Notes
Introduction: On Being Defeated
1. Pre-Virgilian literary treatments of the Aeneas myth, by authors such as Naenius and Ennius, existed as early as the third century B.C. On the English adoption of the myth, see A. E. Parsons, “The Trojan Legend in England,” Modern Language Review 24 (1929): 253–63.
2. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Oxford, 1954), pp. 49–50.
3. Carl Schmitt, Ex captivitate salus (Cologne, 1950), pp. 30–31, 27. I wish to thank Henning Ritter for drawing my attention to these citations.
4. Reinhart Koselleck, “Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historisch-anthropologische Skizze,” Historische Methode, ed. Christian Meier and Jörn Rüsen (Munich, 1988), pp. 51–53, 60. While Koselleck speaks at the beginning of his essay of short-term victors, his term by the end is “temporary victors” (p. 60). In an imaginative consideration of the battle of Sedan on the occasion of its hundredth anniversary in 1970, J.-M. Domenach proposed celebrating defeats rather than victories: “Victories are often deceptive, but defeats are always instructive. If we had consecrated a day to the anniversary of Sedan rather than to that of November 11, we might have been able to avoid the debacle of May–June 1940, which was nearly a repetition of that of the summer of 1870” (cited in Aimée Dupuy, “Sedan” et l’enseignement de la revanche [Paris, 1975], p. 5). John Keegan advances the opposite position: the most insightful and objective history comes not from the defeated but from the victors. As examples, he cites the nationalistically distorted historiographies of France after 1871 and Germany after 1918, contrasting them with the sovereign Anglo-American historiography after 1918 and 1945. The latter, according to Keegan, allows for an objectivity impossible for the deeply traumatized losing side (The Face of Battle [New York, 1976], p. 61).
5. Hémon said of La Rochefoucauld that he wrote “with the obstinate rancor which is the revenge of the vanquished. Revenge for dashed hopes and hurt pride with one blow; the revenge of the man of action who always observed more than he acted, and who, more than ever, in the impotence in which he was to act, sought consolation in the delicate joy of observing, in the bitter pleasure of remembering” (quoted in Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society [Cambridge, Mass., 1992], p. 151). On the contribution of the Frondist memoirs to eighteenth-century political enlightenment, Orest Ranum writes: “The variety, the richness, indeed the complexity, ambiguity, honesty, and at the same time self-servingness of these memoirs written by both men and women have encouraged civic activism since the early eighteenth century” (The Fronde: A French Revolution, 1648–1652 [New York, 1993], pp. 346–47).
6. Russell Jacoby, The Dialectics of Defeat (Cambridge, 1981). Something similar could be said of the revolutionary right in the period between the world wars, before it came to power. Renzo de Felice’s distinction between “fascismo movimento” and “fascismo regime” approximates the distinction between Western and Soviet Marxism (Renzo de Felice and Michael A. Leeden, Intervista sul fascismo [Bari, 1997], pp. 29ff.). Western Marxism and fascismo di movimento shared an idealistic orientation that was unrealized, indeed betrayed, by their respective regimes.
7. Along with blows, Toynbee lists the stimuli of “hard countries,” “new ground,” “pressures,” and “penalizations.” See A Study of History, abridged ed., vol. 1 (New York, 1946), pp. 88–139.
8. See Heinrich von Stietencron and Jörg Rüpke, eds., Töten im Krieg (Freiburg, 1995), especially the essays by Rüpke on the Roman republic and Walter Burkert on the Greek polis. See also Burkert’s seminal Homo Necans (Berlin, 1972).
9. Ernest Renan’s famous sentence, recorded by Paul Déroulède, reads: “France is dying, young man—do not disturb her agony” (quoted in Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche [Brussels, 1992], p. 287). In his consistent acceptance of the inevitable death of the nation after its military defeat, Renan is something of a lone figure. The normal reaction to defeat, even among social Darwinists, is to seek out alternative explanations for military weakness, including treason, poor preparation, or unconscientiousness within the army. The belief in the inevitable death of the nation in case of military defeat usually only applies before the inception of hostilities and functions as an appeal to the nation’s fighting spirit. On the fourth anniversary of Sedan, León Gambetta posed this all-decisive social Darwinist question without reaching a satisfactory answer in relation to France: “Could it be true that for peoples, as for animal species, the struggle for existence and authority periodically brings about the disappearance of the weakest, most ignorant, most heedless, by means of armed aggression on the part of the most strong, most learned, most wise? Could it be that politics is only a branch of human physiology? Perhaps” (letter to Juliette Adam, Sept. 4, 1874, cited in Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France [Tuscaloosa, 1984], p. 31).
10. Jakob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Gesamtausgabe 7 (Berlin, 1922), p. 124.
11. Letter to Friedrich von Preen, Sept. 27, 1870, Briefe, vol. 5 (Basel, 1963), p. 111. Emphasis in the original.
12. On the celebratory character of declarations of war, see Roger Caillois, whose descriptions of the outbreak of hostilities cast them as an event or condition related to the phenomenon of the festival. According to Caillois, the affinities are as follows: (1) on both occasions, the normal boundaries and rules of the class order are suspended; (2) forces of hostility, destruction, and waste take over; (3) the participants believe themselves to be in a “holy period” utterly unlike times of normalcy; and (4) the prevailing zeitgeist becomes one of societal renewal and rejuvenation (Der Mensch und das Heilige [Munich, 1988], pp. 220ff.). From the vantage point of historical psychoanalysis, Lloyd de Mause describes the festival nature of declarations of war as a liberating blow, characterizing it as a collective reliving of the individual trauma of birth. Just as the fetus perceives birth as liberation from its confinement within the uterus, the outbreak of war is experienced as liberation from a situation increasingly perceived to be overwrought with tension (Grundlagen der Psychohistorie, ed. Aurel Ende [Frankfurt am Main, 1989], pp. 32ff.). The pre-1914 German paranoia about being hemmed in—the classic case of this mass-psychological phenomenon—was foreshadowed by similar psychological states in the pre-1861 American South (the feeling of being encircled by the North) and in pre-1870 France (the concern about being threatened from the west by England and America and from the east by Prussia and Germany).
13. The connotations attached to the term trope include the ideas of transformation, reversal, flight, exchange, and alteration. Nike is the result of all this for the victor, hetta the equivalent for the loser. The seminal sources all agree that the will to fight, the morale among the troops, is the decisive factor in battle, more important than the relative numbers of forces. To cite Napoleon: “In war, morale conditions constitute three-quarters of the game: the relative balance of manpower accounts only for the remaining quarter” (correspondence cited in Helen Friend Langlais, Morale [Oslo, 1955], p. 4). This explains why, even in encounters between armies of widely unequal troop strength, such as the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the side with the lesser numbers but greater morale is often bound for victory. This is a simple explanation for the role of fortunas, or military fortune, in battle, which is recognized by all the leading theoretical and practical commentators.
14. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1976), p. 231.
15. Ibid., p. 255.
16. The phrase en plein roman comes from Raoul Frary, Le péril national (Paris, 1884), p. 188. Clausewitz stipulates that “panicked terror” never occurs in a well-trained army, only among civilians as a consequence of lost battles (On War, p. 273).
17. On War, p. 244.
18. Colmar von der Goltz, Gambetta und seine Armeen (Berlin, 1877), pp. 20, 231.
19. Protocol of a speech delivered on Sept. 12, 1923, in Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905–1924, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 1007. Emphasis in the original. J. P. T. Bury, who called my attention to this reference, incorrectly dates the speech ten years later than it actually took place. See Bury, Gambetta and the National Defence (New York, 1970), p. 279.
20. This view of the significance of the Ruhr War is confirmed by numerous contemporary figures. Prince Max von Baden, who as imperial chancellor organized the October 1918 surrender, greeted the Ruhr War in his pamphlet Der Weckruf aus Westfalen (1923) as a national moral awakening. It “restored to us the sovereign power of decision making … and gave us back our will” (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das 3. Reich, 3rd ed. [Hamburg, 1931], p. ix). Martin Spahn, a political scientist and philosopher associated with the conservative counterrevolution: “Today’s hours are related to those of August 1914.… Destiny is once again putting us to the test, giving us a second chance to show that we deserve to survive as a people” (Um Rhein und Ruhr [Berlin, 1923], p. 15). The nationalist pacifist Max Graf Montgelas: “Even if we are not to be granted success in our stuggle at its present stage, we have at least won back our honor.” (Ursprung und Ziel des französischen Einbruchs ins Ruhrgebiet [Berlin, 1923], p. 38). Emphasis in the original. Chancellor Rudolf Cuno: “The consciousness has been reawakened among the German people of the value of those most valuable national possessions, freedom and honor. This consciousness seemed to have been erased by the terrible collapse of Germany … within broad sectors of the populace” (Der Kampf um die Ruhr [Leipzig, 1923], p. 209). Eugen Rosenstock: “What we are witnessing in the Ruhr is a refounding of the empire as an act of global self-assertion before the eyes of the entire world” (Hochland, June 1923, p. 234).
In retrospect, from the perspective of 1930, Paul Wentzcke wrote: “After the military end of the Great War, the second stage of the struggle took place around its tragic core; even more so than the army previously on the front, the populace took responsibility this time for the outcome” (Geschichte des Ruhrkampfes als Aufgabe und Erlebnis [Düsseldorf, n.d. (ca. 1930)], p. 4). Walther Schotte, publisher of the Preussische Jahrbücher, accused the government “of bureaucratizing the politics of resistance,” that is, repeating the mistakes of November 1918, instead of fostering the “revolutionary mentality” present among the masses (Preussische Jahrbücher 193 [1923]: 351). Communists drew comparisons with the Paris Commune: “Just as once the Parisian proletariat rose up against Bismarck and Thiers, their German comrades are resisting Cuno, Stinnes, and Poincaré” (Leonid A. Friedrich, Warum Ruhr-Krieg? 10 Prozent oder die Nation [Berlin, 1923], p. 43).
Foreign observers were impressed by the unanimous support for resistance in Germany. The English ambassador to Germany, Viscount D’Abernon, wrote: “Day by day, the consciousness is growing among all classes in Germany that one is neither required nor obliged to compromise. I cannot ever remember there being so little class hostility or enmity among political parties as today.… The entire country seems to have been melded into a single unit” (Ein Botschafter in der Zeitenwende, vol. 2 [Leipzig, 1929], pp. 188–89).
On the Ruhr War as a central myth among the revolutionary German right, see Ernst-Otto Schüddekopf, Linke Leute von rechts: Die nationalrevolutionären Minderheiten und der Kommunismus in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1960), pp. 139–64. The fact that the Ruhr War concluded without any great laurels for Germany led the extreme right back to the psychology of the “stab in the back,” which, as the Weltbühne already prophesied in April 1923, was taken up as legend immediately after the end of the passive resistance. In this case, it was the populace of the Ruhr region that played the role of the fighting front abandoned and betrayed by the government in Berlin. See, for example, Edgar Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen (Berlin, 1930), p. 329; Deutsche Rundschau, Dec. 1923, p. 226; Heinrich Totter, Warum wir den Ruhrkampf verloren (Cologne, 1940), p. 106. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, Social Democrats and trade unions were also haunted by the specter of 1918. To avoid the accusation that they were complicit in national betrayal they formed a common force for defense of the home front with the nationalists and business sector (Jean-Claude Favez, Le Reich devant l’occupation franco-belge de la Ruhr en 1923 [Geneva, 1969], pp. 129 ff.).
In an irony of history, the political rhetoric used to mobilize resistance to the Ruhr occupation echoed almost exactly the Belgian call for resistance to the German invasion of August 1914. The call from President Ebert and Chancellor Cuno read: “We object to [this] act of violence in the eyes of Europe and the entire world. We raise our voice in loud protest that a foreign power is here desecrating the holy right of the German people to its own territory, its right to existence” (Hans Pyszka, Der Ruhrkrieg [Munich, 1923], pp. 49–50).
21. Jäckel and Kuhn, p. 1011.
22. Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause (1866; rpt. New York, 1970), p. 726. Rathenau’s call for a levée en masse in October 1918 recalled Jefferson Davis’s equally futile attempt in the American South to continue the conflict as a guerrilla war after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over [Baton Rogue, 1985], p. 23).
23. The idealism with which the leaders of Munich’s Republic of Councils adopted France’s attitude toward Germany represents the zenith of such fraternization with the former enemy. See Henning Köhler, Novemberrevolution und Frankreich: Die französische Deutschlandpolitik, 1918–1919 (Düsseldorf, 1980), pp. 102–04, 271 ff.
24. André Bellesort, Les intellectuels et l’avènement de la Troisième République (Paris, 1931), p. 46. Bellesort is paraphrasing a description in La Gorce’s Histoire du Second Empire.
25. There were a number of reasons for the muted reaction in Berlin. Whereas the politicians involved in the rebellions in Paris and Munich either belonged to or had close contact with bohemian circles, the revolution in Berlin took place among politicians and bureaucrats, with semibohemian figures like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg remaining outsiders, excluded from the official opposition. The genius loci of the sites of the demonstrations may also have played a role. In 1870, the Parisian masses assembled on the via triumphalis between the National Assembly and the Hôtel de Ville, which since 1792 had been the site of every occurrence of popular unrest. Likewise in 1918, the Theresienwiese in Munich, the site of the annual Oktoberfest, embodied the connection between revolution and festival. The Lustgarten in Berlin had no such popular tradition as a place of revolutionary assembly.
26. Th. Bost, Le réveil de la France (Brussels, 1871), pp. 15–16, 48.
27. V. F. Calverton, The Bankruptcy of Marriage (1928; rpt. New York, 1972), pp. 16–17. The sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld characterizes the dance craze in post-1919 Germany in similar terms (Sittengeschichte des Weltkriegs [Berlin, 1931], pp. 317, 359ff.).
28. Quoted in G. A. Masson, “Philosophie des Foxtrott,” La revue mondiale; rpt. in Das Tagebuch 1 (1920): 959.
29. See, for example, a Dr. W. Morgenthaler: “The German people were badly shaken from 1914 to 1918 by war and famine, and their capacity for resistance was weakened. When it became clear that the reward for the endless suffering and silent heroism of persistence was to be political collapse … they suffered a commensurate collective psychological breakdown.… This psychic ailment was followed by compulsive motor activity as drastic compensation for the tremendous stress. Having reached the nadir of its suffering, Germany suddenly began dancing like mad” (“Die alten Tanzepidemien und ihre Beziehung zur Gegenwart,” Blätter für Bernische Geschichte und Altertumskunde 21 [1925]: 282). See also Dr. F. Schwarz, “Tanzwut: Medizinhistorische Studie zur Massenhysterie,” Hygiaia 3 (1933): 200–05.
30. “The penetrating force of the waltz is directly related to the sociological repercussions of the French Revolution and to the sociohistorical restructuring of the nineteenth century” (Hugo Riemann, “Walzer,” Musiklexikon, quoted in Rémy Hess, La valse: Révolution du couple en Europe [Paris, 1989], p. 97). A sign was affixed to the Bastille, which was stormed on July 14, 1789, setting off the French Revolution: “Ici on danse” (p. 104). Of the eruption of the cancan in 1830 in Paris, David Price writes: “It seems too much of a coincidence that the cancan appeared in the same year as the revolution of 1830 and it seems fair to say that there are links between the cancan and the carmagnole of 1789, in so far as each was stimulated by the general upheavals in society and an urge to demonstrate liberté” (Cancan! [London, 1998], p. 26).
31. Troeltsch describes the months between the cease-fire and surrender in November 1918 and the announcement of the conditions for peace negotiated at Versailles as the “dreamland of the cease-fire period,” since during that time the wildest delusions about the postwar order were maintained (Spektator-Briefe [Tübingen, 1924]).
The elation of the losers can perhaps be best understood when compared with that of the victors. What is remarkable is the relatively short duration of the victors’ elation. It is spontaneous and momentary, lasting hardly longer than the parades, fireworks, and confetti, and is followed by sobriety and a return to the pedestrian everyday order, which as before the war is determined by the fathers’ generation. There is hardly a more desultory spectacle in the world than that of youth returning home victorious from war and marching by the grandstands packed with parents, before returning to the office or the factory. In 1942, the English historian E. L. Woodward summed up this phenomenon after World War I with the sentence: “The men who came back from the war have counted for less, perhaps, in the political life of their country than any generation during the last two or three centuries” (quoted in Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 [Cambridge, 1979], p. 112). The concept of a “Lost Generation” in the victorious nations of World War I applies beyond the literary realm it was originally intended to characterize. The opposite side of the coin in the defeated nation was the “Front generation.” Its members, too, returned to a society and a home front ruled by their fathers. Nonetheless, the fathers were soon deposed and humiliated so that they no longer possessed any authority. Even when those fathers were not part of the antebellum regime and thus might have represented a new start, as was true in Germany with the pre-1918 Social Democratic Party leadership, their sons saw the world as a “fatherless society” (to use Paul Federn’s term) in which the older generation appeared solely as losers and objects of ridicule. The loser-fathers were far less likely than their victorious and therefore unimpeachable counterparts to inspire the feeling among their progeny of having been the “victim of a dirty trick played by the older generation” (Wohl, Generation of 1914, p. 100). This appraisal is supported by a comparison of the social politics in post-1918 Germany on the one hand and France, England, and the United States on the other. While the victorious-father regimes were often allowed to forget the promises made during wartime or to shunt them on to a symbolic level, the humiliated loser fathers had little option other than to make real concessions, such as the 1918 Stinnes-Legien Agreement on employment and wages in Germany. The central Fascist and National Socialist myth of the long march of the former frontline soldiers to positions of power in the homeland was understood by its participants as nothing more than the belated overthrow of the loser-father regime by wartime youth.
32. There are various indices of a feminizing process in the psychology, rhetoric, and iconography of loser cultures, although they can be mentioned only briefly here. One example is the Queen Luise cult in post-1806 Prussia, which France seems to have imitated after 1870 (Revue des deux mondes, Jan. 1, 1872, pp. 222ff.). There are the numerous sightings of the Virgin Mary reported in France in the fall and winter of 1870–71 and in the years following. The image of the “defiled nation” was popular above all among the revolutionary right in post-1918 Germany. See Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Die Nation greift an: Geschichte und Kritik des soldatischen Nationalismus (Berlin, 1933), p. 10. Heroic figures were portrayed less often as powerful and masculine than as sentimental, feminine, and romantic. In post-1871 France, Joan of Arc experienced her great renaissance, Roland bore the features of the suffering Jesus, and in general the image of the martyred savior increasingly replaced that of the active warrior hero. In the American South, portraits of General Lee reveal a similar sensitive softness, which accorded well with the contemporaneous cult of the Southern lady. No comparable phenomenon existed in post-1918 Germany. Perhaps, however, the predominant death cult can be understood as a sublimated form of the mother-nation cult. The hero’s death, understood as a kind of immortality, represents another version of the son’s reunion with his mother, which, according to C. G. Jung, signifies immortality (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, part 3, sect. 5).
33. On the Wilson myths, see Peter Berg, Deutschland und Amerika, 1918–1929 (Lübeck, 1963), pp. 9–47, and Ernst Frankel, “Das Deutschland-Weltbild,” Jahrbuch für Amerika-Studien 5 (1960): 66–120. A good example of corollary psychology in the American South is expressed by Edward Pollard: “It was this peculiar trust in the generosity of the North … that brought the Southern Confederacy to such a sudden and almost abrupt conclusion of the war” (Lost Cause, p. 50). In France, no such legends were constructed, in part because the war was divided into two parts—Napoleon III’s war against Prussia and the défense nationale—each with its own surrender. Nonetheless, the projection of hopes and expectations of mild treatment onto certain leading personalities in the enemy camp was common to all three losing societies. What Wilson was for Germany, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was for the American South. French hopes for a peace settlement like that between Prussia and Austria in 1866 were pinned to Bismarck up until a few days before his post-Sedan meeting with Thiers and Favre in Ferrières. Only after German demands for the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine were made known did Bismarck become a “monster.”
34. On post-Vietnam reactions, see Jeffrey P. Kimball, “The Stab-in-the-Back Legend and the Vietnam War,” Armed Forces and Society 14 (1987–88): 433–57. The rhetoric documented by Kimball across the ranks of the American military leadership, including President Richard Nixon, is quite similar to that among right-wing Germans during the Weimar Republic. The reason the Vietnam War did not polarize the nation or lead to civil war is, of course, that it did not entail national collapse and was not followed by a humiliation like that of the Versailles treaty. On the other hand, the German-American comparison raises the question of whether the stab-in-the-back legend was a uniquely German phenomenon, as most historians argue, or whether, during a more serious crisis, it might not have a similar effect in the United States.
35. Claude Billard and Pierre Guibert, Histoire mythologique des français (Paris, 1976), p. 174.
36. Quoted in Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Tour of the Southern States, 1865–1866 (Cincinnati, 1866), p. 310. The German equivalent is from Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, quoted in E. Günther Gründel, Die Sendung der jungen Generation (Munich, 1933), p. 395.
37. This is the same ethos—quality workmanship versus mass production—that artisans were simultaneously and with a similar lack of success promoting as an argument against industry. The sociologist Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz compared Germany’s defeat in World War I with the “destruction of a hard-working small business by the overwhelming power of a giant trust company” (Soziologie des Krieges [Leipzig, 1929], p. 373).
38. The Confederacy and Germany in the two world wars provide examples of initial military successes, followed by defeats in wars of attrition. In conjunction with the Civil War, Michael C. C. Adams shows that the aura surrounding military nations can cause a kind of inferiority complex among civilian-bourgeois ones. This inferiority complex has a definite impact on the conduct of war and may indeed lead to tactical inferiority (Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 [Cambridge, 1978]). Total war directed not only at the enemy’s army but at its civilian population is a necessary innovation of bourgeois culture, the only means for overcoming the tactical superiority of a military culture. The initial reactions in the South to General Sheridan’s and General Sherman’s scorched-earth policies were disbelief and moral incomprehension. This military-ethical dichotomy recurred in twentieth-century air warfare. Whereas the Luftwaffe in National Socialist Germany was deployed (albeit for military and ideological and not humanitarian reasons) as a tactical instrument, the Western democracies used their air forces for the saturation bombing of civilian populations.
39. George Fitzhugh in DeBow’s Review, n.s., 1 (1866): 76.
40. Victor Hugo, Choses vues (Paris, 1972), p. 84.
41. If one considers those who fall in battle on the victorious side as losers among winners, an idea for which there is strong anthropological and psychological support, the cult surrounding their heroic deaths takes on a similar significance. Glory and honor become the reward and compensation for exclusion from the victors’ enjoyment of triumph. Wartime casualties are honored as heroes, victims, and martyrs—that is, for those very qualities that obtain generally among the losing side.
42. There are differences in the quality of offensive and defensive propaganda. The American South and Germany, which had to defend themselves against moral and judicial condemnation from the victors, tended to argue more defensively. France, which was spared such accusations in 1871, could afford to be more aggressive. Corresponding differences in the organization of propaganda resulted. The American South and Germany created special institutions for the dissemination of propaganda to protest their innocence: the Southern Historical Society and its series of publications and the Kriegsschuld-Referat in the German Foreign Office, which coordinated a multitude of organizations and publications. Activities in France required no such state coordination and planning.
43. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Recht der jungen Völker (Berlin, 1932), pp. 107–08.
44. In magical thinking, the transference of strength is not without its dangers, since what is transferred may include the evil sentiments of the enemy—his desire for revenge, his curse. Special rituals of purification and sacrifice are thus required to protect oneself against contamination. Warrior societies in the transition to pacified culture often develop a mythology of decadence according to which the “softening” of the old warrior values (as a result of the adoption of the luxuries of the losers) represents the losers’ covert revenge on their conquerors. German romantic-reactionary cultural criticism up to Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Non-Political Man treats Western (that is, French) civilization as one of decay and dissolution. The softening elements of civilization (as opposed to German Kultur) are constantly equated with feminization and enfeeblement and are thus treated as the covert means of revenge (poison, seduction, defamation) utilized by those condemned to the role of treacherous weakness. The symbolism of iron versus gold (which arose in Germany during the war of “national liberation” of 1812) occupies a central position in this complex of ideas. Also worth noting is the tendency to speak of a swamp of decadence in contrast to heroism on the field of battle. Swamps and gold go together, as do battlefields and iron. The battlefield, like the desert and the steppes from which the conquering barbarians emerge, is an open space.
45. On children and women as heroes, see Marieluise Christadler, “Zur nationalpädagogischen Funktion kollektiver Mythen in Frankreich,” Nationale Mythen und Symbole in der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 206ff. One must distinguish between the dehumanizing propaganda practiced during war by all sides and the postwar propaganda of the defeated. This is sometimes difficult, owing to the similarities in iconography, but such a distinction is essential for understanding the underlying collective psyche. The question arises, for instance, whether the side that most fears its military inferiority (for example, France during the first phase of World War I) is more assiduous in dehumanizing the enemy than the more self-assured opponent. If so, this would explain the relative lack of German dehumanization propaganda vis-à-vis the French in the First World War.
46. Heinrich Mann, “Kaiserreich und Republik,” Macht und Mensch (Munich, 1919), p. 181. In another passage, Mann expresses the hope that France, enlightened by its defeat in 1870–71, will be wise enough to avoid such hubris: “Our fervent wish … is that the moral seriousness that this nation achieved fifty years ago in defeat will outlive its greatest threat, today’s victory” (“Sinn und Idee der Revolution: Ansprache im Politischen Rat geistiger Arbeiter,” Macht und Mensch, pp. 161–62).
47. On the extinction of German culture, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. 1 (Munich, 1982), p. 137. On the spiritual-cultural improvement of the defeated in contrast to the simultaneous decline of victorious Germany, see Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, sec. 4, Werke, vol. 2, pp. 985–86.
In 1880, Bruno Bauer observed: “The last ten years have devoured [Germany’s] cultural products as thoroughly as Saturn his offspring.” On a painting of A. de Neuville: “The victors stand ashamed and downcast before the example of strength that its conquered enemy has developed in his spiritual battle with defeat” (Zur Orientierung über die Bismarck-Ära [Chemnitz, 1880], pp. 131, 141). Heinrich Sybel, a nationalist hardly plagued by self-doubt, merely recommended that Germany learn from France’s negative example: “Above all, we should learn to recognize the causes for the demise of a powerful empire. We are now at our height—for that very reason, we have good cause, if we are not vain fools, for self-evaluation. We should be on guard against the beginnings of those false tendencies and ambitions that infected once-proud France and caused her collapse” (Was wir von Frankreich lernen können [Bonn, 1872], p. 3). Otto Röse commented in 1884: “It would be foolish not to recognize that our enemy has gained from its defeat an artistic advantage, a more splendid and powerful capacity for expression than we Germans, despite our great victories, currently possess” (Bilder aus Paris [Berlin, 1884], p. xi).
