-sighted opponents proved to be products of that very system. Brilliant experts, technicians, and managers though they were, they utterly lacked what one might call the democratic instinct. As long it was possible to mobilize, organize, rationalize, and discipline “from above,” the system possessed an efficiency beyond compare. Wilhelm II’s remark at the onset of the war that he now recognized not parties, only Germans, represented the high point of the system. But when such lofty pronouncements failed to deliver democratic reforms, the nationalistic enthusiasm of the masses dried up and all the regime’s calls for popular mobilization following the military collapse were met with stolid rejection.28
The inability to envision a truly popular levée en masse was common to the entire generation of leaders, from Prince Max to Friedrich Ebert. When Ludendorff, after his second about-face, imagined that the SPD leadership could mobilize the masses at will—“Grab the people by the collar. Pull them up on their feet. Can’t Herr Ebert do that?”—his conception of popular activism differed from that of Rathenau and Prince Max only in degree.29 By the end of October 1918, the leading advocates of a national war of defense realized that it was too late. “The masses would likely have risen,” Prince Max later concluded, “but not against the enemy. Instead, they would have attacked the war itself and the ‘military oppressors’ and ‘monarchic aristocrats,’ on whose behalf, in their opinion, it had been waged.”30
Around the same time that the idea of the levée en masse was abandoned as an instrument of Realpolitik, several upper-level military and civilian leaders came up with a plan to stage the national collapse as a heroic demise. Their idea, debated within the military high command at the beginning of November 1918, was to have Wilhelm II sacrifice his life, not only to save the honor of the nation and the crown but also to give rise to a latter-day myth of Thermopylae. “A small special assault at a designated target,” was contemplated, “in which the kaiser could give his life as a frontline hero, encouraging loyal subjects to follow his example.”31 Even years later, this final fantasy product of the Wilhelminian passion for the grand gesture would continue to excite imaginations. In a book popular in the 1920s, Ludwig Reiners speculated as to the effect such a German charge of the Light Brigade would have had: “It would have been a worthy end to the tragedy [of the First World War] if several hundred officers, together with the emperor, the field marshal, and their generals, had met their deaths at the vanguard of an assault on a foreign division.” Even historian Johannes Ziekursch, no friend of Wilhelminian romanticism, rhapsodized: “The Germans would have interred the fallen kaiser, like the mythological hero Friedrich Barbarossa, in the Kyffhäuser Mountain.… They would have endured years of disgrace until the mountain opened up once more and the emperor returned to rebuild the old empire in all its previous glory.”32
Better known and historically more significant than the so-called Kaisertod was the idea of a suicidal deployment of the German fleet. This was not merely the private fantasy of isolated individuals but an actual plan drafted by the naval high command. The fleet was Germany’s one remaining military reserve in November 1918, having, with the lone exception of the battle of Jutland, never actively participated in the war. It was therefore not unreasonable to use the fleet for a final offensive of the kind envisioned by Prince Max and Rathenau. The navy’s plan, however, was based not on such calculations but on a desire to preserve German military honor. As Admiral Adolf von Trotha put it at the beginning of October, “We are seized by the horror of shame … at the thought that the fleet could be delivered up to internal destruction without ever seeing battle.” In contrast, even an engagement that was senseless from a military point of view would have carried major significance as a symbol and a signal. “If the fleet fights an honorable battle,” von Trotha said, “even one leading to its own destruction, a new German fleet will be born of it, so long as our people do not fail entirely as a nation.”33
In France, the national defense after Sedan had signified the rebirth of the nation—a baptism of fire and blood legitimating the opposition in its seizure of power, and a foundational myth of the republic, which had been born of defeat but had overcome this “birth defect” through the heroism of the levée en masse. In Germany, the situation was precisely the opposite: instead of a heroic deed by the new government, Germans were offered a symbolic act by an old regime trying to save face. And in the end, even this symbolic gesture was never actually made—what transpired was one of the most unheroic capitulations in military history. Instead of falling heroically at the vanguard of his troops, the emperor fled in the night across the Belgian-Dutch border, while Ludendorff, after being relieved of command, went to Sweden. The German navy did not set sail for one last battle but mutinied, thereby hastening the national collapse it was supposed to prevent. With few exceptions, those who had preached resistance to the last man yielded without struggle. Those officers who were prepared to defend the monarchy were prevented from doing so by indecision and panic in the central command. Most of the thousand volunteers who reported to defend Berlin against the revolution were simply sent home.34
The spectacle of rioting soldiers tearing the insignia from their officers’ shoulders on the street and in broad daylight would become the enduring image of German defeat; the antithesis of heroic capitulation, it blatantly revealed the failure and impotence of the Wilhelminian military and governmental elites. And just as the French bourgeoisie of 1871 sought to project its own patriotic shortcomings onto the Paris Commune, the German elites of 1918 took “flight in hatred,” particularly of the witnesses to their miserable debacle of a last fight.35 Among those witnesses were men like Philipp Scheidemann, who mercilessly reminded them of their failings: “Two years ago,” he railed in a speech before the Reichstag in 1920, “you cowards deserted us.… You deserted us!”36
Eventually this caste, in order to shift the blame from itself, would invent the legend of the Germany military’s having been stabbed in the back. But another image of defeat came to the fore immediately after the German collapse—that is, before the stab-in-the-back legend took hold—and served temporarily to console the nation.
“Undefeated on the Field of Battle”
“No enemy has defeated you. Only when the enemy’s superiority in numbers and resources became suffocating did you relinquish the fight.” These were the words with which Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, greeted the troops returning from the front to Berlin on December 10, 1918.37 The idea that, while Germany may not have won the war, it certainly hadn’t lost it held sway throughout the political spectrum. “You do not return defeated and beaten. You have defended our homeland against a world of enemies,” the revolutionary government in Baden declared on November 16, 1918. “Having gone to battle with the will to win, you return, suffocated by a previously unknown superior force, as the unquestioned victors from your field of battle,” seconded Minister of War Heinrich von Scheuch on December 18. “We have won victories in all directions of the four winds. It’s only the war we have lost” was the assessment of Lieutenant General Arnold Lequis on December 14.38 “Now you return to a fatherland that has collapsed, you who have not been defeated.… I bid you welcome, German soldiers, the victors of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” Alwin Saenger wrote in Die Glocke on December 7.
The slogan im Felde unbesiegt, or “undefeated on the field of battle,” was the German version of the universal loser trope that the vanquished side has not been bested in combat but rather “suffocated” by the sheer mass of the enemy. Theoretically, the phrase could have given rise to a formula for national consolation akin to the idea of revanche in France or the Lost Cause in the American South. Historians explain the fact that it did not by citing the split in Weimar Germany between the powerful antirepublican forces and the relatively weak republican center. The temptation on each side to blame the other for the collapse was too great. But such logic ignores the similar split between republicans and monarchists in the French Third Republic. Why in France did the opposing camps compete over who would advocate the most promising form of revanche while in Germany they competed only to assign blame?39
For a brief moment immediately after the capitulation, im Felde unbesiegt seemed to possess the mythic potential to unite the nation; it was the most lapidary and penetrating expression of those weeks and months in which the suddenly shattered expectations of victory had to be reconceived as defeat. The verbal equivalent of the levée en masse that never was, the slogan aimed at restoring the nation’s lost honor. Therein lay its temporary strength and its long-term weakness. In the direct aftermath of national collapse, the im Felde unbesiegt idea stabilized Germany’s collective identity, but after the full dimensions of the unheroic capitulation became known, the slogan was unable to bear the weight placed on it. In fact, it backfired. That Germany had lost the war without being defeated in a decisive battle could no longer be held up as a sign of heroic triumph. “Undefeated on the field of battle” could all too easily be reinterpreted as “capitulated without having put up a fight.”
Consequently, the Weimar Republic lacked a “legitimizing foundational myth,” as historian Detlev Peukert puts it. Instead of invoking a necessary “heroic or at least heroicizable act” comparable to the French Third Republic’s défense nationale, the Weimar Republic faced the abyss of capitulation without a struggle.40 Although the slogan im Felde unbesiegt had the same integrative effect for the Germans in their moment of defeat as the ideal of Volksgemeinschaft, or “folk community,” had inspired at the beginning of the war, it also contained the mechanism of its own destruction. Referring as it did explicitly to the army, it begged the question of who, then, was responsible for the defeat. The leaders of the SPD, the ruling party, who tried to use the idea to win the loyalty of the army and prop up national morale, failed to see that the backlash—the inevitable matter of blame—would be directed at them. As it happened, blame was apportioned most aggressively by the very people who had had the biggest hand in the national collapse and who then had disappeared. Their accusations had all the force of shame, of lost self-respect, and the search for appropriate scapegoats onto which their guilt and humiliation could be projected. The legend they created for this purpose had little evidence to back it up but nonetheless came to exert a formidable hold on the German psyche.
“Stabbed in the Back”
The idea of an internal enemy lying in wait to overthrow the rule of law, an enemy against whom it was legitimate to employ any and all means of defense, was one of the political-psychological foundations of Wilhelminian culture. For many years, this enemy was the Social Democratic Party. Chiefly responsible for the demonization of the Social Democrats was Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who proclaimed in 1878 that “we have here in Berlin sixty to a hundred thousand well-organized men, split up into cells, who openly advocate fighting against the current system.… They are like an enemy army living in our midst.”41 Later, in 1905, Wilhelm II fantasized about eliminating the Social Democrats in the event of a European war: “First we will neutralize the socialists, shooting them down and cutting off their heads in a bloodbath, if necessary, and then we will fight the war abroad. But not before and not a tempo.”42 When war came to pass in August 1914, Wilhelm did not in fact pursue this plan; he accepted the Social Democrats as part of the Volksgemeinschaft, though only after they paid the price of renouncing internationalism. It was a price that Social Democracy, until then a dissident movement languishing on the margins of society, proved all too willing to pay. The intoxicating sense of brotherhood Germans felt in the days before and immediately following the outbreak of hostilities became known as the “August experience.”
It did not last long. Undermined by the strains of war, the Volksgemeinschaft soon lost its power to unite, and the old “civil war” mentality returned, the difference now being that the internal enemy was no longer just the Social Democratic movement but all those individuals who had criticized the aim of “peace through victory.” Anyone who advocated peace through negotiation, as the SPD, the Center Party, and the Progressives did in their Reichstag resolution of 1917, could be accused of having ambushed Germany’s fighting troops from the rear.43
An obvious predecessor of the stab-in-the-back legend, this image could even be invoked, at least implicitly, against the civilian population.44 As Max Weber wrote in May 1918: “If the army fighting Germany’s battles takes the position ‘What we have conquered with our blood should remain German,’ ‘we’ who have remained at home certainly have the right to say, ‘Think for a moment whether that is politically expedient.’ But if they insisted on their perspective, ‘we’ would have to hold our peace.”45 Weber was writing from the perspective of the stay-at-home civilian who saw himself as indebted to the frontline soldiers because he had not risked his own life. Ludendorff’s reversal of Clausewitz’s axiom is relevant here: there was no doubt as to the primacy of war over politics, the soldier over the politician, the battlefront over the home front. Some even accused themselves of potentially stabbing soldiers in the back; the Bavarian progressive Ernst Müller-Meiningen, for example, said on November 2, 1918, a few days before the outbreak of the revolution: “As long as the external front lines hold, we have a damned duty here at home. We would be shamed in the eyes of our children and grandchildren if we attacked the frontline soldiers from behind and stabbed them in the back.”46
Thus, by the end of the war, a mentality susceptible to a stab-in-the-back myth was already in place across the political spectrum. On the right, suspicions of revolutionary treachery were rife, and the search for traitors took on almost paranoid dimensions after the conservatives’ own failure in November 1918. The liberal center did not immediately project onto others its sense that the home front had failed the battlefront but instead internalized these feelings. In other words, the right did what it had to do to clear itself of moral culpability and the center joined in the blaming, thus restoring its strained self-respect. Ultimately, the various factions agreed on the version that cleared everyone of blame: it was not the home front in its entirety that had stabbed the military in the back but rather the revolution. The parallels to the situation in Paris in 1871 are obvious. Just as in nineteenth-century France, the Germans’ sense of their failings and cowardice were inverted into paranoid hatred for those who had behaved differently. In November 1918, the critic and publisher Count Harry Kessler quipped that “the revolution had seen only flying coattails—people were already fleeing before it happened” and characterized the stab-in-the-back legend as a phantasm that the representatives of the old regime “feared with all the pathological cowardice of the imagination and hid from in the houses and cellars of Jewish bankers.”47 Much the same could have been said of the Parisian bourgeoisie’s exodus to Versailles.
The stab-in-the-back legend made its debut in public political discourse one year after the German defeat. In autumn 1919, in an interview before the committee investigating the causes for Germany’s military collapse, Paul von Hindenburg quoted an alleged remark by an English general: “The German army was stabbed from behind.”48 In the memoirs Hindenburg published the following year, he used a different image. “Just as Siegfried fell to the treacherous spear of terrible Hagen, so did our exhausted front lines collapse. They tried in vain to draw new life from the dried-up wellspring of the home front.”49 The change in metaphor is significant even if Hindenburg, whom no one would accuse of sensitivity toward language, was unlikely to have been conscious of it. For him and his generation, raised on Nibelungen mythology—especially in its Wagnerian version—Hagen’s killing of Siegfried with a spear was a more familiar image of traitorous murder than the dagger. The dagger was the classic instrument for conspiracy and calumny, less a weapon than a means of murder akin to the most insidious tactic, poison.50 No less enduring was the association of women with both daggers and poison, although both were put to heroic use by such figures as the Roman Lucretia and the biblical Judith.
As these connotations suggest, the metaphor of the dagger was ambiguous, all the more so given the Wilhelminian exaltation of manliness. Thus, even as Hindenburg promoted a stab-in-the-back legend, he preferred to speak of Hagen’s spear. The spear—the weapon of Achilles, Hector, and all other Homeric heroes—was the opposite of the dagger. But the traditional notion held that a spear in the back signified not only the treachery of the spear-thrower but the cowardice of the fleeing. How can this view be reconciled with Hindenburg’s use of the image? The answer is that Hagen’s spear was directed not at a fleeing coward but at an unsuspecting hero; Hagen was no hero but a traitor and a murderer. Hagen’s spear was thus in reality a dagger in the back, and the German stab-in-the-back legend nothing other than a latter-day version of the Nibelungenlied.
The Wilhelminian Siegfried
“While we were assembled, L[udendorff] entered into our midst, his face filled with the deepest worry, pale, but with his head held high. A truly Germanic figure of a hero. I could not help thinking of Siegfried, mortally wounded in the back by Hagen’s spear.” This was how a member of the military high command described Ludendorff’s announcement of his decision to ask for an armistice.51
Nibelungen mythology had played a central role in the rise of German nationalism in the nineteenth century. Rediscovered by eighteenth-century philologists, the Nibelungenlied began its career as national myth in the era of the German wars of liberation from Napoleon. For nationalists seeking German unification, Siegfried united the traits of two other heroes of liberation from foreign hegemony, Arminius and Friedrich Barbarossa. Until 1848, as long as German nationalism remained liberal and republican, the image of Siegfried was that of the rebel. As Friedrich Engels put it in 1840, “We all feel the same thirst for great deeds, the same stubborn refusal to accept what has come before, which drove Siegfried from his father’s fortress. Eternal rumination, a philistine fear of bold deeds, is contrary to our entire soul—we want to break out into the wide world.”52 After Germany’s unification following the wars of 1864–71, however, Siegfried became a symbol of an empire built on military victory and an honorary title for Germany’s founding fathers. There was Bismarck-Siegfried:
The long hard battle is done.
The foreign dragon lies cold
And Bismarck-Siegfried returns home
Rich with the Nibelungs’ gold.53
By his side the kaiser, the “Sieg-Fried of the German people,” an epithet that played on the name’s literal meaning, “victory-peace.”54 As the Wilhelminian empire progressed, the Nibelungenlied—a complex, rather ambiguous story with various heroes—was increasingly reinterpreted as an extended homage to Siegfried.
The most influential figure in this reinterpretation was, of course, Richard Wagner. He began, like Engels, with the image of the rebellious republican and ended up after 1871 with the sanctified Siegfried, who heroically meets his demise doing battle against the world of gold, greed, and betrayal. In Wagner’s Ring, Hagen is no longer the loyal vassal of Gunther and Brunhilde whose deed avenges the insult to Brunhilde’s honor by the loose-tongued Siegfried. Wagner’s Hagen, the son of Rheingold thief Alberich, is part of a dark (that is, Semitic) underworld that contrasts with the bright light surrounding Siegfried.55
The post-Bismarck generation was steeped from childhood in this version of Siegfried and Hagen’s metaphorical significance. Thanks to Wagner, Germany became Siegfriedland, just as the American South had become Walter Scottland and France Joan of Arcland. No one recognized Wagner’s influence more instinctively or described it more accurately than Walther Rathenau. A few months before Germany’s collapse, he spoke of his generation’s “theatrically barbaric pomp of virtue.” “There’s always someone,” he wrote, “be it Lohengrin, Walther, Siegfried, or Wotan, who can do everything and beat everyone, who rescues suffering virtue, punishes vice, and offers general salvation, forever striking a pompous pose to the sound of trumpet fanfares and with the help of lighting and theatrical effects. Today this sort of opera is mirrored in politics.”56
The humiliation the “Siegfried generation” suffered in 1918 was a double, indeed triple shock. Instead of the assured victories of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ time, there was an unexpected collapse. Then, to make matters worse, came the more personal failure at the outbreak of revolution: the silent stealing away into the night instead of the heroically tragic final battle in Etzel’s hall. Not to face the dragon like Siegfried but instead to vanish like Alberich under his cloak, only to reemerge and take up posts under a government ruled by the hated Social Democrats, whose ascendance was a third shock—such a serial loss of face must have hit the military and bureaucratic elites of Wilhelminian Germany harder than they admitted. Their later attempts to depict November 1918 as “the greatest of all revolutions” served, like the stab-in-the-back legend, to erase the memory of their own failure.57
That this legend was tailor-made to the needs of Wilhelminian elites is clear from its lack of resonance outside their circles. The resistance of the liberals and the left, the groups villainized by the myth, is easy to understand. The radical nationalist right, however, also refused to accept it as an explanation for Germany’s defeat. For Edgar Jung, one of the right’s leading spokesmen, Germany’s collapse was the result not of betrayal but of the masses’ justifiable desertion of a system that had not merited a defense to the last drop of blood.58 In a remarkable affinity with the revolutionary left, the radical nationalists of the 1920s viewed national collapse as a purifying event. For them, the Wilhelminian empire did not represent a golden era whose demise was to be mourned but a lamentable detour into the crassest materialism, the worst taste, the most vacuous pomp, the emptiest rhetoric, and the purest decadence. They had welcomed the war as an opportunity for national renewal, and they accepted defeat as a fire that would cleanse and purify the nation. They did not reject the Weimar Republic on principle because it had arisen from defeat but because it had not broken radically enough with the Wilhelminian empire, instead perpetuating the decadence under a new name. The nationalists’ great model was Gambetta’s French Republic, which had been born of heroic resistance. Hitler’s speeches sometimes made this link explicit, but more often it was left unspoken, as in Jung’s statement that “if the republican left in Germany had adopted the cause of German liberation and pursued it in all its consequences, the gigantic gap that opened up in 1918 would have closed long ago.”59
For revolutionary nationalists, accordingly, Siegfried was seen as the embodiment of the despised Wilhelminian culture: a Germanic “miles gloriosus,” “the absolute antithesis of a chivalric and noble hero,” someone who “breaks his word and then like a cowardly criminal transfers the blame to his wife.” The nationalist backlash against the Wilhelminian Siegfried figure is exemplified by a 1924 treatise on the Nibelungenlied that characterizes him as “dapper” and “internally shallow” and says of his fateful effect on the nation: “The whole country has to pay up … with beautiful garments and valuable armor to cover the debt resulting from the frivolity and coarse manners of the young Siegfried.” To kill such a man is not an act of treachery but a political necessity, and Hagen, who carries out the deed, is no traitor or mutineer but a Realpolitiker: “We need to understand that Hagen had to get rid of this violent, unreliable man because he recognized him as a permanent danger to the Burgundian people and state.”60 Nothing could be more antithetical to the Wilhelminian view than the radical nationalist argument for the necessity of a stab in the back. In this interpretation, Hagen is the frontline soldier who frees his country in its greatest hour of need from an incompetent and decadent leadership, and Hagen’s only real transgression, his violation of Burgundian law, is simultaneously a heroism of a new sort.61 Six years before Hitler ordered the murder of his own commanders in the Night of the Long Knives, Hagen was being valorized in one high school syllabus as a monumental figure whose “stature, piety, and beauty” were to be emphasized. “The class should consider the state of an empire,” the syllabus read, “whose leadership does not hesitate to break petty bourgeois laws in the interest of the general good. For: ‘My country, right or wrong!’”62
Contagion
Along with the images of the army undefeated on the field of battle and the dagger/spear in the back, a third idea was invoked to explain Germany’s defeat: that of the physical exhaustion, dissipation, and gradual disappearance of fighting spirit. In 1933, the military historian Friedrich Altrichter wrote of the “decline of a shared military spirit,” “the predominance of egotism,” the “feeling of impotence,” and the “bitter rage against everything to do with war and being a soldier.”63 Others identified three causes for the demoralization of Germany’s fighting forces: Unterwühlung (being undermined), Vergiftung (being poisoned), and Verseuchung (being contaminated). While the first two metaphors were traditional, the image of infection and contamination was new.64 It was used by the military leadership for the first time at the beginning of November 1918 to refer to the danger that revolution at home would spread to the soldiers at the front. Shortly before the armistice on November 11, Ludendorff’s successor in the military high command, General Wilhelm Groener, considered measures normally used in quarantines against infectious diseases: the establishment of a cordon sanitaire between the front line and the home front, and the use of “inoculators” (“loyal and skilled officers to immunize the troops against the spirit of revolution”).65
The differences between the metaphor of a dagger in the back and that of epidemic infection are immediately apparent. In the former, the victim is a fighting warrior; in the latter a vulnerable patient. The stab in the back is masculine and instantaneous, the epidemic feminine and insinuating. The dagger is external; the plague, even if it is externally transmitted, suggests weakness in the patient’s internal constitution. But above all, by 1918 the dagger was an ancient metaphor, whereas infection via bacteria or viruses was thoroughly contemporary. Robert Koch had discovered the tuberculosis bacterium a mere generation before, while Paul Ehrlich’s cure for syphilis, Salvarsan, was only a decade old. Moreover, Gustave Le Bon used the analogy of bacteria and the image of contagion in 1895 to describe the psychological processes typical of modern society. In his Psychology of the Masses, Le Bon wrote: “Among the masses, ideas, emotions, passions, and systems of belief are transmitted with the same infectious capacity as microbes.” And: “The power of infection is such that not only certain opinions but specific emotional states can be transmitted from person to person.”66 Adolf Hitler, an avid reader of Le Bon, would come to see the Jews as a kind of microbe harmful to the German body politic, an epidemic that had “broken out” in November 1918. For Hitler, too, the metaphor of bacterial plague better expressed the reality of Weimar than the image of the dagger in the back. In Hitler’s bacteriological view of the world, the dagger was a foreign element; he used it specifically to appeal to conservative listeners.
The bacteriological metaphor transformed the view of the defeated German army from a collection of soldierly Siegfrieds stabbed in the back by Social Democratic Hagens into an easily infectible mass in Le Bon’s sense—irrational, moody, feminine, hysterical. Accordingly, the prevailing view about the conduct of war was turned completely on its head. In classic theories of war, the destruction of soldiers is not an end in itself but a means of influencing the will of the enemy. If, however, there were another, more direct, less destructive way to capture the hearts and minds of the enemy, the use of great armies would become obsolete. The mega-battles of the First World War had shown that even the drastic destruction of human life entailed in the strategy of bleeding the other side dry was not enough to subjugate a determined adversary. Attention now turned to an alternate method of influencing the other side’s will.
The Discovery of Propaganda
Before 1914, the term propaganda rarely appeared in encyclopedias and dictionaries. When it did, it was used in reference to distant institutions and events that were foreign to the bourgeois spirit of the times, such as the Catholic Counterreformation in the seventeenth century or the revolutionary agitation of the French secret societies in the nineteenth. Nor was the term especially popular in its commercial sense, as a synonym for advertisement, a word that enjoyed far greater currency. By 1918, however, propaganda had become a thoroughly fashionable term. New editions of reference works devoted not occasional sentences but whole pages to the subject.67 The general view was that propaganda was a child—indeed, the child—of the world war and that the conflict had actually been decided not by weapons but by words. Many believed that without propaganda to motivate one’s own people and demoralize the enemy, modern mass warfare could not be conducted, much less won.
The victors and the vanquished agreed on this point, although they drew widely divergent conclusions from it. The victors, as always, equated military and moral superiority and tended to see the triumph of their propaganda as a confirmation of their system and their idea of truth, while the vanquished were confronted by a cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the idea of having been subdued not by weapons but by propaganda supported the conceit of being undefeated on the field of battle. On the other hand, it was unsoldierly and weak to have been bested by mere words. The postwar German debate surrounding this dichotomy led to a striking reversal of the usual psychology of defeat. Instead of seeing themselves as heroes crushed by the enemy’s far greater numbers, some Germans came to believe that defeat had resulted from their own weakness of will. Ludendorff, for example, attributed Germany’s defeat not to the material superiority of its enemies but to their superior propaganda, equating propaganda with the desire to win. The Entente, with its “powerful will to destroy,” its “strong national thinking and steel-hard desire,” its “unshakable resolve to annihilate and triumph,” had held a decisive advantage over Germany, which lacked an “iron will.”68 No one pursued this line of thought more vigorously than the most fanatical of all the stab-in-the-back advocates, the publisher of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, Paul Cossmann, who in the July 1919 issue called Germany a “nation of wretches.” The sense of malaise and embarrassment that the war had been lost as a result not of a heroic battle but of susceptibility to enemy propaganda was widespread.69
The dilemma was all the greater since in the eyes of Wilhelminian warrior Kultur, propaganda amounted to nothing more than despised Western cant: nice-sounding words, under cover of which English shopkeeper Zivilisation plied its trade. Finally, though, it was concluded that the time had come to learn the art of propaganda. Edgar Stern-Rubarth, considered the leading expert at the time, defined propaganda as “the weapon by which we were defeated, the weapon that has been left to us, the weapon that will help us rise once more.”70 The German fascination with propaganda in the 1920s followed the same reflexive desire to learn from the enemy evidenced both in the post-1865 New South program of the former Confederacy and in France’s educational reforms after 1871; it entailed walking a fine line between imitative modernization and preservation of national identity. What helped German efforts to view the new orientation as not another capitulation was the idea—present in the American South and France as well—that the reforms had already been suggested at home before the war and had not been carried out only because of obtuse opposition from the old regime.
Before 1914, reflections on the relationship of public opinion, psychology, and politics had come largely from liberal imperialists like Friedrich Naumann, Max Weber, and Paul Rohrbach, who shared a dissatisfaction with the muscle flexing and saber rattling of German foreign policy. Characteristic of the ambivalence of the Wilhelminian generation, and not without irony, was the fact that even Imperial Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, who was responsible for the diplomatic fiasco of the 1911 Morocco crisis, privately registered the publicity blunders of official policy. Two years after the standoff at Agadir, he wrote: “We are a young people and have perhaps too much naïve faith in the military, so that we underestimate the value of more subtle means of obtaining power and fail to grasp that what has been won through violence cannot be kept by violence.”71 (This insight did not, however, prevent him from justifying the German invasion of Belgium a year later, in August 1914, by referring to the treaty on Belgian neutrality as a “scrap of paper” or from freely admitting to the German breach of international law in the Reichstag and thus before the eyes of the entire world.) There was a clear understanding among liberal imperialists that the status of world power to which Germany aspired required not just demonstrations of military and economic might but also moral and ideological acumen. It was a fatal mistake in foreign policy and in the court of public opinion, they believed, to pursue a place in the sun solely by conquering territory and markets. Like the established world powers England and France, Germany required a “universally appealing ideology,” as Paul Rohrbach put it. Friedrich Naumann wrote: “We Germans must come up with something as our world-historical mission that no other people can achieve as well as we can, indeed, that will remain unachieved if we do not carry it out. We need a national calling in the great assembly of humanity so that we can pursue our independent path with purpose and passion.”72
Prior to the war, Rohrbach was the most active advocate of what he termed “ethical imperialism.” In his 1912 book Der deutsche Gedanke (The German Way of Thinking), he argued for “the essential moral core of Germanness as the determining force on current and future world events” and specified the mission of ethical imperialism as “the peaceful penetration of the non-German world with elements of our spiritual and material culture.” Culture and power did not merely reinforce each other; as the example of England showed, a self-confident imperial culture was the prerequisite for global power.73 The liberal imperialists perennially complained about Germany’s ignorance and incompetence in this area. Rohrbach wrote of “our weak capability as a moral conqueror” and of a Prussian-German “abrasiveness” that elicited not admiration but alienation and mistrust in international public opinion.74
These isolated voices of the prewar era came together after the German defeat in a great chorus of national self-criticism. Even a figure as strongly identified with political saber rattling as former minister Karl Helfferich joined in. “It was not clever,” he wrote, “to talk incessantly about the sword, thus enabling our foreign enemies to portray the most peaceful people and monarch on earth as being obsessed by war. In this way, we unintentionally promoted the myth of our warlike intentions and helped produce an international mood that provided the coalition against us with the necessary, mass-psychological underpinning.”75 Many others offered similar judgments. Sociologist Johann Plenge wrote: “Because in our so-called Realpolitik we failed to grasp the very real power of propaganda, suggestions from the politics of ideas were ruthlessly kicked aside by jackbooted tacticians.” And Ernst Troeltsch added: “Vain pride in our honesty for admitting that all morality in politics is just a pretense and a smoke screen and that politics comes down to questions of power and interest … only confirms every hostile opinion.”76
The limitations of German propaganda were everywhere apparent. The political theorist Paul Rühlmann had, as early as 1914, cited the example of France as evidence of the need for Germany to foster better public relations in its foreign affairs. After the war, he accused the German diplomatic corps of being divorced from reality and declared this disassociation symptomatic of the government as a whole. Career diplomats, he insisted, failed to grasp the “imponderables of the foreign popular soul” and thus also lacked the capacity to recognize and exploit the potential usefulness of such “imponderables” to Germany itself. “The bureaucratic apparatus,” he wrote, “was not set up for that purpose. The German diplomatic missions had no means for registering what moved the masses: their ideals, virtues, and passions. Consequently, the officials were helpless when confronted with these things. They simply did not understand that the emotions, urges, and ideals of the foreign masses had to be an object of scrutiny.”77 On the domestic front, the situation was equally dismal. Ludendorff, while operating at a high level concerning the techniques and organization of propaganda, lacked any sensibility for the disposition of the mass psyche. Though he supported the use of propaganda as a means of war and was the driving force behind the creation of the film studio Ufa as a propaganda instrument, he was hopelessly incompetent at gauging the mood of the masses. Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies remarked that Ludendorff and the military high command were “totally unfamiliar with public opinion” and had acted with “the zeal of clerics who preach that God-fearing faith is a prerequisite for salvation and believe that their zeal alone is enough to bring it about.”78
This belated discovery of propaganda repeats the familiar German pattern of appropriating a foreign concept—one that was viewed simply as a means to an end—and subjecting it to an idealistic transformation that renders it into a kind of theology of salvation. The start of the process was the publication of The German Way of Thinking, which Rohrbach expected to have a transformative effect on the international battle of ideas. What he and others overlooked in their missionary zeal, however, was the fact that unfavorable images of Germany were not just the result of clumsy public relations. As Max Scheler showed in 1917 in a book on the origins of Germanophobia, anti-German public sentiment had concrete economic and political causes that could not be dismissed with soothing words.79 The view of propaganda as simply a weapon that functioned and could be deployed like traditional military weapons was not restricted to Ludendorff, who saw it as analogous to gas grenades, submarines, or zeppelins, all of which, he believed, could be activated by the push of a button. Few Germans seemed to comprehend that propagandistic effects could not simply be produced on demand but were dependent on the prevailing mood of the target population. Moreover, in contrast to the United States, England, and France, pre-1914 Germany possessed neither a metropolitan mass press nor the sorts of engineers of mass psychology needed to run one.80 If indeed the Entente’s propaganda was superior, the advantage was due to the participation of journalists who had learned the art of mass manipulation from their work in tabloids and were supposedly unencumbered by traditional notions of military fairness. Yet in the English army, as well, at least at the beginning of the war, propaganda had to battle against military ethics, as is evident in General Herbert Plummer’s justification of his refusal to distribute propaganda leaflets on the front lines: “No, that wouldn’t be fair,” he declared. “We have to defeat these boys on our own merits.”81 The superiority of English propaganda was thus not as great as postwar Germans believed. Nor were German efforts in this area really as insufficient as they were later portrayed.
It is true that by 1914 England—thanks to its global communications network and its control over transatlantic cables—enjoyed a monopoly on the news that enabled it to isolate Germany, cutting off its communications with the rest of the world. Nonetheless, German propaganda theorists concluded that it was not technological deficiencies that had decided the war but rather the strength of will, manipulative skill, and unscrupulousness of the Fleet Street entrepreneur and master propagandist Lord Northcliffe. However, this man of “near Napoleonic significance”—for Germans the demonic embodiment of English wartime propaganda—was only named chief of British propaganda operations in 1918, nearly four years after the hostilities had begun.82 Moreover, in 1914, at the beginning of the war, he had disparaged English propaganda much as the Germans did their own after 1918, praising instead Germany’s superior capacity for mass mobilization.83 Which estimation was correct, the German one after 1918 or Northcliffe’s of 1914?
When Northcliffe assumed his position in 1918, the military situation was beginning to change fundamentally. Although the German spring offensive in France was still to come, the Allies had received a significant morale boost with the arrival of American troops in the theater of war. Notwithstanding the belief shared by the Germans and Northcliffe that propaganda could completely transform reality, it now became clear that the success of propaganda depended on the general mood, which in turn depended on the strategic situation. “As long as the military situation is … unfavorable to the Entente, it will be difficult to construct out of it effective propaganda,” noted Undersecretary of State Lord Robert Cecil. This sentiment was seconded by John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-nine Steps, who worked for the Ministry of Propaganda: “The most active propaganda cannot undo the effect of an enemy victory or explain away an Allied check.”84 In other words, English propaganda could only boast of as many—or as few—victories as the English army could. Likewise, Northcliffe’s initial respect for German propaganda was prompted by the military superiority of German troops, just as the German postwar admiration for English propaganda, and their biting criticism of their own, was born of England’s battlefield success.