48. Friedrich Schönemann speculated in 1921 that the Civil War disrupted the Emersonian transcendentalist movement, out of which a “different” American culture—that is, one free of commercialism and materialism—could have developed (Amerikakunde [Bremen, 1921], p. 29). Walt Whitman was another of the Northern “loser intellectuals.” A few years after the victory of the North, in which he had invested great hopes, he wrote: “It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and thoroughly appointed body and then left with little or no soul” (quoted in Charles A. Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, vol. 2 [New York, 1930], p. 436).
49. Interestingly, the Lost Generation recapitulated the education in exile of the German hero in Romain Rolland’s novel Jean-Christophe, who flees the negative developments in his victorious homeland and discovers true German culture in Paris. Another literary hero who breaks with his victorious homeland (England) and allies himself with the losing camp (the Scottish clans) is of course Walter Scott’s Waverly. In his wartime diaries, Rolland quotes a young Japanese about the great cultural influence exercised on Japanese intellectuals after Russia’s defeat in 1905: “Defeated Russia conquered Japan with its literature and philosophy. Tolstoy had Japanese disciples. Turgenev inspired an art-for-art’s-sake movement. Even Arzybaschev (Sanin) had a greater effect in Japan than in Europe. But no one who has adopted and disseminated Russian ideas in Japan occupies an official position” (Das Gewissen Europas, vol. 3 [East Berlin, 1983], p. 488).
50. Quoted in R. J. B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945–1990 (London, 1994), pp. 167–68.
51. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993), p. 147. On Abba Kovner’s plan, see pp. 140ff.
52. Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don, in Sociologie et anthropologie.
53. “The potlatch should be described as a war,” writes Claude Lefort in the tradition of Mauss, illustrating his point with the fact that the language of the Tlingit tribe uses one word for both the potlatch and the war dance. Battle and the exchange of gifts are “men’s struggles for mutual recognition,” so that “men have no choice but to fight or to give” (Les temps modernes 6, no. 3 [1950]: 1415, 1416).
54. Emmerich von Vattel lists three justifications for legitimate warfare: “to recover what belongs, or is due to us”; “to provide for our future safety by punishing the aggressor or offender”; and “to defend ourselves, or to protect ourselves from injury, by repelling unjust violence” (Law of Nations, book 3, ch. 3, sec. 28). The archetype of legitimate war is the Greek campaign against the Persians since it was motivated by the “desire of avenging the injuries that the Greeks had so often suffered” (sec. 31).
55. François Billacois, Le duel dans la société française des 16è–17è siècles: Essai de psychosociologie historique (Paris, 1986), pp. 358–60. Billacois illustrates his arguments with copious citations from contemporaries. For example, Giovanni di Legnano: “[The duelist] does not intend to destroy but to win, which he can do without the elimination of his opponent.” Mutio: “Be careful to take up arms not in hatred or in the spirit of vengeance but instead as an instrument to serve the justice of his eternal majesty.” Anton Maria Salvini: “Not only should a knight not approach [the duel] with hatred, but indeed he should do so with the desire of being of service to his opponent, while at the same time mindful of, or rather ministering to, his own honor.… He should act neither in anger nor inflamed by hostility or hatred but spurred on by reason alone.” Vendramin: “The more we take our opponent for a man of honor and valor, the higher our own reputation and honor will rise.”
56. Recorded by Bernhard von Bülow, cited in Walter Frank, Nationalismus und Demokratie im Frankreich der Dritten Republik (Hamburg, 1933), p. 635.
57. Victor Hugo, Choses vues, p. 120.
58. See Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (London, 1955), p. 8.
59. Max Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen: Vom Umsturz der Werte, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Bern, 1972). For Scheler, vengeance always contains the seed of ressentiment, since it “does not coincide with the impulse to return a blow or defend oneself” but postpones the response. “This self-restriction, however, which results from the forward-looking consideration that one would incur harm from an immediate reaction, entails an accompanying feeling of ‘inability’ or ‘impotence’” (p. 39). As a result, in Scheler’s view, revenge and hatred are intimately connected. Both are ressentiments of the weak, especially women. See also Karen Horney, “The Value of Vindictiveness,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 8 (1948): 3–12.
60. As we shall see, because the South ceased to exist as a nation after its defeat, the myth of the Lost Cause involved a heroization of defeat and ruled out any real possibility for revenge. Nonetheless, the idea of nemesis obtained even there. “[Southerners] well know that in due time, they, although powerless themselves, will be avenged through the same disorganizing heresies under which they now suffer, and through the anarchy and woes which they will bring upon the North” (R. L. Dabney, A Defence of Virginia and, through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party (New York, 1867), p. 356.
61. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 16 (London, 1963), p. 372. To understand the mentality of myths of revenge, it is necessary to recall what Freud writes about “imaginary wish-fulfillments”: “There is no doubt that dwelling upon imaginary wish-fulfillments brings satisfaction with it, although it does not interfere with a knowledge that what is concerned is not real. Thus in the activity of phantasy human beings continue to enjoy the freedom from external compulsion which they have long since renounced in reality” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey [New York, 1966], pp. 372). Unlike individual fantasy, collective-national fantasy is not subjectively conscious of the discrepancy but nevertheless behaves realistically in that it strives not to cross the borders of reality. Like German demands for reunification after 1949, the French revanche slogans after 1871 were anything but a call for real action.
62. Eugen Rosenstock, Hochland, June 1923, p. 230.
63. In France, the thought of revanche seldom occurred between 1815 and 1870, although each of the successive regimes aimed at revising the political map drawn up in 1815, that is, setting the Rhine as the French border with Germany. On the bipartisan policies of revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany, see Ulrich Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage (Göttingen, 1983).
64. In conjunction with French contingency plans in fall 1918 to reject Germany’s proposal of an immediate cease-fire and to start a final offensive under exclusively French auspices, that is, outside the Entente, Guy Pedroncini cites military planners: “The honor of delivering the decisive blow should be reserved for the French army.… We want the 1919 battle to bring us a decisive victory in the war” (Pétain, général en chef, 1917–1918 [Paris, 1974], p. 423).
65. The nineteenth century witnessed the functional transformation of revanche from gentlemen’s agreement to national propaganda weapon. (It says something about this transition that the moment when the idea of revanche lost its traditional meaning was also the moment when the word was adopted as France’s main post-1871 slogan. Following Hegel, one might describe this coincidence as the flight of the owl toward its own twilight.) The individual steps in the escalation and transformation of the concept can best be illustrated with instances of Franco-German revanche after 1871. Even the first of these, the proclamation of the German empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, was no longer revanche in the sense of reestablishing equilibrium but rather revenge by Germany for two centuries of French hostility and annexation. Freed from the specifically military context and transferred to the national level, the revenge continued with the signings of the peace treaty of 1919, again in the Hall of Mirrors, and of the ceasefire of 1940 in the historic railway car at Compiègne, which had to be specially retrieved from a museum. Instead of aiming at mere redress, each of these symbolic acts sought to trump, indeed, eradicate the previous victory of the enemy. In line with such symbolic spatial significance, one might even speak of a “trophyizing” of revanche. Consistent with this transformation, the Compiègne railway car was brought to Berlin in 1940 after the signing of the cease-fire and publicly exhibited. Gambetta’s remark, made on the occasion of a visit to Bismarck’s castle in Friedrichsruh, where he saw the desk at which the peace treaty of 1871 was signed, can also be understood in this sense: “I will not be completely happy until that little table is in my house” (quoted in Daniel Amson, Gambetta ou le rêve brisé [Paris, 1994], p. 369).
66. The unsuccessful argument of General Pershing for just such a conclusion to the First World War shows how far the traditional European culture of war and diplomacy still was from engaging with the changing reality. Pershing’s English colleagues in particular refused to follow his suggested course of action. A further quarter of a century and the Second World War were required for the idea of unconditional surrender to be fully accepted. The significance of this change is signaled by the adoption of the American “surrender” instead of the British “capitulation.” Surrender stemmed not from the vocabulary of warfare and international law but from the vocabulary of civil and property law. It signified the transference of property title to the purchaser, that is, the actual handing over of the object in question. An army that capitulates in the traditional sense lays down its arms but retains its status as a legal entity. An army that surrenders is subjugated in toto to the authority of the victor.
67. Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1960), p. 24. McKitrick writes also of the “very intimate relationship … between battles and elections,” asserting that “military campaigns had to be ‘ratified,’ in effect, at the polls” (p. 25). The same, of course, was true of the civil wars attending the French Revolution in the 1790s, but the political agitation was restricted to Paris, whereas the American Civil War encompassed the entire Union.
68. Ibid., pp. 23–24.
69. Ibid., p. 27. (“complete paralysis” and “forty years of torpor”); Revue des deux mondes, Feb. 1, 1871, p. 568 (“Chinese lethargy…”); Elme Marie Caro, Revue des deux mondes, Feb. 1, 1871, p. 256 (“Krupp-manufactured cannons”). The topos of “Chinese lethargy” was common in contemporary newspapers and magazines (see, for example, the articles by Paul Janet and Albert Sorel in Revue des deux mondes, Nov. 15, 1872, and Apr. 1, 1873). A nice characterization of the political stagnation is provided by Empress Eugénie’s bon mot that Napoleon III’s regime couldn’t sneeze without permission from the opposition (Annette Horvath-Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education: Liberal Reform in the Second Empire [Baton Rouge, 1984], p. 284).
70. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961; rpt. New York, 1993), p. 284. Another image was that of the purifying, productive fire: “It was providence placing the idle ore in flame and forge. God said, ‘Go up and die,’ but already the South has learned that the summons to death was a summons to life … and so, lying down on the rugged summit of her defeat and despair, the South is awakening to an inheritance that eclipses her past” (“Confederate Veteran,” quoted in Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay [New Rochelle, 1968], p. 353).
71. From the perspective of psychological history, it is no accident that it is the epoch of the grandfathers that the intellectual interpreters of defeat promote in contrast to the shortcomings and detours of the fathers. The generation of the grandfathers always serves the sons as a point of reference, allowing them to establish an identity independent of their fathers. And no type of father is more particularly suited to the role of negative example than the one who squandered the grandfather’s inheritance and thus put the son in the position of having to recover it in heroic fashion or, when this is impossible, of restoring the nation’s morale and honor. On the psychohistory of relations between generations, see George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979). Naturally, competing ideological and political camps choose different pasts to invoke within internal political conflicts. In the Third Republic, the ancien régime and its restoration were the main points of orientation for the royalists, while the First Republic fulfilled the same function for the republicans. The corollary in Weimar Germany was Bismarck versus the Revolution of 1848. The common factor, however, is a return to a “healthy” past before the nation took a wrong turn.
72. Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause Regained (1868; rpt. New York, 1970), p. 155.
73. See Anthony Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson and the Legacy of the Civil War,” Civil War History 43 (1997): 225–42.
74. It was only with the union sacrée of the United States’s entry into World War I that the persistent reservations in the South toward the Union disappeared. World War I thus served the same function in the United States as the Franco-Prussian War, which healed the trauma of intra-German conflict in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, did in Germany.
75. It makes no difference that the origin of all these reform and modernization efforts lay in their respective prewar periods. The all-decisive and irrefutable argument that allowed reformers to prevail was that the nation would not have been defeated in war if it had heeded their earlier advice.
76. Reinhart Koselleck writes of the conjunction between the Scottish Enlightenment and the historicist-idealist school in Germany: “Being defeated is apparently an inexhaustible wellspring of intellectual progress. Historical transformations gnaw at the defeated. Insofar as they survive, they have automatically learned the ultimate lesson of all history: that things often turn out very differently than intended by the parties concerned” (“Erfahrungswandel,” p. 60). Along with reflections on the reasons for one’s failure (that is, modernity), an equally consequential contribution made by the defeated is the romanticization of the past into a kind of lost paradise. Here we must distinguish between two complementary strains in the philosophy of defeat: enlightened reflection on the modernity of the victors and romanticization of the past that was lost in defeat. Scotland offers a perfect example of how these schools coincide. The romanticism of McPherson, Hogg, and Walter Scott existed alongside its antithesis, the Edinburgh and Glasgow Enlightenment. The international resonance and success of the romantic movement were, however, if anything, greater for its appeal to a mass audience. “Ossian” in the waning eighteenth century and Walter Scott in the nineteenth can be characterized as the first literary industries serving the world market of mass taste, arising together with and in the immediate wake of industrial mass production along the Manchester model. The symbiotic, mutually reinforcing nature of Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish romanticism meant that while Adam Smith provided the theoretical underpinning for the Industrial Revolution, McPherson and Walter Scott produced the complementary world of romantic-escapist entertainment, a precursor of Hollywood. See Murray G. H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity from 1638 to the Present (London, 1991), pp. 72ff.
77. Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789 (Geneva, 1985).
78. Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792–1918 (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 80, 75, 93–94.
79. After the present book was completed, my old classmate Werner Sollors told me about Georges Devereux’s term “antagonistic acculturation,” defined as “the new means … adopted in order to support existing goals, sometimes even for the specific purpose of resisting the compulsory adoption of the goals of the lending group.… Means are adopted and the goals pertaining to them are rejected.… The borrowing of means is frequently understood only for the ultimate purpose of turning the tables on the lender” (Georges Devereux and Edwin M. Loeb, “Antagonistic Acculturation,” American Sociological Review 8 [1943]: 133–47).
1: The American South
1. Norbert Finzsch and Jürgen Martschukat, eds., Different Restorations: Reconstruction and “Wiederaufbau” in the United States and Germany, 1865—1945—1989 (Providence, 1996), pp. 316–17.
2. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), p. 125.
3. Quoted in Russell F. Weighley, The American Way of War (New York, 1973), p. 153.
4. Quoted in Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (New York, 1961), p. 380.
5. Quoted in Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York, 1995), p. 167.
6. On the Puritan concept of wilderness, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967), pp. 26–40. On the Elizabethan-Renaissance iconography of Virginia as a Garden of Eden, see Raimondo Luraghi, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South (New York, 1978), pp. 27, 31; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950; rpt. Cambridge, 1970), pp. 145ff. For a comparison of the two visions, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London, 1972), p. 43.
7. William Hepworth Dixon, New America (Philadelphia, 1867), pp. 461–63.
8. Quoted in William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961; rpt. New York, 1993), p. 97.
9. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951; rpt. Baton Rouge, 1995), pp. 456–57.
10. Quoted in Edwin A. Miles, “The Old South and the Classical World,” South Carolina Historical Review 48 (1971): 258, 263.
11. As Rollin G. Osterweis points out, the South’s “intellectual blockade” against the North put an end to its traditional role as the national seat of enlightenment (Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South [New Haven, 1949], p. 21).
12. Ibid., p. 11. The economic experience of the post-1830 South was not unlike that of sixteenth-century Central Europe. Both regions came out on the losing end of an epochal and global transformation of the world economy. Just as Central Europe was marginalized by the opening of overseas trade routes, the South was robbed by industrial development in the North of its leading role in agrarian industry. Throughout the first third of the nineteenth century, plantation products were the economic locomotive of the United States. That was where capital accumulation first took place, and without it the industrial takeoff of the North would have been impossible (see Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 [New York, 1966], pp. 66ff). Raimondo Luraghi describes the global economic context of the South’s decline, in all its “tragic” dimensions, as the demise of “seigneurial” culture in the European overseas colonies, which gradually lost its economic foundation to rising industrial capitalism (Rise and Fall). The feeling of abandonment and betrayal among those who are left sitting atop outmoded economic structures—while all around others are denouncing and attacking the older order—is common in history. England, which during its mercantilist-colonialist phase had engaged in the slave trade with unreserved energy, began to fight against slavery with much the same vigor after becoming an industrial society (David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress [New York, 1984], pp. 127ff.). The drama is being replayed today in the warnings of the First World to the industrially developing Third World about preserving the environment. It goes without saying that the warnings, criticisms, and denunciations emanate from a moralistic minority that distances itself from the voraciously capitalist past of its own culture.
13. Both quoted in Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 55, 57–58. Emphasis in original.
14. Quoted in Luraghi, Rise and Fall, p. 81.
15. Quoted in Osterweis, Romanticism, p. 20. Henry Clay would employ the same metaphor of the scales decades later, before the actual outbreak of hostilities, when the polarization had reached an advanced stage: “You Northerners are looking on in safety and security while the conflagration … is raging in the slave States.… In the one scale, then, we behold sentiment, sentiment alone; in the other, property, the social fabric, life, and all that makes life desirable and happy” (Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy [Boston, 1967], p. 122).
16. C. Vann Woodward, “The Irony of Southern History,” The Burden of Southern History, rev. 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge, 1993), p. 198.
17. Quoted in C. Vann Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston, n.d. [1971]), p. 123.
18. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (1948; rpt. New York, 1973), pp. 67–91.
19. Fitzhugh is quoted in Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York, 1962), p. 345. Grayson in Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma (Columbia, 1992), p. 71. Michael O’Brien, a leading representative of contemporary Southern intellectual history, grants the proslavery theoreticians that “their vision of the plantation … was as utopian as that of the phalanstery of Fourier” (Rethinking the South [Athens, Ga., 1993], p. 44).
20. “Slavery is…” quoted in Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay (New Rochelle, 1968), p. 89. “The new fashionable name…” quoted in Woodward, American Counterpoint, p. 119. Woodward mentions that Fitzhugh used the same source material on the condition of the English industrial proletariat that Marx would use ten years later as the basis for the first chapter of Das Kapital. Describing Fitzhugh’s anticapitalism, Woodward writes: “The ferocity of Fitzhugh’s indictment of the capitalist economy … is equaled only by the severity of the socialist attack” (p. 125). In this context, it is worth noting that Eugene D. Genovese, the historian of the plantation economy and its social forms, began his career as an orthodox Marxist, only to become a committed conservative and antisocialist. His interest in Fitzhugh, indeed his open sympathy for this “conservative revolutionary,” has remained so constant over the years that it could be attributed to both an authoritarian-socialist affinity and a romantic anticapitalism. Recently, Genovese has connected the collapse of Soviet-dominated real-existing socialism back to the fall of the Confederacy, one similarity being the disillusionment of the intelligentsia. “The fall of the Confederacy drowned the hopes of Southern conservatives for the construction of a viable noncapitalist order, much as the disintegration of the Soviet Union—all pretenses and wishful thinking aside—has drowned the hopes of socialists. The critique of capitalism has led Southern conservatives to the impasse in which the Left now finds itself” (The Southern Tradition [Cambridge, 1994], p. 37).
21. Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States (Ithaca, 1969), p. 153.
22. Quoted in Luraghi, Rise and Fall, p. 73.
23. Quoted in Sharon E. Hannum, “Confederate Cavaliers” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 1965), p. 54.
24. European public opinion was doubly divided about the American Civil War. Liberals condemned the South on account of slavery whereas conservatives sympathized with what they considered to be the South’s feudal-aristocratic cause. Within the liberal camp, however, there was considerable sympathy for the South’s cause when it was understood as a war for national liberation similar to those in Italy, Poland, and Hungary. Napoleon III supported the Confederacy not only for economic and political reasons but also for sentimental ones. Even Prévost-Paradol, a political supporter of the Union, found the aspirations of the South thoroughly comprehensible: “Let us suppose that we had received our slaves from our fathers at the same time we had received our fields,… that we had become slave owners in this great republic by a free contract and without argument.… Let us be just.… We would leave our homes armed, resolved to do everything to safeguard our security” (quoted in Serge Gavronsky, The French Liberal Opposition and the American Civil War [New York, 1968], p. 77). The German historian Heinrich Treitschke recorded among the Prussian officer corps, contrary to the official government line, “a certain sympathy for the slave barons of the South since they displayed such clear superiority in matters military” (Politik [Leipzig, 1898], vol. 2, p. 249).
25. Southern Literary Messenger 30 (1860): 404, 407.
26. On Robert E. Lee, see Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (Baton Rouge, 1977), p. 102. The Hans Muller family tree is cited in W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; rpt. New York, 1991), p. 64.
27. Edwin A. Miles, “The Old South and the Classical World,” North Carolina Historical Review [1971]: 264–65. On the post-1830 reinterpretation of the cavalier-Yankee dichotomy into racial antagonism, see Drew Gilpin Faust, Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge, 1988), pp. 10–11.
28. Murray G. H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London, 1991), pp. 5, 67.
29. See Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, 1988). According to McWhiney, the settlers in the South around 1800 came overwhelmingly from the periphery of England (Wales, Ireland, and Scotland) and were of entirely different social, cultural, and confessional stock than the English-Puritan middle class of the North. “Crackers” were lower-class, maintained archaic clan structures, had little use for the Protestant work ethic, acted on emotion, valued comfort and hospitality, and possessed an easily wounded sense of honor. In short, they represented all those qualities normally attributed to the cavalier. Thus the conclusion can be drawn in reverse, supporting W. J. Cash’s thesis that an originally plebeian class had elevated itself to the status of an American aristocracy.
30. Osterweis, Romanticism, p. 19.
31. While the author had assumed this happening during the Reconstruction period, Harry L. Watson points out a later date and a more twisted story: “KKK cross-burning originated as a literary flourish of Thomas Dixon in his 1905 novel The Clansman. He borrowed it from the novels of Sir Walter Scott (who had described cross-burning as a signaling device used by the clans of medieval Scotland) and erroneously attributed it to the Reconstruction Klan. When the KKK was reinvented in 1915 in the wake of The Birth of a Nation, the famous movie version of the Dixon novel, cross-burning was accepted as part of the package because everybody involved had seen it in the movies. And so this bit of bogus folklore made it into vicious real life” (personal correspondence).
32. This oft-cited passage comes from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883). It is surprising, in light of the date of publication, that cultural historians have taken for granted that Twain was exclusively attacking the South. In the 1880s, it was the North that saw medieval chivalry again become fashionable, and this contemporary trend must have been more what Twain had in mind than the past one of the South. A few years after the publication of Life on the Mississippi, Twain satirized in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court what he considered the unbearable foolishness of romanticism. Given that in the South the romantic disease Twain described had disappeared almost a generation before, whereas an outbreak was in full force in the North, it is tempting to conclude that his tongue lashing of the South was actually directed at the North. See also Cash, Mind of the South, p. 65; Wilson, Patriotic Gore, p. 444; and John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge, 1982), p. 52. On Walter Scott’s role in the South, there are no recent studies. The standard sources are still those from the 1930s and 1940s, on which Osterweis, too, relies. Along with Eckenrode, they are Grace Warren Landrum, “Sir Walter Scott and His Literary Revivals in the Old South,” American Literature 2 (Mar. 1930–Jan. 1931): 256–77; Landrum, “Notes on the Reading of the Old South,” American Literature 3 (1931): 60–71; and G. Harrison Orians, “Walter Scott, Mark Twain, and the Civil War,” South Atlantic Quarterly 40 (1941): 342–59.
33. Hamilton James Eckenrode coined the term Walter Scottland to describe the South after its self-transformation (“Sir Walter Scott and the South,” North American Review 206 [1917]).
34. Osterweis, Romanticism, p. 41.
35. Hamilton J. Eckenrode, Jefferson Davis (1923; rpt. Freeport, 1971), p. 11.
36. O’Brien, Rethinking the South, p. 51.
37. The standard regional study is J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978).
38. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1967), p. 121. Moore describes “capitalist-but-not-bourgeois” societies like the American South and Junker-dominated Prussia as “catonistic.” In an attempt to get around an age-old question—whether a slave-based economy that produces for a global capitalist market is capitalist or feudal—Moore answers “both.” This is the current consensus among historians. One horizon-expanding achievement of this discussion, initiated by Marxist historians, has been a comparison of the plantation system and the Prussian landed aristocracy in terms of their economic, social, and ideological structures. Shearer Davis Bowman’s Masters and Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York, 1993) provides a comprehensive survey and draws attention to the changing significance of the Marxian idea of a “Prussian path” into modernity. Whereas the phrase originally, in Lenin’s usage, designated the transformation of feudal estates into capitalist-organized agrarian concerns, it now refers to capitalist modernization within authoritarian-patriarchal societies like Prussia and Japan, in contrast to the liberal-democratic model.
39. As of 1860, the North was producing 97 percent of all cannons and firearms, 93 percent of all raw iron, 94 percent of all textiles, and 90 percent of the shoes in the United States (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era [New York, 1988], p. 318).
40. Michael O’Brien, “The Nineteenth-Century American South,” Historical Journal 24 (1981): 755.
41. Raimondo Luraghi, “The Civil War and the Modernization of American Society,” Civil War History 18 (1972): 246. See also the statistics on the rise of the munitions industry (p. 244).
42. Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America (Boston, 1968), p. 338. A further indicator of the superior military tradition in the South was the fact that responsibility for both the War Department and the army rested overwhelmingly in Southern hands. (Jefferson Davis, later the Confederate president, was for many years secretary of the War Department.) Of the four commanding generals in the United States, three were from the South, as was the leading military theoretician in prewar America, Denis H. Mahan, father of the author of The Influence of Sea-Power upon History.
43. Unlike those in Ivanhoe, Southern tournaments featured not dueling but contests of skill (Esther J. Crooks and Ruth W. Crooks, The Ring Tournament in the United States [Richmond, 1936]).
44. It is worth remembering that the picture of the South as the military citadel of the United States was unknown at the time of the Revolutionary War. New England played the leading role as both the site of the main battles and the origin of major military players. See Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 350. An important question for further investigation would be when and why the North relinquished its military aura to the South.
45. On the founding of military academies, see John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800–1861 (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 146–70.
46. Michael C. C. Adams, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 39.
47. Ibid., p. 31. The esteem in which the military culture of the South was held by the Northern military leadership did not, of course, remain a secret to the Union’s political leadership, as General McClellan’s ultimate dismissal attests. In the decisive phase of the war, as politicians began to search for explanations for the South’s early military victories, even West Point came in for criticism. The military academy was described as a breeding ground for traitors, and some demanded that the institution be abolished. One senator even suggested that the Union’s epitaph, if the North was defeated, should read: “Died of West Point pro-slaveryism” (p. 374).
48. Ibid., p. viii.
49. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (Cambridge, 1983), p. 15.
50. On Pollard, see Jack P. Maddox, The Reconstruction of Edward A. Pollard (Chapel Hill, 1974). During the war, Pollard had criticized the Southern leaders for their defensive strategy. To use a phrase from World War I, Pollard was a proponent of “peace through victory.” Moreover, anticipating something like the Morgenthau plan for defeated Nazi Germany, Pollard suggested that the industrial system of the North, after it was defeated, should be completely destroyed so the South would never again have to fear a capitalist-industrial threat. At the same time, the South was to expand its area of influence through a slavery-based empire including the Caribbean and parts of Central America. In the immediate aftermath of Lee’s surrender, Pollard was one of the few who wanted to continue the struggle with guerrilla warfare. The idea of the Lost Cause seems to have enabled him personally to jettison this sort of extremism. He spent the rest of his short life as a political moderate. Pollard died in 1872 at the age of forty.