Significantly, German self-castigation went so far that even the one undeniable German propaganda success—the destabilization of Russia, culminating in revolution and the victors’ peace of Brest-Litovsk—was hardly ever mentioned. The similarities between that war of words and Northcliffe’s propaganda campaign of 1918 against the Central Powers were striking. Both used the same methods for “breaking down” the opponent’s morale (riling up national minorities, assurances of a generous peace settlement, calls for the overthrow of the present system), and both achieved success because the ground they were sowing was suitably fertile.85 The reason for Germany’s silence on its propaganda victory in Russia was not modesty but a sense that it could hardly style itself as the unsuspecting, innocent victim of Allied machinations if it had successfully used the same means. Even the stab-in-the-back legend might lose its unique heinousness through such an admission, since it was the Russian troops, if anyone, who had been stabbed in the back by a foreign-propaganda-induced revolution on their home front. (The destruction of Russian fighting morale paved the way for the revolution carried out by Lenin, who was sped into Russia by the German military high command, and the subsequent acceptance of the punitive peace treaty dictated at Brest-Litovsk.) The postwar German propaganda debate hinged on how Germany, having opened the Pandora’s box of propaganda in the war against Russia, could best cast itself as the blameless victim of similar methods.86
In many respects, the flip side of the never-mentioned success in Russia was the oft-remembered national enthusiasm at the outbreak of war, the so-called August experience. Unlike Lord Northcliffe, as ever an admirer of German efficiency, the people themselves did not view the August experience as a product of propagandistic manipulation. On the contrary, it was the totally spontaneous and unexpected nature of the celebration that elevated it to the status of a national myth. While there were also outbreaks of war enthusiasm in England and France in August 1914, these were one-time occurrences, which, once they had subsided, were no longer recalled and never again emulated. The German August experience, on the other hand, became something of a national mantra, even after the everyday reality of war had diffused the initial enthusiasm. Recent social history has begun to question whether the emotional outpouring was indeed universal, suggesting that the middle classes (including the Social Democratic leadership) were the ones chiefly caught up in the idea of a “folk community.” Nevertheless, the August experience represented a fundamental reconstitution of the national psyche, in which the Social Democratic opposition abruptly ceased to exist, or, more positively, was subsumed within the nation. The national integration of the masses had already taken place in England and France, a process completed in the 1890s with the creation of a new jingoistic mass culture. In the course of a few hours, the August experience enabled Germany to catch up with developments that had taken years in other European nations. Such a sudden explosion, of course, would also echo far longer.
One further reason for the intensity of the outburst in August was Germany’s paranoid fear of being encircled. This anxiety differed from other national paranoias, such as the French fear during the years 1866–70, in that it was based on more than just Germany’s central geopolitical location. On the one hand, the upper and middle classes were frightened of the “secret army” of Social Democracy; on the other, the lower classes felt entrapped within a state run by their oppressors. The sudden disappearance of this reciprocal fixation and its redirection outward gives insight into the particular force of the August experience. Forty-three years after Wilhelm I and Bismarck had proclaimed the German empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, August 1914 came to represent the actual founding moment of the nation. To call upon the unity of the nation in the form of folk community was henceforth identical with reviving the spirit of 1914. And this would become the main goal of all post-1918 German propaganda.
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THE PROPAGANDA OF the Entente, which was of such great interest to the postwar debate in Germany, contained two very different strains. One was the Anglo-American propaganda of mass manipulation; the other had originated and been perfected in France. French propaganda was directed less at the masses than at the elite and focused primarily on culture, building on the influence France had exerted since the seventeenth century.87 Supplemented after the French Revolution by the theology of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the elitist cultural propaganda of the nineteenth century essentially amounted to a declaration that “La France, c’est l’humanité.”
France’s fall from the heights of European hegemony in 1870–71 had increased the importance given to cultural propaganda and cultural politics, evident both in the institutional initiatives of the Third Republic and in pronouncements by Wilhelminian politicians and publicists who looked enviously to the French example. Post-1918 German elites, however, were less interested in France’s cultural propaganda than in its moral propaganda, which had been elevated to something of an art form after 1871. The transformation of France in world public opinion from the Bonapartist conqueror state it had been before the Franco-Prussian War into the republican martyr nation it became after its defeat could hardly have failed to appeal to a vanquished Germany. “A bid for sympathy always works,” wrote Paul Rühlmann in promoting the French example. “France was highly skilled at playing the martyr: as the bearer of freedom, carrying the torch of liberty to all oppressed nations, it suffered for the good of all humanity.”88
France’s 1923 occupation of the Ruhr region, on the pretext that Berlin had fallen behind on its reparations payments, offered the first opportunity for Germany to develop a martyr propaganda of its own. In an exact reversal of the situation in 1914, Germany could now cast itself as the defenseless victim and France and Belgium as the brutal conquerors. The passive resistance staged by the Germans, complete with the invocation of Gandhi as a spiritual brother, became the first great success of German propaganda. Less spectacular but similar in effect was the conciliatory German reponse to Allied demands for reparations payments between 1919 and 1922. Under its new “fulfillment policy,” Berlin renounced the “grumbling arrogance” with which the hawks within postwar German society had reacted to the demands of the victors, seeking instead to display understanding and cooperation.89 Walther Rathenau, for example, conceived a plan to send a kind of Peace Corps of German workers to northern France to rebuild destroyed territory, a proposal that, as his biographer David Felix succeeds in showing, was never meant seriously but served the purpose of “demonstrating Germany’s good will and willingness to contribute to an international project of fraternity.”90
Nevertheless, the experience of the Third Republic had also shown the limits of martyr propaganda. While French cultural propaganda, under the catchphrase pénétration pacifique, had proved successful wherever it was tried, including Germany, the French obsession with Alsace-Lorraine had elicited more alienation than sympathy, prompting Gambetta’s warning to think constantly but never speak of revanche. The punitive Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, determined the political emotions of Weimar, just as the loss of Alsace-Lorraine had those of the Third Republic. And in both cases, “the fantastical self-delusion of an entire people” (as Carlo Mierendorff termed the German Versailles syndrome) undermined all efforts to gain a sympathetic hearing; the creators of propaganda were so caught up in their own obsessions that they frequently lost touch with world public opinion.91 Even a Realpolitician like Paul Rohrbach never considered that the vanquished might have to take the first step in winning the sympathies of others. Quite the contrary, Rohrbach argued, “reconciliation can only come after our moral restoration.… In other words, it is incumbent on the hostile world, our enemies, and the neutral peoples to rethink the question of guilt before we can even think about practicing genuine politics.”92 Both the German stance of martyred innocence and the Allies’ moral condemnation of Germany had their origins in the central clause of the Treaty of Versailles. Since the entire treaty was based on article 231, the “war guilt” clause, which declared Germany solely responsible for the conflict, the amendation or propagandistic nullification of that article was destined to be the main strategic goal of postwar German politics. Germany’s fixation on its innocence and the injustice of Versailles, however, took on a tendentious tone similar to that of Germany’s prewar foreign-policy pronouncements, the difference being that whereas the mighty Wilhelminian empire had demanded from the rest of the world a place in the sun, the government now insisted that the world acknowledge the injustice that had been done to poor Germany.
As the ideas of revanche and the Lost Cause have shown, martyr propaganda tends to be so obsessed with the bruised, defeated ego that little energy remains for more productive forms of regeneration. Emulating “successful” models of martyr and moral propaganda may help a society recover from an initial trauma, but it can also confine that society to a mental ghetto. At the point when the first acts of mourning have been concluded and possibilities for national recovery become evident, most nations reorient themselves toward a victorious model. For post-1918 Germany, Anglo-American propaganda and not its French equivalent served this function, since it had so effectively undermined the German will to victory and ushered in the Allied victory. Those defeated by propaganda, so the logic ran, must also be able to achieve victory by propaganda. Thus, although propaganda was also used to argue for Germany’s peacefulness and innocence, the main priority was to master its use as a weapon in anticipation of a further round of armed conflict.
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THE DISCUSSIONS OF the 1920s were unanimous in their conclusion that wartime German propaganda had not understood how to appeal to the masses, that it was highly academic and removed from reality—“professorial propaganda,” as Johann Plenge put it—and that it would have to be recast along Anglo-American lines.93 It was assumed that the Anglo-American intelligentsia had a natural gift for mass suggestion because they were part of the mass Zivilisation of which propaganda was a product. By contrast, the German spirit, or Geist, was predestined to fail because of its identification with elite Kultur, the antithesis of Zivilisation. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, the discussion in the 1920s centered on the question of whether and to what extent Germany could adopt English and American methods of mass manipulation without endangering its soul. Most of those who took part in the debates lacked the sociological insight and, more important, the personal readiness to accept, as a price for effective mass propaganda, a thoroughly democratic and commercial—or alternatively, a thoroughly totalitarian—society. From Ludendorff to Tönnies, the prevailing wisdom was that effective propaganda was an instrument, a kind of whirling fan that, if operated properly, could vent a certain opinion, conviction, or message out into the world. Perhaps the most concise image of this take on propaganda is Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, who directs the applause of the masses with a single hand gesture, turning it on and off like a radio.94
Whereas the bourgeois propaganda theorists handled their subject gingerly, ever wary of being burned, the National Socialists were untroubled by scruples such as the distinction between means and ends. The lessons learned from Gustave Le Bon about the role of “contagion” in mass psychology and the latest advertising techniques were not lost on men like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Nazi propaganda expert Eugen Hadamovsky. Theodor Heuss, a politician critical of Hitler, remarked that the section on propaganda in Mein Kampf was “better and more precisely written” than anything else in the book: “Here we see a man who knows what he’s talking about.”95 Several of Hitler’s formulations could have been written for, or lifted from, any one of a number of contemporary textbooks on advertising psychology.96 In its methods of mass manipulation and mobilization, National Socialism was thus “more American” than any of the other political movements. Hitler’s public appearances—for instance, his airplane tour through Germany in 1932—have been described as “rituals of German hero worship staged with American know-how,” and the success of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry was in no small part due to its entertainment value.97 As Ernest K. Bramsted points out, “There was a good deal of showmanship and of the American circus à la Barnum in Goebbels’s techniques.”98
The reasons for the success of Nazi propaganda are twofold. For one thing, Hitler and his men not only knew their subject but also identified with it far more personally than any of their bourgeois competitors. For them, the masses were not a foreign world that had to be painstakingly researched but the very element from which they themselves had come and within which they moved easily and comfortably.99 The Nazis, moreover, brought the expectation that propaganda could completely remake reality back down to earth. To the old adage that even the best propaganda can achieve only what reality allows, National Socialism added the idea that reality and propaganda had to be coordinated, indeed melded together into a single, novel instrument of mass manipulation. Indeed, the two were often indistinguishable. Did the state-sponsored “Kraft durch Freude” (Strength through Joy) vacations, instituted in 1933, serve the purpose of relaxation or political integration? Was the Volkswagen merely a motor vehicle, or was it also a catalyst for folk community? Was state terror simply physical oppression, or was it a kind of propaganda of intimidation aimed at bringing the home front into line?
Nowhere was the Nazis’ skill with propaganda more evident than in their ability to keep both public morale and food supplies steady, a problem that had stumped Germany’s leaders during World War I. During World War II, the Nazis knew their calls for steadfastness would succeed only with a people who had enough to eat. That was the simple, nonideological, but thoroughly Machiavellian lesson they had learned from the collapse of 1918. As Hitler put it, “A people can do without some material good, so long as it gets powerful ideals in return. However, these ideals must never be purchased at the cost of material well-being, or they could have disastrous consequences for a people.”100 Finally, the National Socialists “propagandized” a domain that during the First World War had been considered inhospitable to propaganda, the military, which ceased to be used exclusively as the ultimate instrument of physical violence, coercion, and destruction and became, for several years at least, the primary weapon of foreign-policy propaganda. The great insight was that the perception of military strength was just as important as the actual number of planes and tanks. The mere threat of deploying Germany’s armed forces could be used to break the enemy’s will.
As the success of Hitler’s foreign-policy bluffing before 1938 demonstrated, such calculations paid off. The Führer did not require a fully armed German war machine to achieve his desired effect. In the arms buildup that commenced in 1936, the actual production of warplanes and tanks was significantly less impressive than the accompanying propaganda made it out to be. The Luftwaffe, in particular, functioned as an effective instrument of terror and propaganda. Most historians today agree that its role in intimidating the Western powers during the Sudeten crisis of 1938 was decisive. “Hitler’s adroit manipulation of the threat of aerial warfare,” Edward L. Homze writes, “helped Germany achieve its stunning victory over England and France.” By the late 1930s, as historian Uri Bialer shows, British foreign policy was being dictated by fears that England could become a target for German air attacks. Bialer calls the Luftwaffe during this period “one of the most effective weapons of persuasion of the Third Reich.”101 (The fact that Goering and Goebbels, the heads of the new departments for the Luftwaffe and for propaganda, respectively, were the two figures with the greatest cultural power in the regime perhaps appears in a new light in this context.) One might ask, if the pre-1939 German army—like the threat of the atomic bomb after 1945—was such an effective deterrent that it didn’t actually have to be used, was it not then primarily propagandistic in function, much like food supplies and Gestapo terror?
For a remarkably long time, it was. Even in 1939, when Hitler’s propagandistic and psychological hand had been played out and war had become a reality, the military continued to an astonishing extent to operate “propagandistically.” The blitzkrieg was basically the military continuation of Hitler’s strategy of bluffs and threats from the prewar years. With a relatively scant but highly concentrated and, above all, rapid deployment of forces, the Nazis proved able to terrify and traumatize the enemy so thoroughly that it capitulated before its reserves and resources had been exhausted. This strategy of surprise and terror departed radically from the strategy of exhaustion in World War I, which aimed at the methodical physical destruction of the opponent’s forces. The blitzkrieg applied, as the military historian John Frederick Charles Fuller points out, “mobility as a psychological weapon, mobility not in order to kill, but to terrorize, confuse and deceive, to call forth despair, uncertainty and disorder behind enemy lines.” Moreover: “The physical principle of destruction was replaced by the psychological principle of confusion.… The effect of the blitzkrieg … was directed not at the enemy’s muscles but at his nerves.”102
Historian Marc Bloch, who himself took part in the war, describes this phenomenon with singular insight. In his account of France’s lightning-quick collapse in the spring of 1940, the Wehrmacht emerges as victorious no longer because of its greater potential for destruction but because of its ability to inflict paralyzing fear. The French will to fight had been destroyed not by bombs from German Stukas, Bloch writes, but by the horrific, barbaric, and utterly enervating noise that accompanied them. That noise was not an accidental by-product of dive-bombing raids, like the thunder of cannons, but was deliberately created by sirens, so-called Jericho trumpets, expressly built for that purpose.103
Ultimately, though, the military propaganda of terror depended, like every other type of propaganda, on the circumstances in which it was applied. Hence the failure of Hitler’s attempt toward the end of the war to turn the tide with a surprise attack in the Ardennes. Just as the bombing of London with V rockets proved of limited effectiveness, the unexpected advances of German armored divisions achieved only a short-lived, strategically insignificant effect within the ranks of a clearly superior enemy that now believed in its certain victory.104
From Propaganda to Spiritual and Moral Revival
Propaganda fascinated its German adherents above all as an instrument of mass manipulation and as a psychotechnical miracle weapon. But another view of propaganda saw it not as an amoral tactic but rather as the charismatic effusion of a vital historical strength. As the example of Wilhelminian Germany seemed to demonstrate, a bankrupt system that lacked charisma and a vision for the future could not produce persuasive propaganda. A master of propaganda like Adolf Hitler did not hesitate to acknowledge the charismatic quality of his archenemy, Marxism, or to recognize a self-confident will at work even in mercantilist England and America. Thus, even before the propaganda-savvy Nazis assumed power, criticism of enemy propaganda as a cause of defeat became criticism of the German system for being unable to project itself effectively. Like all other losing nations, Germany began to search for the origins of the false path that had led it to the abyss.
There were numerous starting points. The most obvious ones were the mistakes made during the war, from the German violation of Belgian neutrality and the decision to pursue unrestricted submarine warfare to the uncompromising demand for peace through victory. The question of how such mistakes could have been made, however, led back to the prewar era and beyond. Many postwar observers dated the origins of the catastrophe back to the founding of the empire, seizing anew on ideas that had been advanced forty years earlier by Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Konstantin Frantz, and other opponents of Bismarck. The gist of the argument was that with the founding of the empire in 1871, Germany had renounced its former universalistic spirit, embraced non-Germanic traits such as materialism, mercantilism, and imperialism, and thereby lost all sense of proportion and spiritual substance. In short, Germany had lost its soul. This verdict had little to do with ideologized left-right divisions. Just as Heinrich Mann spoke in the fall of 1918 of a “pathology report,” the radical conservative Max Hildebert Boehm wrote of imperial Germany’s “inner instability and external excess.” Walther Rathenau, who was among the first to recognize the Wagner cult as a culture of the ersatz and make-believe, characterized Wilhelminism as “electric-journalistic Caesaro-papism.” Carl Heinrich Becker, orientalist, reformer, and later Prussian minister of culture, saw in the empire’s militarism a compensatory culture. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a radical conservative who ridiculed the “brass-band sentimentality” and “family-album idiocy” of Wilhelminian Germany, wrote in 1919 “that ever since 1871 we have been moving backward, not forward. The Germany we love and can admire lies prior to 1871, quite a few years prior, in fact, and not afterward.”105
If there was a brief consensus immediately after the shock of defeat, it resided in the idea that collapse and revolution should be welcomed as a flood that would wash away Wilhelminian frivolity. The idea spanned the radical left, which was awaiting the outbreak of world revolution, the liberal center, which longed for the introduction of Western-style parliamentary politics, and the extreme right, which hoped for a rebirth of the nation.106 The results disappointed everyone. Instead of revolution, there was mere “rioting in the guards’ absence,” as Rathenau called it, and the moral bankruptcy of the system presided over by the majority socialists of the SPD, who did everything in their power to prevent revolution.107 After half a century in the opposition and four years of wartime solidarity, the SPD was revealed to be an integral part of the system, whose preservation in republican form the party made its overriding task. At least that is how the SPD was seen by those who refused to acknowledge the Weimar Republic, born as it was of military defeat and aborted revolution. As historian Ludwig Dehio noted after 1945, the Weimar Republic more closely resembled the 1815 French restoration than it did the French republics of 1792 and 1870 or revolutionary Russia of 1917.
World War as Educational War
Disgusted by the unheroic republic, radical nationalists as well as radical socialists were reduced to finding another object for identification. In psychoanalytic terms, this process is called regression: a wish that cannot be fulfilled in reality is compensated for through withdrawal to an earlier state of fulfillment and happiness. The most recent such state for Germans existed in August 1914. The enthusiasm then had less to do with the war itself than with the expectation that a show of national military strength would once and for all resolve the contradictions between the nation and democracy or the nation and socialism.108 But since the war brought about everything but such a quick resolution and since the enthusiasm died out almost as quickly as it had flared up, the August experience ceded to a second, darker myth of wartime brotherhood.
The German Fronterlebnis, or experience of the front, turned the August experience on its head. Death and suffering in the trenches were in no way seductive, liberating, or utopian. The equality and fraternity of the battle lines in World War I were purely negative and destructive, and those who directly suffered the war’s fury had no illusions to the contrary. Soldiers felt themselves to be a community forged by the destiny of having been used as cannon fodder. If they maintained any ideal of socialism, it was that of the classless business of living and dying in the trenches. From their perspective, the Volksgemeinschaft proclaimed from above and behind the front lines was just another Wilhelminian slogan. The front was a world unto itself, hemmed in on one side by the enemy, for whom the soldiers had a certain existential empathy, and on the other by the rulers at home, with whom they had nothing in common.
The decisive element and defining criterion of the front line was fire. By passing through it, the so-called generation of the front underwent its baptism, its salvation ritual, or, to use one of the most popular terms of nationalistic war literature, its “purification” of the illusions, deformities, and pieties of prewar society. For the frontline soldier and radical conservative writer Ernst Jünger, for instance, the experience of war was nearly indistinguishable from the experience of fire.109 There were only two alternatives: to perish in the flames or emerge hardened by them. Both involved becoming one with the barrage of fire, or Feuerwalze (literally, “waltz of fire”), described by Jünger as that “towering wall of fire and steel [that is] the image of ourselves.” Whoever had encountered and gone through the fire was “hardened by the glowing element” and had all his impurities “burned off.”110 Conversely, the image of slag symbolized the impure elements cast out by fire: “The relativism and indifference of the time of corruption before the war had been burned to slag,” wrote one observer shortly before the Nazi assumption of power in 1933.111
The idea of a world-consuming fire, which is as old as the Apocalypse, was familiar in Germany from Wagner’s Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung, and the fire rituals of the Nazi Party, including ceremonial bonfires and torchlight parades, represented another modulation of the fire metaphors of war rhetoric. Even liberal politicians like Rathenau spoke of a “world fire that transforms material in order to free the spirit.”112 Across the political spectrum, then, the “fire” of the world war was seen as a medium for forging a new type of man, the war itself as a “war of education,” and defeat as an intrinsic part of this education.113 Had imperial Germany won the war, it would have meant the triumph of an inauthentic and superficial materialism. The German word meaning “to win,” as in “winning a war,” gewinnen, is derived from Gewinn, the word for “profits.” Gewinn was an inherently material, financial, or mercantile concept like the treasure of the Nibelungs, with its central role in German national mythology. Moeller van den Bruck’s conviction that Germany’s road to demise began with the “accursed riches”—the five billion francs in reparations exacted from France in 1871—cast German defeat as a necessary corrective.114 The philosopher Hermann Keyserling wrote in November 1918:
We are experiencing at this moment probably the most overwhelming manifestation in history of the eternal truth, formulated most potently by Christ, that those who momentarily wield temporal power are not the ones who possess the greatest historical might. It is not just as a defensive mechanism … that oppressed peoples … so quickly come to join in messianic missions. Just as the individual ascetic has to suffer to transcend his present condition, so the creative desire for new life can blossom only out of the oppression of the here and now. For this reason, people of the lowest classes very often adopt the most far-reaching and future-oriented beliefs.… If the general socio-economic conditions of humanity improve, we will have this primarily proletarian yearning to thank. Salvation in times of great upheaval usually comes from those who are weakened or who have suffered most. Only they can find within themselves the strength as well as the motivation for radical change.115
National Socialism
Having emerged from its trial by fire, the wartime generation was convinced that it had been called to lead the nation. Its mission consisted specifically of bringing the education received at the battlefront back to the home front, where people remained stubbornly ignorant. Rituals of return in primitive cultures traditionally require that warriors who have spilled blood undergo purification rituals before being allowed back into the community. In Germany, by contrast, the warriors were to carry the knowledge of fire back to the home front, which would then be purified as well.
Thus, the image of the march from the battlefront back to the capital occupied a central place in Fascist mythology, suggesting the reestablishment of unity in a nation that had been split into a home front and a battlefront during the war. (The immediate forerunner of this image—which happened to reverse Marx’s quip about farce following tragedy—was Wilhelm II’s plan in November 1918 to lead the army from the front and restore order at home.) Neither Italian Fascism nor German National Socialism can be understood without the idea of the march back home. Nor can their respective death cults be understood without reference to the fallen who were “left” or “remained behind” at the front. The surviving veterans from whose ranks came the earliest Fascists explicitly portrayed themselves as the advocates of their departed comrades.116 This “tragic” identification with the dead was a primary difference between frontline soldiers—and the Fascist community that linked up with them—and Bolshevik revolutionaries, with whom there were otherwise numerous affinities.
For its part, the home front, from which the soldiers felt alienated after four years of war, had undergone its own transformation since 1914. Once the conflict had entered the phase of total war in 1916, the nation had ceased to be a mere spectator, if it ever had been one, and was drafted into the fight as an active participant. Even in the numbers of their dead—for example, the many victims of the Allied food blockade—the noncombatants bore comparison to their counterparts in the army. Just as the fighters could accuse civilians of not having put their lives directly at risk, the starving home front could counter that the frontline soldiers had at least been fed. Regardless of where it occurred, death was the result of the same war.
The nation’s enlistment in the cause was described as war socialism, a term coined in 1915 by the sociologist Johann Plenge. Plenge’s neologism did not connote Marxist socialism; the only thing the two concepts had in common was their opposition to capitalism and liberalism. War socialism meant that the German economy was ruled no longer by the free market but by central planning. In other words, economic organization was subsumed within military organization, and both were now instruments of the state. Plenge could just as well have spoken of “war organization” as of “war socialism” since for him the two were identical: “Organization is socialism.” The fact that he chose the word socialism and that it immediately resonated even among people for whom it had previously been taboo can be explained by the psychology of wartime solidarity. Once the Social Democratic movement had rejected class conflict in favor of national struggle and folk community, the right, in a symbolic reciprocal gesture, accepted and redefined “socialism.” A socialism that could be agreed on by all yet could be understood in any number of ways was the perfect label for the Volksgemeinschaft proclaimed at the beginning of the war. The majority socialists saw in it a potential escape from the pariah status they had occupied for so many years. A nationally redefined socialism was also ideal for the nationalists and technocrats, who sought to replace the reviled Wilhelminian amalgamation of liberalism and feudalism with a strictly organized bureaucratic state.117
A creation of the war like Volksgemeinschaft, the idea of war socialism was actually strengthened by Germany’s defeat. The slogan had become so closely associated with the experience of the war that it shed its left-wing connotations and took on a mythological life of its own. One sign of its new independent life was the adoption and reinterpretation of the Marxist concept of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, class conflict, and the liberation of the world through the emancipation of the workers. Translated into the language of national socialism, post-Versailles Germany was the proletarianized nation, the West was the bourgeoisie, the struggle against the West amounted to an international, or more accurately, inter-national, class struggle; and victory over the West would achieve world liberation. This was the German version of the martyrdom and salvation on a global scale that post-1871 France had celebrated under the banner of “civilisation.”
The idea of Germany as the world’s proletariat occupied a central place in the thought of conservative revolutionaries such as Moeller van den Bruck, Boehm, Edgar Jung, Jünger, Friedrich Hielscher, Oswald Spengler, the group affiliated with the journal Die Tat, and the National Bolshevists (Ernst Niekisch, Heinrich Laufenberg, and Fritz Wolffheim).118 But it also exerted an influence on the basic mood and, at times, the strategy of the political and cultural center. Rathenau, for instance, wrote, “The signature of our future existence is this: we have practically nothing except our own labor,” and the Weimar Republic’s first foreign minister, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, was prepared to continue the struggle against the “bourgeois” West in alliance with proletarian Russia, presumably because Germany had nothing to lose but its chains.119 Of course, an alliance with Soviet Russia was for the postwar mind-set merely the latest, “regional” version of Prussian Germany’s historical orientation toward Eastern Europe. Yet others proposed a global alliance with the colonized nations of the Far and Middle East—Egypt, Persia, India, Japan—which were about to throw off the Western yoke or, in Japan’s case, had already done so. After all, Germany had aided their cause as well, these partisans argued, by sufficiently weakening the colonial powers so that liberation movements like Gandhi’s could arise. It was a short leap to the idea that Germany had actually fought the war as the representative, indeed as the messiah, of the world’s oppressed. Having now been relieved of its own colonial burden, Germany was on the same level as the colonies. And finally the Germans, like the colonial populations fighting for their independence, were a “young” people whom the old rulers of the West were trying to deny their rightful place in the sun. The German obsession with being encircled, which could be overcome only through a preemptive encircling of the enemy (as in General Schlieffen’s Cannae plan, patterned on Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans in 216 B.C.), found expression after 1918 in the imagined alliance with colonial peoples.120 United under German leadership into the greatest ring the world had ever known, the oppressed peoples of the world would encircle the West in a global Cannae.
It was not only the colonial proletariat, however, that was to be mobilized for Germany’s cause but also the proletariat of the victorious nations themselves. If Germany developed its wartime socialism into a “profound, inspiring, well-armed (peacetime) socialism,” the nationalists believed, it would be a signal to the working classes in the Western nations.121 In the form of such phantasms, Berlin presented itself as the national socialist alternative to Moscow long before the Nazis assumed political power in 1933.
August 1914 Revisited
The Weimar Republic is usually divided into three distinct periods—revolution and inflation (1918–23), stability (1924–29), and economic crisis (1930–32)—but one can also view it as a continuum, one protracted megacollapse stretching over fifteen years, only briefly interrupted by a period of economic and cultural respite. Indeed, from the perspective of 1930, the “stable” years of 1924–29 looked like a pleasant but illusory aberration from the catastrophe now returning with redoubled force. What military defeat and revolutionary upheaval had unleashed in 1918 the economic crisis set off in the late 1920s: a slow-motion implosion of the system, “an uncanny, incomprehensible, and ineluctable process of decay and decomposition.” In the conservative magazine Die Tat, a barometer of the post-1930 crisis mentality, Ferdinand Fried described the behavior of the economy with the same language that had been used in reference to the army in November 1918: “The absolute dissolution of morale among German entrepreneurs … is shown by the fact that they are now deserting their posts.”122
The reflexive understanding of the economic crisis as a resumption of the world war following a “truce” (namely, the period of stability) was common not just in Germany. The sense that the war had begun as a traditional military conflict but ended as a military-industrial quagmire tended to support that opinion. It was but a small step from the idea, popular in the 1920s, that future wars would only be fought on the level of economics to interpreting the Great Depression as a continuation of the Great War.
For many Germans, however, the repeat of the military collapse in the form of economic disaster was not necessarily to be mourned. The only people who were truly distressed by the demise of the liberal republic in the economic crisis were those who felt that the republic was Germany’s best hope despite being born of defeat. Those on the right and the left who had expected something more after 1918 than a reconstitution of the old system under a republican banner welcomed its failure as a chance—on a now empty stage—to do what had then been neglected. The party that declared itself best suited to the task was of an entirely new sort, consisting at first almost exclusively of combat veterans and sporting both “national socialist” and “workers’ party” in its name—a fact pointing toward the legacies from which its success was derived. The socialism of the Volksgemeinschaft: a product of the war. The worker: a further refinement of the frontline soldier, an archetype central to the so-called soldierly nationalism of Ernst Jünger and others. And finally, at the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a man who promised to bring about the national renewal that should have taken place in 1918: the frontline soldier Adolf Hitler. Without these equivalences, the connection between war, defeat, national rebirth, and renewed war in Nazi mythology would remain as obscure as the true significance of the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 did for the majority of liberal commentators. Most observers perceived only accidental parallels between that event and the revolution of November 1918 rather than a direct connection. The Italian journalist Filipo Bojano, for instance, wrote that as in November 1918 “the petty bosses [of the Weimar Republic] simply handed over the keys and disappeared with their masters.”123
The spring of 1933 was usually compared not to November 1918 but to August 1914, the memory of that summer filling the void left by the aborted revolution of 1918.124 Both moments in the collective mind helped define the nation’s soul in 1933. Or, put another way, the failed and now revived “national revolution” of 1918 was imbued, years after the fact, with the spirit of 1914.
Publisher Peter Suhrkamp succinctly captured the “spirit of 1933.” A veteran and an anti-Nazi, Suhrkamp also experienced spring 1933 as a recapitulation of 1914, as the rebirth of the feeling that anything was possible, a second chance for a nation that suddenly seemed quite young, as though the millions of fallen soldiers had returned to the realm of the living to help in the rebuilding effort. “I was repeatedly struck by the similarity to my memories of the summer of 1914,” he wrote.
The similarity extended to the smallest details. Uniformed SA and SS men and regular army soldiers now marched alongside private citizens, some wearing medals. There were children and older women and servant girls, and between the marchers and the spectators standing on the sidewalks or perched on fences or trees or on the roofs of the electric streetcars there ran a current of unanimity and heartfelt openness.… At the center of it all were always young men in uniform—and men in uniform always seemed young. Great columns of young men in neatly pressed uniforms marching in lockstep and taut, disciplined faces dominated the scene. Cities, towns, and country roads … all were filled with the presence of the army. The astonishing thing, however, was that although the soldiers sang war songs they seemed not warlike but rather, at that moment, thoroughly peaceful. Not complacent or collegial or clubby, though; the impression was of earnest readiness. What we experienced was an active army filled with the determination, zeal, and excitement of our old forces in the field, but without the threat of war or even the prospect of war on the horizon. What we were witnessing was something that made no rational sense and can scarcely be imagined: the military as an end in itself, as the fulfillment and satisfaction of a feeling for life.… Without the past war, such a pure military phenomenon would hardly have been possible. But what we saw did not necessarily require a war.125
Reeducation
Among the “unfriendly services” that, in Arnold Toynbee’s phrase, Germany and France provided for each other in their regularly recurring conflicts were the educational reforms, modeled on the respective victor’s systems, that were carried out after every defeat. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reforms after the Prussian defeat at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806 would have been unthinkable without the influence of Rousseau and the French Revolution. Likewise, vanquished France would use those same Prussian reforms two generations later as a model for its own intellectual and moral renewal. The French studied the University of Berlin with special care, seeing it as the foundry in which men like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher and nationalist agitator much admired in post-1871 France, had forged the German revanche against Napoleon. In 1872, when a group of prominent republican professors and politicians decided to establish a private university for the education of future political leaders, the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, they explicitly cited Berlin as their inspiration.
The imitation came full circle in 1920 when two groups of intellectuals and politicians in Berlin sought to found a political academy, independent of the state and the university, along the lines of the Ecole libre. The first of these groups was the conservative Ring Association around Moeller van den Bruck; the second consisted of liberal reformers. Both groups agreed that since Bismarck Germany’s elites had utterly failed in their political leadership; if they hadn’t actually brought on the catastrophe, they had done little to prevent it. But the two groups differed radically on the new academy’s goals, and so two institutions were founded instead of one. The conservatives set up the Politisches Kolleg, while the liberals established the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. The former remained little more than a debating society comprising various working committees that convened in Moeller van den Bruck’s June Club at 22 Motzstrasse. The latter became a generously funded public institute for teaching and research housed in Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Academy of Architecture.
Both organizations became gathering places. Opponents and detractors of the republic assembled at Motzstrasse, while the republican establishment and a talented younger generation that included Helmut James Moltke and Sebastian Haffner met at the Academy of Architecture. The Politisches Kolleg debated how parliamentarianism and the party system could be most quickly overthrown so the work of national renewal could progress. The Hochschule forged the political cadre that was to lead the parliamentary republic in the future. The Politisches Kolleg measured the success of its activities by how closely it approximated the Ecole libre as a school for nationalism and preparation for revanche. Its director, Martin Spahn, wrote:
The Ecole was … the vestal temple in which the fire of serious and profound appreciation for the virtues of the nation was guarded from 1872 to 1918.… We Germans should look back on the last fifty years and be embarrassed at how the French after Sedan … reflected and conducted those rays of light that illuminated us in the days after our defeat in 1809 [sic].… They reaped the rewards of their efforts in the years 1914–18 in the determination with which their entire people opposed us. We are now faced with the challenge not of retreating to the old guidelines of 1809 but of revising them in the light of French achievements over the last half century, indeed of taking them one farther.126
Within the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, on the other hand, the hoped-for renewal was to be not just national but Europe-wide, indeed universal. “To become a point of crystallization for the intellectual and spiritual reconstruction of Germany—a new Germany and therefore also a new Europe in one new spirit” is how Ernst Jaeckh defined the task. Jaeckh, the Hochschule’s first director, oriented his institute around the ideas of 1789, while the Politisches Kolleg clung to those of 1914.127
A number of other political and sociological institutes founded in the immediate postwar period followed this pattern of polarization, among them Johann Plenge’s Academy for Governmental Studies in Münster, Leopold von Wiese’s Institute for Social Research in Cologne, and, a few years later, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. All of them either arose entirely outside the universities or were only tenuously connected to them. When a formal affiliation was proposed, the suggestion was sometimes rejected by the traditional faculties as alien to the missions of their universities, but the newcomers themselves also raised objections: political education had no chance of making inroads into German universities whether it was conducted by Johann Plenge in the spirit of 1914, by Leopold von Wiese or Franz Oppenheimer in the Enlightenment tradition, or by a liberal centrist like the Prussian minister of culture Carl Heinrich Becker. An academic outsider even before the war, Becker entered the ministry in 1916 and became a key figure in the educational reform movement. As undersecretary of state and minister of culture, he directed Prussian educational policies both administratively and politically from 1919 to 1930. In a 1919 pamphlet, he enumerated the ways in which German universities had contributed to national decline and collapse: overspecialization (“We’ve produced ear, nose, and skin specialists but no doctors”); the depoliticization that went with it, which was in reality a form of subservience to the ruling powers; and the loss of the capacity for intellectual, moral, and political synthesis. “It was precisely their dedication to their specific disciplines,” he wrote, “that was to have dire consequences for professors’ abilities to function as good citizens.”128
Becker did not trust the universities to regenerate themselves. He regarded the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin, which he personally helped establish, and the institutes for sociology in Cologne and Frankfurt as “pacesetters and experimental laboratories” designed to bring reform to the universities at some later date.129 Aside from those few enclaves, however, reformers were doubtful that significant and timely results could be achieved within academia, so they focused instead on what had been described before the war as “popular” education. A new kind of school, the Volkshochschule—similar to the American community college—was set up in many cities for the explicit purpose of teaching civic consciousness. In contrast, public secondary schools, which had been so central to the process of national renewal in the Third Republic, played only a subordinate role in the thinking of German educational reformers.130
Of all the educational institutions, the Volkshochschule was the one most influenced by the experience of war. The architects of the Volkshochschule deliberately distanced it from its prewar forerunners, bourgeois philanthropic institutions aimed at popularizing culture among the lower classes. The Weimar Volkshochschule did not see itself as a charitable institution, distributing crumbs of bourgeois cultural sustenance to the poor huddled masses, but as an arena where high and popular culture could meet on an equal footing. For Werner Picht and other educational reformers of the early Weimar Republic, the August experience had been the harbinger of revolution, whose completion had been prevented by four years of wartime deprivation as well as by the lack of “solidarity between the classes,” incompetent leadership, and “overreliance on patriotic sentiment.”131 The task of the Volkshochschule was to reconstitute the Volksgemeinschaft, or folk community, through an education that would bridge the divisions between social classes. Without such a unifying cultural hand, it was felt, folk community, revolution, and republic would remain empty phrases.