51. Pollard, Lost Cause, pp. 750–52.
52. George F. Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton, 1964), p. 264.
53. Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York, 1966), p. 91.
54. Hilt to Hilt by John Esten Cooke. Le Conte is quoted in Hannum, “Confederate Cavaliers,” p. 73.
55. Southern Review, July 1869, quoted in Susan Speare Durant, “The Gently Furled Banner: The Development of the Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865–1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1972), p. 130.
56. John S. Blackburn and William Naylor McDonald, “Southern School History of the United States of America” (1870), quoted in Durant, “Gently Furled Banner,” p. 131.
57. The quotation is from the periodical The Land We Love, Sept. 1868, p. 447.
58. “Bludgeon against rapier” is John Esten Cooke’s characterization, quoted in Lloyd Arthur Hunter, “The Sacred South: Postwar Confederates and the Sacralization of Southern Culture” (Ph.D. diss., St. Louis University, 1978), p. 248. “Machinery against chivalry” is from Edward McCrady Jr., “Address before the Virginia Division of the Army of Northern Virginia” (1886), quoted in Durant, “Gently Furled Banner,” p. 370. The use of modern military technology was not, of course, considered “unmilitary” in the South. On the contrary, the South was perceived to have led the North in the realm of military technological innovation. The publisher of The Land We Love maintained that all major military inventions were discovered in the South and then copied and mass-produced in the North. “The Southern mind is eminently ingenious and suggestive, while the Northern mind takes up the hints thrown out, appropriates and improves them” (The Land We Love, June 1866, p. 90). The same conviction was common in post-1871 France with reference to Germany.
59. Quoted in Durant, “Gently Furled Banner,” p. ii.
60. The phrase is Union general J. W. Turner’s version of a saying common in the South. Quoted in Michael Perman, Reunion without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865–1868 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 29.
61. General Turner commented on the sentiment “We are whipped” with the following words: “I think if a man of generous soul felt deep mortification he would keep quiet on the subject. I have always thought that [Southerners’] feeling of mortification was more superficial than otherwise” (quoted in Perman, Reunion, p. 29). The frivolity or irony inherent in the term whipping is apparent in the record of a conversation between a Northern judge and an ex-senator from North Carolina. After the senator made a remark to the effect that his home state accepted the whipping, the exchange ensued: “‘Then they really feel themselves whipped?’ ‘Yes, you’ve subjugated us at last,’ with a smile which showed that the politician thought it not the worst kind of joke, after all” (p. 29).
62. “He looked like a cross between a Cavalier dandy and a riverboat gambler. He affected the romantic style of Sir Walter Scott’s heroes and was eager to win everlasting glory at Gettysburg” (McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 662).
63. Dixon, New America, pp. 492–93.
64. Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Long-street (Baton Rouge, 1982), p. 36.
65. Quoted in Connelly, Marble Man, p. 17.
66. Along with Connelly’s Marble Man and God and General Longstreet, see his “The Image and the General: Robert E. Lee in American Historiography,” Civil War History 19 (1973): 50–64.
67. Connelly, Marble Man, p. 95.
68. Ibid.
69. This account follows Thomas L. Connelly’s “Virginia argument” in attributing Lee’s national stature to the fact that he came from Virginia. In the South’s rhetoric, Virginia was used metonymically for the entire region to portray the South as the seat of the nation’s soul and the victim of a tragic conflict (God and General Longstreet, pp. 39ff.). Two divergent regions—the “aristocratic” Old South and the dynamic, nouveau riche Cotton Belt—had crystallized in the three decades prior to the Civil War. The South’s postdefeat “rediscovery” of Virginia’s leading role in the birth of the nation was accompanied by Virginia’s own desire to distance itself from those usually held responsible for secession. (The corollary here would be the attitude among the southern German states, above all Bavaria, toward Prussia in November 1918.) What had begun as an argument for Virginia, however, was taken over and adopted by the rest of the South once it had become clear that there was indeed a considerable amount of sentimental-romantic sympathy for Virginia in the North.
70. Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877 (New York, 1998), pp. 175ff.
71. A “sacred society” is defined by the sociologist Howard Becker as “one that elicits from or imparts to its members, by means of association, an unwillingness and/or liability to respond to the culturally new as the new is defined by those members in terms of the society’s existing culture.” Its antithesis, “secular society,” “endows its members with a high degree of readiness and capacity to change” (quoted in Samuel S. Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis [New York, 1967], p. 67). The definitions were originally contained in Becker’s essay “Sacred and Secular Societies,” Social Forces 28 (1950): 363ff. Lloyd Arthur Hunter suggests the term cultural religion for the Lost Cause (Sacred South, p. 42). Coined by Fritz Stern in reference to the culturally pessimistic German intelligentsia during the Wilhelminian era, the term is in fact the first step toward a fruitful comparison of the two cultures. “Rebuffed in actuality and turned inwards by their beliefs, the German elite tended to become estranged from reality and disdainful of it. It lost the power to deal with practical matters in practical terms” (Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair [Berkeley, 1974], p. xxv). Charles Reagan Wilson describes the Lost Cause as a “civil religion” distinguishing the South from the rest of the United States. He takes his definition of “civil religion” from Robert N. Bellah, Sidney E. Mead, and Will Herberg (Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause [Athens, Ga., 1980], pp. 12–14).
A famous passage from William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust illustrates the extent to which the Lost Cause was a sacred one and gives insight into the psychology of its believers. “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock in the afternoon in 1863, the brigades are still in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand and probably his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin” (quoted in Douglas T. Miller, “Faulkner and the Civil War: Myth and Reality,” American Quarterly 15 [1963]: 201).
72. A passage from an 1894 sermon reads: “I do not forget … that a Nero wielded the scepter of empire and a Paul was beheaded; that a Herod was crowned and a Christ was crucified.… Instead of accepting the defeat of the South as a divine verdict against her, I regard it as but another instance of ‘truth on the scaffold and wrong on the throne’” (quoted in Hunter, Sacred South, p. 265). On theological explanations for defeat, see Wilson, Baptized in Blood, pp. 58ff. On the Job argument in particular, see pp. 72ff.
73. Sermon by James I. Vance, quoted in Wilson, Baptized in Blood, p. 75.
74. “Narcotic influence,” coined by Walter Hines Page, is quoted in John Milton Cooper Jr., Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill, 1977), p. xxi.
75. Manufacturers Record, July 9, 1887, quoted in Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (1970; rpt. Baton Rouge, 1976), pp. 57–58.
76. Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 92–93.
77. Ibid., p. 93.
78. Ibid., p. 100. On the genesis of the antagonism between the pro-industrial North and the anti-industrial South, see Norris W. Preyer, “Why Did Industrialization Lag in the Old South?” Georgia Historical Review 55 (1971): 378–96. According to Preyer, the development of artisanry and early industry in the North and South around 1800 was basically comparable and, if anything, somewhat more advanced in the South. A half century later, the balance had tilted radically in favor of the North. Along with the traditional explanation that the cotton boom prevented further industrial development in the South, Preyer draws attention to an anti-industrial mentality common to both North and South. Both regions viewed the Manchester model as evil and sought to hinder it with every means at their disposal. Northern industrialization was understood as something altogether different from its English equivalent. The factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, were seen as stations of orderliness, morality, and hygiene, a kind of extension of Sunday school. In other words, factories were as much the holy counterimage to satanic industrialization for Northerners as plantations were for Southerners.
79. The Land We Love, May 1866, pp. 8–10.
80. Dixon, New America, pp. 474–75.
81. Stampp, Era of Reconstruction, pp. 44, 56.
82. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), p. 6.
83. Tocqueville himself noted early on that “the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists” (quoted in C. Vann Woodward, “The Antislavery Myth,” American Scholar 31 [1961]: 316).
84. All quotations appear in Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (Boston, 1937), pp. 11–12.
85. Eric L. McKitrick distinguishes between two phases of postwar sentiment in the North. He characterizes the first as a “wait-and-see” attitude, in keeping with the North’s expectation that the South would show visible signs (“rituals”) of subjugation and regret. Only after this did not happen did the mood shift to one demanding punitive measures (Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction [Chicago, 1960], pp. 15ff.). McKitrick is primarily referring to popular opinion as distinguished from opinions expressed in the media.
86. The black codes were “a melange of paternalism and repression” (Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 [Baton Rouge, 1985], p. 217). Considering the chaos prevailing in the postwar South, the black codes can also be seen as an attempt to reestablish order. In the months prior to the passage of this legislation, the occupying Union army had taken similar, often harsher disciplinary and discriminatory measures against blacks. See Carter, When the War, pp. 180ff.
87. Quoted in Stampp, Era of Reconstruction, p. 200.
88. Gaston, New South Creed, pp. 18ff. This study remains the classic on the intellectual history, mentality, and ideology of the New South.
89. Ibid., p. 32.
90. Of the four articles by DeLeon that Gaston lists in his bibliography, two were published in Northern magazines, two in the South. “The New South” was the title of an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1874). The titles of the articles that were published in the South were “Ruin and Reconstruction of the Southern States” and “The Southern States since the War” (Gaston, New South Creed, p. 289).
91. Pollard’s revision of his views took place in his book The Lost Cause Regained (1868). He published numerous other articles on the necessity of modernizing the South, using the North as a model, between 1870 and his death in 1872. See Jack P. Maddex Jr., “Pollard’s ‘The Lost Cause Regained’: A Mask for Southern Accommodation,” Journal of Southern History 40 (1974): 610 off.
92. Gaston, New South Creed, p. 91.
93. Quoted in John S. Ezell, “Woodrow Wilson as Southerner,” Civil War History 15 (1969): 163. Emphasis in original.
94. Such figures were not, of course, aware that when they said “economy” they meant politics. Politicians’ politics were disdained: “Politics won’t increase the number of factories in a town. Politics won’t build stores and houses. Politics won’t attract investors; on the contrary, it often creates such oppressive laws for the benefit of its adherents that capital is kept away. Politics seldom increases a man’s business in a legitimate way” (Richard H. Edmonds, quoted in Gaston, New South Creed, p. 109). What was meant by “politics” was “bad for business” politics, just as “business” was code for business-friendly politics.
95. Quoted in Gaston, New South Creed, p. 196. The Manufacturers Record, published in Baltimore, was more a propaganda organ than a source of information. C. Vann Woodward observes that the publisher, Richard H. Edmonds, “employed statistics for hortatory purposes, with something of the orator’s license” (Origins of the New South, p. 145).
96. Quoted in Woodward, American Counterpoint, pp. 42–43. Grady was born in 1850 in Atlanta and died at the age of thirty-nine. His role as a figurehead for the New South was due primarily to his oratorical skills and secondarily to his journalistic activity as the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. His youth and charisma seem to have had a kind of Alcibiades effect on his audience.
97. Ibid., p. 43. “Mother of millionaires” is quoted in Gaston, New South Creed, p. 79.
98. Gaston, New South Creed, p. 76.
99. Ibid., p. 78.
100. Ibid., p. 72.
101. Ibid.
102. As with all stereotypes, contradictions abound. The mirror image of the South as “mild,” “lovely,” “sensual,” and “charming” was the masculine, aggressive, martial self-conception of Southern male culture, epitomized by its rigid codes of honor. This feverish masculinity can be seen as overcompensation for the feminine side. The self-stylized Southern knight defined himself as both defender and vassal of feminine cultural refinement. The ideal, of course, was a synthesis of both characteristics in the image of the “tender-hearted hero.” General George Burgwyn Anderson was characterized at his funeral as “a soft, gentle, refined, winning, and almost womanly spirit” (Durant, “Gently Furled Banner,” p. 204). William Gilmore Simms, the most prominent author of plantation novels in the prewar period, was not alone in seeing Hamlet as “a kind of parable for the South.” Southern literature was, as William R. Taylor argues, full of such “weak and sensitive heroes” (Cavalier and Yankee, pp. 293–96). The heroines were another matter entirely. The Southern belle was a female anti-Hamlet, a driving force, and, as Kathryn Lee Seidel stresses, a figure who owed her influence not to beauty but to a combination of charisma, energy, grace, and intellect (The Southern Belle in the American Novel [Tampa, 1985], p. 3). After the war, however, the active young heroine became a passive object to be married. Seidel discusses this shift in a chapter tellingly entitled “The Belle as the Fallen South” (pp. 127–29).
103. Henry W. Grady, The New South and Other Addresses (1904; rpt. New York, 1969), pp. 95–96.
104. Woodward, Origins of the New South, p. 108.
105. Foner, Reconstruction, p. 597.
106. Woodward, Origins of the New South, pp. 140, 111.
107. Carter, When the War, p. 171. On the thwarted expectations for an influx of immigrant labor and capital investment, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, p. 299. In this respect, as in so many others, the New South period resembled the two initial post–Civil War years.
108. On the South as “colonial economy,” see Woodward, Origins of the New South, pp. 291 ff.
109. Richard H. Edmonds, quoted in Gaston, New South Creed, pp. 164–65.
110. The term mummies was coined by Walter Hines Page, one of the few critical minds in the New South movement.
111. Scribner’s Magazine, Dec. 1874, quoted in Gaston, New South Creed, p. 39.
112. Buck, Road to Reunion, p. 131.
113. Frederick Taylor, quoted in Buck, Road to Reunion, p. 191.
114. Quoted in Wilson, Baptized in Blood, pp. 172, 173–74. Naturally the old antagonisms did not completely disappear in the crusade rhetoric. They lived on in the form of puns such as “German–Sherman” (p. 224).
115. An intriguing question is whether that segment of the loser elite that is bent on adopting not only the “technical” and “material” methods but also the idealistic-moral content of the victorious model is trying to be more Catholic than the pope. A comparison between Woodrow Wilson’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s attitudes toward U.S. entry into World War I suffices to illustrate the point. Long before Wilson, Roosevelt was a passionate interventionist; his rationale, however, was not moralistic but military and strategic. A psychohistorical interpretation of Wilsonian moralism might argue that Wilson was trying to compensate for the “moral defeat” of his father’s generation by playing the role of the “abolitionist” against the Central Powers. In any case, for Wilson the Civil War and World War I possessed a similar moral status and were intimately connected. “The Civil War was a war to save one country,” he remarked. “The Great War is a war to save the world” (Anthony Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson and the Legacy of the Civil War,” Civil War History 43 [1997]: 241). Consistent with this attitude, Wilson saw his idea for a League of Nations as the extension of the American Union. Just as the Union soldiers had given their lives in the Civil War “in order that America be united, these men [the soldiers of World War I] have given their lives in order that the world might be united.” Lincoln was Wilson’s undisputed role model, and his influence was so great that, for example, after his stroke Wilson received visitors in Lincoln’s bed.
116. “The Cause Triumphant,” Confederate Veteran, Mar. 1918, quoted in Wilson, Baptized in Blood, p. 174.
117. The phrase spiritual Secession was coined by Donald Davidson (Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War [New York, 1973], p. 291). I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York, 1930) has been reprinted repeatedly since 1962.
118. “Out of this philosophy laced with selective facts and ancestral legend,” writes Daniel Aaron of the agrarians, “came simplistic history, but out of simplistic history came fruitful myth” (Unwritten War, p. 293). In his review of I’ll Take My Stand, Edmund Wilson recognized an authenticity and “warmth” in Southern life that the North lacked (New Republic, July 29, 1931; reprinted in Wilson, The American Earthquake [New York, 1958], pp. 330ff.). The most prominent authors in the group were, in addition to Tate and Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Stark Young, and Andrew Nelson Lytle. See Paul K. Conkin, The Southern Agrarians (Knoxville, 1988).
119. David M. Potter, “The Enigma of the South,” Yale Review 51 (Oct. 1961): 148–49.
120. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Anxiety of History: The Southern Confrontation with Modernity,” Southern Cultures 1 (1993): 66.
121. It is no accident that the term exceptionalism (Sonderweg), most often used in conjunction with pre-Nazi Germany, is here applied to the development of the South after 1830. The exceptional development undergone by the South and Germany is the same insofar as both societies belonged to the modern West yet rejected the ideas of 1789—democracy, equality, and progress—in favor of a romantic-aristocratic ideal of culture. In Germany, the rejection is reflected in the distinction between Kultur (positive) and Zivilisation (negative); in the South it is the idea of agrarian patriarchy as distinguished from Northern liberal democracy. Similar, too, are the resulting forms of class hegemony—for example, the latifundia produce goods according to capitalist principles for the world market yet maintain an aristocratic-feudal culture and ideology. The ideal of a patriarchal Gemeinschaft, or community, was defined in both cases through a rejection of Gesellschaft, or society, which was deemed atomizing and inhuman. In this vein, David M. Potter characterizes the secession as a “conservative revolt” (The South and the Sectional Conflict [Baton Rouge, 1968], p. 293). What Germany was for Western Europe, the South was for the United States. Both conceived of themselves, to return to Werner Sombart’s antithesis, as heroic versus shopkeeper cultures. This explains the contempt maintained for the ideological “cant” of the enemy and the high estimation of one’s own “openness,” which from the enemy perspective is nothing more than pure barbarism. Whether we are speaking of the German violation of Belgian neutrality in 1914, which was freely admitted by Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, or the comparison between slavery and free wage labor—the former as “an open system of undisguised force, the other … a system of disguised fraud,” in the words of Francis Pickens (quoted in Carter, When the War, p. 130)—masculine plain talk was considered morally superior to the enemy’s hypocrisy.
122. Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (1924; rpt. Gloucester, 1962), p. 16.
123. Seidel, Southern Belle, pp. 5ff.
124. Gaines, Southern Plantation, p. 23.
125. The equation of “escapist” literature in the North and the South fails to take into account the fundamentally divergent social structures and mentalities in the two societies. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese draws attention to the danger of measuring prewar Southern literature according to Northern standards—for example, by expecting the hero to be internally tormented when such behavior would have violated Southern social and cultural norms. “The southern hero owes his identity to his identification with society, rather than his struggles against it” (“Anxiety of History,” p. 76). The insistence on evaluating Southern literature according to Southern norms and not those of the West European or Northern hero is evocative of Henry Adams’s oft-cited phrase that the Southerner is “simple beyond analysis.” W. J. Cash develops this line of thinking even further: “From first to last … he did not … think; he felt; and discharging his feelings immediately, he developed no need or desire for intellectual culture in its own right—none, at least, powerful enough to drive him past his taboos to its actual achievement” (Mind of the South, p. 99).
126. Ibid., p. 62.
127. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, p. 310.
128. Buck, Road to Reunion, p. 229.
129. John W. DeForest, “Chivalrous and Semi-Chivalrous Southrons,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Jan.–Feb. 1869, p. 192.
130. Tourgée cites this passage in his 1888 essay “The South as a Field for Fiction” (Forum 6 [1888]: 405), claiming that it was published “more than twenty years ago.” No record of its publication can be found in either of the Tourgée biographies, Otto H. Olsen, Carpetbagger’s Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgée (Baltimore, 1965), or Theodore L. Gross, Albion W. Tourgée (New York, 1963). In the 1888 essay, Tourgée develops the motif of the heroicized loser even further:
Our literature has become not only Southern in type, but distinctly Confederate in sympathy. The Federal or Union soldier is not exactly depreciated, but subordinated; the Northern type is not decried, but the Southern is preferred.… In sincerity of passion and aspiration, as well as in the woefulness and humiliation that attended its downfall, the history of the Confederacy stands preeminent in human epochs. Everything about it was on a grand scale. Everything was real and sincere. The soldier fought in defense of his home, in vindication of what he deemed his right. There was a proud assumption of superiority, a regal contempt of their foe, which, like Hector’s boastfulness, added wonderfully to the pathos of the result. Then, too, a civilization fell with it—a civilization full of wonderful contrasts, horrible beyond the power of imagination to conceive its injustice, cruelty, and barbarous debasement of a subject race, yet exquisitely charming in its assumption of pastoral purity and immaculate excellence (pp. 405, 411–12).
131. Harris, who alongside Thomas Nelson Page was the leading exponent of the “plantation school” in the 1880s and 1890s, worked with Grady on his newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, and was a public supporter of the New South program. Paul H. Buck notes the parallels between New South propaganda and plantation romanticism: the novelists of the 1880s, he writes, “set about to exploit the raw materials of fiction with much the same spirit that others of the same generation sought wealth in the undeveloped resources of the South” (Road to Reunion, p. 197).
132. Woodward, Origins of the New South, p. 158. The history of this quotation is a story all its own. Kenneth S. Lynn mistakenly attributes it to Henry James (Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor [Boston, 1959], p. 231), and Daniel Aaron repeats the error in The Unwritten War (p. 245).
133. Several of the prewar novels also thematize the intrusion of the Revolutionary War on the plantation idyll. The difference is that the outbreak of the Civil War signals the end, in literature as well as in reality, of plantation culture.
134. Buck, Road to Reunion, p. 233; Osterweis, Myth, pp. 102ff.
135. Trophies are often those possessions that made the vanquished enemy powerful, particularly his weaponry. John W. DeForest identifies the connection between power and literature in the necessary disempowerment of the enemy that precedes his transformation into literature. The South, he writes, “had been too positively and authoritatively a political power to get fair treatment in literature.” With the eradication of this power, the qualities that made the South an ideal literary subject are suddenly visible. The loser becomes an object not of aggression or criticism but of collectors’ interest, since “his day is passing; in another generation his material will be gone; the ‘chivalrous Southron’ will be as dead as the slavery that created him.… It would be good both for him and for us if we should perseveringly attempt to put up with his oddities and handle him as a pet” (“Chivalrous,” p. 347).
136. Origins of the New South, p. 148. On the role of the ideal of chivalry in the Gilded Age of the North, see John Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (New York, 1982): “Northern society increasingly made itself over in the light of aristocratic European and Southern patterns, partly as a defense against immigrant groups like the Irish and the Jews, partly to sustain the morale of the wealthy against the working class in general, partly because the older rich wished to preserve distinctions between themselves and the newer rich” (p. 26). In the late 1890s, with the rise of progressivism as a reaction to robber-baron capitalism, the ideal of chivalry was once more reinterpreted, with Theodore Roosevelt’s trustbusters becoming the fearless knights laying siege to the fortresses of Capital.
137. Quoted in Wilson, Patriotic Gore, p. 606.
138. Gaines, Southern Plantation, p. 114. Examples of similar “cleansing” in both the North and the South could be cited endlessly. A memorable one is the sanitized image of Robert E. Lee as national hero. Southern historians edited out all recorded statements by Lee that were critical of the North, and their Northern colleagues refrained from calling Lee’s patriotism into question.
139. Vernon L. Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800–1860, vol. 2 of Main Currents in American Thought (1927; rpt. New York, 1987), p. 474.
140. On Lee, see Connelly, Marble Man, pp. 134ff., as well as Connelly and Bellows, God and General Longstreet, p. 109 (which lists thirteen biographies of Lee published in the 1930s alone) and pp. 127ff. on the Depression-era interest in the Lost Cause. “Never before had the entire nation been so close to the southern experience” (p. 130). An initial Lee renaissance had taken place between the turn of the century and 1914. Two biographies, whose authors (Charles Francis Adams Jr. and Gamaliel Bradford) belonged to the Lost Generation of the Gilded Age, presented Lee as a cross between a loser-hero and a nationalist—a more or less exact reflection of the authors’ own status (see Connelly, Man of Marble, pp. 116ff.). Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialist nationalism, coupled with the social philosophy of progressivism, took up the cause of idealism in reaction to the materialism of the Gilded Age, providing a signal of hope and a point of assembly for the disenchanted idealists of the older generation.
141. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (1960; rpt. Baton Rouge, 1993), p. 21.
142. Ibid., p. 117. In Henry Adams, one finds a characteristically off-the-cuff admission of his greater sympathy with the South in one respect. The following quotation comes from the passage cited above, in which Adams describes Robert E. Lee’s son somewhat superciliously as “simple beyond analysis.” Writing as always in the third person, Adams concludes his observation with the words: “Roony Lee had changed little from the Virginian of a century before; but Adams himself was a good deal nearer the type of his great-grandfather than to that of a railway superintendant. He was little more fit than the Virginians to deal with the future America which showed no fancy for the past” (The Education of Henry Adams [Boston, 1916], p. 59).
143. Henry Adams’s novel Democracy appeared anonymously in 1880, Henry James’s The Bostonians in 1886. Herman Melville’s Claret was not a novel, but rather a “philosophical poem.”
144. Lewis P. Simpson, Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes (Baton Rouge, 1989), p. 92.
2: France
1. Pierre Guiral, Prévost-Paradol: Pensée et action d’un libéral sous le Second Empire (Paris, 1955). The formulation “la première victime de la guerre du Rhin” is that of the embassy attaché Charles-Adolphe Chambruns (p. 714). On the circumstances of Paradol’s suicide, see pp. 720–23.
2. Quoted in Guiral, Prévost-Paradol, p. 715. The remark was published under Cherbuliez’s pen name, G. Valbert, in the Revue des deux mondes, May 1, 1894.
3. La France nouvelle (Paris, 1868), p. 388.
4. Ibid., pp. 381–83.
5. Ibid., pp. 418–19.
6. See Konrad W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (The Hague, 1964).
7. Hippolyte Taine, Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 332; quoted in Eduard Wechssler, Die Franzosen und wir (Jena, 1915), p. 11.
8. Stendhal, letter to Pauline, Correspondence, vol. 4 (Paris, 1934), p. 282; Journal, vol. 5 (Paris, 1937), p. 236 (this entry contains Stendhal’s secondhand account of his friend Louis Crozet’s description). Napoleon’s commissars reported similar lethargy at the end of December 1815. See G. de Berthier de Sauvigny, La restauration (Paris, 1955), pp. 15ff.
9. It is tempting to compare the businesslike manner in which Napoleon was deposed in 1814 by the corps législatif, whose members he had himself appointed in better days, with Mussolini’s removal 129 years later by the Grand Fascist Council after the Allied landing in Sicily.
10. La nouvelle revue 65 (1890), p. 178.
11. “The irritation…” quoted in Lynn M. Case, French Opinion on War and Diplomacy during the Second Empire (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 226. “We wish…” quoted in André Armengaud, L’Opinion publique en France et la crise nationale allemande en 1866 (Paris, 1962), p. 88. Representative of the mood within the press is the Gazette de France of Aug. 31, 1866: “After the invasions of 1814 and 1815, nothing has been more tragic for France than the events in Germany of 1866” (Armengaud, L’opinion publique, p. 80). Emile Ollivier, who was to inaugurate the war against Prussia four years later, spoke in 1866 of an année fatale, prefiguring the année terrible (Armengaud, L’opinion publique, p. 2). “The energy…” quoted in Hermann Oncken, Die Rheinpolitik Kaiser Napoleons III von 1863 bis 1870 und der Ursprung des Krieges von 1870–71 (Berlin, 1926), p. 330. Königgrätz/Sadowa also anticipated the French defeat of 1870–71 in that, as of 1866, a comprehensive discussion of state, educational, and military reforms commenced. This discussion came to nothing, however, probably because it wasn’t yet motivated by a dramatic defeat.