The German Volkshochschule took its name from and was patterned after the Danish Landvolkshochschule of the nineteenth century, itself a product of national defeat by France in 1807 and by Prussia in 1864. More immediately influential, however, were the two reform movements of the prewar years. What the alternative school and the youth movement had previously offered only to small elite groups was to be made available to the general public, just as earlier protests against traditional schools’ emphases on rote learning and discipline were now carried to the national level. From the alternative schools pioneered by Gustav Wyneken, Rudolf Steiner, and Paul Geheeb, the Volkshochschule movement adopted the idea of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, a working group of students and teachers learning from one another in positions of equality. The reformers even borrowed the term Arbeitsgemeinschaft for the title of their official journal, thus placing the concept at the very center of the movement—and indeed of the new folk community.
The missionary zeal that inspired the Volkshochschule movement proved no more durable than the enthusiasm for Volksgemeinschaft had been at the beginning of the war, an outcome that is hardly surprising given the intimate connection between the two. Such enthusiasm was characteristic of the rhapsodic, idealistic, and expressionistic mood of the German revolution, which spewed out ecstatic buzzwords like spiritual turning point, unified spirit, new humanity, impetus toward community, world consciousness that quickly became fashionable in the salons of the educated middle classes but had no lasting influence.132 By 1923, the Volkshochschule had lost its aura as a source of national revival and of competition with the university, reverting to the role it had played before the war, namely, providing continuing education to ambitious members of the lower classes.
The post-1918 German educational reform can perhaps be best understand by comparison with its French equivalent. In France, defeat was attributed to the backwardness of schools as institutions for transmitting knowledge. Accordingly, the main goals of reform were literacy and universal compulsory education. In Germany, the culprit was not a deficit in knowledge but a deficit in civic spirit. Thus, while the target of French reform was the politically empowered but illiterate citizen, in Germany it was the educated—even overeducated—but politically disempowered underling, who carried the blame for Germany’s faintheartedness in the war. The German educational system had taken a wrong path, becoming a “noisy factory of reason” and a “mill grinding the brain into a malleable pulp.” As the reformer Ludwig Gurlitt complained as early as 1902, the German system brought forth “pedagogical products of fear: pale, frightened, oppressed young people with no self-confidence, who live timidly and hope only to do the bidding of their masters.”133 Here, too, the French-German relationship had come full circle: France had originally admired the example of the Prussian schoolmaster as necessary for national survival, only to see Germany, forty years later, deciding that the schoolmaster had degenerated into a “petty dictator,” who needed to be remade in the image of the republican instituteur. It was the instituteur, after all, who had “charged” victorious France’s cannons “with ideas.”134 German educational reform in the Weimar Republic failed to involve Germans as active, committed participants in the revival of the nation, but there was another sort of “civic education” whose effects would prove more significant. It was economic—and American.
Paths of Modernity: Americanism and Rationalization
At the end of the First World War, virtually everyone agreed that none of the nations that had begun the conflict and bled themselves dry on its battlefields could claim a resounding victory. The big winner was the lone non-European combatant, whose late entry into the fighting had ended the stalemate and effectively decided the war. In 1914, the United States was Europe’s debtor. By 1918, the situation had been reversed. For three years, until entering the war itself, the neutral industrial giant had supplied the Entente with matériel, which was paid for with Europe’s gold reserves and then promptly consumed on Europe’s battlefields. American industrial might, which had impressed European observers—and elicited some unease—before 1914, had taken another huge leap forward.
While no one among the former enemies disputed who had actually won the war, there was far less agreement about who had truly lost it. The Entente, of course, saw Germany as the loser. In Germany, however, a variation of the stab-in-the-back legend emerged according to which, having signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia in March 1918, Germany was destined to prevail over the rest of the exhausted Entente. Only America’s sudden intervention, at the Allies’ behest, had saved England and France from the coup de grâce of the spring invasion in 1918. Put simply, the Americans had stolen Germany’s victory. If one ignored the fact that it was German policies that had provoked America’s entry into the war, the psychology of stolen victory and a treacherous European stab in the back seemed plausible: German defeat was the result of the Entente’s betrayal of Europe to the non-European power America.135
In the German view, America’s entry into the war instantaneously converted Germany’s European enemies into second-rate powers; since the Allies had ridden America’s coattails to victory, Germany had not been subdued in and by Europe. France had not been taken seriously as a great power since 1871 and had been respected during the war merely as a kind of David bravely fighting a hopeless cause.136 England, the only enemy Germany had fought with any bitterness or hatred, seemed to have been devalued in comparison with America just as, earlier, France had been in comparison with England. Italy hardly counted at all, and Russia was its own separate case. All that mattered after 1918 was that America was the actual winner and Germany the loser—but only in relation to America. As painful as the defeat had been, it allowed Germans to imagine themselves as the only European power, the only serious participant in a future European-American duel, and therefore the only legitimate mouthpiece for Europe in a transatlantic dialogue. In sharp contrast to its prewar assertions of power, Germans could thus derive from defeat a claim to a leading moral role in Europe. This aspiration is clearly evident in statements like “Germany may have lost the war militarily, politically, and economically. Germany’s European enemies, however, did not fight for themselves and their part of the world but for the spread of the American economy. That was their victory” and “In defeating us, the New World has defeated all of Europe.”137
Along with Germany’s moral calling came its military and financial independence. In contrast to the Entente, it had conducted the war not on American credit but with its own resources. Even as it was sinking into hyperinflation in 1922, Germany could look on in satisfaction as America coolly presented its former allies with the bill for its services. “That is the worst form of defeat, one that is meted out by a brother in arms,” remarked radical nationalist Hans von Hentig, not without a trace of Schadenfreude. “The German threat has been repulsed at the cost of American vassalage.”138
Germans were not alone in drawing such conclusions; some of the French saw the situation similarly.139 Even with reference to reparations, the issue on which Germany seemed to be most at the mercy of its enemies, Germany could place itself on a par with the United States as a historical subject, whereas the nations on the receiving end of reparations were mere objects. Were they not obliged to first extract from Germany what they owed Washington, even if they tried to conceal that fact from themselves with the optimistic slogan “Germany will pay”? Were not the nations of the Entente thus the victims of a new two-front war, this one financial? Or to put it metaphorically, were they not the chaff caught between the millstones of Germany and America?
Such fantasies were a transparent way of compensating for Germany’s actual powerlessness, but they pinpointed the victors’ frailties with the sharp eye of defeat. England, which had come through the war physically unscathed, had a comparatively easy time redefining itself in relation to America. The mother country of the former colonies could see itself without any great difficulty as the paternal authority over its traditionless, not very cultivated, but undeniably successful offspring. This possibility was not open to France, which had suffered significant physical damage as the actual locus of the fighting. Moreover, the war had scarcely lived up to the expectations of revanche that the French had nurtured for forty years. The idea of revanche implied subduing Germany in a one-on-one contest. France, however, had merely been part of a victorious coalition that owed its triumph to the Americans. The image with which France resolved its ideological desperation and redefined its relationship to America was that of the beloved, cherished for her own sake. The United States, in this logic, had not entered the war in 1917 out of national interest but because it had been so enamored of French universal human rights, the French Revolution, and French civilization. America was thus the young hero who had rescued Marianne from the German defilers. As America’s beloved, France had no cause to see American help as an encroachment on its autonomy—on the contrary, Washington’s intervention was a belatedly returned favor for France’s having supported American independence in 1776: General Pershing was the American revanche, in the positive sense, for Lafayette. But the romance ended there. In Les américains chez nous, a popular play by Eugène Brieux staged in 1920, a group of firemen extinguish a blaze in a grand manor house and promptly move into the lord’s living room, usurping his place.140
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AMERICA’S EMERGENCE AS the new world power in 1918 did not come as a surprise to those who had been following global political developments since the turn of the century. Politically and militarily, America had already challenged European hegemony in 1898 with its lightning-quick victory over Spain. But as its relatively small volunteer army attested, the military was only an ancillary part of America’s real power. Its position resembled that of Great Britain a century earlier. Both countries relied far less on their armed forces than on their capacity for economic and technological innovation. Just as the English monopoly on industry proceeded from the first Industrial Revolution, the United States’s world dominance after 1900 was based very much on the second.
In these years, the European image of America was rapidly transformed from one of Indians, woodsmen, primeval forests, and empty spaces that sheltered the outcasts of the Old World into a new iconography of skyscrapers, automobile traffic, slaughterhouses, refrigerators, gramophones, telephones, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and conveyor belts spewing out thousands of such products a day, even an hour, with millionaire entrepreneurs guiding and directing it all. While books like The Leatherstocking Tales and Moby-Dick were cherished for their nostalgic view of an old America, the industrial novels of Upton Sinclair exerted a far stronger influence over Europeans and were more widely read. Books and articles by European authors about the brand-new New World were also consumed voraciously, though their titles left no doubt about the perceived threat. (Typical examples included American Energy, The American Challenge, American World Power, American Danger, and The American Future.)141 Finally, as the neologisms Americanization and Americanism began to enter daily speech, the word America ceased to refer simply to a place but increasingly took on negative connotations: materialistic, nouveau riche, uncultivated, tasteless, and lacking in proportion.142
European cultural critics barely scratched the surface of the new image of America, adding little to what Tocqueville had written nearly a century before. European economists, entrepreneurs, and engineers, however, made more progress toward identifying the methods they suspected had facilitated America’s sudden leap to prominence. These methods, known collectively as “scientific management” or “Taylorism,” grew out of a theory of industrial rationalization developed by Frederick W. Taylor. The fascination Taylor exerted is difficult to overestimate. To call him, as one historian does, the Darwin of work organization whose historic achievement was to “separate thought and work” is to sum up only half of his influence.143 In fact, Taylor reconceived all aspects of the production process—work, machines, materials, and organization—as part of a production flow, or, as it soon became known, the assembly line. Once this transformation had been achieved, industrial efficiency and “productivity” grew beyond the wildest dreams of economists and technicians alike.
Europeans first became aware of the specter of American mass production around 1900, and the three leading European nations responded in very different fashion. England had the easiest time adjusting to the new economic power relations. The old English antipathies toward America had long since given way to solidarity with their Anglo-Saxon cousins against Germans, Latins, and Slavs. The idea of England as the brain and will—and America as the workbench—of this new alliance was seductive indeed. For France, preoccupied with the direct German threat, developments in America were of secondary importance. If anything, growing American power was viewed less as a challenge to France than as a force that could be harnessed for the struggle against Germany.144 Not surprisingly, the titles of French books about Germany resembled the titles of German books about America: German Force, The German Menace, The German Danger, German Imperialism, German Expansion.145 And ultimately France had no reason to fear America, given the high regard in which prominent Americans from Wall Street to Harvard Square held the French intellect, culture, and way of life and how little they thought of the new Germany.
German reactions to America’s economic ascendency, by contrast, were a mixture of dismay and active interest. Germany’s cultural arrogance was no greater or less than that of the English or French; indeed, according to the German idea of Kultur, all three Western powers represented mere Zivilisation, and any distinctions between the two sides of the Atlantic were merely ones of degree. Nonetheless, Germans felt a special bond with America, one that differed markedly from the conceptions maintained by the English and French. First, the percentage of the American population of German origin was second only to that of English descent, providing the demographic basis for the German fantasy, nurtured since the 1890s, of outmaneuvering the competitor England in the New World.146 Second, there were numerous affinities from recent history: at almost the exact same moment that the Union fought the Civil War, Prussia had unified the German nation in its war against Austria.147 Prussia had openly supported the North, unlike England and France, both of which sympathized with the South. Carl Schurz—an immigrant who became a distinguished Union general, statesman, and publisher in his adoptive homeland—was something of a German Lafayette. Third, the United States and Germany had made their entry into the elite circle of industrial nations, global traders, and world politics at roughly the same point in history. They were both “young, energetic firms,” one contemporary wrote, “who still had to fight for their place” against the “two old trading companies [England and France], whose operations have gradually fallen behind the times.”148
Germany’s feelings of affinity were offset, as in any other fraternal relationship, by the drive to compete and distinguish itself. The competitive urge was expressed in the view that Taylor’s work was essentially not American but German. In a 1914 essay, “German Lessons from America,” Wichard von Moellendorff, a distinguished engineer, approvingly dubbed Taylorism “the militarism of production.”149 And while Germans saw the American skyscraper as a technological achievement, they thought that the form only achieved cultural perfection in their very own Turmhaus (tower house).150 German pretentions thus differed from those in England and France in being focused not exclusively on high culture but also on what was most American about America. While England and France were wisely content to be the model for and the supplier of high and luxury culture (art, literature, fashion, and tradition), Germany presented itself as a brash challenger in the quintessentially American areas of technological and industrial culture. This could hardly fail to have consequences for German-American relations as well as for Germans’ self-image. Starting around 1900, their self-perception oscillated between the two poles of “American technology” and “German culture” without ever yielding the desired synthesis, “German technological culture.” Even before its manifest Americanization in the 1920s, Berlin had been considered the most American of European metropolises. The accelerated tempo of life there, its advanced electrical system, its urban rail network, and its pneumatic postal system, as well as other technological achievements, were only part of the story. What struck European visitors as American about “Parvenupolis” and “Prussian Chicago” was the absence of proportion, the tastelessness, and the “lack of style as a style.”151 Berlin boasted the first imitations of American popular culture on European soil, like the massive Rheingold restaurant, in whose half-neo-Gothic, half-Oriental main hall more than four thousand customers could dine simultaneously at rock-bottom prices. American visitors who found Paris and London alienatingly old-fashioned felt right at home in Berlin.152
Berlin’s conspicuous Americanism—indeed the entire style of imperial Germany, which was perceived as scarcely less vulgar—was treated as an embarrassment by pre-1914 German cultural criticism. Still, few people would have seriously advocated rigid adherence to tradition or a return to the sleepy world condition that existed before the empire. Men like Max Weber, Walther Rathenau, Friedrich Naumann, and Paul Rohrbach saw no alternative to the path Germany had chosen toward becoming a modern industrial world power, though all suspected that the venerated German cultural soul was going to have to pay a price for it. A discussion thus began—and continues to this day—as to whether and how culture should be defended against technological and economic modernization or preserved through integration into such a process.153
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AS LOUDLY AS the United States had announced itself to turn-of-the-century Europe, its tremors were still distant enough to be fully registered only by a relatively small group of specialists. Public opinion and politics were still tuned exclusively to European frequencies, and even places like Berlin were perceived by the rest of Europe less as a transatlantic threat than as a more acute, specifically German one. Until 1917, the American phenomenon was seen only in outline, as if through a translucent veil. By 1918, however, the veil had dropped and with it all concealment. America did not just become visible in the 1920s; it positively swamped the European viewing audience with a wave of products, investments, tourists, fashion, jazz, flappers, and movies—all the exports of American mass culture. Hardly had the European public awakened from the nightmare of the Great War than it sought refuge in the American dream factory. It seemed as if America was soaking up all the moral and hedonistic energies unleashed by the war; whatever was left over was absorbed by the socialist utopia of Russia.
The one arena that remained untouched by these changes was foreign policy. Encouraged by the United States’s withdrawal into isolationism, Europe resumed control of its own affairs. A replay of the prewar era followed, as attempts to integrate Germany into Europe were met with Germany’s attempts to control Europe. Ultimately, of course, the United States would reintervene on behalf of Europe and against Germany. But in the meantime, Germany’s relationship with the new economic giant across the Atlantic continued to evolve in a number of unexpected ways.
The Elevation of the Economy
That the First World War had been not a familiar sort of military conflict but something entirely new quickly became apparent to the participants and was expressed in neologisms like matériel battles and human matériel. From there, it was a short step to the realization that wars were no longer being fought solely by the armed forces but also by the nations that stood behind them. That, however, was the extent of the insight. Military and political leaders lacked sufficient capacity for abstraction to go one step further and see that warfare had become the reciprocal “consumption” of both sides’ total resources, material and human. The art of military strategy, which was based entirely on mobility, had been made obsolete by the new industrial realities of the First World War.
After being locked in trench warfare in the autumn of 1914, military commanders on both sides sought to regain their freedom of movement. They attained it only in 1918, in the last phase of the war, through the tactical innovation of shock troops. The strength of shock troops lay not in mass but in speed and mobility, and their goal was not only to eradicate but to surprise and demoralize the enemy. Along with their mechanical equivalents, the tank and the warplane, shock troops could penetrate systems of defense that, designed to ward off massive frontal attacks, were as helpless against sudden rapid maneuvers as a factory is against an act of sabotage. In light of the subsequent history of the shock troops, the comparison with sabotage appears apt. Both forms in which the shock-troop concept lived on after 1918—as a synonym for troops of thugs within the Fascist movements and as part of Germany’s blitzkrieg strategy at the beginning of World War II—were deliberate attempts to sabotage the workings of highly organized societies and their defensive systems.154
While the military may have taken until 1918 to understand the new quality of industrialized warfare and develop appropriate counterstrategies, the economy was much quicker to make the transition. In all the countries involved in the world war, but particularly in Germany, the civilian economy was coordinated with the military or indeed fully militarized. The mobilization of the German economy, which had been carried out in 1916 as part of the Hindenburg Program, did not just subordinate the civilian sector to the war effort but rather melded domestic production and the military. As the economy reoriented itself to meet military requirements, the army had to tailor its demands to conform to the specific capabilities of German industrial plants. As historian Michael Geyer writes, “The Supreme Command began to approach operations in terms of ‘tasks’ and available ‘resources.’… Battle plans were drawn up accordingly, stressing the capabilities of the assembled weaponry rather than specific principles of strategy.… Technical and instrumental rationality replaced the remnants of a holistic approach to the conduct of war. Operational planning and strategy became a matter of the management of arms.”155 “War socialism,” as this phenomenon was called, was the economic equivalent of the Volksgemeinschaft; the entrepreneur and the warrior, who previously had little in common or were in fact enemies, merged into a new type of engineer and manager. For both sides there were costs in this merger, but for the military they were steeper. What the military lost in heroic stature, the economy gained as a reward for its role in the nation’s defense.
War was the great furnace that forged the military and civilian economy into a single new whole, but it only heated up and hastened a fusion that had already begun. Frederick Taylor and his idea of scientific management had already captivated the imaginations of turn-of-the-century engineers and entrepreneurs. Now, largely unnoticed by the public, a new perspective opened on the future of the industrial system, one that would seriously compete with the Marxist idea of inevitable revolution. In essence, scientific management aimed to replace the industrial entrepreneur with the technocrat, or in Marxist terms, the owner with the manager. Taylor’s prewar adherents had not gone that far, but they did see themselves as a third force between capital and labor, one superior to both in that it represented not class interests but the objectivity of technology itself. Since the state also understood itself as such a third force, an instant affinity developed with the Taylorists. Before the war, a number of thinkers had argued for making technology, like the military, an instrument of the state instead of leaving it in the control of capitalist entrepreneurs. Men like Thorstein Veblen and Charles Steinmetz in the United States and Walther Rathenau and Wichard von Moellendorff in Germany wanted to see technology and industry liberated from the commercial entrepreneur and handed over to engineers, managers, and planners. The world war had made this dream possible, if only for a short time. The question was, what would come next?
The Surrogate Army
At the end of World War I, the victorious nations treated the return to a peacetime economy as a matter of course that no one questioned—not even the organizers of the war effort, who were now out of a job. But in Germany the situation was entirely different. There the Treaty of Versailles was perceived not as a cessation but as a continuation of the conditions of wartime, which differed from the war itself only in the sense that the demilitarized German empire was now a passive object in international politics. But was Germany really powerless? Since the German war machine had relied in equal parts on the military and the economy, the removal of the military component still left the economic arm intact. And since the postwar goal of the Allies—to extract reparations—could be fulfilled only by expanding Germany’s manufacturing base, its economic leaders were put in a position not unlike that of the military high command. For those German politicians who had always viewed the war as an essentially economic endeavor, there was no doubt that German economic might could now be directly brought to bear. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, for instance, called the economy “the strongest basis of current German power” and advocated its strategic deployment “to determine foreign policy along the lines of the one area in which we are still a major force.”156 In so doing, Stresemann demonstrated greater insight into the possibilities for economic Realpolitik than the traditional politicians either on the German right or among the Allied victors.
Suffice it to say that the reparations, which were conceived as an act of retaliation, yielded results quite different from those expected by the statesmen of Versailles, who were ignorant of several key economic principles. John Maynard Keynes, in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, warned the Allied camp—to no effect—that reparation payments in a modern global economy represented a gift of dubious value to their recipients and a potential economic boon to their supplier. Among the nations involved in the First World War, Germany was alone in experiencing an economic upswing in 1919–21 rather than a demobilization recession. This achievement was registered abroad with surprise and envy.157 Since the German mark was no less stable during the first three postwar years than any other currency and since no one anticipated the devaluation and hyperinflation that would commence in 1922, the general picture of Germany abroad was that of an economic superpower beyond all competition. However one views the subsequent fall and then free fall of the mark—as a carefully staged plan or a snowballing catastrophe—the behavior of German economic planners bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the military strategists during the war. Ludendorff had been called a “gambler” whose only strategy consisted of an all-or-nothing insistence on absolute victory.158 So too German policies on inflation were described as a “casino gamble” in which “Germany’s political and economic leadership placed all their bets on one card—that England and America would intervene to save the day and that France would ruin itself in its attempts to enforce its demands.”159
During the war, the traditional military strategy of inflicting maximum damage on the enemy with a minimum of risk had been reversed: with no consideration for one’s losses, war became a matter of bleeding the enemy dry. Just as Germany’s military high command primed the blood pump at Verdun in 1916, so its postwar political leaders pumped out bank notes in the hope that the resulting economic destabilization would pose a threat to the Allies as well and force them to relent.160 There was an undeniable measure of gamesmanship in this strategy. But that had also been true of that quintessential German military strategy the Schlieffen Plan, which advocated bold flanking maneuvers to attack the enemy from behind. The plan, named after a former army chief of the general staff, was theoretically unimpeachable but militarily equivalent to betting on a single card. Could it be that the culture that considered itself the most highly organized, rational, and disciplined in Europe had a secret weakness, an Achilles’ heel or a Siegfried’s back, for taking enormous gambles?
Gustav Stresemann—the man who presided over Germany’s stabilization in the mid-1920s—regarded the economy from the start as a surrogate army to be mobilized in 1919 for the cold war over reparations. But monetary policy was only half of the arsenal. The other half was technology, and the technocrats who volunteered their services did so with an enthusiasm comparable to that of the willing soldiers of 1914. Such economic patriotism was a consequence of the new confidence perceptible among the technocratic intelligentsia since the turn of the century. Members of this new elite considered themselves uniquely capable not just of reducing the unproductive friction of class conflict and of raising productivity but also of remaking the whole of society. This self-conception had been bolstered by their vital role in conducting what Lloyd George trenchantly called an “engineers’ war.” Predictably, then, the technocrats, mirroring the military, rejected any responsibility for defeat and developed a stab-in-the-back legend of their own.161 “Wherever the engineer took an active part in defending the fatherland,” editorialized their trade magazine,
tried and tested technological procedures were blocked by the military leadership.… The German engineer may not be able to claim that we would have won the war without this interference, but he can say that, had the military high command truly recognized the importance of technology and been willing to admit its ignorance in technological and economic affairs, it would have listened far more carefully to the engineers. Then, the engineers could have determined, independently and reliably, what feats technology was capable of achieving.… We have lost militarily but we have not been technologically defeated, since the German military forced German technology to fight with one arm tied behind its back.162
The engineers’ reference to the American army and “its utilization of specialists in the proper areas” as a brilliant counterexample was part of this worldview, which also saw the rediscovery of Frederick W. Taylor.163
The war had not interrupted the spread of scientific management in Germany. On the contrary, methods that had previously been applied at individual firms or in particular industries were extended to the nation as a whole. The state-issued decrees simplifying labor regulations led to the creation of the DIN system, which set uniform standards for all of Germany’s industries. Industrial sites, transportation links, and the allocation of raw materials were centrally coordinated so that decisions were made no longer by individual entrepreneurs but by high-level state or state-controlled agencies called “war collectives,” which were divided up according to industry and assigned to the corresponding departments of the Ministry of Economics. In fact, the Ministry of Economics itself was founded during the war; economic matters had previously been dealt with by a branch of the Ministry of the Interior.
The earliest and probably most significant of the offices within the new ministry was the Department of Raw Materials. Germany’s prewar military and political leaders had not foreseen the possibility of an Allied blockade threatening the supply of raw materials to the German armaments industry. The department, whose founding in August 1914 is usually credited to Walther Rathenau, was in fact the brainchild of his former employee at the electrical firm AEG Wichard von Moellendorff. A devout adherent of Frederick Taylor and scientific management, which he called a “German export from America,” Moellendorff had continued to play a leading role in building the wartime economy. It was he who drafted the Hindenburg Program in 1916 (in a form that called for far more direction from the state than the one actually adopted).164 And it was he who, within the Ministry of Economics, began to examine the problem of how to run the economy after a peace treaty had been concluded.
The war gave a great boost to the technocrats’ sense of themselves as leaders and organizers of the nation: Moellendorff and others like him rose to senior positions in the newly created ministries, offices, departments, and staffs of the war economy, where they were free to do as they pleased. Largely unconstrained by the military leadership, which was interested solely in receiving armament shipments in full and on time, the technocrats enjoyed the sort of organizational independence from capital they could only have dreamt of before the war.
It is no surprise, then, that the idea of a postwar return to dependence on the whims of entrepreneurs did not appeal to them and strengthened their desire to see the exigencies of war prevail in peacetime. This desire furthered their own interest, although they were the last to recognize that fact. Like Johann Plenge, they understood war socialism as the economic manifestation of the Volksgemeinschaft. And since the Volksgemeinschaft was imagined as not just a temporary truce between hostile classes but a lasting achievement of the nation, it followed that the fundamentally altered, “socialized” economy of wartime would continue on after the end of hostilities. During his tenure in the Ministry of Economics, Moellendorff developed a program for a “social economy”—in essence, the continuation of war socialism in peacetime. His plan, as Moellendorff never tired of repeating, was not socialism in the Marxist or Social Democratic sense (“socialism of class interest”) but a national socialism of the sort advocated before 1914 by Friedrich Naumann and his disciple Paul Rohrbach, which, having been exalted by the August experience, was now embraced by the bourgeois middle class under various names—“German,” “Prussian,” or “military” socialism—as the only original, pure form. In this way, the technocratic engineers, organizers, and managers took the leadership role for a new middle class that was defined no longer economically but universalistically. And they were as exemplary in that role as the academic mandarins had been for the old middle class.
As he was developing his ideas, Moellendorff assumed that Germany would win World War I. Germany’s defeat was for him one more reason to retain the wartime economy, or rather to extend it into a “social” one. Since peacetime did not bring a return to normality but instead a continuation of the struggle—an economic cold war aimed at winning the victory in the marketplace that had eluded Germany on the battlefield—the national economy could not be demobilized. On the contrary, it was all the more necessary that the economy fulfill its function as an “instrument of peaceful national liberation.”165 Moellendorff’s definition of Taylorism as “the militarism of production” echoes that belief, as does his characterization of the social economy as a “new national vow of brotherhood.” The idea that national solidarity and technological and economic optimization were mutually reinforcing was expressed by Moellendorff in 1919. The social economy, he said, was the “form of economy in which awareness of the nation’s impoverishment following the lost war unites all individual economic actors in the firm commitment to rebuild the nation as quickly as possible without wasting strength and resources.”166 The losses that needed to be addressed were reparations and the ceded territories, with their plentiful raw materials. Only the social economy could make up for these shortfalls since only it—like its predecessor, the wartime economy—was capable of applying Taylor’s scientific management on a national scale, thereby decisively raising productivity. In other words, social economy and Taylorism were one and the same thing: socialized Taylorism and Taylorized socialism. Once profits were redirected from entrepreneurs to the nation, Taylorism was relieved of the stigma it bore before the war as a mere means for maximizing capitalist exploitation. Gustav Winter, the most widely read post-1918 popularizer of Taylorism, compared its potential to the achievements of the wartime economy: “Just as during the war we Germans extracted precious ammonia from the atmosphere, we will now manufacture the equivalent of billions [needed for reparations] out of thin air.”167 Since the term “equivalent of billions” was used from 1918 to 1923 almost exclusively in the context of reparations payments and currency devaluation—with the former assumed to have caused the latter—increases in productivity seemed to be the only effective means of offsetting inflation. Winter even demanded that Taylorism be written into law to guarantee that productivity would rise sufficiently to combat the effects of currency devaluation.168
The promotion of Taylorism as the national dogma of recovery and salvation was not an exclusively German phenomenon. In France and England, the critical year of 1917 saw similar proposals. These, however, disappeared immediately after the Allied victory.169 Only in Italy and Russia, the two other nonwinners, did Taylorism exert a postwar influence comparable in duration and intensity to that in Germany—hence Mussolini’s enthusiasm for America and Lenin’s pronouncement on scientific management stating that the young Soviet republic had to “adopt at any price everything valuable that science and technology have achieved in this area.”170
The First Shift: From Taylorism to Fordism
The concept of social economy may have been a salvation theology for the technocrats, but for the public at large it had little resonance. After Germany’s collapse, the masses could no longer be won over for grand ideological projects, whether conceived as national or universal. Walther Rathenau learned this firsthand in October 1918 with his call for a popular uprising, as did the Spartacists in January 1919 with their attempted Communist revolution. The drive for a social economy according to the principles of Taylorism also failed to attract mass support because it was too reminiscent of calls for folk community, which had been discredited by four years of war, and brought back memories of wartime privation as well as the negative image of Taylor as the Dr. Frankenstein of human labor. The “military aroma” of all planned economies blocked any enthusiasm for this one.”171
It quickly became apparent that the idea of social economy never had much of a chance in the postwar economic reality. A few days after Germany’s collapse, representatives of labor and business agreed on a compromise addressing both of their interests: higher wages and shorter working hours in return for the preservation of private property. Moreover, both agreed that the state should not interfere in economic affairs. With Moellendorff’s departure in 1919 from the Ministry of Economics, the social economy disappeared from the political agenda and returned to the obscure circles of the technocratic intelligentsia, where the reasons for its failure were discussed with great passion and not a small amount of pathos until the hyperinflation of 1923 challenged its relevance even there.
In 1924, after the imposition of currency reform, the unfolding drama of Weimar Germany began a new act entitled “Stabilization.” In it, the roles of the social economy and Taylorism—both unpopular with the audience—were scrapped, replaced by a new part that effectively promised to deliver everything the other two, despite their best attempts, had failed to do. This new character was named after the American engineer and auto manufacturer Henry Ford.
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FRANZ WESTERMANN, A German engineer traveling through the United States in 1926, recorded his impressions of a memorable visit to Highland Park (Detroit) and River Rouge: “I have long gone through life with perceptive eyes, a thinking soul, and an open heart,” he wrote, “enthusiastic about everything beautiful, be it nature, art, sport, or productivity. Nonetheless, my most powerful experience was a visit to the Ford works, that gigantic production facility … which not only impresses the eyes by its size and the manner of its technical construction, but whose living spirit is palpably present to such a degree that it simply draws people into its orbit.”172
The change in German mentality between late 1923 and early 1924 could not have been more dramatic. Whereas Frederick Taylor had been known as a technological revolutionary since the turn of the century, the name of the man who had actually revolutionized the automobile industry remained obscure. In late 1922, almost a decade after assembly-line production of the Model T had begun, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung introduced Ford to its readership under the headline “Curiosities from America.” He was described as a kind of charlatan: “A relatively uneducated man full of futile, harebrained ideas for world salvation,” the article read, “a personality not … to be compared to the old capitalist barons Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc.,… a ‘loudmouth’ who supposedly produces 2,000 of his automobiles a day.”173 In the technical journals, Henry Ford was not even the object of scorn. His name simply did not appear before 1924.
What happened next is history. The German edition of Ford’s autobiography was published in November 1923, at the very moment the German mark was stabilized. The book became an overnight best-seller, and Ford himself in the following decades became the messiah of the new religion of mass production. Ford’s message was twofold: exploitation, the moral and physical burden that had plagued industry since its inception, had to be removed; and the division of industrial life into two halves, production and consumption, work and leisure, had to be eradicated. Fordism transformed industry into a gigantic wish-fulfillment machine, with the conveyor belt uniting production and consumption, work and leisure into a single system of circulation. The workers who staffed it were to be paid well enough to become viable consumers, thereby permitting the manufacture of goods in yet greater numbers and at lower prices. This, in turn, would stimulate production, further increasing purchasing power, consumption, and hence production in an ascending spiral. Service, Ford’s term for the entire process, was a system that united employee, entrepreneur, and consumer, supposedly rendering the concept of exploitation obsolete. It represented socialization without socialism—or “white socialism,” as Fordism was also known. German engineers and journalists saw Ford’s factories not as halls of industry but as a natural attraction, a great river of production from which workers, like the fisherman and poet in Karl Marx’s utopian vision of perfect socialism, could extract profit and amusement in equal measure. The engineer Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld characterized the assembly-line worker as someone who, “when he looks up- or downstream from his post, receives a vivid impression of how his rationally limited role contributes to a mighty total work.”174 Metaphors of games, sports, and dances were as popular as comparisons to nature. “The workers walk alongside their work, often backwards,” wrote one Ford admirer. “The impression is almost one of sports, like the ‘legwork’ of a boxer.”175
The essence and the appeal of Fordism for the zeitgeist of the 1920s represented a “synthesis,” that is, the opposite of everything that made Taylor both famous and notorious. Whereas Taylorism broke down “organic” labor into its smallest units and relentlessly reduced the worker to a cog in the machine, Fordism appeared to be the great unifier. The assembly line, as Gottl-Ottlilienfeld and others described it, had restored the old unity of labor, indeed raised it to a higher level. It remains one of the great psychological ironies of the stabilization period that Ford, who essentially just took Taylor’s principles to their logical extension, became a canonical figure, while Taylor sank into obscurity. Even Taylor’s adherents among the technocratic intelligentsia either fell into resigned silence—like Moellendorff—or renounced their allegiance and transferred their loyalties to the new star. As long as the infatuation lasted, those few critics who pointed out that Fordism was hardly more than Taylorism with a conveyor belt found no audience. One critic attributed Ford’s success to the promises of contentment that accompanied the production and distribution process. According to him, Henry Ford’s main innovation was “not a Detroit factory of cars, but a Detroit factory of souls.”176
Fordian promises of contentment were, however, more than mere advertising; they were part of that novel phenomenon propaganda. Just as propaganda had been directed toward the war effort, it was now turned back on the economy, enriched by the psychological insights gained in the war. Hopes for salvation were shifted from the nation to the economy, which was now the provider of dream-fulfilling, labor-saving appliances—above all else, the Ford automobile. Since propaganda can only awaken in its audience thoughts that are already present in some form, the question arises: What was the source of the quasi-religious readiness and faith, so astonishing in hindsight, with which both the general public and small circles of technocrats in Germany embraced Fordism?