12. By contrast one out of every 450 Frenchmen died in the war against Prussia.
13. Naturally, there was also a historical and mythological legacy on the German side: the devastation of the Rhineland-Palatinate, the destruction of the Heidelberg castle, Jena-Auerstedt, the peace of Tilsit, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. German revanche for two centuries of humiliation by the French, however, was a matter divorced from military events, which were determined by Bismarck and Moltke’s purely pragmatic strategy, whereas mythology and strategy melded into one in France.
14. Revue des deux mondes, Sept. 1, 1870, pp. 181–82.
15. Hermann Grimm, “Voltaire und Frankreich,” Preussische Jahrbücher 27 (1871): 2.
16. Also vanishing without a trace were any memories that public opinion, including that of the opposition, had enthusiastically supported the declaration of war and every military move by the regime. A recent study compares the national consensus in July 1870 with the union sacrée of August 1914 (Jean-Jacques Becker and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, La France, la nation, la guerre, 1850–1920 [Paris, 1995], pp. 66ff.). The only linguistic indication that the national enthusiasm of September 4 was any less intense than that before World War I was, as Michael Jeismann shows, the replacement of the terms la nation and la France with the more personal nous. See Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792–1918 (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 174ff.
17. In New York in 1981, I witnessed a similar phenomenon in which rituals of triumph served to obscure an actual humiliation. The release of the American hostages after their months-long imprisonment in Tehran was celebrated with the traditional ticker-tape parade with which victorious armies and heroes of air and space travel are welcomed back to the United States. No one seemed to notice that there was no victory to celebrate—at most a fortunate, and hardly heroic, escape.
18. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (n.p., 1969), p. 232. A. J. P. Taylor calls the treaty of Frankurt of May 1871 “a victor’s peace on the Napoleonic model,” observing that the five billion francs demanded as reparation was “a sum exactly proportioned to the indemnity which Napoleon I had imposed on Prussia in 1807” (The New Cambridge Modern History [Cambridge, 1957–79], vol. 11, p. 543).
19. Quoted in Jean-Pierre Azéma and Michel Winock, La 3è République (Paris, 1976), p. 44.
20. Revue des deux mondes, Sept. 15, 1870.
21. Quoted in Azéma and Winock, 3è République, p. 59. In Theodore Zeldin’s fascinating if undocumented portrait, Thiers emerges as the embodiment of bourgeois revanche for 1848. His carefully planned strategy was first, in March 1871, to abandon Paris to its own devices, before turning it over to the military for a “final solution” (not Zeldin’s term), in order to break the revolutionary backbone once and for all (History of French Passions, vol. 1 [Oxford, 1993], pp. 735ff.).
22. In the face of German occupation, the newly elected National Assembly had convened in nonoccupied Bordeaux. In the short term, it planned to use the city as a temporary exile. However, the decision to relocate the government to Versailles—Fontainebleau was also considered—was intended to be permanent.
23. Victor Hugo donated the proceeds from all performances of his theatrical works during the occupation to the fund. One of the cannons that this money financed was named after him (Victor Hugo, Choses vues [Paris, 1972], pp. 106ff.).
24. On the revival of the spirit of 1792, E. Malcolm Carroll writes: “The fall of the Empire had been followed immediately by the organization of numerous radical clubs where orators nightly renewed the memories of 1792” (French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870–1914 [1931; rpt. Hamden, 1964], p. 38).
25. Quoted in Daniel Amson, Gambetta, ou le rève brisé (Paris, 1994), p. 223.
26. Quoted in Azéma and Winock, 3è République, p. 58.
27. Quoted in André Bellesort, Les intellectuels et l’avènement de la 3è République (Paris, 1931), p. 16.
28. The comparison between the Commune uprising and the American Civil War is made by Jean T. Joughin, The Paris Commune in French Politics: The History of the Amnesty of 1880, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1955): “Just as the Confederacy represented an obsolescent concept of the relationship between the state and the federal government, so the Paris Commune had an antique view of the role of the municipality vis-à-vis the national government. Both ‘lost causes’ were victims of the swing toward concentration of political power at the top” (vol. 1, p. 14).
29. Most of the victims were not claimed by the actual fighting, nor were they killed in “spontaneous” massacres. They were executed by “war tribunals,” which usually consisted of the commanding generals. A not atypical case was the execution of the Republican deputy Millière, who did not participate in the uprising but was brought before General de Cissey during de Cissey’s midday meal and summarily shot “between the pear and the cheese.” For this and other examples, see Robert Tombs, The War against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 179ff.
30. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, vol. 2 (Paris, 1956), p. 453. Edmond had criticized the January capitulation as degrading, asking how a French hand could have signed the treaty (p. 386).
31. Quoted in Nicole Priollaud, ed., 1871: La Commune de Paris (Paris, 1983), p. 110.
32. Littré quoted in Priollaud, 1871, p. 181. Zola quoted on p. 75. For Goncourt, see Journal, p. 386.
33. Clemenceau: “It was one of those extraordinary nervous outbursts, so frequent in the Middle Ages, which still occur amongst masses of human beings under the stress of some primeval emotion” (quoted in Roger L. Williams, The French Revolution of 1870–71 [New York, 1969], p. 114). Renan: “The biggest factor is the terrible chill running down the spine of an impressionable population unprepared for the embarrassment of Prussian invasion [the victory parade of the German army on March 1], one that has been stirred up by chimeras and impossible promises, gorged on arms and munitions, and nourished by the six months of inactivity it has had to endure. From that moment on, the population of Paris went crazy” (letter of July 17, 1871, Correspondence, vol. 10 of Oeuvres complétes [Paris, 1961], p. 571).
34. The “folie,” added Juliette Adam, the grande dame of revanche, was one she understood (Mes angoisses et mes luttes, 1871–1873, vol. 5 of Souvenirs [Paris, 1907], p. 123).
35. “Confused and short-lived though it was, the experiences of the Commune provided the lurid and violent background against which the institutions of the republic were devised and consolidated” (Joughin, Paris Commune, p. 11).
36. The remark, which appears in Bismarck’s memoirs, is quoted in Maurice Beaumont, Bazaine: Les secrets d’un maréchal (Paris, 1978), p. 159. Similarly, the Times of London for Nov. 9, 1870, asked when France’s soldiers would learn to say that they had been vanquished and not that they had been betrayed (p. 159). See also Moltke: “The French need a traitor at any cost to explain the defeat suffered by their nation” (Edmond Ruby and Jean Regnault, Bazaine: Coupable ou victime? [Paris, 1960], p. 304).
37. Quoted in Ruby and Regnault, Bazaine, p. 304.
38. Philip Guedalla, The Two Marshalls: Bazaine—Pétain (London, 1943), p. 232.
39. Quoted in Beaumont, Bazaine, p. 283.
40. Klaus Rudolf Wenger, Preussen in der öffentlichen Meinung Frankreichs, 1815–1870 (Göttingen, 1979), pp. 37–38.
41. Louis Veuillot, quoted in Wenger, Preussen, p. 222.
42. In comparison, the change of mood in 1914 Germany after England’s entry into World War I (“Let God punish England!”) was also intense but less fundamental and shorter-lived because there had never been even a trace of erotic undertones in Anglo-German relations.
43. H. D. Schmidt, “The Idea and Slogan of ‘Perfidious Albion,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 14 (1953): 604–16. On the Carthage topos, see Frances Acomb, Anglophobia in France, 1763–89 (Durham, 1950), p. 9.
44. Wenger, Preussen, p. 42.
45. These are the words of Charles Gravier Vergennes, foreign minister under Louis XVI, quoted in Jean-François Labourdette, Vergennes, ministre principal de Louis XVI (Paris, 1990), p. 89.
46. The French conceit of having won a “moral victory” over its opponent was much in evidence at the end of the Seven Years War. In 1763, after the signing of the treaty of Paris, which ceded much of France’s territory in the New World to England, two plays were staged in the French capital to great popular success. The comedy L’Anglais à Bordeaux by the popular playwright Charles-Simon Favart has an English lord, who otherwise embodies all the negative characteristics of his nation (arrogance, coldness, calculation, and greed), being won over as a prisoner of war on the estate of a French chevalier by his host’s charm, generosity, and nobility. Likewise, the patriotic melodrama Le siège de Calais (1765), in which the heroic citizens of Calais shame the English victors, makes abundantly clear who the moral victor is. Diderot and Voltaire, who doubted that the celebration of defeat could awaken patriotic sentiment, were proved wrong. The marquis de Croy better caught the spirit of the times when he concluded about the Calais melodrama: “The nation, in need of edification, found it in this brand-new genre.” On the two plays, see Acomb, Anglophobia, pp. 55ff. On Diderot and Voltaire’s divergent opinion, see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v “Dormont de Belloy.”
47. For these formulations, see Jeismann, Vaterland der Feinde, p. 201, and Marieluise Christadler, “Zur nationalpädagogischen Funktion kollektiver Mythen in Frankreich,” Nationale Mythen und Symbole in der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 201–02.
48. Quoted in Jeismann, Vaterland der Feinde, pp. 191–92; emphasis added. The dates of these statements are Sept. 17, Sept. 5, and Sept. 9, 1870. (The quotation that serves as the title of this section is also from Sept. 5.) Jeismann has effectively captured the sudden transformation at the moment of defeat of France’s self-perception from active bringer of civilization to passive keeper of the flame. This is the overheated rhetorical-ideological equivalent of the “trope” in battle, which causes morale to plummet and the soldiers to give up the fight and flee en masse.
49. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complétes, Politique (Paris, 1985), pp. 882–83, 896.
50. Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays in Five Volumes, vol. 5 (New York, 1904), p. 54.
51. On the interpretation of the war by the German intelligentsia, see Gerhard R. Kaiser, “Der Bildungsbürger und die normative Kraft des Faktischen: 1870–71 im Urteil der deutschen Intelligenz,” Feindbild und Faszination: Vermittlerfiguren und Wahrnehmungsprozesse in den deutsch-französischen Beziehungen, 1789–1983, ed. H.-J. Lüsebrink and J. Riesz (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 55–74, and Hein-Otto Sieburg, “Die Elsass-Lothringen-Frage in der deutsch-französischen Diskussion von 1871 bis 1914,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Saargegend 17–18 (1969–70): 9–37. On Strauss, see Claude Digeon, La crise allemande et la pensée française, 1870–1914 (Paris, 1959), pp. 189ff. On Mommsen, see Lothar Wickert, Grösse und Grenzen, vol. 4 of Theodor Mommsen (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), pp. 170–79. The open letters from July and Aug. 1870, “Agli Italiani,” are reprinted in Quaderni di storia 4 (1976): 197–247. On Schulze-Delitzsch, see “Drei Briefe an die italienischen Patrioten über den deutschen Krieg und seine Folgen (November/Dezember 1870),” Hermann Schulze-Delitzschs Schriften und Reden, ed. F. Thorwart, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1911), pp. 648ff.
52. Revue des deux mondes, Jan. 1, 1871, p. 28.
53. Revue des deux mondes, Sept. 15, 1870. Quoted in Jeismann, Vaterland der Feinde, p. 238.
54. “En campagne,” L’illustration, Sept. 13, 1870, quoted in Jeismann, Vaterland der Feinde, p. 236.
55. Quoted in Wilhelm Windelband, “Der Nationalismus in der französischen Geschichtsschreibung seit 1871,” Deutsche Rundschau 176 (1918): 174.
56. Warning the victor of 1870–71 against hubris was, like so much of the French reaction to Sedan, an echo of the rhetoric that French public opinion had used to console itself after the Seven Years War. In that conflict, England’s victory was deemed doubly Pyrrhic: economically, since the industrialization and colonial expansion that would come with Britain’s vastly enlarged empire was certain to destroy the natural harmony of the land, and morally, since victory would remove the last barriers to the “universal rule of the shopkeepers.” For the physiocrats—who believed economics should obey natural law—English industrialization was “a harbinger of decadence” (Acomb, Anglophobia, p. 66). In contrast, the self-conception of physiocratically balanced France is paraphrased by Acomb as follows: “Her power was ‘natural,’ for her economy was balanced: her commerce was not overexpanded, and her debt remained, it was supposed, within bounds.… If France had lost territory abroad, she was not beset with imperial problems, while her metropolitan resources in soil and population were many times those of her rival” (pp. 60–61). France considered itself the victor on the moral score as well. One French writer, reacting in 1777 to the humiliation of the treaty of Paris, used a rhetoric that anticipated that of 1789, indeed that of Victor Hugo, to announce France’s ambition to lead humanity: “O France, ma patrie! Europe has your light to thank for the discovery of human rights and citizens’ duties, for insight into its true interests and the revelation of the social order and the laws that govern the lives of men as well as nations” (Le Trosne, quoted in Acomb, Anglophobia, p. 65).
57. Hugo, Politique, p. 754. The quotations that follow are from pp. 755–56.
58. This characterization of revanche was first advanced by Paul Rühlmann, Die französische Schule und der Weltkrieg (Leipzig, 1918), p. 3. Rühlmann goes on to call the religion of revanche a “substitute for the lost unity of church affiliation.”
59. Henry Contamine, La revanche, 1871–1914 (Paris, 1957), treats only a few of the military doctrines leading up to World War I and—except for a couple of remarks in the foreword—ignores the whole psychological complex of revanche.
60. Nietzsche’s definition of gratitude as “a milder form of revenge” is relevant here (Human, All Too Human). The same idea of the gift as a “flat usurpation” that occasions revengelike ressentiment and compulsion in the recipient and that is redressed through formulas for expressing gratitude, or a countergift, appears in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Gifts” (The Works [Boston, 1914], p. 413). On the anthropology of gift giving and exchange, see the still unsurpassed classic by Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift.
61. Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993), p. 26.
62. “A somewhat too direct stare” (Jean Bodin, Discours contre les duels) and “a glass of lemonade” (Le Febvre d’Ormesson, Journal) are quoted in François Billacois, Le duel dans la société française des 16è et 17è siècles: Essaie de psychosociologie historique (Paris, 1986), p. 127. On the choreography of the duel, V. G. Kiernan remarks that the procedure of the duel was “almost as highly stylized as the minuet, and a product of the same social atmosphere” (The Duel in European History [Oxford, New York, 1988], p. 97).
63. Billacois, Duel, p. 351.
64. On the crisis of confidence, see James C. Riley, The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and the Financial Toll (Princeton, 1986), p. 192. On the claim to political and moral leadership by the aristocracy in the years leading up to the Revolution, see Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the 18th Century (Cambridge, 1985). Chaussinand-Nogaret sees the opposition formed after 1763 as a long-term result and/or revival of Frondist resistance: “Naturally the nobility was the particular opponent of government, and it was to be expected that nobles should want a say in redefining it.… Such redefinition of power sprang from the thought of those whom power had most affected, those most wounded by a scandalous authority answerable to none, without limits.… It had robbed them of one justification for their existence and at the same time destroyed their fundamental rights: the right to advise, the right to check, the right to govern” (p. 12).
65. Quoted in Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), p. 25.
66. Roland Mausnier, Paris: Capitale au temps de Richelieu et de Mazarin (Paris, 1978), pp. 235–36.
67. It was only with the return of the republicans to parliamentary power in 1879 that the National Assembly and the government moved back to the capital.
68. Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, 1983), p. 123. In the widely read apocalyptic prophesies of Abbé Latour, revanche against Prussian Germany—predicted for 1876—was only the first in a series of events including the restitution of the pope’s former rights, the subjugation of Turkey, and a crowning triumph over England (Latour, L’avenir de la France [Toulouse, 1871], p. 52).
69. Blanc de Saint-Bonnet, La legitimité (Tournai, 1873), pp. 68–69.
70. Saint-Bonnet: “Protestants are undoubtedly delighted in this hour by the successes of the kingdom of Prussia and its sin against France and Christianity.… So, too, will they partake of the joy of the prodigal son upon first seeing his father’s house again” (quoted in Otfried Eberz, “Die gallikanische Kirche als Werkzeug der Révanche,” Der Nationalismus im Leben der dritten Republik, ed. Joachim Kühn [Berlin, 1920], p. 160).
71. On the sacré-coeur as a symbol for counterrevolution, see Raymond A. Jonas, “Restoring a Sacred Center: Pilgrimage, Politics, and the Sacré-Coeur,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 20 (1994): 96ff. See also Jonas’s “Sacred Mysteries and Holy Memories: Counter-Revolutionary France and the Sacré-Coeur,” Canadian Journal of History 32 (1997), and “Monument Ex-Voto, Monument as Historiosophy: The Basilica of Sacré-Coeur,” French Historical Studies 18 (1993).
72. Quoted in Jeismann, Vaterland der Feinde, pp. 154–55.
73. Quoted in Schama, Citizens, p. 744.
74. Hugo, Politique, p. 758; Choses vues, p. 107.
75. Quoted in Kühn, Nationalismus, p. 22. Blanqui quoted in Henri Gallichet Galli, Gambetta et l’Alsace-Lorraine (Paris, 1911), p. 50.
76. Gerd Krumeich, Jeanne d’Arc in der Geschichte: Historiographie, Politik, Kultur (Sigmaringen, 1989), p. 130. My depiction of the Joan of Arc cult is based, unless otherwise indicated, on this study.
77. Quoted in Krumeich, Jeanne d’Arc, p. 12.
78. Michelet is again most explicit. On the triumphant Joan of Arc: “Jeanne took the lead in the popular battle … and obliged France to become conscious and free.” And: “With centuries of hindsight, the Parisians stormed the Bastille rediscovering the temerity of the soldiers of La Pucelle” (quoted in Krumeich, Jeanne d’Arc, pp. 64, 65). And on the silent martyr and savior: “The people … saw in all of this a form of the Passion, and in their eyes this painful end consecrated La Pucelle, for whom until then they had felt only admiration.… The pious tears of La Pucelle regenerated France.… The funeral pyre at Rouen was the end of the Middle Ages but also the beginning of modern times. Joan of Arc, the last of martyrs, is also the first patriotic figure” (p. 71).
79. A. Arnou in Revue de Paris, Nov. 1949, cited in Krumeich, Jeanne d’Arc, p. 162.
80. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies, p. 117.
81. Krumeich, Jeanne d’Arc, p. 159.
82. It is unfair, of course, to compare an allegoric and emblematic figure like Marianne with a historical one like Joan of Arc. Nonetheless, in the eighty years after 1792 the figure of Marianne accrued so many levels of meaning that its “appropriation” by various factions of republicanism—from the conservative republic of Adolphe Thiers to the Paris Commune—was not dissimilar to the hotly contested appropriation of Joan of Arc. To name only the most important iconographic variants: the passionate, forward-storming goddess of liberty; the reigning state deity, Minerva; the republican Athena in armor and helmet; the people’s goddess, replete with symbols of fertility; the laurel-wearing goddess of victory. Even the iconography of the Phrygian cap—its omission (on account of its connection with the Jacobin terror) and its emphasis (in the Revolution of 1848 and the Commune)—is a long story of its own. See Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat (Paris, 1979), and its sequel, Marianne au pouvoir (Paris, 1989).
83. Christian P. Amalvi, De l’art et de la manière d’accommoder les héros de l’histoire de France (Paris, 1988), p. 92.
84. The comparison was popular in the 1870s. In “Le prisonnier,” a poem written in 1875 on the occasion of Bazaine’s escape from prison, Victor Hugo compares the traitorous marshal not only to Ganelon but to Judas.
85. Léon Gautier, ed., La chanson de Roland (Paris, 1872), p. cc.
86. See Amalvi, De l’art, pp. 106–07, which compares Lavisse’s textbooks of 1876 and 1882.
87. “Like Christ, he saw himself abandoned and forgotten. From his calvary in the Pyrennees, he shouted and blew his horn,… he called, and the traitor Ganelon de Mayence and the insouciant Charlemagne did not want to hear” (quoted in Harry Redman Jr., The Roland Legend in Nineteenth-Century French Literature [Lexington, 1991] p. 100). Recall, too, Michelet’s Christlike image of Joan of Arc (n. 78, above).
88. Maurice Bouchor, 1895, quoted in Redman, Roland Legend, p. 197; Robert Francis Cook, The Sense of the Song of Roland (Ithaca, 1987), p. 99. The idea of the insignificance of the enemies’ weapons also applies to the second version of Roland’s demise, namely, his death in an enemy-triggered avalanche, which was used in various nineteenth-century treatments of the story.
89. “Roland perished, but France triumphed” (quoted in Redman, Roland Legend, p. 98).
90. Charles Lenient, “La chanson de Roland et les Niebelungen [sic],” Revue politique et littéraire (1872): 291–98.
91. Lenient’s political agenda shines through clearly in this passage. Departing from his remarks on the Nibelungenlied, he continues: “Everyone, from the king who looks covetously upon the billions of his neighbors, to the sentimental Gretchen figure who asks her fiancé to bring her some golden earrings after the sacking of Paris, to the standard-bearer in whose heart is hidden not a medal, not a cross, but an iron obligation to appropriate from the French peasant his capacity for hard work, they all dream in their own way of the treasure of the Nibelungs” (“La chanson de Roland,” p. 294).
92. Christadler, “Funktion,” pp. 201–02.
93. Claude Billard and Pierre Guibert, Histoire mythologique des français (Paris, 1976), pp. 174–75.
94. Herbert von Nostitz, Bismarcks unbotmässiger Botschafter: Fürst Münster von Derneburg (Göttingen, 1968), p. 160. Among the scores of diplomatic memoirs, two are particularly worth noting; although separated by fifteen years, they describe exactly the same mood. In September 1870, a few days after Sedan, Metternich, then Austrian ambassador in Paris, wrote: “A pretense of menaces and at heart an immoderate desire of peace, if I am not mistaken,… represents the real state of public opinion. People wish to lay down their arms, without having the courage to avow it” (Carroll, French Public Opinion, p. 37). In the late 1880s, the German ambassador wrote: “The anti-German incitements only find an echo when the word war is left unspoken.… Every Frenchman harbors the wish for ‘revanche,’ for a ‘guerre sainte,’ but the thought that the realization of that wish could be at hand is deeply unsavory to the majority and causes people to shake their heads and warn of dire consequences whenever it is uttered” (Die grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914, vol. 6 [Berlin, 1927], pp. 143–44).
95. Max Nordau, Paris: Studien und Bilder (Leipzig, 1881), p. 261.
96. We have Paul Déroulède, the founder of the most important organization for celebrating revanche, the Ligue des patriotes (1882), to thank for recording Ernest Renan’s famous answer to a request to support the undertaking: “What is the need for all this verbal agitation, these irritating fits and this superfluous excitement?… Young man, young man, France is perishing; don’t disturb it in its death throes” (Bertrand Joly, Déroulède: L’inventeur du nationalisme français [Paris, 1998], p. 72).
97. Gambetta never used this precise formulation. It is an ex post facto contraction and paraphrase of the words “There is a dignity of the vanquished when they are felled by fate and not through any fault of their own. Let us protect this dignity and let us not talk any longer of the foreigner; but let it be understood that he is always on our minds.… Then you will be on the right path toward revanche” (quoted in Galli, Gambetta, p. 51). Another variation: “Let us not talk of revanche, let us not speak the frightening words, let us gather our strength” (Joseph Reinach, ed., Discours et plaidoyers de Léon Gambetta [Paris, 1903], p. 87, quoted in Matthias Salm, Deutsche Rundschau, Feb. 1917, p. 200).
98. These statements can be found in Gambetta’s letters to his political confidante Juliette Adam, quoted in Amson, Gambetta, pp. 343, 320. From a 1876 conversation with the English politician Grant Duff: “I more and more doubt whether there will be any guerre de revanche at all. The fact is nowadays, when peace is once made between two coterminous nations, so many joint interests grow up and become rapidly strong that, with every month that passes, the chances of war are lessened” (quoted in J. P. T. Bury, Gambetta and the Making of the Third Republic [London, 1973], p. 350).
99. Quoted in Amson, Gambetta, pp. 263–64.
100. Charles Maurras, quoted in Galli, Gambetta, p. 249, speaks of Gambetta’s “comedy of revanche.” George Sand is quoted from a letter to Juliette Adam in Amson, Gambetta, p. 258.
101. It makes no difference whether Gambetta pursued this aim consciously or instinctively, although statements of his argue for the former. See, for example, Gambetta’s letter to Juliette Adam on the fourth anniversary of September 4, 1870: “Despite the incidents that marked that day, I could not keep the cruel thought from my mind that we did not overthrow the empire with our own hands but saw it succumb to the blows of foreigners” (Amson, Gambetta, p. 182).
102. General Trochu, quoted in Amson, Gambetta, p. 208.
103. Revue des deux mondes, Mar. 15, 1871, pp. 405, 408.
104. Take, for example, Hugo’s epic poem “La libération du territoire” (1873):
The task today is to let ourselves grow
Quietly, and to shut our hatred away
Like a virgin in a cloister
And to nourish our black resentments.
What is the point of deploying our regiments so soon
And what is the point of galloping before a hostile Europe?
To avoid stirring up dust uselessly
Is wise; the day will come to burst out;
It’s better not to act in haste.
105. Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 46.
106. Ibid., p. 130.
107. Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire (Paris, 1978), p. 196.
108. Jean Garrigues, Le général Boulanger (n.p., 1991), p. 47; Frédéric Monier, Le complot dans la République: Stratégies du secret de Boulanger à Cagoule (Paris, 1998), p. 29.
109. The establishment of a press office in the ministry and the creation of a close connection to the Havas press agency (whose employees Boulanger exempted from military service) were among the first measures. It has been surmised that Boulanger was adopting American advertising methods, since a close associate of his, Arthur Dillon, had become acquainted with them during a long stay in America. See Patrick Hutton, “Popular Boulangism and the Advent of Mass Politics in France, 1886–90,” Journal of Contemporary History 11 (1976): 91.
110. Ibid., p. 64.
111. Garrigues, Général Boulanger, p. 74; Le Figaro, July 25, 1886, quoted on p. 73, ibid.
112. Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, vol. 6, pp. 139, 146, 201. This estimation did not prevent Otto von Bismarck from publicly portraying Boulangism as a threat and using it as a pretense for a military advance: “I could not invent Boulanger, but he happened very conveniently for me” (quoted in Frederic H. Seager, The Boulanger Affair: Political Crossroad of France, 1886–1889 [Ithaca, 1969], p. 51).