The Dance Floor of Inflation and the Girl Machine
Times of crisis often witness eruptions of dance fever. As the dance epidemics of the late Middle Ages make clear, a threat to one’s existence can produce an obsessive enjoyment of life. Contemporary accounts of postwar Berlin repeatedly mention an ostensibly pathological “dance mania,” “dance craze,” and “dance epidemic.” The French author of one article, entitled “Berlin Amuses Itself,” noted with disbelief that even the invitation to a memorial service for the murdered Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht stated that there would be dancing.177 During the Spartacist uprising of 1919, Ernst Troeltsch thought it worth remarking that “the theaters are open as always and attracting their usual public, who dodge bullets along the way.… Wherever possible, people go dancing.”178
The dance phenomenon is usually explained as a cathartic release of drives that have been repressed during war. If so, the German dance mania represents part of a more general erotic explosion, including everything from prostitution to free love to new women’s fashions that bared the leg and shoulders, as well as substitutes like gambling or taking drugs. Perhaps dancing’s appeal can be explained by the fact that it occupied a middle position in the sliding scale of sexual sublimation. But the decisive reason for its popularity in Weimar Germany was its break with the past: the only feature the popular dances of Weimar shared with the prewar variety was the necessity for a partner. Otherwise postwar dance was emphatically an American import. Dances were no longer based on prescribed steps and precisely circumscribed movements of the legs, arms, and upper body. Instead, popular favorites like the jazz and the shimmy set the body stamping, swinging, and swaying to a new rhythm, transferring the center of motor activity from the legs to the hips, the waist, and the shoulders. From there, the movements took over the whole body and then the mind—a state experienced as a form of intoxication. People spoke of musical groups “getting you drunk without alcohol” and inducing a trancelike sensation. “It’s a great feeling to abandon yourself to the rhythm, having turned off the rational mind and the will,” one observer recalled, “as though after a night of staying awake you’re finally allowed to fall asleep.”179
There was no doubt that the “sleepless night” referred to the old regime. The political significance of the jazz and the shimmy was to eradicate “any hint of dignity, correct bearing, trimness, and starched collars.” As one wag remarked, “If the kaiser had jazz-danced, none of this [war and defeat] would ever have happened.”180 Jazz dances were “the revolution, the expressionism, the Bolshevism of the ballroom.”181 Ever since the ascendance of the waltz after the French Revolution, new popular dance styles had been recognized as the symbolic lifting of old constraints, which were danced off, danced out, and danced to death. The ecstatic jazz dances of the 1920s were, as one contemporary observed, “a reaction against troops marching in straight lines, against the military itself. The fact that the rows of soldiers consisted exclusively of men dictated the response of couples doing jazz dances: man and woman, released from the straight line, moved in circles. The straight line was directed toward battle and death, the circle toward love and procreation.”182
Weimar critic Siegfried Kracauer saw more than just eroticism in the jazz dances of the early postwar years. Jazz, by which Kracauer meant the music as much as the dancing, was “the present tense and nothing else. A present that had turned its back on the war and was concerned only with itself.… The feeling of life it exuded was one of unencumbered physicality. The fact that it affirmed the moment, had no tradition, and was without any consequence explains its ascendance. It was only fair that, since jazz had freed the world from the curse of time and consciousness, the world should deliver itself up to jazz unconsciously and without limitation.”183
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SIMILAR TRANSFORMATIVE DEVELOPMENTS were occurring in society at large. Emil Lederer, an economist and disciple of Max Weber’s, described the economic equivalent of the erotic freedom immediately after the end of the war: “If consumers had up to this point restrained themselves somewhat, recalling the earlier value of money and saving what they could … so as to invest wisely after the happy conclusion to the war, consumer excess now knew no bounds.”184 These lines were written in 1920, as the devaluation of the mark was still proceeding at the tempo of a slow fox trot. Since inflation was accompanied by an economic upswing, full employment, and an availability of products unknown since 1914, its catastrophic potential went unrecognized. On the contrary, people perceived the movement of inflation as lively and stimulating, like a long flirtation with occasional, not unpleasant feelings of giddiness. Indeed, the years 1919–22 can be seen as an economic “dreamland” following the political one that lasted from November 1918 to May 1919. It was only after this cheerful swinging motion had turned into a free fall that people wakened to the trauma of hyperinflation.
The historian Jürgen von Kruedener points out that, in the public mind, the military collapse of 1918 and the complete devaluation of the German mark in 1923 blended into a single trauma of defeat and that the currency catastrophe was ultimately more responsible for the depth of the trauma than the military debacle.185 In many ways, the economic buoyancy of 1919–21 was reminiscent of the military and political euphoria after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty and before the beginning of the spring offensive of 1918. Both times, Germans were confronted with the spectacle of what they saw as reality—military victory, the blossoming economy—dissolving into thin air. The analogy can be taken still further since in neither case was the demise physically apparent, as it was on the battlefields of Flanders and northern France; rather, they both left German society eerily intact. With no perceptible ruins or physical wounds to make the trauma concrete, the German perception of reality itself became unbalanced. Vertigo became the dominant sensation of and metaphor for the period of hyperinflation. In 1921, Heinrich Mann, noting the profusion of fairgrounds and cheap cafés popping up in the center of Berlin, spoke of a “compulsive desire for vertiginous intoxication.” In 1939, Sebastian Haffner, looking back on the hyperinflation of 1923, wrote: “An entire German generation had a spiritual organ removed: an organ that gives human beings constancy, balance, even gravity, and that expresses itself, depending on the individual, as conscience, reason, the wisdom of experience, fidelity to principles, morality, and piety. A whole generation back then learned, or at least thought it had learned, how to live without any ballast.”186
Vertigo results from the loss of equilibrium. Affecting the body and the mind in equal measure, it makes the individual stagger and sway without direction or orientation, and leaves him or her incapable of maneuvering, passive. But the German word for vertigo, Schwindel, has a second, no less important meaning: swindle. People who discover that they have been swindled lose trust in the ground beneath their feet. The two great swindles in this sense were the call for an armistice in October 1918 and the hyperinflation of November 1923, and in both instances the confidence man was the state itself.187 If this bastion of reliability and security could no longer be trusted, an abyss of amorality opened up, as was evident in the lyrics to a hit song during the period of hyperinflation: “We’ll drink poor Grandma out of her tiny house.” The thesis that inflation was the source of the nihilism that led directly to National Socialism seems quite plausible here. Elias Canetti, for instance, writes:
In its treatment of the Jews National Socialism repeated the process of inflation with great precision. First they were attacked as wicked and dangerous, as enemies; then they were more and more depreciated; then, there not being enough in Germany itself, those in the conquered territories were gathered in; and finally they were treated literally as vermin, to be destroyed with impunity by the million. The world is still horrified and shaken by the fact that the Germans could go so far; that they either participated in a crime of such magnitude, or conived at it, or ignored it. It might not have been possible to get them to do so if, a few years before, they had not been through an inflation during which the Mark fell to a billionth of its former value. It was this inflation, as a crowd experience, which they shifted on to the Jews.188
In the light of Schwindel’s dual meaning, German postwar dance mania takes on an added dimension. The dance craze may have served not only to discharge frustrated erotic desire but also to act out the vertigo that the various collapses had produced in society. The jazz and the shimmy reproduced this seemingly infinite dizziness, articulating and absorbing it in cultural form. The vertigo that seized society from 1919 to 1923 was simply “danced off” and “danced out,” much as the stresses of revolutionary, inflationary Paris had been waltzed away in the 1790s.189 The dance epidemic represented both pathology and therapy in one.190
Weimar Germany’s embrace of an American-style economy after 1924 can thus be seen as a desire for stability after an exhilarating but perilous roller-coaster ride. Many historians of the Weimar Republic note that the stabilization of the currency in 1924 was accompanied by an equally abrupt turnaround in cultural mentality. Up until 1923, expressionism had set the aesthetic tone; as of 1924, the New Objectivity, which prided itself on clinical sobriety, assumed that role. A similar shift can be observed in dance fashions. The erotically charged dances for couples did not disappear—indeed their popularity increased—but they were no longer seen as a manifestation of the zeitgeist. Another dance genre took their place: the show dancing of “troops” of young female dancers, known in Germany as Girls. This genre was distinguished by the near-military discipline and precision of the Girls, who performed as a single rhythmic body, or, as they were often described by contemporaries, as a “dance machine.” The military associations, which were already present in the Girl troops’ historical predecessor, the variety or operetta revue, were now both underscored (with coordinated movements, costume uniforms, and boots) and ironically undercut (with an erotic minimum of clothing, and bare legs and shoulders). In this respect, the show dancing of the Girl troops—like the fox trot, the jazz, and the shimmy, represented a release from and a dancing off of the military order of the war years. At the same time, though, it also entailed a physical reimposition of discipline on a world that had fallen apart because of inflation. Inflation, after all, was often pictorially represented as a pernicious femininity, unloosed from all restraints, that stirred up and broke down patriarchal, ordered value relations in a “witches’ dance” or “witches’ Sabbath.”191
Contemporary cultural critics, however, identified yet another aspect of the “girl machine.” “From the Girls,” wrote industrial psychologist Fritz Giese, “we learn the value of mass conformity, the idea of the elevated average, in contrast to exaggerated eccentricity, which perhaps individualizes the individual to an extent he cannot bear.”192 Giese, the author of the book Girlkultur, published in 1925, was among the most thoughtful adherents of Fordian standardization and mass production, and understood the psychological and cultural reeducation that those phenomena required.193 For Giese, the appeal of the Girl troops, whose very name evoked America, was the same as that of the workers “dancing” along Ford’s assembly lines. In contrast to their strained and cramped European colleagues, who followed an externally imposed regimen, the Girls moved to their own rhythms since their “collective soul spirit” (Giese’s term) recognized no distinction between the individual, the collective, and technology. Girls were “dance machines who never lapsed into military drills or zombielike obedience. The guiding thought was not the compulsion to obey but the idea of technology as something automatically collective.”194
Giese’s assertion that the Girl performances were “not a show but a production” placed them on the same level as sports, in which effort and pleasure were united, in contrast to work, which lacked such unity (unless it had been Fordized).195 The assembly line in Ford’s factories appeared to many to be effortless, light, playful, dancelike, and athletic, and the entire facility resembled “a symphony, a bacchanal of work, an entirely closed whole, a single otherworldly machine.”196 During the period of stability and prosperity, the dancers in the “girl machine,” Giese wrote, were seen to be engaged in “work as a sports achievement” similar to that taking place on the assembly lines.197 They were the apotheosis of the Fordian promise of salvation. Looking back from the vantage point of the Depression, Siegfried Kracauer had a hallucinatory vision of dancing Girls as “the fleshly metaphor for a blossoming economy”:
When they formed a line, moving up and down, they provided a glowing depiction of the advantages of the conveyor belt. When they stamped their feet in double time, it sounded like: “Business, business.” When they kicked their legs with mathematical precision, they were joyously affirming the progress made by rationalization. And when they repeated the same moves without any break in their ranks, an uninterrupted line of automobiles could be seen gliding from the factories out into the world, and one became convinced that the happy days would never end. Their faces were rouged with an optimism that immediately cut off any opposition to the economic developments, and the squeals of delight that issued from them in carefully calculated intervals praised the glory of this sort of existence always anew.198
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THE NUMBER OF neologisms created between 1924 and 1929 shows that the Girl phenomenon transcended dance and even Fordism. Linguistic creations like “girl culture,” “girl idea,” “girl problem,” “girlification,” and “girlism” point to an underlying philosophy or psychology of gender.199 In the decade following the First World War, the stereotype of the emancipated single young woman became an icon of the international zeitgeist, with France boasting its garçonne and Italy its ragazza. The use of the English word for the German equivalent seems all the more baffling since women of this type in America were called “flappers,” not “girls.” The prototypical flapper was a slim woman of about twenty whose clothing deemphasized her feminine curves (no bust, no hips) while exposing her healthy-looking, sporty legs, arms, and shoulders. Her favored hairstyle and headgear was noticeably influenced by the military: short hair and helmetlike hats. Ironically, the original form of the flapper hat was not the flat helmet of the American and British infantry but the rounded one of the German army, which covered most of the head, including the back of the neck and the forehead, leaving only the face free.200 In her relations with men, the flapper displayed simultaneously an “ostentatiously sexless camaraderie” and an unromantic sexuality.201 The androgynous look of the flappers paraded the gender-equalizing role of the war as well as the subsequent leap into modern-day equality of the sexes.
The Girl style of the 1920s was a trend in fashion and behavior throughout the West, but only in Germany did it inspire theoretical interpretations. Were Girlismus and Girlisierung simply inadvertent self-parodies of the German obsession with theorizing, or do they point up an actual instance of German exceptionalism? The most obvious exceptional aspect of post-1918 German relations between the sexes was that the men were not returning from war as victors. The Girl phenomenon might thus be read as a gendered version of the stab-in-the-back legend, the aim of which was to enable men to save face. The androgyny of the Girls spared men the humiliating prospect of coming back to their women as losers. Nonetheless, losers they were, and while winners can dictate their will, losers must accommodate. German “girlism” of the 1920s was the result of such accommodation, reflecting a shift in power relations in favor of women. At the same time, the blow was softened for men, who could understand the phenomenon as American, not German—in other words, as springing from the victors. Like a consolation prize, the Girl took the place of the goddess of victory in the postwar German psyche.202 In a way, the comfort offered by “girlism” was similar to the downsizing of Germany’s prewar aspirations for a place in the sun to the more modest postwar wish to bask in the light of the radiant eye on the back of the American dollar bill. It also called to mind the modification, in the 1920s, of Germany’s ambition to be a world power into the more humble longing to make Berlin into a world city.
The World City
German contains more constructions with the word world than any other European language.203 Goethe wrote of “world literature” and Kant of “worldviews.” Hegel’s “world spirit,” Schelling’s “world soul,” and Fichte’s “world will” have become inextricably identified with their creators, while the progenitors of “world plan,” “world circle,” “world trade,” “world transport,” “world history,” “men of the world,” “world citizen,” “world power,” “world inferno,” and even “world war” are lost to history. Goethe was already speaking of a “world city” during his visit to Rome in 1787. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, “world city” had served to designate great metropolises such as London and Paris. In 1824, for example, the geographer Carl Ritter wrote of Paris: “A world city like this is the artificial product of history, the most artificial fruit that the earth brings forth, the most intricate image of the civilization of a people.”204
The German usage of the word world (Welt) contained a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, it referred to the global world opened up in the sixteenth century, in whose conquest and division the old German empire had played no part. On the other hand, it called to mind medieval universalism, which Germany saw itself as embodying. This dual sense was the origin of the inferiority-superiority complex that would make itself particularly evident in relation to what would become the German capital. If a city was capable of embodying universalism, it was Rome or, perhaps for the post-1800 German intelligentsia, Weimar, but certainly not Berlin.
Before 1871, no one would have thought of comparing the Prussian royal residence and garrison site to cities like London or Paris. With the founding of the empire, however, the new capital suddenly found itself in the same company as those European metropolises. Moreover, the decision in 1890 to transform Germany into a world power gave the question of Berlin’s status a new urgency, since a global power was unimaginable without a metropolis. Nevertheless, Berlin, as even Wilhelm II remarked in 1896 in connection with plans for a World’s Fair there, simply could not compare with London or Paris in historical importance, cosmopolitanism, population, or grandeur. The only option for Germans was therefore to redefine “world city” so that their capital would fit the bill.
That is what they did in the two decades before World War I. A new understanding of the world city evolved whose dimensions and scope were no longer those of London and Paris but of New York and Chicago. Underlying this shift was the conviction that, while the classical European capitals were no doubt grand historical monuments, they were as useless in the modern global economy as gigantic open-air museums. Long before Le Corbusier, who spent the prewar years as an architect in Berlin and coined the phrase living machine, Berlin architects, city planners, and transportation managers developed the idea of the world city as a functional construct of the global economy. World cities were those into which the international traffic in goods and money flowed, and the younger and more dynamic they were the more “worldly” they could be considered. With the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the promoters of Berlin had a model to follow. Defined as “Chicago on the Spree” (Walther Rathenau, referring to the river that flows through the city), the “clearinghouse of the global German economy” (Martin Mächler), and the “main junction of world trade” (Georg Simmel), Berlin appeared to be a world city in its prime compared with London and Paris, which were of interest only to tourists.205
* * *
GERMANY’S DEFEAT IN 1918 did not sweep aside Berlin’s aspirations but rather reaffirmed them, much as Waterloo validated nineteenth-century Paris as the undisputed mecca of European civilization. The world does not quickly forget a capital that once threatened it and, conversely, that capital develops a hypersensitive, almost paranoid need to promote its own image. This need was abundantly clear in the post-1918 development of Berlin as a technological, functionalist center. Urban planners relentlessly extended the city’s reach, establishing, for example, Greater Berlin as the central administrative unit in 1919 and pushing through numerous suburban development and transportation projects during the 1920s. At the same time, the world city ceased to be an exclusively infrastructural idea and began to develop theatrical aspirations. Martin Wagner, the man responsible for city planning in the 1920s, demanded that Berlin’s “leading character as a world city” be made visible in an “appearance befitting a world city.” This transformation would not occur on its own, he hastened to add: “The world city of Berlin needs a director.”206 In 1929, Wagner declared that the first act in this urban drama would be the completion of Alexanderplatz as a “world city square.” Its purpose, however, would be not so much to provide an architectural representation of Berlin’s “cosmopolitan spirit” as to embody the city’s role as “a crossroads for a whole transportation network.”207 Wagner’s vision of Alexanderplatz at once distilled and monumentalized the notion of the world city as a global traffic junction.
Although no director appeared on the scene, there were a score of writers applying themselves to the task of depicting Berlin as a world city. They, too, saw its defining feature as international traffic; they were primarily fascinated, however, not by the carefully directed stream of automobiles and streetcars flowing through the urban machine but by the mass traffic jam, by chaos as the most advanced form of movement. The world city square for the cosmopolitan Berlin feuilleton was Potsdamerplatz, whose chaotic traffic figured in article after article. Even today, devotees of Potsdamerplatz remain convinced that it was, if not the busiest traffic circle in Europe, at least comparable to Piccadilly Circus and the place de l’Opéra, perhaps even to Times Square. Whatever the case, it isn’t hard to recognize in the Potsdamerplatz articles of the 1920s the venerable literary trope of metropolitan chaos, which began in seventeenth-century travel reports from Paris and London and had never ceased to remind Germans of their embarrassing backwardness. Germany’s pride in the chaos of Potsdamerplatz was a tentative expression of satisfaction at having finally arrived at the point where others had been for nearly two hundred years. The satirist Kurt Tucholsky summed up the new Berlin obsession in perceptively sarcastic fashion: “When you arrive in Berlin, people will come up to you and ask pleadingly: ‘Don’t you think our traffic is overwhelming?’”208
The Second Shift: From Fordism to Rationalization
Historically, the vanquished tend to find self-serving explanations for why following the victor’s model is so crucial. In Fordized Germany, the rationale went: “Ford’s methodology is nothing more than the reawakening of the Prussian German ethic of service and work.”209 The mere imitation of Fordism, however, was never going to compensate for the inferiority complex Germany bore after being defeated in World War I, in part by America’s manifest technological and economic superiority. An intellectual foundation was required that contrasted America’s material productivity with Germany’s intellectual and cultural power. This was possible only by promoting an economic concept free of American associations.
In theory, Johann Plenge’s concept of organization could have been revived for this purpose but, like Taylorism, it was “semantically overburdened,” discredited by its link to Germany’s defeat.210 The concept of “rationalization” carried no such burden. In 1908, when Max Weber had used the term as an approximate synonym for “scientific management,” it had attracted little interest. Taylor’s teachings were enjoying such resonance among the technocratic intelligentsia that no one felt the need for alternatives.211 It was only after Fordism had transformed the technology debate into a broad popular discussion (relegating Taylorism, as we have seen, to obscurity), that rationalization’s time finally came. As social historian Mary Nolan points out, rationalization was attractive because it was a general concept that signified both everything and nothing and because it “could at one and the same time incorporate, transcend, and Germanize various versions of Americanism.”212 Rationalization became the idealistic sum of everything embodied materially by Fordism, just as liberty, equality, and fraternity represented for eighteenth-century France the idealistic culmination of the practical right to ply the trade of one’s choice.
The definition put forward by the National Board for Economic Efficiency (Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit), the main administrative body responsible for rationalization, still resonates with the Fordian promise of happiness as an endless increase in production and pleasure: “Rationalization is the identification and application of all means offered by technology and planned organization for increasing economic competitiveness. Its main goal is an improvement of the standard of living by reductions in the price, increases in the availability, and improvements in the quality of consumer goods.”213 To foreign observers, however, the German rationalization movement of 1925–29 seemed a “popular cult,” a “national effort,” an “ardor of faith,” and an example of “almost apostolic fervor that could be compared in fanatical intensity to nineteenth-century Saint-Simonism and twentieth-century Bolshevism.”214 German commentators dubbed rationalization the “evangelism of the technological-social services”; phrases such as “magic word,” “formula for salvation,” and “formula for the general good” were widely used.215 The psychology underlying the term is illustrated by the managerial scientist Eugen Schmalenbach’s explanation of its appeal: “After four years of war and five years of inflation—a full decade of economic chaos—the whole world longs for a return to a healthy and orderly economy. And once the feeling ‘If only we had a stable, orderly, healthy economy’ is present, then the desire for order fosters a certain receptiveness to the word that signifies that order.… The word best corresponding to this desire has become the word of salvation.”216
The promise of salvation extended beyond the economy. Herbert Hinneberg, director of the National Board for Economic Efficiency, argued that rationalization was a “slogan that stands for everything needed to restore balance.”217 Economic stabilization was thus characterized as part of an all-encompassing renewal of culture, everyday life, and society. Rationalization contained something of all the ideas about modernization and happiness that were under discussion in the 1920s. Small wonder then that its economic and technological side receded into the background. With only a few exceptions, such as the mining, steel, and chemical industries, the rationalization of the German economy in the 1920s lagged far behind the rhetoric. Even though rationalization was being envisioned and sometimes even initiated in a variety of areas—from sexuality to city planning, from the household to the managerial office, and from public transportation to leisure activities—only 1 percent of industry was actually rationalized along Ford’s and Taylor’s lines.218 Robert A. Brady, the author of an influential American study of the German rationalization movement published in 1933, described the tremendous expectations behind what he called the “New Enlightenment” movement: “Rationalized production was to be followed by rationalized distribution, and this by rationalized consumption. Rationalization was somehow to supply the ‘efficiency’ key to orderly social and individual life; subscription and adherence to its working codes would free the round of productive and leisure activities from lag, leak, and friction, from waste and from the gravamen of social mal-adjustment to personal contumely.”219
Up to this point, rationalization’s reception in Germany was an overblown response to what was in fact a rather prosaic economic and technological process. In the late 1920s, however, people in France, England, and even the United States also suddenly discarded the terms Fordism and scientific management in favor of rationalization. “This neologism, which has come to us from Germany,” one French paper editorialized, “can be found not only in technical trade magazines but in the daily press. It is omnipresent.”220 In a book published the same year, the English economic theoretician L. Urwick declared rationalization “a revolution in world economic thinking.” Another English economist had earlier concluded that it was “impossible to survey the international economic situation without being convinced that what has been accomplished in Germany will be attempted in every country where similar industrial problems have to be faced.”221 And earlier still, in 1927, a congress convened by the League of Nations to examine the state of the global economy had discussed rationalization as part of its official program and passed a resolution calling on governments, international economic organizations, and world public opinion to put principles of rationalization into practice.
How did the German rationalization movement gain its illustrious international reputation given its rather modest successes in the areas of management and technology? One reason was Germany’s improved image in the wake of the Locarno Pact of 1925, which made possible its return to the European fold. Along with the scaled-down tension in foreign policy, there was a psychological and ideological relaxation of hostilities. To all appearances, the German turn toward rationalization amounted to a turn away from militarism. The replacement of the authoritarian homo militaris with the liberal homo oeconomicus seemed to signal Germany’s acceptance of liberal Western values and, with it, the achievement of Wilson’s wartime aims. While recognizing the German origins of the concept of rationalization, the victors of 1918 could see themselves as the fathers without whom the child would never have been born.
To make the picture even rosier, the child turned out to be a perfectly behaved little boy. The massive infrastructure renewal projects Germany undertook from 1925 to 1929 in the name of rationalization—from urban and traffic planning to social and health policies—made the country seem like a vast laboratory of modernism. Berlin, even more than Detroit, came to represent a gigantic, smoothly running Fordian machine, the ideal prized by all nations with a faith in modernity. Rationalization appeared to be without peer both as a method of modernization and as a means to generate the capital required, a technological-economic perpetuum mobile that promised not only to make the American dream come true in Europe but to Europeanize the dream itself. Suppressed from consciousness was the fact that these ends were achieved least through rationalization and most by dint of American credit, which flowed freely into the Old World during those years.
* * *
FROM 1929 TO 1932, as the world’s economy collapsed, so did most of the salvation theologies that were based on prosperity. Rationalization, however, was able to survive by adapting to the new circumstances. Unlike rigid Fordism, the rationalization movement reacted promptly to the change in climate and redefined itself accordingly. “The logical and historically necessary product of rationalization trends,” wrote Robert A. Brady, “seems to be economic and social planning.”222 It is not difficult to recognize here the recurrence of war socialism and the idea of the social economy, from which the rationalization movement had tried to distance itself during the years of prosperity.
The vanguard responsible for redefining rationalization as a form of economic planning consisted of none other than those who had aspired to a German economic empire in Central Europe during World War I. Calling no longer on the nation but on rationalization to advance their strategy, they had clearly grasped the tenor of the times—even if they could not resist the temptation to advance grand historical visions. Werner Daitz, for example, proclaimed: “Germany today provides the only opportunity for finishing the work of Napoleon I and Bismarck, which has perennially been blocked by English policies.”223 Daitz, who in World War II would play a role in formulating a “new European order,” made this remark one year after the signing of the Locarno Pact. Significantly, Gustav Stresemann, the architect of Germany’s rehabilitation at Locarno, was not only one of the most prominent political advocates of a German-dominated Central Europe during the war but also the person who had said in 1920 that the German economy would have to reconquer what the German army had lost.224 These connections were evident to the other side, as well. A contemporary French study, for one, noted that Stresemann’s foreign policies were nothing more than “a manifestation of rationalization,” which would inevitably lead to a “continental European economic bloc” under German leadership.225
National Socialist Americanism
A few months before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Robert A. Brady referred to the “supreme paradox” of rationalization in Germany: that it could be carried out successfully not within the borders of the German empire alone but only on a European scale. “Yet it is precisely in the international sphere that rationalization has the least chance of successful application as long as European nationalism survives in its present form.” Brady also identified similar problems within German society: “Rationalization will be retarded in Germany as long as national, political, social, and other barriers stand in the way of technological and economic forces.… There are definite limits set to rationalization and economic planning so long as Germany remains a house divided against itself—so long as Catholic Bavaria is pitted against Protestant Prussia, the right against the left, the industrialists against the agriculturists, the urban against the rural districts, the cartels against consumers, the states against the Reich.”226
To describe the nazification of German society and the imperialistic foreign policy of the Third Reich as the necessary preconditions for total rationalization may be as exaggerated at Canetti’s explanation of the Holocaust as an outgrowth of the spirit of inflation—but just as illuminating. Recent historiography on the Third Reich, especially in the subfield of modernization, has reached astonishing conclusions in its study of these long-ignored affinities. While the Third Reich talked a lot less than the Weimar Republic about rationalization, it put it far more thoroughly into practice, indeed involving the main Weimar agency for rationalization, the National Board for Economic Efficiency, in the process of “economizing” mass murder.227
A similarly perverse continuity persisted between the Weimar Republic’s images of America and those of the Third Reich. Although the fetish for archaic Teutonism would suggest that the Nazis rejected and criminalized everything American, research shows that they were some of Germany’s most eager students of American methods.228 Hitler’s vision of a continental European empire dominated by Germany was copied not from the British Empire, which in his eyes had outlived its prime, but from the contiguous and state-filled landmass of the United States. The extermination of the Indian population influenced Hitler as profoundly as the Monroe Doctrine, which codified America’s hegemonic aspirations.229 In 1941, as Germany seemed on the verge of realizing its own, similar goals, the economics editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung announced that the basis had now been created for a properly “American” production of “automobiles, tractors, refrigerators, bathtubs, and other consumer goods.”230
Another American achievement that elicited Hitler’s enthusiastic applause was mass manipulation. American propaganda during the First World War, he wrote, had mobilized the populace “in truly ingenious fashion.” The Führer diverged from other prominent Germans—Ludendorff, for example—in focusing not only on America’s success but on the conditions and methods necessary to achieve it. These Hitler accepted without reservation. What made American-style treatment of the masses so “ingenious” was not so much explicit political propaganda as a continuous forging of consensus. As great as Hitler’s and Goebbels’s admiration was for America’s wartime synthesis of propaganda and state repression, the more significant lesson lay elsewhere.231 National Socialism learned from America how to secure people’s allegiance materialistically and hedonistically, rather than ideologically. The years after 1933 witnessed an almost twentyfold increase in Coca-Cola consumption in Germany, the development of an affordable popular automobile patterned on the Model T, and the conception of “Volk radio, television, and washing machines.” An institute for consumer market research was also founded in Nuremberg in 1935, the same place and time the racial laws were announced. In all these moves, the Nazis’ goal was a politically directed consumerism whose inspiration Hitler openly acknowledged: “We resemble the Americans in that we have wants and desires.”232
The Hollywood Paradigm
In the area of popular entertainment, as in other areas, the National Socialists brought about not so much a radical break as a modified continuation of the technologically and organizationally progressive tendencies of the 1920s. The Nazi-supervised German film industry avoided explicit political propaganda to a surprising degree, continuing instead to produce the escapist films popular before 1933. The new element was that the man in charge of the cultural-industrial complex was an intellectual with definite views about the fundamental difference between German and American cinema, and not always in favor of the former. Joseph Goebbels’s remarks about American film entertainment in the 1930s closely resembled what had been said about it in the 1920s in liberal periodicals like the Weltbühne. From opposite vantage points, Goebbels and the liberal critics agreed that America’s intellectual and general cultural level was as modest as its cinematographic achievements were impressive.233 Likewise, they shared the belief that American cinema was an authentic expression of the mass age and that, in this, German cinema lagged pathetically behind. Just as liberal intellectuals saw the superiority of American film as residing in its “inner rhythm,” its “expression through tempo and dynamic force,” and the “élan of the whole affair,” Goebbels praised Hollywood for having a firmer grasp on what he called the “modern world feeling.” “How easy it is for the Americans to produce this stuff. One can only admire them,” he commented after seeing Mutiny on the Bounty. Of Gone With the Wind, he noted: “This film should be seen more often. We should take it as an example.” He also maintained few illusions about Germany’s ability to compete with Hollywood in the postwar world market. “We would have a hard time … and perhaps even lose the competition.”234
Volkswagen Community
After cinema, consumerism was the second main means of Nazi popular integration along American lines. The advent of mass car ownership clearly shows how this other dream factory operated. Before automobiles became widely affordable in Europe, they provoked sharp class antagonisms. The enmity encountered by motorists on country roads has been compared to the “centuries-old hatred of the common people for aristocratic horseman”; in this regard, car ownership recalled hunting privileges.235 In urban areas, especially during times of crisis, the resentment was much the same. In 1930, an observer witnessed Berlin pedestrians who “out of spite walk as close as possible to the street so that the tires scrape their shoes. They stare through the car windows with burning eyes, eyes that say: ‘Get out, you scoundrels, get out of your limousines. Your time is up.’”236
To be sure, the German automotive industry had made attempts prior to 1933 to exploit the untapped mass market for their products. These efforts, however, had been hampered by the traditionalist view that an automobile was and had to remain an essentially bourgeois phenomenon. The very term for the affordable automobile, Kleinwagen (small car), made it clear that any vehicle designed for the masses would be a distinct and separate product, of lesser worth than the vehicle owned by the bourgeoisie. But Hitler had something else in mind when he ordered Ferdinand Porsche to develop a car that would be, “above all on Sundays and holidays, a source of previously unknown joyous delight” to the masses. The Volkswagen was to be a four-wheeled vehicle powered by a four-stroke engine, with space for four passengers and a price not to exceed 1,000 Reichsmarks, “not much more than a middling motorcycle,” as Hitler put it.237
The model for the Volkswagen was none other than Ford’s Model T, although the ideological affinity between the antisemitic and anti-finance industrialist Henry Ford and Hitler played a minor role, if any. The decisive factor in the development of the Volkswagen was the car’s function as an instance of mass production: it was “service” and “a factory of souls” all in one.238 As Hitler’s “gift” to the masses, the “plan, will, and deed of the Führer,” the wish-fulfillment machine that was the Volkswagen proved to be one of the most effective and long-lasting instruments of propaganda ever, tying the individual tightly to the system.239
The “Volkswagen community” was completed with the Führer’s additional “gift” of the autobahn, which, too, has been characterized as an “engineered advertisement.”240 Accounts from the 1930s are striking for their fascination with the autobahn’s totally unimpeded traffic flow, the result of two innovations, one technical (a hard, smooth road surface of concrete instead of gravel or construction blocks) and the other organizational (restriction of usage to motorized vehicles and the channeling of traffic in a single direction). The sensation of driving was of pleasurably yielding to and becoming one with the road. A recurring theme in descriptions of the autobahn is weightlessness, the association with flying. With its lack of oncoming traffic, the autobahn was less a road than a starting ramp that received vehicle and driver, accelerated them on their way, and, after a certain speed had been reached, lulled the driver into feeling that he no longer had to operate the vehicle—by looking, steering, shifting gears, or braking—but merely had to allow himself to be transported by it. Few have described this seductive “totalitarian” quality better than the critic and journalist Walter Dirks, hardly a Nazi sympathizer. In 1938, he wrote: “Once we are in our lane … we no longer seem to be active ourselves.… So passive are we, so much does the great curve of the road determine our state of mind that relations seem to be reversed. It is the road that is active, that moves quickly and smoothly, without friction or violence, toward us, inexorably sucking the vehicle into it.… It is as if our own bodies, safely ensconced in smooth metal capsules, were merely following the twists and turns of the road, feeling the contours of the landscape in one long, rapid glide.”241
How vividly this recalls the descriptions of the euphoria for the vélo in turn-of-the-century France. Was there a connection between the two phenomena? Was the car merely a new variation of that instinct for motion that had previously taken the form of the levée en masse, gymnastique, exercise, and racing sports? And what of dance mania, the assembly-line utopia, and the girl machine, not to mention the traffic-filled world city square, the arditi of Italian Fascism, and the storm troopers of National Socialism? Perhaps the longing for, or more precisely the drive to reclaim, motion is so central to the psyche of the vanquished because they experienced their defeat as a sudden and deadly halt. Perhaps, too, reclaimed motion is a form of revanche. And much the same energy may be at work in those revolutionary groups that since the nineteenth century have been referred to not as parties but as movements.
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