113. Both poems are quoted in Garrigues, Général Boulanger, p. 74. The defensive quality of the eruption of revanche sentiment in 1886–87 is taken as a given in contemporary research. For instance, Zeev Sternhell: “Boulanger is the man to slake the thirst for self-respect the whole country feels” (Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français [Paris, 1972], p. 96). Daniel Mollenhauer speaks of the French “analysis of threat … according to which Bismarck continued to play the aggressive part” that had to be defended against (Auf der Suche nach der “wahren Republik”: Die französischen “radicaux” in der frühen Dritten Republik, 1870–1890 [Bonn, 1997], p. 338). Even the militaristic science-fiction literature, the genre where the pure aggression of revanche fanatasies was allowed to play itself out, reveals the same dynamic. The recurring visions of apocalyptic victories over Germany were simply a compensatory, cathartic playing out of fantasy, an opium of the defeated, as it were. The comparison here with contemporaneous English fantasy literature is instructive: the English literature focuses almost exclusively on military catastrophes and apocalyptic invasions besetting the island kingdom, which was in reality the very incarnation of security. If the analogy holds and militaristic fiction depicts the mirror image of reality, then the French literature of triumph (with titles like L’art de combattre l’armée allemande, La revanche, La France victorieuse dans la guerre de demain, L’offensive contre l’Allemagne, La fin de l’empire d’Allemagne) would in fact be an expression of a deeply defeatist mood. See I. F. Clarke, ed., The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and Battles Still to Come (Syracuse, 1995).
114. Boulangism was politically and ideologically just as complex and internally inconsistent as the groups that collected around Boulanger, from the extreme left to the reactionary right. The best overview is provided by Seager’s The Boulanger Affair. On the role of royalist elements, see William D. Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France (New York, 1989).
115. Sternhell, Barrès, pp. 365–66. Raoul Girardet describes the same change in mood: “The cult of revanche has come back to haunt the existing political institutions” (Le nationalisme français [Paris, 1966], p. 16).
116. Arthur Meyer, quoted in Sternhell, Barrès, p. 101.
117. Quoted in Saad Moros, Juliette Adam (Cairo, 1961), p. 510.
118. Quoted in Nineteenth Century (London) 74 (1913): 22–23.
119. Barrès’s recollections of the troops returning from Sedan (“This journey embodied everything I was ever to feel about my country”) were in fact those not of an eight-year-old boy but of a fully grown man. “Having become a nationalist, these are the childhood memories he most likes to evoke” (Digeon, Crise allemande, p. 404).
120. Quoted in Sternhell, Barrès, p. 30.
121. Ibid., pp. 29–30. Ten years later, in 1895, Barrès once again said of French-German relations: “The exchange of ideas between France and Germany never ceased. One benefited as much as the other from this fruitful collaboration.… It was an uninterrupted mutual penetration of ideas” (p. 33).
122. “M. le général Boulanger et la nouvelle génération,” La revue indépendente, Apr. 1888, p. 56.
123. The literary character of turn-of-the-century French nationalism has been pointed out by many—indeed most—historians, including Eugene Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 (Berkeley, 1968), who writes of nationalism as a “literary movement,” and Stern-hell. Along with Barrès, other literati and poets among the fathers of French nationalism were Déroulède, Maurras, and Péguy.
Before their appropriation by Barrès, the terms nationalisme and nationaliste were not part of the French vocabulary. In Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1873) there is no mention of them. Barrès used the concepts for the first time in 1892. See Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France (Stanford, 1998), p. 6.
124. Quoted in Digeon, Crise allemande, p. 428.
125. Quoted in Sylvia M. King, Maurice Barrès: La pensée allemande et le problème du Rhin (Paris, 1933), p. 106.
126. King, Barrès, p. 104. The divergent estimations of internal and foreign enemies emerged most clearly in the Dreyfus affair: “The foreign enemy plays above all the role of manipulator and financer of the dark forces that undermine the national organism. But the German is no more hated than the Jew, the Protestant, or the Freemason. On the contary,… the German is a brother of race against whom we must fight in order to strengthen the species” (Sternhell, Barrès, p. 366).
127. Digeon, Crise allemande, p. 404; Sternhell, Barrès, p. 64. On the nationalist-racist typology of the German in Barrès’s novel Colette Baudoche, for example, see Robert Soucy, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 150–56.
128. Ernst Robert Curtius, Maurice Barrès und die Grundlagen des französische Nationalismus (Bonn, 1921), p. 217.
129. Ibid., pp. 216–17.
130. Under the name Agathon, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde wrote a programmatic series of newspaper articles and books that appeared under the titles Sur l’esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (1910 and 1911) and Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (1912 and 1913). Once again they enacted the change of generations, which consisted in this case of rebelling against the prevailing liberal-pacifist spirit of the post-Dreyfus age. In retrospect, the Agathon rebellion was a well-planned strategy for establishing literary careers. Starting with a provocative attack on the academic authorities in the first book, they proceeded to a systematic self-portrayal in the second. The public response shows that the time was ripe for such a revision. Not only was the “new generation” suddenly on everyone’s tongue but a score of stories followed in newspapers and magazines. See Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge 1979), pp. 5ff.
131. Quoted in Digeon, Crise allemande, p. 441.
132. Julien Benda, Sur le succès du Bergsonisme (Paris, 1914), p. 137.
133. Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris, 1972), p. 100.
134. Along with France, Italy was a leader in the pre-1914 enthusiasm for automobiles and airplanes. Interestingly, France and Italy were also the two major film nations in the world before 1914. As of 1918, America (that is, Hollywood) took the lead with the industrial production methods of its studio system. The traditional French understanding of technology and industry as instruments of emancipation as well as of national prestige—and not as rationally and pragmatically applied methods for increasing productivity—can of course be traced back to Saint-Simonism. This emphasis also explains such French-initiated large international projects as the Suez and the Panama Canals.
135. Quoted in Weber, Nationalist Revival, p. 113.
136. The best account of the new nationalism is still Weber’s Nationalist Revival in France.
137. The French response to the Zabern affair in 1913 was, like the whole renaissance of revanche for Alsace-Lorraine, an echo of and a reaction to the Moroccan crises. On the fading and functional transformation of the idea of revanche, see Gilbert Ziebura, Die deutsche Frage in der öffentlichen Meinung Frankreichs, 1911–14 (Berlin, 1955), pp. 14–16, 30–32, 160–61 (as well as notes 17 and 18).
138. Along with colonial-imperialistic rivalry, the economic-imperialist challenge from and humiliation by Germany played a major role in the “neo-revanche” mood of the years after 1905. Indeed, German colonialism was perceived as less threatening than German economic expansion, which was considered an economic invasion and therefore raised the specter of 1870–71. What was feared was “the most complete and definitive disaster since our defeat during the année terrible,” a distinct possibility because Germany’s “commercial and industrial army now is just as redoubtable as its military army in 1870. It is the same clever organization, with the same attention to details, the same perfection in using resources, the same intelligence agency of spies, extended to the whole world this time” (Marcel Schwob, Le danger allemand [Paris, 1896], pp. 1–2). “The pernicious side of the adversary is less cruel in appearance [than the military invasion of 1870–71] but no less deleterious, and every year, in the form of commercial tribute, the vanquished will be paying indemnity for the war” (Maurice Lair, L’impérialisme allemand [Paris, 1902], p. 173). One need only look at the titles of the relevant literature to get an idea of the predominant feeling of threat: La force allemande, La menace allemande, L’expansion de l’Allemagne en France, L’effort allemand, L’impérialisme allemand, La guerre commerciale. See Digeon, Crise allemande, p. 480.
139. Ernest Lavisse, quoted in Aimée Dupuy, “Sedan” et l’enseignement de la Revanche (Paris, 1975), p. 13.
140. Howard, Franco-Prussian War, p. 16.
141. Douglas Porch, The March to the Marne: The French Army, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 52.
142. Quoted in Allan Mitchell, Victors and Vanquished: The German Influence on Army and Church in France after 1870 (Chapel Hill, 1984), p. 87.
143. Revue des deux mondes, Jan. 15, 1871, p. 259.
144. Quoted in Revue politique et littéraire (1874): 735. While national enmity continued unabated, the models for purely technical and organizational imitation were the Prussian military reformers whose “hatred of France” was noted, not without sympathy, by the military historian Godefroy Cavaignac, son of the general in charge of the famous June 1848 massacre (Revue des deux mondes, Sept. 15, 1890, p. 411).
145. Alfred Rambaud, who along with Ernest Lavisse and Gabriel Monod was one of the most important historians of the early Third Republic, devoted two widely read books to the topic of French fatherhood to modern Prussia: Les français sur le Rhin, 1792–1804 (1873) and L’Allemagne sous Napoléon I, 1804–1811 (1874).
146. Ernest Renan, “La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France” (1871).
147. “The German philosophers before Jena, too, in the tranquil ecstasy of their speculation and labor and the serenity of pure theory, attained a supreme indifference toward their country, which is very often confused with a love for humanity. This kind of blissfully vague cosmopolitanism was singularly like the one from which we were awakened as if by a thunderball” (Revue des deux mondes, Jan. 15, 1871, p. 259).
148. Quoted in Porch, March to the Marne, p. 36.
149. Amalvi, De l’art, pp. 70–71. This perspective had been advanced for the first time in 1820 by François Guizot: “For more than thirteen centuries France … contained both a conquered and a victorious people. For more than thirteen centuries, the conquered people fought to shake the yoke of the victorious peoples. Our history is the history of that struggle” (quoted in Amalvi, De l’art, p. 21). The analogy to the English two-class society of Saxons and Normans described by Walter Scott in his medieval novels is obvious. Given the international popularity of Scott, it is conceivable that the division between Gauls and Franks was a translation of the Saxon-Norman dualism.
150. Amalvi, De l’art, p. 62.
151. François Corréard, Vercingetorix, ou la chute de l’indépendence gauloise (1888), quoted in Amalvi, De l’art, p. 69.
152. Quoted in Mona Ozouf, L’école, l’église, et la République (Paris, 1963), p. 23.
153. “If political rights outstrip intellectual culture, it is to be feared that people will make the most serious errors in the exercise of those rights” (quoted in Felix Ponteil, Histoire de l’enseignement de France, 1789–1965 [Tours, 1966], p. 284).
154. In Elementarschule und Pädagogik in der französischen Revolution (Munich, 1990), Hans-Christian Harten describes how the idea of reason, which was to a large extent identical to heroism in the First Republic, had no clear equivalent in a concrete educational or organizational program.
155. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Cousin.” Cousin’s reforms obliged every community to maintain a public school but without imposing compulsory education or freedom from tuition. Wherever there was already a Catholic school, that was considered sufficient. The influence of the priests and the landed gentry on the curriculum was great, whereas training and pay for teachers were meager.
156. Katherine Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue de l’enseignement and the Origins of the Third Republic, 1866–1885 (New York, 1982), p. 18. The idea that a fight for education was a fight against the church in favor of a secular, republican substitute is expressed in a statement by republican teachers in 1849 voicing their expectation that “teaching was going to become a veritable mission, and [that] the teacher, the priest of the new world, would be charged with replacing the priest of Catholicism” (Antoine Prost, Histoire de l’enseignement en France, 1800–1967 [Paris, 1968], pp. 145–46). As a political religion of equality that did not question class society, republicanism saw schools primarily as instruments for political equality and only secondarily as educational institutions. For example, Jules Michelet: “If children rich and poor have sat together on the benches of the same school, if they have been joined in friendship though divided in career … they will preserve in their disinterested, innocent friendship the sacred knot of the City” (Prost, Histoire, p. 46).
157. Baron Stoffel, Rapports militaires: Ecrits de Berlin, 1866–1870, 4th ed. (Paris, 1872), p. 103. Just as Stoffel depicts the Prussian military reforms after the defeat of 1806 as paradigmatic for the later French ones, he also cites as a negative example Austria’s behavior after its defeat by Napoleon: “This likeable and sympathetic nation, eager for the finer things in life, continues to go along without any trace of resentment toward its conquerors, without any of those feelings of hatred that, after so many humiliations, are the appropriate reaction of a vigorous race” (p. 189). Stoffel’s phrase nation aimable et sympathique refers not solely to the Austria of 1805 but also to the France of 1866.
158. The educational trade press in Germany reacted with sympathy, respect, and wonder. The Pädagogische Zeitung spoke of the “admirable persistence” of the French reformers (Nov. 29, 1883), suggesting that France “was preparing to steal away one of our greatest achievements, the superiority of our public education system” (July 31, 1879). It was registered, not without some jealousy, that the French synthesis of school education and civic emancipation was superior to the Prussian system of training underlings (Untertanen). “In our country the members of the teaching profession find themselves under regulation, so that those liberal-minded teachers who seek truth and openness must unfortunately keep their objectives to themselves or only discuss them in hushed tones. In France, by contrast, these goals are proclaimed by the government itself, and by its advisers, as worthy of pursuit and imitation. That the two countries have swapped roles in the space of a few years is a strange spectacle indeed! And it is admittedly disconcerting that we have abdicated the leadership that France has assumed” (Pädagogium 4 [1882]: 149–50).
159. Whether reform propaganda overstated the reality is an open question. In most historical accounts, the republican educational reform emerges as a secular process, and it understood itself as such. Only in isolated cases before 1880 was it conceded that Catholic schools often featured essentially the same curricula and similar moral ideas as public schools; likewise, it was reluctantly admitted that more Catholic than public schools around 1880 were tuition-free. See Raymond Grew and Patrick J. Harrigan, School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, 1991), pp. 99, 236–37.
160. Laws making primary education compulsory and waiving tuition for six- to thirteen-year-olds were also passed (1881), as were ones mandating the replacement of religious instruction with “instruction morale et civique” (1882). In 1886, the last priests were removed from the system, and the instituteur was granted the status of a civil servant.
161. A. Giolitto, Histoire de l’enseignement primaire au XIXè siècle (Paris, 1983), p. 150. On the Black Hussars of the Republic, there are only scattered literary and autobiographical sources, for example, Charles Peguy’s “L’argent” in Oeuvres en prose complètes, vol. 3 (Paris, 1992), p. 801. Another image of the teacher borrowed from the military was that of the “noncommissioned officer of education” (Ozouf, L’école, p. 148). As early as 1866, Jean Macé, the founder of the Ligue de l’enseignement, demanded the creation of an “educational Landwehr [national guard] as an auxiliary to the regular army” (Sanford Elwitt, The Making of the Third Republic [Baton Rouge, 1975], pp. 187–88).
162. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Journal des débats, Nov. 16, 1871, quoted in Ozouf, L’école, p. 20. An informative case study of the renewal of the French discipline of history after 1871 along the German model is provided by William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1975): “It appeared almost as though the French professors were preparing to reenact the war of 1870, using the modern weapons of scholarship that they had appropriated from their Germanic conquerors in order to reverse the outcome” (p. 241).
163. Report of the Paris Conseil municipal (1890), quoted in Albert Bourzac, “Les bataillons scolaires en France,” Les athlètes de la République, ed. Pierre Arnaud (Toulouse, 1987), pp. 53, 49; Arnaud, Le militaire, l’écolier, le gymnaste (Lyon, 1991), p. 254.
164. Harten, Elementarschule, pp. 299, 304.
165. Pierre Chambat, “La gymnastique, sport de la République?” Esprit 4 (1987): 24. Arnaud speaks of “alphabétisation motrice,” suggesting that the same standardization and normalization took place in gymnastics as in the instruction of standard French idiom, which replaced regional dialects (Militaire, p. 253). See Arnaud, “Les deux voies d’intégration du sport dans l’institution scolaire,” Education et politique sportives XIX et XX siècles, ed. Arnaud and Thierry Terret (Paris, 1995), p. 13.
166. The most important examples are Italy and Bohemian Czechoslovakia (Arnaud, “Deux voies,” pp. 14ff.).
167. Benoit Lecoq, “Les sociétés de gymnastique et de tir dans la France républicaine, 1870–1914,” Revue historique 276 (1986): 162.
168. Speech of June 26, 1871, quoted in Arnaud, Militaire, pp. 59–60. No less militant were the assertions of Jules Ferry, who played the strange double role of being the incarnation of opportunism and the organizer of reform, including the militarization of the schools. On the occasion of the creation of school battalions, he said: “Military education will never completely penetrate our scholarly circles until the instructor himself has become a professor of military exercises” (speech of June 3, 1882, quoted in Arnaud, Athlètes, p. 144).
169. Raymond Guasco, quoted in Nineteenth Century 74 (1913): 36.
170. Quoted in Michel Caillat, L’idéologie du sport en France depuis 1880 (Paris, 1989), p. 33.
171. Ibid., pp. 31–32. In Coubertin, the idea of the military instrumentalization of sports approximates that of gymnastique, for example, in his remark that “sports are an excellent way of physically ‘clearing one’s mind,’ which should precede entry into the modern army” (1902 article in Revue des deux mondes, quoted in Arnaud, Athlètes, p. 292). Or even more clearly: “Whoever learns not to shrink from a rugby scrum will not retreat from the mouth of a Prussian cannon” (Sports athlétique, Feb. 13, 1892, quoted in Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993), p. 230.
172. Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984), pp. 328–29.
173. “Petite machine ailée”: Maurice Leblanc, quoted in Philippe Gaboriau, Le Tour de France et le vélo: Histoire sociale d’une épopée contemporaine (Paris, 1995), p. 115. “Fée bicyclette”: L’auto, quoted in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 3, part 2 (Paris, 1992), p. 888.
174. Gaboriau, Tour de France, p. 116.
175. Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Oxford, 1981), p. 100.
176. Pre-1914 competitors in the Tour de France were seen as “soldats du sport” and as a “bataillon sacré du sport” (Holt, Sport and Society, p. 23). For example, in a report from L’auto on May 20, 1902: “They were climbing Calvary, a long, athletic Calvary, like soldiers drafted by the state going to battle” (Holt, Sport and Society, p. 24). The process by which sports gradually accrued a nationalistic meaning in the sense of gymnastique is illustrated by the resonance of the Olympic Games of 1912. France’s poor results caused “a veritable flood of consternation throughout the country. For the first time, a sporting event profoundly affected the soul of the nation. The press in its entirety commented on the defeat,… expressing the rage of the country … and the unanimous will to prepare our revanche” (Jean de Pierrefeu, quoted in Caillat, Idéologie du sport, p. 49). Sixteen years earlier, Charles Maurras, by then a radical nationalist, remarked self-critically after the first Olympic Games in Athens that he had been wrong to reject Coubertin’s idea of internationalism, for Athens had shown that “far from quashing patriotic passions, all the false cosmopolitanism of the stadium does is exacerbate them. I am far from complaining” (Pierre Arnaud and James Riordan, eds., Sport et relations internationales, 1900–1941 (Paris, 1998), p. 47.
177. Raoul Girardet describes the Algerian occupation as “a limited operation fundamentally directed at lifting the prestige of the restored monarchy in the eyes of outsiders and in popular domestic opinion” (Idée coloniale, p. 6).
178. Jacques Valette, “Note sur l’idée coloniale vers 1871,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 14 (1967): 65; Marcel Emerit, “L’idée de colonisation dans les socialismes français,” L’age nouveau 24 (1947): 103–09. On Algeria as France’s replacement for America: “We had in that country a ‘Far West’ to discover and a California to exploit” (Paul Gaffarel, L’Algérie: Histoire, conquète, et colonisation [Paris, 1883], p. 562).
179. The connection of the Far East with the Mediterannean had already been achieved in 1869 with the opening of the Suez Canal, likewise a French project. The fact that both of the great nineteenth-century canals, the Suez and the Panama, were conceived in France suggests a monumental action of compensatory revanche for France’s demise as a sea power. In the Latin self-conception of French imperialism, the tone was set in part by the idea of a “Latin” revanche for England’s seventeenth-century displacement of the old colonial powers Spain and Portugal. Prévost-Paradol was already sounding this theme in La France nouvelle (1868). Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the most influential colonial propagandist after 1871, wrote on the occasion of the Italian protest against the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881: “We would hope that the Latin races would be the ones to colonize Africa. They could come together in this glorious task” (“La politique continentale et la politique coloniale,” Economiste français, May 7, 1881, p. 566). In another passage, Leroy-Beaulieu insisted that the Mediterranean be made “if not a French lake, at least a neo-Latin lake” (quoted in Agnes Murphy, The Ideology of French Imperialism, 1871–1881 [1948; rpt. New York, 1968], p. 140). On the trans-Saharan railway, see Murphy, Ideology, pp. 154–55, as well as A. Duponchel, Le chemin de fer trans-Saharien, jonction coloniale entre l’Algérie et le Soudan (Paris, 1879).
180. Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle, p. 418.
181. Quoted in Henri Masson, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 49 (1962): 415.
182. Quoted in Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 4. The anticolonial vox populi was summarized by a procolonial author as follows: “Soon we will have been fifty years [in Algeria], and colonialization is still at a rudimentary stage. Millions of us have buried our treasures there and the bones of our children, and here’s what we have to show for it: a few artichokes, which were very expensive, and too many insurrections” (Raboisson, Etude sur les colonies [Paris, 1877], p. 44).
183. See Charles-Robert Ageron, “Gambetta et la reprise de l’expansion coloniale,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 59 (1972): 57.
184. Ibid., p. 203.
185. Gambetta, letter to Arthur Ranc, Sept. 20, 1875, quoted in Ageron, Gambetta, p. 169. On exchanging colonies for Alsace-Lorraine, see Peter Grupp, Deutschland, Frankreich, und die Kolonien: Der französische “Parti colonial” und Deutschland, 1890 bis 1914 (Tübingen, 1980), pp. 78ff., and Sieburg, “Elsass-Lothringen-Frage,” p. 32.
186. Ageron, Gambetta, pp. 172ff.
187. Raoul Girardet, quoted in Ageron, Gambetta, p. 59.
188. Leroy-Beaulieu, “Politique continentale,” p. 566.
189. Le siècle, May 27, 1881, quoted in Carroll, French Public Opinion, p. 90.
190. Open letter to Le temps, Oct. 4, 1885, quoted in Leo Haman, ed., Les Opportunistes—Les débuts de la République aux républicains (Paris, 1991), p. 174. Jules Ferry, the main target of the accusation that the colonies were a replacement for and thus a betrayal of Alsace-Lorraine, spoke in similar terms before parliament: “There can be no compensation, none whatever, for the disasters we have suffered.… The real question that has to be asked, and clearly asked, is this: Must the containment forced on nations that experience great misfortune result in abdication?… Should they let themselves be so absorbed in contemplating this incurable wound [Alsace-Lorraine] that they play no part in what is going on around them?” (quoted in Henry Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 1871–1914 [New York, 1966], p. 79).
191. “How can we” and “an additional weakening”: La nouvelle revue (1887): 572, 579. Le temps, Apr. 7, 1881, described the Tunisian undertaking as a “new Mexican adventure” (quoted in Carroll, French Public Opinion, p. 89). “The breach”: quoted in Herbert Tint, The Decline of French Patriotism, 1870–1940 (London, 1964), p. 43.
192. Ferry the German: Jean Michel Gaillard, Jules Ferry (Paris, 1989), p. 14. “For a couple”: quoted in Jochen Grube, Bismarcks Politik in Europa und Übersee: Seine “Annäherung” an Frankreich im Urteil der Pariser Presse, 1883–1885 (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), p. 117. “I see before me”: quoted in Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic, p. 99. “Ferry has gotten”: quoted in Sternhell, Barrès, pp. 87–88.
193. “Gold and blood”: Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 57. “A successful”: quoted in Sternhell, Barrès, pp. 87–88. Like the nationalism of the period, the antisemitism of Drumont’s La France juive was still of the social-revolutionary variety in which Jewishness served as a “metaphor” for high finance. Drumont was an anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and antisemite because all three enemies represented the exploitation of the “little people”: “The suffering endured by our soldiers enables the Jews to engage in those operations” (quoted in Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 61).
194. Quoted in Sternhell, Barrès, n. 43. A good illustration of the third contention is given by Joseph Reinach, an intimate of Gambetta’s and a spokesperson for Opportunism: “Without colonialism, the martial instincts of the French people would turn to bloody confrontation, class hatred, and maybe even civil war” (quoted in Ageron, Gambetta, p. 199).
195. Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 85. “From the point of view of the sole imperatives of national interest and grandeur, history appears to have worked in [the Opportunists’ and colonialists’] favor.… The main arguments of [the anticolonialists and Boulangists] lost most of their significance during the great controversies of the 1880s” (p. 66).
196. Ibid., pp. 36ff.
197. Between 1871 and 1881, some ten thousand families emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine (Louis Vignon, La France en Algérie [Paris, 1893], p. 106).
198. Quoted in Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 65.
199. Porch, March to the Marne, pp. 153ff., 165ff.
200. Quoted in Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 87. As this quotation suggests, France’s self-presentation as a force of liberation usually referred to local, that is, native oppressors. France also styled itself, however, as a benign and unselfish liberator, in contrast to its European imperial competitors, chiefly England. (Worthy of further investigation is the extent to which the memory of France’s support for the American War of Independence played a role here.) A similar rhetorical shift took place in Germany after World War I. Following the loss of its colonies, Germany underwent a reversal of self-presentation from colonial master to vanguard warrior for the colonized peoples oppressed by the Western powers.
If French colonialism is seen as a compensatory mechanism for defeat—that is, as a unique French path to imperialism—further perspectives open up. France fulfills all the conditions for what Winfried Baumgart calls “compensatory imperialism.” Traditional, or defensive, imperialism was characteristic of the established colonial and industrial power England, while aggressive imperialism epitomized the ambitious parvenu Germany. According to Baumgart, for the compensatory imperialists (France, Russia, and Italy), colonial expansion was important not so much for economic reasons as, “to a large extent, to restore national prestige” (Imperialism: The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880–1914 [Oxford, 1982], p. 67). Classic imperialism served both to provide a safety valve for overpopulation and to acquire new markets for industrial production, but these two functions were largely irrelevant to France with its low population growth and comparatively slow industrialization. French investments aboard, too, were made less in the spirit of venture capital, aimed at quickly reaping great financial rewards, than as a kind of “reservoir that could be tapped in times of need” and a “savings account one could draw on in an emergency” (Gilbert Ziebura, “Interne Faktoren des Hochimperialismus, 1871–1914,” Der moderne Imperialismus, ed. J. Mommsen [Berlin, 1971], p. 91; see also pp. 85ff.). The extreme social Darwinism of English and German imperialism thus has no equivalent in the Third Republic, for the simple reason that social Darwinist arguments have less appeal for the losers of major wars (Linda Clark, Social Darwinism in France [Tuscaloosa, 1984], pp. 161, 180).
201. Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 88.
202. The distinction between the prestige-oriented state colonialism of France and the profit-driven private colonialism of England had its corollary in the realm of culture. If American culture has become the world’s mass culture, it is not because of a state-planned export program but rather as the result of the invisible guiding hand of American capital. The anti-American buzzword cultural imperialism is a projection of the French mentality of cultural planning.
The Alliance française described itself as “a national association for the spreading of the French language in the colonies and abroad.” Among its founders were Paul Bert; Paul Cambon, France’s resident minister in Tunisia; and Pierre Foncin. See Maurice Bruezière, L’Alliance française: Histoire d’une institution (Paris, 1983), pp. 10, 11. The title of a lecture held at the Alliance in 1885 defined its mission: “The Struggle of Languages on the Face of the Globe: The Role of the Alliance française” (Bruezière, Alliance, p. 20). Unfortunately, there is no study devoted to the institution and its influence other than the uncritical pamphlet published by the Alliance in celebration of its one hundredth anniversary.
203. Quoted in Grupp, Deutschland, p. 76. King Leopold II of Belgium spoke of the “twofold revenge” sought by France for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and Egypt (Baumgart, Imperialism, p. 62). Raoul Girardet draws attention to the revival of older traditions of revanche (the Seven Years War, Trafalgar) by pointing to its persistence in the French navy, which understood colonial expansion—one of its responsibilities until the creation of a separate colonial ministry—as a form of revanche against England (Idée coloniale, pp. 11–12).
204. Quoted in Girardet, Idée coloniale, p. 100.
205. Pierre Guillen writes of German fears “that a French protectorate in Morocco would mean a weakening of the global position of the empire and would ruin Germany’s economic position” (L’Allemagne et le Maroc de 1870 à 1905 [Paris, 1967], p. 886). On Morocco as a model of and test for German participation in the carving up of the colonial world, see pp. 19, 22, 29, and 125ff.
206. Max Weber, “Bismarcks Aussenpolitik und die Gegenwart” (1915), Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Tübingen, 1958), p. 114.
207. Pierre Baudin, L’empire allemand et l’empéreur (Paris, 1911), p. ix.
3: Germany
1. Interview in the Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), partially reprinted in the Berliner Tageblatt, morning ed., Aug. 3, 1928.
2. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis (London, 1931), p. 800.
3. Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic, 1871–1918 (1931; rpt. New York, 1962), p. 239.
4. Quoted in Frederick Maurice, The Armistice of 1918 (London, 1943), p. 41.
5. Ibid., p. 49. The crusading mentality of the American North during the Civil War and its own “totalitarianism” can be recognized both in Sherman’s suggestions as well as in Wilson’s universal humanitarianism. Both are the moralizing mirror images of Ludendorff’s purely power politics.
6. Erich Ludendorff, “Kriegsführung und Politik,” quoted in Joachim Petzold, Die Dolchstosslegende (Berlin, 1963), p. 54. It should be recalled that Clausewitz subordinated politics to war only in his later years. In his “revolutionary” youth, he had distinguished between war as non-or antipolitics, as heroism or national honor, and the private egotism of bourgeois society. He preferred an honorable defeat to a “cowardly subjugation.” See Herfried Münkler, Gewalt und Ordnung (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), pp. 103–06.
7. Heinrich Mann, Macht und Mensch (Munich, 1919), pp. 208–09.
8. Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1915; rpt. London, 1953), pp. 204, 184. Emphasis added. Trotter goes so far as to surmise that had the Allies known earlier about this “hysterical” disposition of their enemy, “[Germany’s] collapse could have been brought about with comparative ease at a much earlier date” (p. 184).
9. Mann, Macht und Mensch, p. 203. See also p. 162: “The counterfeiting of our entire character as a people, boasting, challenges, lies, and self-deception as our daily bread, greed as our only motivation to live: this was the Wilhelminian empire.”
10. Frederick Maurice, The Last Four Months: How the War Was Won (Boston, 1919), p. 206; Churchill, World Crisis, p. 817; George Young, The New Germany (London, 1920), p. 4; Henri Lichtenberger, L’Allemagne d’aujourd’hui dans ses relations avec la France (Paris, 1922), p. 28.
11. Hochland, Dec. 1918, p. 331. Michael Geyer traces the rise of the Ludendorffian mentality to the disappearance of strategy, that is, the setting of strategic goals, in the technocratic totalization of the war as part of the 1916 Hindenburg Program. The replacement of strategic and political goals by an emphasis on the most advanced technology of destruction available enabled the idea of an unrestricted total victory to flourish; anything less would appear to be a failure. See Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, 1986), pp. 540ff. The submarine as a “miracle weapon” was a concrete instance of the replacement of strategy with technology. In this respect, it was the immediate precursor of the V rockets of 1944–45 and the various irrational expectations of victory that were projected onto them.
12. Quoted in Rosenberg, Birth of the German Republic, p. 251.
13. Martin Doerry, in Übergangsmenschen: Die Mentalität der Wilhelminer und die Krise des Kaiserreichs (Weinheim, 1986), characterizes the psychological makeup of the Wilhelminian as combining a fixation with authority with a striving for harmony, conformity, and aggression. Doerry sees their “pale and impotent revolt” against their fathers and grandfathers (Bismarck is their grandfather “who founded the empire over the objections of the despised liberal ‘fathers’ of 1848”) everywhere in evidence in the 1890s: in their program of liberal imperialism, in their taste for literary naturalism, and in the revisionism of the Social Democratic Party (p. 180).
14. George B. Forgie, Patricide in a House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979).
15. On Treitschke’s role in the political education of the Wilhelminian generation, see W. Bussmann, “Treitschke als Politiker,” Historische Zeitschrift 177 (1977): 249–79, and Peter Winzen, “Treitschke’s Influence on the Rise of Imperialist and Anti-British Nationalism in Germany,” Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914, ed. Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (Oxford, 1981). Among Treitschke’s disciples, readers, and acolytes were Friedrich von Bernhardi, Bernhard von Bülow, Helmut von Moltke Jr., Heinrich Class, Carl Peters, Richard von Kühlmann, Alfred Tirpitz, Paul Rohrbach, Maximilian Harden, and even, to an extent, Max Weber. Weber’s characterization of the empire’s creation as a “youthful prank” of the Germans that would have significance only if followed by further heroic deeds evoked Treitschke’s image of Germany as a giant awakening after a long sleep, rubbing his eyes, and scanning the horizon for new possibilities.
16. Treitschke, speech to the Reichstag, Nov. 29, 1871. The elder Helmut Moltke also expected a “Seven Years or Thirty Years War” in which Germany would have to defend the spoils of its victory in 1871 (Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, vol. 2 [Munich, 1965], p. 244). After the failure of the blitzkrieg concept, World War I was understood by the educated as a continuation of the Seven Years War, another sign of Treitschke’s persistent influence on Wilhelminian elites.
17. Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 44. The phrase symbolic inflation can be found on p. 41. On the self-presentation of nation and empire, see Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership (New York, 1991).
18. On Hindenburg’s award, see Bernhard Schwertfeger, Das Weltkriegs-Ende, 6th ed. (Potsdam, 1938), p. 60. On Moltke’s, see Hull, Entourage, p. 41.
19. Albrecht von Thaer, quoted in Siegfried A. Kaehler, “Vier quellenkritische Untersuchungen zum Kriegsende 1918,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen. I. Philologisch-Historische Klasse 8 (1960): 428.
20. Quoted in Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien. Erste Reihe Vol. 2: Die Regierung des Prinzen Max v. Baden (Düsseldorf, 1962), p. 44.
21. Schwertfeger, Weltkriegs-Ende, p. 142; Secretary of State Hintze, quoted in Schwertfeger, p. 119; Bethmann-Hollweg, quoted in Ursachen des deutschen Zusammenbruchs von 1918, vol. 6 (Berlin, 1929), p. 124; Stresemann, quoted in Anneliese Thimme, Flucht in den Mythos (Göttingen, 1969), p. 76; Hans Delbrück, in Preussische Jahrbücher 174 (1918): 430.
22. Hans von Hentig, Psychologische Strategie des grossen Krieges (Heidelberg, 1927), pp. 133, 134.
23. In his article “Ein dunkler Tag” in the Vossische Zeitung of Oct. 7, 1918, Rathenau spoke not of a levée en masse but—with reference to the anti-Napoleonic movement of 1812–13—of a “popular uprising.” See Gerhard Hecker, Walther Rathenau und sein Verhältnis zu Militär und Krieg (Boppard, 1983), p. 432. The fact that contemporary commentators and later historians almost exclusively used the French term, which they put in Rathenau’s mouth, speaks volumes about the exotic attraction that the idea of popular warfare exerted on the German imagination.
24. Quoted in Prince Max von Baden, Erinnerungen und Dokumente (Berlin, 1927), p. 344.
25. Ibid., p. 331.
26. Ibid., p. 455.
27. Quoted in Hecker, Walther Rathenau, p. 436.
28. Ludendorff was the driving force behind the creation of the Ufa film studio as a propaganda instrument. A lack of feeling for the mass psyche was evident in the prewar era as well. The “presentation of empire” proved utterly incapable of appealing to a mass audience. The most prominent example of this deficiency was the celebration of the German victory at Sedan, which despite the technical opulence of the ceremonies never became a popular holiday.
29. Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, p. 430. Ludendorff made this statement to Philipp Scheidemann. In later discussions, the left would attribute the collapse chiefly to the German leadership’s lack of democratic sensibilities. See, for example, Karl Mayr’s article “Weltkriegführung und Demokratie,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (1926): “Democracy contained the only organizational possibility for mobilizing the masses in a defensive war. Democracy could inspire the masses by means of political education and training. This irreplaceable fermenting quality of democracy was what Germany’s field marshals were incapable of understanding with either their hearts or their minds” (p. 290).
30. Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, p. 495.
31. Albrecht von Thaer, quoted in Kaehler, “Untersuchungen,” p. 462.
32. Ibid., pp. 457, 453. Wilhelm, to whom the proposal was addressed, also imagined himself leading the army at its vanguard, but in a completely different sense. According to General Wilhelm Groener, the kaiser intended after the outbreak of revolution “to assume command of the army and order it to do an about-face, attack the Rhine border, and reconquer Berlin and his homeland. He issued orders for me to prepare for this operation” (Lebenserinnerungen [Göttingen, 1957], p. 454).
33. Quoted in Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, vol. 4 (Munich, 1968), p. 463. The symbolic—even charismatic—power of the fleet in the Wihelminian imagination is evident in the fact that even a realist like Prince Max had similar hopes for a final sea battle: “After a victory by the German fleet, the revolution and capitulation of November 9 and 11 would have been an emotional impossibility.… Even if our navy had gone down to glorious defeat, the military and political necessity of the operation would have been affirmed. Such a sacrificial act would have had a shaming power that many of the traitors and cowards would have had a hard time resisting” (Max von Baden, Erinnerungen, p. 575).
34. Ernst-Heinrich Schmidt, Heimatheer und Revolution 1918 (Stuttgart, 1981), p. 292.
35. Thimme, Flucht in den Mythos, p. 151.
36. Ibid., p. 163. Scheidemann made similar statements in Der Zusammenbruch (Berlin, 1921): “Where were the loyal formations of troops in Berlin? Where were the officers and political leaders speaking even a single word of support for the kaiser? Yes, where were the officers and loyalists? Not one of those who now speak and write such sharp words were anywhere to be seen or heard back then” (pp. 207–08). As an auditor on the committee investigating the causes of the collapse, Hans Delbrück concluded that the characteristic feature of the revolution was “that nowhere did it encounter the slightest resistance. The decisive factor was not one side’s power but the other’s absolute lack of it. Where was the courage and the feeling of duty, that once created Prussia and the German empire?” (Ursachen des deutschen Zusamenbruchs. 2. Abt. Der innere Zusammenbruch, vol. 6 [Berlin, 1928], pp. 79–80). Six months earlier, Max Weber had written of the cowardice and opportunism shown by the Conservatives and National Liberals when Bismarck, who had always been their man, was forced from office: “They did not lift a finger but instead turned toward a new sun. This event is unequaled in the annals of a proud people.” Weber diagnosed the “contemptible lack of honor” and “cant,” of which German elites perennially accused England, as a pure case of projection (Gesammelte politische Schriften [Tübingen, 1971], pp. 312, 313).
37. Quoted in Petzold, Dolchstosslegende, p. 42.
38. Ibid.; Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen, “‘Dolchstoss-Diskussion’ und ‘Dolchstoss-Legende’ im Wandel von vier Jahrzehnten,” Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewusstsein: Festschrift für Hans Rothfels zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. W. Besson and von Gaertringen (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 132, 133.
39. Ludendorff’s demand for an armistice was often described as the actual stab in the back. Liberal Wilhelminians like Prince Max von Baden, Hans Delbrück, Max Weber, and Walther Rathenau neither used the term nor accused Ludendorff of intentional treason, but they made it clear that they held his peace-through-victory strategy responsible for overtaxing German strength and thus causing the defeat. An explicit version of this reversed stab-in-the-back accusation can be found in the article “Dolchstoss von oben,” Weltbühne (1920): 406–20.
40. Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), pp. 15, 16.
41. Speech to the Reichstag, Oct. 9, 1878, on the occasion of the proposed Socialist Law (Otto von Bismarck, Die Gesammelten Werke, 3rd ed., vol. 12 [Berlin, 1929], p. 9).
42. Quoted in Bernhard Fürst von Bülow, Denkwürdigkeiten, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1930), p. 198.
43. Karen Fries-Thiessenhusen, “Politische Kommentare deutscher Historiker 1918/19 zu Niederlage und Staatsumsturz,” Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Cologne, 1972), p. 350.
44. In a sermon delivered in a Protestant church in January 1918, Bruno Doehring referred to striking munitions workers as “cheap, cowardly creatures who have desecrated the altar of the fatherland with their brothers’ blood,… who … have poisoned the virtuous spirit of our people, who have misdirected and herded the unfortunate masses into the streets from their peaceful workplaces, pressed deadly weapons into their hands, and bid them attack from behind their brothers, who are still confronted by the enemy” (quoted in Wilhelm Pressel, Die Kriegspredigt 1914–1918 in der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands [Göttingen, 1967], pp. 305–06).
45. Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften, p. 307.
46. Quoted in Hiller von Gaertringen, “‘Dolchstoss-Diskussion,’” p. 124.
47. Harry Kessler, Tagebücher, 1918–1937 (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), p. 294.
48. Quoted in Hiller von Gaertringen, “‘Dolchstoss-Diskussion,’” p. 138. The most comprehensive history of the myth’s origin after Hiller von Gaertringen’s is Petzold, Dolchstosslegende. The English general Frederick Maurice refused to acknowledge his authorship of the phrase. In contrast, there seems to be no doubt as to his authorship of the denigrating remark about Britain’s “little army,” which wartime English propaganda attributed to Wilhelm II. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1977). According to another account, the phrase stab in the back stemmed from the English general Neill Malcolm, who supposedly used it in conversation with Ludendorff (Petzold, Dolchstosslegende, pp. 26–27). The ostensibly English origin of the phrase is remarkable not as a measure of the myth’s truth or falsehood but because it has “mercantilist” England—German’s former enemy—acting as the arbiter of German honor.
49. Hiller von Gaertringen, “‘Dolchstoss-Diskussion,’” p. 138.
50. Herfried Münkler explains the “victory” of the dagger over the poison metaphor by noting “that in contrast to the dagger, poison could not be incorporated into a mythical story. Therefore it would have symbolized a definitive end, whereas after the dagger, understood as the murder of Siegfried, the story could continue” (Herfried Münkler and Wolfgang Storch, Siegfrieden: Politik mit einem deutschen Mythos (Berlin, 1988), p. 93. Münkler recalls here Donoso Cortes’s distinction between the “dictatorship of the dagger,” that is, revolution, and the “dictatorship of the saber,” that is, the old regime (p. 89).
51. Note by von Thaer of Oct. 1, 1918, quoted by Herfried Münkler in Udo Bermbach, ed., In den Trümmern der eigenen Welt (Berlin, 1989), p. 259.
52. Quoted in Klaus von See, Barbar, Germane, Arier (Heidelberg, 1994), p. 108.
53. Ibid., p. 109.
54. Julius Rodenberg, quoted in Werner Wunderlich, Der Schatz des Drachentöters: Materialien zur Wirkungsgeschichte des Nibelungen-Liedes (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 43–44.
55. Hartmut Zelinsky, in Bermbach, In den Trümmern, pp. 201ff.
56. Walther Rathenau, An Deutschlands Jugend (Berlin, 1918), p. 83. On Wagner’s influence on the psyche, politics, and culture of Wilhelminian Germany, see Hartmut Zelinsky, “Kaiser Wilhelm II, die Werk-Idee Richard Wagners und der ‘Weltkampf,’” Der Ort Kaiser Wilhelms II in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. C. G. Röhl (Munich, 1991). See also Zelinsky, Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Thema (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), and Zelinsky, Sieg oder Untergang (Munich, 1990).
57. Thimme, Flucht in den Mythos, pp. 15, 81. The majority SPD acted in similar fashion. Whatever explanation the SPD offered for its behavior in August 1914 and November 1918 amounted to an abdication of the fundamental positions that constituted its previous identity. The fact that the right and (former) left were both “broken” after 1918, and were not as self-confident as they had been until 1918 and 1914 respectively, may help explain the political psychology of the Weimar Republic.
58. Edgar J. Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen (Berlin, 1927), pp. 291, 293. On the radical nationalists’ rejection of the stab-in-the-back legend, see Arnim Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932, 4th ed. (Darmstadt, 1994), p. 37.
59. Jung, Herrschaft, p. 293.
60. Arnold Bergmann, Die Bedeutung des Nibelungenliedes für die deutsche Nation (Karlsruhe, 1924), pp. 22, 14, 21, 23.
61. See Börries von Münchhausen’s “Ein Lied Volkers” (1920) (Wunderlich, Schatz des Drachentöters, p. 76), which ends as follows:
We readily lent our sword
To the king in desperate days
Still on the most difficult day of all
Hagen swore Gunther the oath: “Let the blame be mine!”
Therefore, although my heart trembled
As Siegfried groaned and Krimhild wept,
You are the hero of my songs,
Surrounded by horror, my Hagen, my friend!
62. Klaudius Bojunga, Mittelalterliche Nibelungensage und Nibelungendichtung im Unterricht auf der Obersekunda höherer Schulen, Deutschunterricht und Deutschkunde, vol. 12 (Berlin, 1928), p. 130. On the reinterpretation of Siegfried and Hagen after 1918, see Francis G. Gentry, “Die Rezeption des Nibelungenliedes in der Weimarer Republik,” Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur, ed. James F. Poag and Gerhild Scholtz-Williams (Königstein, 1983), pp. 146ff., and von See, Barbar, pp. 109ff., 125ff.
63. Friedrich Altrichter, Die seelische Entwicklung des Heeres im Weltkriege (Berlin, 1933), pp. 151ff.
64. Hermann von Kuhl, addressing the Committee to Investigate the Causes of German Defeat, spoke of “pacifist, internationalist, antimilitarist, and revolutionary foment within the army” and concluded that one should talk “not of a stab in the back but of a poisoning of the army” (Ursachen des deutschen Zusammenbruchs, vol. 6, part 2 [Berlin, 1928], p. 39). The nationalist representative Albrecht Philipp, a member of the committee, made a similar suggestion (Hiller von Gaertringen, “‘Dolchstoss,’” p. 149).
65. Wilhelm Groener, Lebenserinnerungen (1957; rpt. Osnabrück, 1977), pp. 472, 452. In the Guidelines for Troop Motivation of Nov. 6, 1918, “prophylactic inoculations” are recommended to ward off revolutionary agitation (Erich Otto Volkmann, Der Marxismus und das deutsche Heer [Berlin, 1925], p. 318).
66. Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des foules (Paris, 1991), p. 74.
67. In the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910) there is not a single entry devoted to propaganda, which is discussed as part of the entry on the Roman curate. In contrast, in the 12th edition (1922), the article on propaganda stretches over ten pages.
68. Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen (Berlin, 1919), p. 4; Ludendorff, Kriegführung und Politik (Berlin, 1922), p. 188.
69. The same had been true half a century earlier in the American South. See Edward A. Pollard in his second book, The Lost Cause Regained: “We find a war tamely expiring, without either of those final experiences almost uniform in history—a last convulsive effort or a resort from the open field to such strongholds as nature or art have supplied. We know of no other instance in modern history where more than one hundred thousand men have laid down their arms in open fields to an enemy, and have ceased from war with a resolution so sudden and complete” (1868; rpt. New York, 1970), p. 18. In the same context, Pollard speaks of the South’s lacking “popular will,” “the want being, not of material, but of animation.”
70. Quoted in Hans Linhardt, ed., Johann Plenges Organisations- und Propagandalehre (Berlin, 1965), p. 128.
71. Letter to Karl Lamprecht, quoted in Edgar Stern-Rubarth, Die Propaganda als politisches Instrument (Berlin, 1921), p. 108.
72. Paul Rohrbach, Unser Weg: Betrachtungen zum letzten Jahrhundert deutscher Geschichte (Cologne, 1949), p. 30; Friedrich Naumann, Das blaue Buch von Vaterland und Freiheit (1913), quoted in Rohrbach, Unser Weg, p. 31.
73. Paul Rohrbach, Der deutsche Gedanke (Düsseldorf, 1912), pp. 6–7, 53. The French idea of “civilisation” was for Rohrbach an idea to be admired for other reasons—namely, as a model for cultural world domination, even though the defeat of 1870–71 was the “source of energy” from which it arose (p. 28).
74. Ibid., p. 227.
75. Karl Helfferich, “Die Vorgeschichte des Weltkriegs,” quoted in Otto Becker, Deutschlands Zusammenbruch und Auferstehung (Berlin, 1922), p. 144.
76. Linhart, Organisations- und Propagandalehre, p. 169; Ernst Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe (Tübingen, 1924), p. 318.
77. Paul Rühlmann, Kulturpropaganda (Charlottenburg, 1919), p. 6.
78. Ferdinand Tönnies, Zur Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung (Berlin, 1922), p. 549. Tönnies identifies precisely the same misconception in a comment by Colonel Walter Nicolai, an aide to Ludendorff: “We needed the mood of confidence we had during the first part of the war.” In the same way, Tönnies notes sardonically, “the aged invalid ‘needs’ the lively strength of youth to achieve again the glories of the past.”
79. According to Scheler, Germanophobia was the reaction of the old Western European nations to having been “driven from paradise” by the parvenu Germany with its work ethic, its discipline, and its artificially low prices (Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses [Leipzig, 1917], pp. 63ff.). Although Scheler does not explore the issue, Germanophobia went hand in hand with antisemitism in the two countries, France and the United States, in which Jewish financiers had predominantly German names.
80. This exceptional German feature can be explained by the marginalization of the Social Democratic movement since Bismarck and the specific SPD public sphere that developed as a result. The mass press in Germany consisted largely of Social Democratic Party organs and was therefore more pedagogic and enlightened than sensationalist in character. As for the tabloid media, even the sensationalist newspapers of the Scherl company were but a pale imitation of their Anglo-American model.
81. Quoted in Hans Thimme, Weltkrieg ohne Waffen: Die Propaganda der Westmächte gegen Deutschland, ihre Wirkung und ihre Abwehr (Stuttgart, 1932), p. 42. The extent to which the introduction of psychological warfare on the front in the form of dropped leaflets violated previous standards of military fairness is shown by the initial reactions to the first English sorties. Captured pilots who had dropped bombs on German lines were treated as prisoners of war, whereas pilots who had dropped leaflets were threatened with military execution as spies (Thimme, Weltkrieg, pp. 35ff.; M. L. Sanders, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–1918 [London, 1982], p. 251).
82. Stern-Rubarth, Propaganda, p. 72.
83. Ernest K. Bramstedt, Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda, 1925–1945 (East Lansing, 1965), p. xiv.
84. Cecil and Buchan quoted in Sanders, British Propaganda, p. 252.
85. See Zbynek A. B. Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–18: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry (London, 1958). For a summary see Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf, 1962), pp. 168ff., 473ff.
86. Paranoia about being stabbed in the back can also be understood as a manifestation of another German fear. The encircling of the empire, the avoidance of which was the main goal of Bismarck’s foreign policy but which by 1905 had become reality, was to be counteracted by entrapment of the enemy armies (Hannibal’s Cannae strategy). The so-called Schlieffen Plan envisioned not a frontal attack on France but rather a circling round, then a surrounding, then the destruction of the French army from behind. “Siegfried had maneuvered behind the enemies. Whooping, he swung his horse round and started off along a second lane with his bloody sword.” This passage from Rudolf Herzog’s novel Die Nibelungen (1912) has been seen as an unambiguous reference to the Schlieffen Plan. See Münkler and Storch, Siegfrieden, pp. 34, 9.
87. The adherents of French culture ranged from the German princes of the eighteenth century to the American industrial barons of the Gilded Age and the upper middle class of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. German elites were something of an exception, since to be a Francophile after 1871 was to be part of the intellectual minority, which included Nietzsche, that was dissatisfied with the new imperial German culture. During the First World War, this attitude was radicalized and concentrated among the small colony of émigré German intellectuals in Switzerland.
88. Rühlmann, Kulturpropaganda, p. 13.
89. Otto Flake, Das Ende der Revolution (Berlin, 1920), p. 83.
90. David Felix, Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic: The Politics of Reparation (Baltimore, 1971), p. 77. Felix goes on to characterize Rathenau’s offer as a “romantic prospect” and a demonstration of the German “perfection of harmlessness” (p. 74).
91. Quoted in Ulrich Heinemann, “Die Last der Vergangenheit: Zur politischen Bedeutung der Kriegsschuld- und Dolchstossdiskussion,” Die Weimarer Republik, ed. Bracher, Funke, and Jacobson (Düsseldorf, 1987), p. 383.
92. Quoted in Kl. Löffler, ed., Deutschlands Zukunft im Urteil führender Männer (Halle, 1921), p. 126.
93. Linhardt, Organisations- und Propagandalehre, p. 140.
94. Tönnies speaks of English propaganda’s being “kneaded into the masses” and refers to Hermann Oncken’s image of a “goal-oriented political will … that trickles down from the top to the bottom,… becoming ever more powerful” (Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung, pp. 518, 517).
95. Theodor Heuss, Hitlers Weg: Eine historisch-politische Studie über den Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 1932), p. 129.
96. Hitler writes in Mein Kampf: “All propaganda must be popular, and its level must be attuned to the most limited of those at whom it is directed.… The more it orients itself exclusively toward the emotions of the masses, the greater its success will be.” Compare this with the following two passages from contemporary commentary on how advertisements work: “The effect [of advertisement] on the psyche of the individual or the mass is greatest when it appeals to the most primitive impulses and affectations” (Christof von Hartungen [C. Herting], Psychologie der Reklame [Stuttgart, 1921], p. 9) and “The simpler and less argumentative the assertion is, the more authoritative the effect; the masses are always prepared to accept assertions as true and right” (R. Seyffert, Die Reklame des Kaufmanns, quoted in Theodor König, Reklame-Psychologie [Munich, 1924], p. 175).
97. Derrick Sington and Arthur Weidenfeld, The Goebbels Experiment (London, 1942), p. 34.
98. Bramsted, Goebbels, p. 22.
99. Nothing would be more misguided than to read Hitler’s views on the masses as an expression of disregard or cynicism. His assertions about the “feminine proclivities” and the “primitiveness” of mass sensibilities are the value-neutral opinions of a technical specialist. In contrast, Hitler felt genuine contempt for the educated upper middle classes, as he demonstrates clearly in the propaganda chapter of Mein Kampf, where he writes of “pallid little lords” and “literary tea socials” ([Munich, 1940], p. 187).
100. Quoted in Timothy Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the “National Community” (Providence, 1993), p. 31. Mason draws attention to the internal conflict within Nazi policies between guns and butter and points out the resulting frictions and contradictions. In contrast to their public claim that the 1918 defeat was the result of “November treachery,” the Nazi leaders were fully aware that the collapse was the result of the overtaxing and exhaustion of the people. In 1936, at the beginning of German rearmament, Robert Ley expressed the lesson learned in preparation for the coming war as follows: “If you demand only sacrifices from a people—something the First World War showed us with all possible clarity: Hold out, hold out, stick it out, stick it out!—that’s all well and good, but there is a limit to the endurance of every individual, and naturally of every people also. It’s just as with an iron girder or any structure that is supposed to support a load. There’s a limit and when that limit has been reached everything breaks. And for us, that was 1918, November 9 to be precise. We can be sad about it and embittered, we may curse and swear; but the fact is that the men in power forgot to compensate the people for the enormous strain of those four-and-a-half years, forgot on the other hand to inject new sources of strength, to pump in new strength again and again” (Mason, Social Policy, p. 19).
101. Edward L. Homze, Arming the Luftwaffe: The Reich Air Ministry and the German Aircraft Industry, 1919–39 (Lincoln, 1976), p. 240. On Britain’s paranoia about becoming a target of Nazi air warfare, see Uri Bialer’s excellent study, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932–1939 (London, 1980), pp. 143ff. A. J. P. Taylor was one of the first historians to draw attention to Hitler’s strategic “war of nerves.” Whereas traditional propaganda had played down the extent of actual armaments, the Nazis achieved success by doing precisely the opposite: “Pretending to prepare for a great war and not in fact doing it was an essential part of Hitler’s strategy” (The Origins of the Second World War [New York, 1983], p. xx). For the bluffing, blackmailing, and psychological steamrolling of the enemy, it was sufficient to have a rearmament “in width, a front-line army without reserves, adequate only for a quick strike” (pp. 217–18). This was what Hitler in fact ordered, in contrast to the rearmament “in depth” favored by military professionals, and he used his small forces to great effect during the blitzkrieg phase of 1939–41. Admittedly, the Nazis themselves eventually became a victim of their own propaganda, in that they came to believe their overestimation of the Luftwaffe. See David Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (Boston 1973), pp. 74ff.
102. Quoted in Karl-Heinz Friese, Blitzkrieg-Legende: Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich, 1995), pp. 431. Friese dismisses the idea that the blitzkrieg was a personal innovation that Hitler pushed through over the objections of the military. On the contrary, military leaders such as Manstein had advocated a highly developed version of shock-troop tactics from the final phase of World War I. It was only after the success of the strategy that Hitler began celebrating himself as the father of the blitzkrieg.
103. See Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat (New York, 1968). On the Jericho trumpet, see Friese, Blitzkrieg-Legende, p. 432, as well as Peter C. Smith, Stuka: Die Geschichte der Junkers Ju87 (Stuttgart, 1993), pp. 17–18. After 1941 and the end of the blitzkrieg successes, the sirens were no longer built into planes (Smith, Stuka, p. 18).
104. Karl-Heinz Friese, “Die deutschen Blitzkriege: Operativer Triumph—strategische Tragödie,” Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, ed. Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann (Munich, 1999), p. 193. The dropping of the two American atomic bombs on Japan, unlike the German tank advances, owed its devastating demoralizing effect to the Allies’ favorable strategic position. If strategically weak Japan had had the bomb and deployed it against Los Angeles and San Francisco, it seems unlikely that the shock effect would have led to an immediate American offer of peace or surrender.
105. Max Hildebert Boehm, Ruf der Jungen (1919; rpt. Freiburg, 1933), p. 43. Walther Rathenau, “Der Kaiser,” Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), p. 251; C. H. Becker, Kulturpolitische Aufgaben des Reiches (Leipzig, 1919), p. 5; Hans-Joachim Schwierskott, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und die Anfänge des Jungkonservativismus in der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie über Geschichte und Ideologie des revolutionären Nationalismus” (diss., University of Erlangen, 1960, pp. 128–29).
106. Klemens Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its Historical Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1957), pp. 76ff.; Peter Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and the November Revolution,” Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (Providence, 1993), pp. 301–04, 318ff.). “What would have become of us, had we won the war?” Moeller van den Bruck asked. “Would Wilhelminism not have experienced its greatest and most superficial triumph? Would this triumph not have been credited to the same people who behaved so incomprehensibly on November 9?… Who knows whether we wouldn’t have experienced a … scene at the Brandenburg Gate: Wilhelm II with his paladins in the pose of a monumental statue, receiving the congratulations of a thankful populace” (Das Dritte Reich, quoted in Schwierskott, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” p. 130).
107. Rathenau quoted in Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, Fordismus: Über Industrie und technische Vernunft (Jena, 1926), p. 39.
108. The SPD’s August 1914 “betrayal” of its internationalist-socialist ideals can only be understood as part of the yearning to resolve these contradictions. A moving document of the inner struggle between the internationalist tradition and nationalist convictions and aspirations is Konrad Haenisch, Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie in und nach dem Weltkriege (1916; rpt. Berlin, 1919): “I would not go through this internal struggle again for anything in the world! This burning desire to plunge into the powerful current of general national enthusiasm and, on the other hand, the terrible fear in my soul of heedlessly following this desire, of giving in entirely to the mood that is crashing and storming all around me!… The fear is this: are you going to become a traitor to yourself and your cause?” (p. 110). On the socialist orientation of the wartime economy: “It is beyond question that we are engaged in a gigantic process of reorganizing our entire economy. Likewise beyond doubt is the fact that this reorganization process is moving in the direction of socialism” (p. 122). A wartime economy is a planned economy, which is essentially socialism.
109. Fire, the military term for attacks with guns and cannons, took on a new dimension during the First World War. Its first signs were evident in the nineteenth-century multiplication of firepower with the machine gun. After the futility of infantry attacks in the face of blanket machine-gun fire in the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War, the importance of such firepower was murderously confirmed at the beginning of the world war. As a countermeasure, the fire barrage, or Feuerwalze, was developed. It consisted of covering fire that preceded an infantry attack in two ways: first, by softening up the enemy lines before the actual attack, and second, by clearing the ground in front of the advancing troops during the attack. The Feuerwalze swept forward at the same tempo as the troops, often only a few meters ahead of them. Along with the trenches, it became one of the central symbols of the First World War. This explains why death on the battlefield was no longer associated with the deadly shot but with the inferno of fire. In the jargon of France’s soldiers, the word allumer (to light) meant “to kill.” See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (London, 1989), p. 48. The whole spectrum of fire and front imagery can be found in the works of Ernst Jünger. In his essay “Feuer und Blut” (1925), for example, Jünger speaks of “the glowing hot breath of mechanistic death,” “a massive flaming oven,” “a glowing wall of fire,” “burning waves,” “a glowing fire of purgatory,” et cetera. In a later essay, “Feuer und Bewegung” (1930), he describes “a zone of flames,” “gravity of fiery space,” “fire protection … under fiery helmets and bells,” et cetera. The image of the fire front is that of Purgatory: “Circles of fire, lakes and seas of fire, rings of fire, walls and moats of fire,… rivers of fire, rings of fire, and burning mountains and valleys” (Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory [Chicago, 1984], p. 7). In numerous cultures and mythologies, fire is a symbol of destruction and rebirth. The phoenix rises regularly from the ashes, and Empedocles chooses death in the fires of Etna as the shortest and purest path to salvation. Death by fire is also a “cosmic death” (Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire [Boston, 1964], p. 19). And what does the cherubim’s fiery sword blocking the entrance to the Garden of Eden represent if not the prospect of reentering paradise by passing through fire? The idea of a “baptism of fire” existed for quite some time before it became an initiation ritual among soldiers: John the Baptist, who uses water, prefigures Christ, who baptizes with fire and spirit (Matthew 3:11, Luke, 3:16).
110. Ernst Jünger, “Feuer und Blut,” Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1978), p. 518; Jünger, “Das Wäldchen,” Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, pp. 472, 442.
111. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Die Nation greift an: Geschichte und Kritik des soldatischen Nationalismus (Berlin, 1932), p. 17.
112. Walther Rathenau, Kritik der dreifachen Revolution (Berlin, 1919), p. 67.
113. Moeller van den Bruck in Die Grenzboten (1920), p. 72.
114. Schwierskott, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” p. 128.
115. Hermann Keyserling, Deutschlands wahre politische Mission (Darmstadt, 1921), pp. 48–49.
116. In 1923, Eugen Rosenstock characterized Italian Fascism as the conquest of the country by a youth that “had had its eyes opened out there in the field” (Hochland [June 1923], p. 229, see also pp. 225–26). Werner Beumelburg does not explicitly describe the march home, but he implicitly invokes it when he writes that Hitler’s goal was “to transform Germany’s apparent defeat in the war through the mobilization of the new attitude toward life that had been won out there. This was to happen in all areas of German life, producing the great, gigantic, awesome truth of a German victory” (Von 1914 bis 1939: Sinn und Erfüllung des Weltkrieges [Leipzig, 1939], p. 42, emphasis added). Fredrik Böök, a Swedish literary critic and the author of an account of the collective mood in Germany during the months when the Nazis assumed power, explains Hitler’s charisma by nothing that he was the sole surviving “unknown soldier,” that is, a living collective monument to the war (An Eyewitness in Germany [London, 1933], p. 63; see also pp. 70–74 on Hitler’s front mentality in politics).
In conjunction with Hitler and Albert Speer’s plans for a monumental triumphal arch in Berlin, Elias Canetti comes closer to understanding the mythological umbilical cord connecting National Socialism and the experience of World War I than most Nazi and Hitler historiography. The Triumphbogen was intended to be two things at once: a memorial to the 1.8 million German casualties of the war, whose names were to be chiseled into the structure, and a monument to German triumph in the war of revanche that Hitler would conduct in their name. “There is nothing,” writes Canetti, “that more concisely sums up Hitler’s essence. Defeat in World War I was not to be acknowledged but transformed into a victory.… He had survived the war but had remained true to it, never denying its memory. Conscious of the many dead, he summoned the strength to deny the outcome of the war. They [the fallen] were his masses, when he had no others. He sensed that they were the ones who had helped him to power; without the dead of World War I, he would have never existed” (Das Gewissen der Worte [1981; rpt. Frankfurt am Main, 1994], p. 184). It might be added that without the defeat of 1918 an ex-NCO would never have become Führer since in a victorious Germany there would have been no place for his “movement.” Hitler thus owed his rise to the collapse of 1918. A similarly apocalyptic conception of resurrection took hold in the completely different circumstances of April 1945. In his farewell letter before his execution, Helmut Moltke expressed his conviction that it was good that the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20 had failed since Germany would have to drink the cup of defeat to its very dregs before genuine renewal would be possible. And while the anonymous author of the pamphlet Why Nazi? might not have seen the Nazi assumption of power as the work of the front generation of 1918, he does treat it as the revanche of the sons, who wanted to reverse the subordination of their unvanquished returning fighter-fathers to the defeatist leadership of the homeland (Why Nazi? [London, 1933], pp. 94–95). As the preface makes clear, the author was a German émigré.
117. On “conservative-national socialism,” see Christoph H. Werth, Sozialismus und Nation (Opladen, 1996), who suggests it as an alternative to the term conservative revolution.
118. Ernst Niekisch went the furthest in his murderous fantasies toward liberalism and the West, perhaps as a belated cathartic response to his wartime experiences. For Niekisch, the main goal of world revolution was the destruction of Western civilization, including Western “Communism,” which he contrasts with the “Bolshevism” of the East. He not only accepted but promoted the destruction of civilization; his writings anticipate the Morgenthau Plan, which advocated the deindustrialization of Germany: “The uncompromising razing of cities is an essential element of resistance politics.… The big cities must fall so that death-defying German men may arise again” (Entscheidung [Berlin, 1930], pp. 111–12).
119. Rathenau quoted in Gerhard Hecker, Walther Rathenau und sein Verhältnis zu Militär und Krieg (Boppard, 1983), p. 457.
120. The revolutionizing of the “Third World”—including Russia, India, Egypt, Persia, Ireland, and Mexico—against the colonial powers had already played a role in the German strategy for world war (see Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht, pp. 132ff.). Germany’s conception of itself as a “young” nation in contrast to the “old” colonial power England goes back to Treitschke and amounts to a German version of social Darwinism. Moeller van den Bruck’s essay “Das Recht der jungen Völker,” published in November 1918 and written before the nation’s collapse, can be understood as a bridge between the self-confident demands for power of the prewar and war years and the self-protective conceit of denying defeat in the postwar era. Moeller van den Bruck, who as of 1908 still numbered Great Britain among the “young” nations of the world, now described it as an “old” nation that could not be rescued by victory any more than Germany could be hindered by defeat in its historically predestined road to greatness (Werth, Sozialismus, p. 105): “Every war is first decided after the cessation of hostilities. The moment of destiny always comes somehow and from somewhere for young peoples. Luck is on their side. And even when their luck deserts them, destiny is still on their side” (Das Recht der jungen Völker [Berlin, 1932], p. 171). This view corresponds exactly with the Communist conviction in the 1930s that every defeat is just a stage in the ultimate victory of class conflict.
121. Hans von Hentig, Aufsätze zur deutschen Revolution (Berlin, 1919), p. 38. See also the philosopher Eugen Kühnemann, Der deutsche Geist und die Revolution (Breslau, 1918), pp. 34–37.
122. Both quotations are Fried’s in Die Tat, March 1932, pp. 960, 962.
123. Filipo Bojano, Ein Faschist erlebt die nationale Revolution (Berlin, 1933), p. 41. Ernst Günther Gründel, a veteran who became a National Socialist, described the November revolution as a “premature child” who, having languished in the republic’s liberal-capitalist incubator, would now be awakened to genuine nationalist revolution (Die Sendung der jungen Generation: Versuch einer umfassenden revolutionären Sinndeutung der Krise [Munich, 1933], p. 392).
124. See, for example, Böök, Eyewitness in Germany, pp. 9–11, 28. The anonymous author of the pamphlet Why Nazi? recapitulates the general expectation that the Nazi assumption of power represented “the promise of 1914 fulfilled” (pp. 16–17).
125. Neue Rundschau (1933), p. 709.
126. Martin Spahn, “Die Pariser politische Hochschule und Frankreichs Wiederaufstieg nach 1871,” Die Grenzboten 79 (1920): 30.
127. Ernst Jaeckh, ed., Politik als Wissenschaft: Zehn Jahre Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (Berlin, 1930), p. 182.
128. C. H. Becker, Gedanken zur Hochschulreform (Leipzig, 1919), pp. 5, 13. Plenge understood public education to mean organizational training. Since folk community, the state, and organization were just different aspects of one phenomenon, he defined the task of his Academy for Governmental Studies as being to “civicize” German youth (Das erste staatswissenschaftliche Unterrichtsinstitut [Essen, 1920], p. 17). For Plenge, “civic renewal” was the cultural reaction that would initiate the revision of defeat: “The victors will be the people who force through civic renewal with the greatest urgency and thus take on the leading role” (quoted in Löffler, Deutschlands Zukunft, p. 120).
129. Ibid., p. 29.
130. It is important, however, not to underestimate the significance of the 1920 reform. Prewar reformist pedagogy, at least as spelled out in the “Guidelines for Primary School Syllabi,” was also made binding for all public school instruction, and the requirement that all public school teachers have a higher-education degree ensured the guidelines would be implemented. In contrast, the reform that was considered the most daring and revolutionary, the abolition of preparatory schools for the Gymnasium and the introduction of a mandatory four years of primary school, affected higher secondary education more than it did public primary schools. The heated controversy over those four years (the Grundschulkampf) seldom if ever made reference to the role of public education in national renewal. Instead it was clearly characterized by the “specific interests of parents from the educated upper middle classes” (Ludwig Friedeburg, Bildungsreform in Deutschland [Frankfurt am Main, 1989], p. 226).
131. Werner Picht, Die deutsche Volkshochschule der Zukunft (Leipzig, 1919), pp. 12, 15.
132. Enthusiasm for the Volkshochschule seized not only the adherents of the movement but also university professors and intellectuals who thought the specialized university had betrayed Humboldt’s ideals. This explains statements like “We can [expect] more from the effect of the Volkshochschule on the university and its spirit than from any effect of the university on the Volkshochschule” (Max Scheler) and “As the truly Humboldtian educational institution, the Volkshochschule will pull the cultural carpet from under the feet of the departmentalized university” (Werner Picht).
133. Ludwig Gurlitt, Der Deutsche und sein Vaterland (Berlin, 1902), pp. 76, 80.
134. Hans Blüher, quoted in Otto Stählin, Die deutsche Jugendbewegung (Leipzig, 1922), p. 11; Peter Wust, “Frankreichs geistige Wiedergeburt,” Hochland, May 1924, p. 203.
135. Ernst Fraenkel points out another connection between back stabbing and betrayal in the post-1918 German image of America: the German idea that Wilson was guilty of a back stabbing of his own with his betrayal of German trust in October and November 1918 (“Das deutsche Wilsonbild,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 5 [1960]: 66–120).
136. See Gerd Krumeich, “Le déclin de la France dans la pensée politique et militaire allemande avant la première guerre mondiale,” La moyenne puissance au 20è siècle, ed. Jean Claude Allain (Paris, 1989), pp. 101–15. German perceptions of French weakness vacillated after 1871 between satisfaction at seeing the balance of power favorably shifted in Germany’s direction and sympathy for history’s losers, which Germans had considered themselves to be not so far in the past. A nice example of both is the comparison between the world war and the Thirty Years War made in 1917 by the political scientist Paul Lensch. With reference to the imminent landing of American expeditionary forces in France, he wrote: “The era of the Thirty Years War has come again, only this time France and not Germany will be the battleground for a colorful mixture of foreign soldiers. Mr. Wilson is the Gustav Adolf of the twentieth century translated into the mode of finance capital and Yankeeism.… It is entirely possible that France, like seventeenth-century Germany, will suffer more at the hands of its ‘liberators’ than at those of its enemies” (Drei Jahre Weltrevolution [Berlin, 1917], pp. 81–82).
137. Hermann J. Losch, “Sieg Nordamerikas über Europa,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte, Dec. 1919, p. 363; Eugen Rosenstock, Hochland, June 1923, p. 231.
138. Hans von Hentig, Psychologische Strategie des grossen Krieges (Heidelberg, 1927), p. 136.
139. The approximate French equivalent of Hentig’s comment was André Siegfried’s remark that Fordism was just as threatening to postwar France as pre-1914 German technology and economics had been (Ernst Jaeckh, Amerika und wir [Berlin, 1929], pp. 16–17).
140. Charles W. Brooks, America in France’s Hopes and Fears, 1890–1920 (New York, 1987), p. 793.
141. See, for example, Firmin Roz, L’énergie américaine (1910); Ludwig Max Goldberger, “Die amerikanische Gefahr” (1905); Hugo von Knebel-Doberitz, Besteht für Deutschland eine amerikanische Gefahr? (1904); Johann Plenge, Die Zukunft in Amerika (1912); Wilhelm von Polenz, Das Land der Zukunft (1903); H. G. Wells, The Future in America (1906).
142. See Otto Basler, “Amerikanismus: Geschichte eines Schlagwortes,” Deutsche Rundschau 224 (1930): 142–46.
143. Lothar Burchardt, “Technischer Fortschritt und sozialer Wandel: Das Beispiel der Taylorismus-Rezeption,” Deutsche Technikgeschichte: Vorträge vom 31. Historikertag, ed. Wilhelm Treue (Göttingen, 1977), p. 54.
144. This development can be traced in the articles and books of Victor Cambon, a glue manufacturer and economics journalist. Before 1914, he was exclusively interested in Germany, seeing in it the model that France should emulate (“L’Allemagne au travail,” ca. 1909). During the war, he “discovered America” in the form of Taylorism and saw France’s only hope for salvation in the adoption of scientific management. “Both our prosperity and our future existence depend on Taylorism” (quoted in Patrick Fridenson, “Un tournant taylorien de la société française, 1904–1918,” Annales 42 [1987]: 1053). Germany owed its prewar superiority, as Cambon came to conclude in 1918, not to its talent for invention and organization but to its imitation of the American model, without which it would much sooner have been defeated in the war (Brooks, America, p. 518). In other words, Germany minus America was not a power to be taken seriously. This was the French equivalent of the German interpretation of the Entente’s victory.
145. F. Delaisi, La force allemande (1905); A. Barre, La menace allemande (1908); Marcel Schwob, Le danger allemand (1986); Maurice Lair, L’impérialisme allemand (1902); H. Andrillon, L’expansion de l’Allemagne en France (1909); L. Hubert, L’effort allemand (1911).
146. With the conclusion of the last great wave of German emigration to America in 1880, the image arose of a German bloodletting from which the Anglo-Saxon world had profited. About the same time, the myth circulated that German had almost been adopted as the American national language. The idea of “winning back” America also took shape, culminating in wartime German propaganda to the effect that the actual German soul of America had dozed off under Anglo-Saxon influence and could, like Barbarossa or Sleeping Beauty, be reawakened at any time.
147. On the parallels between the Civil War and the events of 1866, see, for instance, Johann Bluntschli: “In both bodies politic, it came to a decisive inner battle that overcame a deeply rooted dualism, and in both the work ethic and energy of the North triumphed over the proud South” (quoted in Ernst Fraenkel, Amerika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens [Cologne, 1959], p. 276). See also August Julius Langbehn’s remark on the similar settlement policies of Prussia and the United States: “North America is a Lower German settlement in the West, Prussia the same thing in the East” (ibid., p. 167).
148. Siegmund Hellmann, Deutschland und Amerika (Munich, 1917), p. 25.
149. Wichard von Moellendorff, “Germanische Lehron aus Amerika,” Die Zukunft 86 (1914): 323–32. Whereas Moellendorff saw the Germanic element in Taylor as his pursuit of his studies on time and work independently of or even against the interests of capitalism—“He will socialize capitalism and orient socialism around the aristocracy”—other Taylor adherents considered his methodology his most German feature. Taylorism “should have been a German invention since in the main it is a specific characteristic of the German spirit to organize, allocate, and classify things in such ideal fashion” (Gustav Winter, Das Taylor-system und wie man es in Deutschland einführt [Leipzig, 1919], p. 4).
150. See Rainer Stommer, “Germanisierung des Wolkenkratzers: Die Hochhausdebatte in Deutschland bis 1921,” Kritische Berichte 2 (1992): 36–53. The skyscraper had the potential to be an “Acropolis of labor,” but not in socially anarchic America. “Only a socially organized people, pervaded with a socially oriented will to work” (that is, the Germans), could achieve this ideal (Max Berg, quoted in Stommer, “Germanisierung,” p. 46). Such perceived affinities and ideas of appropriation also underlay the nineteenth-century conviction that Hamlet was more a part of German than of English literature.
151. Walther Rathenau, quoted in Gerhard Masur, Imperial Berlin (New York, 1970), p. 74; Hermann Ullmann, quoted in Siegfried Kracauer, Schriften, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), part 3, p. 97.
152. Such was the astonished report of Jules Huret, who visited Berlin from Paris in 1909 (Berlin um 1900 [1909; rpt. Berlin, 1979], pp. 59ff.). On Americans’ comfort in Berlin, see Kadmi-Cohen, L’abomination américaine (Paris, 1930), p. 33.
153. In an enlightening study, Alexander Schmidt argues that the Wilhelminian obsession with America can be explained as a projection of the empire’s unresolved contradictions (post-1871 industrialization and materialism versus the ideal of culture) onto the United States. On the one hand, the United States represented a “paradigm of a technological-industrial modernism,” as Germany aspired to be; on the other, it was seen as the soulless and cultureless image of a modernity that had been uncompromisingly imposed (Reisen in die Moderne: Der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Bürgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im europäischen Vergleich [Berlin, 1997], p. 92, see also pp. 186ff.).
154. The storm-troop division (SA) of the NSDAP and the arditi of Fascist Italy were the direct descendants of the shock troops in a double sense. Both movements were initially made up of former shock-troop soldiers, and both considered shock-troop tactics as the most direct and effective means for translating the experiences of the world war into civil war. To what extent the Futurist avant-garde can be described as an aesthetic shock troop before the fact is another question. In any case, the idea of sabotage was central to the avant-garde, as was the desire to use and/or abuse the latest technological and industrial developments.
155. Michael Geyer calls the Hindenburg Program “a comprehensive effort to ‘rationalize’ warfare much the same way that the German industry ‘rationalized’ production. The substitution of machines for men forced the adaptation of the army to the handling of ‘war machines’” (Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret [Princeton, 1986], p. 541).
156. Speech, Nov. 22, 1925, quoted in Gerald D. Feldman, ed., Die deutsche Inflation: Eine Zwischenbilanz (Berlin, 1982), pp. 244–45, 249.
157. The peacemakers of Versailles expected German reparations to lead to a stimulation of their economies similar to the effect the five-billion-franc tribute of 1871 had on the German economy. Only Keynes recognized that—unlike the 1871 tribute, which had been paid from savings capital—the German payments could only be raised by an increase in production, that is, through rationalization, modernization, increased investment, and, above all, higher exports. Before the victorious economies could be paid a single mark in reparations, they had to receive a flood of German exports whose unmatched low prices more seriously threatened their own producers than the German competition they so feared before 1914 ever had. Inflation only augmented this effect. It was both the motor and the price for the German economic upswing of 1919–21, a period of depression for the Allied economies. As recent inflation research has shown, the German middle class was not the only one to suffer. Above all, American investors, who had gambled on a rapid stabilization of the German economy and currency after 1918, saw themselves by 1923 in possession of trillions of worthless paper marks. According to Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, American capital exports to Germany during the inflation years were no less than those during the years of stability (“Amerikanischer Kapitalexport und Wiederaufbau der deutschen Wirtschaft 1919–23 im Vergleich zu 1924–29,” Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 64 [1977]: 506, 512). Gerald Feldman paints a clear picture of the worldwide readiness to speculate on the mark: “There was scarcely a Scandinavian farmer who did not hold some marks in the expectation that the mark would recover, and thousands of Americans, from lowly busboys to mighty bankers, collectively poured millions of dollars into the German economy in return for marks and mark-denominated assets” (Gerald D. Feldman, ed., Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die deutsche Geschichte, 1924–1933 [Munich, 1985], p. 387). This speculative optimism can be explained as a continuation of the prewar faith in the capacities of the German economy, which seemed to be confirmed by the upswing of 1919–21. No one was able to predict that economic upswing and currency devaluation could go hand in hand—indeed, that the former could encourage the latter. Stephen A. Shuker, who shows that Germany netted a 5 percent increase in national income as a result of reparations, speaks of the American “reparation” to Germany. Shuker compares the German windfall to the financing of the Vietnam War by the world economy: in both cases, the economic superpower unscrupulously exploited its position by printing money to cover debts (Feldman, Nachwirkungen, p. 369).
158. See, for example, Hans Delbrück, the most aggressive post-1918 critic of Ludendorff and the first to accuse Germany’s military leadership of the actual stab in the back: “The high command gambled away the war intentionally and criminally” (“Ludendorffs Selbstporträt,” quoted in Delbrück’s Modern Military History, ed. Arden Bucholz [Lincoln, 1997], p. 192). On Ludendorff’s behavior after the failed spring offensive of 1918: “Ludendorff hoped … for a deus ex machina, namely, the sudden domestic breaking up of one of the Western powers.… Is that strategy or is it the dream of a man without a sense of responsibility? Is it strategy to have no plans and to hope for the unexpected?” (p. 190). Count Harry Kessler calls Ludendorff an “ingenious specialist idiot who was also an incorrigible gambler,… the military equivalent of the ‘German professor’ who in his enthusiasm for his subject strips himself of all ethical decency, indeed of common sense” (Tagebücher, 1918–1937, p. 220). Prince Max von Baden, who regarded Ludendorff not as a gambler but as a great field marshal “who is ultimately prepared to bet everything on one card,” reports that, when Ludendorff was asked at the beginning of the spring offensive what would happen if it failed, he replied: “Then Germany will have to perish” (Erinnerungen, p. 235). The sudden call for an armistice at the beginning of October 1918, which came after four years of obsessively pursuing peace through victory, indicated more the failure of a gambler’s nerve than the realism of a professional soldier. Moreover, Ludendorff’s justification—“I would feel like a reckless gambler if I did not insist on … the quickest possible end to the war via armistice” (quoted in Karl Tschuppik, Ludendorff: Die Tragödie des Fachmanns [Vienna, 1931], p. 385)—can be understood as a case of psychological denial, that is, as affirmation of what the speaker seems to reject.
159. Feldman, Nachwirkungen, p. 388. For Feldman, Fritz Lang’s film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is a parable of inflation in which the villainous protagonist preys “upon a world that has surrendered to speculative fever and gambling mania” (p. 386). In another work, Feldman speaks of 1922, the first year of hyperinflation, as “the year of Dr. Mabuse” (The Great Disorder [New York, 1993], p. 513). He characterizes the end of inflation and expressionism as the simultaneous disappearance of “expressionist art” and “expressionist economics” (Nachwirkungen, p. 390). See also the observations of foreign visitors about the lively “rage du jeu” not only in Berlin but throughout Germany in Ambroise Got, L’Allemagne après la débacle (Strasbourg, 1919–20), pp. 78ff. Permeated with the same fantastic megalomania, lacking any realistic chance of success, and in crass contradiction to Germany’s actual situation were the designs for gigantic technological projects published in popular magazines from 1919 to 1922. Examples include a skyscraper on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, a “world transportation center” in Düsseldorf (Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung [1919], pp. 446–47), and the “Air Express Hamburg–New York” (ibid., p. 146).
160. On the “blood pump,” see Bernd Hüppauf, “Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des ‘Neuen Menschen,’” Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch: Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Gerd Krumeich (Essen, 1993), p. 61. “The forces of France will bleed to death,” said Ludendorff’s predecessor in the military high command, Erich von Falkenhayn, as he began the battle of attrition at Verdun (quoted in Robert B. Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I [New York, 1991], p. 220).
161. Erwin Vierhaus speaks of a “pseudo-stab-in-the-back legend” among technocrats in Karl-Heinz Ludwig, ed., Technik, Ingenieure und Gesellschaft: Geschichte des Vereins deutscher Ingenieure, 1856–1981 (Düsseldorf, 1981), p. 292.
162. Zeitschrift des Vereins deutscher Ingenieure (1919), p. 224.
163. Ibid., p. 712. A year earlier, while people were still reeling from the German collapse, American superiority was explained by the fact that in the United States “the engineer had all of industry at his beck and call and exercised his influence on every initiative undertaken by the military leadership” (Zeitschrift des Vereins deutscher Ingenieure [1918], p. 886).
164. Klaus Braun, Konservativismus und Gemeinwirtschaft: Eine Studie über Wichard von Moellendorff (Duisburg, 1978), pp. 52ff., 69.
165. Technik und Wirtschaft (1919), p. 341.
166. Ibid. Emphasis added.
167. Gustav Winter, Deutschland schuldenfrei (Leipzig, 1921), p. 8. More than a hundred thousand copies of Winter’s first publication, Das Taylorsystem und wie man es in Deutschland einführt, were sold.
168. Winter, Taylorsystem, p. 98. Winter advanced this suggestion during the debate about the socialization of the economy, which he expected to lead above all to inflation. For every 100 percent rise in productivity, he suggested, 50 percent should be reinvested or paid out to Taylorized workers as a bonus and 50 percent used to pay off the national debt and reparations.
169. On France, see George G. Humphreys, Taylorism in France, 1904–1920 (New York, 1986). Briefly in 1917, Humphreys says, “Taylorism was raised to the level of a national imperative” (p. 249). On Britain, see L. Urwick, The Meaning of Rationalization (London, 1929).
170. V. I. Lenin, Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1966), p. 753. On Taylorism in Europe, see Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity,” Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1970): 27–61.
171. Edward Hallett Carr, The Soviet Impact on the Western World (New York, 1947), p. 25.
172. Franz Westermann, Amerika wie ich es sah: Reiseskizzen eines Ingenieurs (Halberstadt, 1926), p. 99. Quoted in Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994), p. 30.
173. Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (1922), p. 786.
174. Friedrich von Gottl-Ottilienfeld, Fordismus: Über Industrie und technische Vernunft (Jena, 1926). Quoted in Helmut Lethen, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1924–32 (Stuttgart, 1975), p. 21. The idea of the “natural” production of the automobile, its smooth-flowing progression from raw metal to finished product, led to the literary hallucination of the finished product’s still being warm, in an almost bodily sense, from the heat of the forge. At the heart of this idea was Ford’s claim that eighty-one hours was all it took to produce a car. See Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism (London, 1988), p. 66.
175. Heinrich Hauser in the Frankfurter Zeitung, quoted in Ulrich Ott, Amerika ist anders: Studien zum Amerika-Bild in deutschen Reiseberichten des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1991), p. 218.
176. Alexander Friedrich, Henry Ford der König des Autos und der Herrscher über die Seelen (Berlin, 1924), p. 24. The literature on Ford repeatedly claims that only the application of “all proven means of American mass suggestion and propaganda” could account for his success, the resonance of his message about service, and the high motivation of his workforce (Helmut Hultzsch, ed., Ford und wir [Frankfurt am Main, 1922], p. 19).
177. C. Ibanez de Ibero, L’Allemagne de la défaite (Paris, 1919), p. 25.
178. Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe, p. 30.
179. Hans Siemsen, quoted in F. W. Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy: Brevier der neuesten Tänze (Berlin, 1921), pp. 14, 18.
180. Ibid., p. 18.
181. R. L. Leonard, quoted in Koebner, Jazz und Shimmy, p. 120.
182. Catharina Godwin, “Der Sinn der Tanzwut,” Die Dame 17 (June 1921): 5.
183. Siegfried Kracauer, “Renovierter Jazz,” Aufsätze, 1927–1931, vol. 5 of Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), part 2, pp. 390–91.
184. Emil Lederer, Deutschlands Wiederaufbau und weltwirtschaftliche Neueingliederung durch Sozialisierung (Tübingen, 1920), p. 47.
185. Jürgen Freiherr von Kruedener, “Die Entstehung des Inflationstraumas: Zur Sozialpsychologie der deutschen Hyperinflation, 1922–23,” Konsequenzen der Inflation, ed. Gerald D. Feldman, Carl-Ludwig Holt-frerich, Gerald A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt (Berlin, 1989), pp. 284ff.
186. Heinrich Mann, Essays (Berlin, 1960), p. 435; Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen, 1914–1933 (Stuttgart, 2000), p. 53.
187. Ludendorff’s “nervous breakdown” can be seen in this context as an attack of vertigo—a reaction to the suddenly yawning gap between his previous assumptions and the realities of military strength.
188. Crowds and Power (New York, 1963), p. 188. See also Frank Thiess: “The currency devaluation prepared the ground for the destructive desire that ate so deeply into the organs of the body politic as to render it susceptible to every kind of relapse and collapse” (Freiheit bis Mitternacht [Vienna, 1965], p. 141) and Pierre Viénot: “During the period of inflation, all Germans existed in an impossible atmosphere that destroyed any sense of certainty. If that was possible, anything was” (Ungewisses Deutschland [Frankfurt am Main, 1931], p. 67).
189. On the postrevolutionary waltz mania, see Rémi Hess, La valse: Révolution du couple en Europe (Paris, 1989), pp. 102ff. The inflation of the years 1790–96 followed a similar curve to its German equivalent in 1919–23: a slow beginning, with a phase of economic upswing, then hyperinflation. It also yielded the same contradictory picture of impoverishment and prodigious wealth. “Along with misery, there were rich people, speculators, ostentatiously wealthy politicians, theaters that were nearly always full, elegants balls and gambling halls” (Emile Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières de l’industrie en France de 1789 à 1870 [1903–04, rpt. New York, 1969], vol. 2, p. 237).
190. In this context, the psychoanalytic explanation of dancing seems enlightening. Dance is defined as “a release of nonpleasurable tension” that occurs when the “original solipsistic stasis” of the ego is disturbed by external stimuli. The goal of dancing is to transform this condition of disruption/disease back into the original condition of stasis (A. Stärcke, “Über Tanzen, Schlagen, Küssen usw,” Imago 12 [1926]: 268–72).
191. Bernd Widdig, “Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany,” ms. See especially the chapter “Witches Dancing: Gender and Inflation” (pp. 315ff.). Joseph Roth called these performances “compositions in militarism and eroticism,” quickly adding that the dancers were working in the service of hygiene, not eros (Frankfurter Zeitung, Apr. 28, 1925, in Roth, Werke, vol. 2 [Cologne, 1990], p. 393).
192. Fritz Giese, Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem Rhythmus und Lebensgefühl (Munich, 1925), p. 141.
193. For Giese, the task of the industrial psychologist resided not in training the producer but in “conditioning” the consumer. The rationalization of consumption was for him identical to the “marketing of wares and goods” that had been synchronized with production, that is, “in the genuine sense of mass production via continual circulation from raw material to finished product” (Methoden der Wirtschaftspsychologie [Berlin, 1927], p. 158).
194. Ibid., p. 83.
195. Ibid., p. 17.
196. Westermann, Amerika, p. 91.
197. Giese, Methoden, p. 98.
198. Kracauer, “Girls und Krise,” Aufsätze, 1927–1931, p. 321. As sarcastic as Kracauer sounds, he had been fascinated by the phenomenon a few years earlier. “The legs of the Tiller Girls correspond to the working hands of the factory,” he wrote in his 1927 essay Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 54.
199. Giese, Girlkultur, p. 82; Das Tagebuch, May 29, 1926, p. 773; Adolf Halfeld, Amerika und der Amerikanismus (Jena, 1927), p. x.
200. The recontextualization of an enemy’s defensive “weapon” into a kind of trophy—in this case an article of women’s fashion—follows along the same lines as the social degradation or “humiliation” of the dress of disempowered classes. The most familiar example is the use of aristocratic costume as servants’ outfits.
201. Duncan Aiken, quoted in Gerald Critoph, “The Flapper and Her Critics,” “Remember the Ladies”: New Perspectives on Women in American History, ed. Carol V. R. George (Syracuse, 1975), p. 147.
202. From a different perspective, the erotic neutralization of the Girls represents a reaction to female sexual emancipation, which had bubbled over in the first years after the war. As Hans Ostwald writes in his “Cultural History of Inflation,” “women in many respects completely transformed themselves. They asserted their demands, particularly their sexual demands, much more clearly. In every conceivable way they intensified their claim to experience life more fully and intensely” (quoted in Widdig, “Culture and Inflation,” p. 312). This was no doubt a sinister development for a masculine world accustomed to entirely different gender relations. Accordingly, one could consider the sexual neutrality of the Girls as a compromise in which both parties agreed on a functional neutrality because emancipation and liberation were perceived not only as dangerous but also as energy-consuming. For Fritz Giese, all eccentric individual behavior required a high expenditure of energy.
203. A comparison of the Grimms’ German dictionary with the Oxford English Dictionary (1928) attests to the German fondness for “world” concepts and neologisms. In Grimm, examples for the use of the word Welt take up 65 columns, and examples for various Welt compounds 219 columns. In the OED, the corresponding figures are 15 and 4, respectively. Even if differences in scope are taken into account (31 volumes of Grimm versus 20 volumes of the OED), the contrast remains extraordinary. This is true not only of the basic root (Welt occurs four times as frequently as world) but especially of the compounds. In German, the word Welt occurs in conjunction with other nouns 44 times as frequently as the world. A comparison with French and other Romance languages is impossible since the word monde occurs grammatically in the adjectival form mondial as a separate attributive.
204. Quoted in Joachim Heinrich Schultze, ed., Zum Problem der Weltstadt (West Berlin, 1958), p. xviii.
205. Jules Huret, Berlin um 1900 (1909; rpt. Berlin, 1979), p. 33; Martin Mächler, “Die Grossiedlung und ihre weltpolitische Bedeutung: Berlin 1918,” Martin Mächler: Weltstadt Berlin. Schriften und Materialien, ed. Ilse Balg (West Berlin, 1986), p. 74; D. Rowe, Urban Studies 22 (1995): 226. The first mention of Chicago as a world city is in Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Chicago—eine Weltstadt im amerikanischen Westen (Stuttgart, 1893). The preference for Chicago over New York as a model can probably be attributed to its geographical location in the middle of the United States, a position similar to Berlin’s in Germany, and to its large German population.
206. Martin Wagner, “Das neue Berlin—die Weltstadt Berlin,” Das neue Berlin 1 (1929): 5.
207. Martin Wagner, “Das Formproblem eines Weltstadtplatzes,” Das neue Berlin 1 (1929): 33.
208. Quoted in Harald Bodenschatz, “Die Planung für die ‘Weltstadt Berlin’ in der Weimarer Republik,” Hauptstadt Berlin—Wohin mit der Mitte? ed. H. Engel and W. Ribbe (Berlin, 1993), p. 156. Many were convinced even before 1914 that Berlin was “essentially American,” that is, without much of an essence at all, compared with other German and European cities. This perception would seem to be confirmed by a comparison with the American aspects of Paris. Siegfried Kracauer writes, for instance, that “the bit of America in Paris [seems] quite French” (“Pariser Beobachtungen,” Aufsätze, 1927–1931, p. 28). Luigi Pirandello declared: “In Berlin one doesn’t feel the gap between the old Europe and the new, because the structure of the city itself does not show the contradiction. In Paris, where there exists a historical and artistic structure, and where there is evidence of a native civilization, Americanism jars like make-up on the face of an old lady” (quoted in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni des carcere, vol. 3 [Turin, 1975], p. 2178).
After 1945, the Berlin feuilletons’ desire for it to be seen as a world city was fulfilled in a different way and on a different level. Starting in 1933, the intellectual creators of the Berlin-as-world-city fantasy had crossed the Atlantic and penetrated, together with the other remaining elements of artistic and sociological modernism, middle-class American consciousness. With the American victory in 1945 and the establishment of the United States as a superpower, this transfer of culture took on all the characteristics of what I have called “trophy taking.” As of about 1960, “Weimar Berlin” became an American metaphor for modernism, in which Americans could recognize themselves, in contrast to Parisian modernism, which remains to this day an export article, a piece of European exoticism. “Weimar Berlin,” too, may have contained unfamiliar elements (though far less exotic ones), but American feelings toward it were largely ones of affinity, a sense that the unreflexive technological and materialistic American modernism of Chicago and Detroit first achieved self-consciousness and definitive form in the cultural laboratory of 1920s Berlin.
Theoretically, Paris and London would also have been suitable for this role, but then the trophy element would have been lacking. As a monument to victory, the trophy renders triumph visible, permanent, and omnipresent; and cultural trophies, in contrast to purely military ones, are necessary to confirm the deeper meaning of the victory and the superiority of the victorious system. They are like the torch taken from the loser’s hand because he has proven unworthy or incapable of carrying it and transferred to the victor so that its light can be better spread throughout the world. Paul Betts discusses this process with reference to America’s appropriation of the Bauhaus idea after 1945 and its transformation into the “International Style.” The United States needed a new style of self-presentation befitting its status as a superpower, Betts argues, and Bauhaus fit the bill, first because, along with the rest of European culture, it had been saved by the United States from Nazi barbarism and second because, as a European-American synthesis, it lent an appropriately “Atlantic” style to the emerging struggle against the new barbarism of Communism (“Die Bauhaus-Legende: Amerikanisch-deutsches Joint-Venture des Kalten Krieges,” Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. A. Lüdtke, I. Marssolek, and A. von Saldern [Stuttgart, 1996]).
209. Anton von Rieppel, quoted in Peter Berg, Deutschland und Amerika, 1918–1929 (Lübeck, 1963), p. 102.
210. Thomas Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), p. 355.
211. In contrast to the noun rationality and the adjective rational, which were used to refer to the increasing enlightenment and objectivity in social relations, Weber’s concept of rationalization implies optimization and maximization in the economic sense. When he writes in his essay “Zur Psychologie der industriellen Arbeit” of “the increasing rationalization of the wage system for the purpose of planned increases in output,” he marks the transition from an enlightenment-objective to an economic-optimizing definition of rationality (quoted in Hans Wupper-Tewes, Rationalisierung als Normalisierung: Betriebswissenschaft und betriebliche Leistungspolitik in der Weimarer Republik [Münster, 1995], p. 38). Before the war only Weber’s disciples Wilhelm Kochmann and Emil Lederer used the concept of rationalization.
212. Nolan, Visions of Modernity, p. 71.
213. Quoted in Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, Fordismus, p. 2.
214. Robert A. Brady, The Rationalization Movement in German Industry (1933; rpt. New York, 1974), pp. 3–7; André Fourgeaud, La rationalisation: Etats-Unis, Allemagne (Paris, 1929), p. 29. The reception of Fordism and the general acceptance of the concept of rationalization went hand in hand, with the former preceding the latter by about a year. The 1925 edition of the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften does not mention rationalization, whereas the supplemental volume of 1929 devotes 109 pages (pp. 708–817) to the concept. Similarly, the annual Bibliography of Social Sciences of the Reich’s Department of Statistics has one entry in 1924, 6 in 1925, and 145 in 1926. See Wupper-Tewes, Rationalisierung, p. 36.
215. Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung, pp. 306, 312, 315.
216. Ibid., pp. 308–09. Freyberg calls rationalization a “formula for consensus and peace that spans all of society.”
217. Ibid., p. 306. Emphasis added.
218. Ibid., p. 24. Bruno Rauecker provides some examples of the discrepancy between program and reality in Rationalisierung und Sozialpolitik (Berlin, 1926), pp. 14ff. The discrepancy was most evident in manufacturing. Mining and heavy industry, on the other hand, were thoroughly rationalized in both the Taylorite-technological sense and the “negative” sense of liquidating unprofitable businesses and branches (Nolan, Visions of Modernity, pp. 137ff.). The main changes took place not in technological-industrial organization but in the concentration of capital and the building of cartels, for example, in the formation of firms like IG Farben and the Associated Steelworks.
219. Brady, Rationalization Movement, p. xx. On the New Objectivity of the 1920s as a continuation of the pre-1914 “old” objectivity, see Frank Trommler, “The Creation of a Culture of Sachlichkeit,” Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 480ff. Old and New Objectivity stand in roughly the same relation to each another as Taylorism and rationalization.
220. Revue de France, Nov. 15, 1929.
221. Urwick, Meaning of Rationalization, p. 20; Walter Meakin, The New Industrial Revolution (London, 1928), pp. 7–8.
222. Brady, Rationalization Movement. Emphasis added.
223. Werner Daitz, “Vom Sinn der europäischen Wirtschafts-Rationalisierung,” quoted by Charles Roy, La formule allemande de production rationelle (Paris, 1929), p. 176.
224. The confidence of the German coal and steel industries, as represented by Werner Daitz, can be explained by their sense of having more leverage than their French enemies. Without coal from the Ruhr region, the steel industry of Lorraine would have come to a standstill, whereas Germany was far less dependent on raw iron from Lorraine. As Guy Greer, a member of the reparations committee, remarked, Germany could “afford to play a waiting game” (The Ruhr-Lorraine Problem [New York, 1925], p. 232). The 1923 French occupation of the Ruhr area thus emerges more as an act of desperation than as one of aggression. Probably no more representative than Daitz but still noteworthy was the industrialist Arnold Rechberg, who considered the Treaty of Versailles “not as a political issue but solely as an economic factor, which he saw as being more disadvantageous to the victor than to the vanquished” (Eberhard von Vietsch, Arnold Rechberg und das Problem der politischen West-Orientierung Deutschlands nach dem I. Weltkrieg, Schriftenreihe des Bundesarchivs [Koblenz, 1958], p. 75).
225. Roy, Formule allemande, p. 178. The fear that the national independence defended at such enormous cost during the First World War could now be swamped by Germany’s overwhelming rationalized economy was specifically French. From the Anglo-American perspective, German rationalization was a welcome contribution to the efforts toward a long overdue modernization of competitive liberal capitalism. If the changeover and transmutation into a more stable system could be carried out by invoking class- and interest-neutral, technological and scientific rationality, all the better. The definition of rationalization by the American National Industrial Conference Board in 1931 points in this direction: “Rationalization represents the idea of enlightened leadership embracing an entire industry in its relation to other industries and to the national economy” (National Industrial Conference Board, Rationalization of German Industry [New York, 1931], p. 7). In other publications, the starring role is given not to rationalization, but to buzzwords like technocracy, efficiency, and managerialism.
226. Brady, Rationalization Movement, pp. 324, 317–18.
227. On rationalization in the Third Reich, see Rüdiger Hachtmann, “‘Die Begründer der amerikanischen Technik sind fast lauter schwäbischallemannische Menschen’: Nazi-Deutschland, der Blick auf die USA, und die ‘Amerikanisierung’ der industriellen Produktionsstrukturen im ‘Dritten Reich,’” Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marssolek, and Adelheid von Saldern (Stuttgart, 1996), pp. 46ff. See also Michael Prince and Rainer Zitelmann, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt, 1991), especially Hans-Dieter Schäfer, “Amerikanismus im Dritten Reich,” pp. 200ff. On the National Board for Economic Efficiency and the rationalization of mass murder, see Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), pp. 300ff., 312ff., 322ff.
228. See Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda, und Volksmeinung, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart, 1997); Hans-Jürgen Schröder, Deutschland und die Vereinigte Staaten, 1933–1945 (Wiesbaden, 1970); Schröder, “Das Dritte Reich und die USA,” Die Use und Deutschland, 1918–1975, ed. Manfred Knapp (Munich, 1978); Hans-Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewusstsein (Munich, 1983); and Schäfer, “Amerikanismus im Dritten Reich.” The Nazis’ readiness to learn from America stands in contrast to the reception accorded by European liberalism, which despite its tendency to flirt with American mass culture insisted on the preservation of its individuality. The readiness, indeed the desire, for the total collectivism that seemed to have been achieved in the United States tied the two other great totalitarian movements of the interbellum era, Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism, to National Socialism. It may not be going too far to regard the entire post-1918 totalitarian phase of European history as an attempt to raise Europe technologically and psychologically to the American level by replacing liberal with totalitarian ideology. Lenin and Stalin’s expressions of admiration for American’s “technical” achievements point in this direction, as do numerous remarks by European and American intellectuals on the democratic-totalitarian character of American society. See, for example, the Italian anti-Fascist Antonio Borgese: “With the exception of its extreme left,… America is totalitarian. The vast majority share the same ideas, the same sentiments. The government is ‘administration.’ A minority controls all politics” (quoted in Giorgio Spini, Gian Giacomo Migone, and Massimo Teodori, eds., Italia e America dalla Grande Guerra à oggi [Lama Umbro, 1976], p. 81). The external appearance, particularly the faces, of Americans struck many Europeans as an especially emphatic sign of standardization. For National Socialist Theodor Lüddecke, the American was “a stable, healthy, unbroken, internally calm type of person. This is expressed in the structure of his athletically controlled body, in his physiognomy, in the stern style of American men’s fashion.… America has put its stamp not only on the automobile but also on the human face. In general, the physiognomy of the American seems sterner than that of the newly arrived. People have spoken of the ‘sporting American face’” (Das amerikanische Wirtschaftstempo als Bedrohung Europas [Leipzig, 1925], pp. 19–20). Friedrich Sieburg commented: “Their padded shoulders appear monumental, their uniform faces, six of one, a half-dozen of the other, seem to be masks of iron” (Die Literarische Welt 23 [July 1926]: 8, quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg [Berkeley, 1994], p. 403). Likewise Rudolf Kayser on the “Americanized” European physiognomy of the 1920s: “Beardless with a sharp profile, a resolute look in the eyes, and a steely, thin body” (Vossische Zeitung, Sept. 27, 1925, quoted in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, Weimar Sourcebook, p. 395).
229. Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, pp. 92, 95, 100, 264, 296ff.
230. Erich Welter in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Nov. 9, 1941, quoted in Schäfer, “Amerikanismus, im Dritten Reich,” p. 213.
231. Nazi communications director Eugen Hadamovsky was equally impressed by the use of the seventy-five thousand “four-minute men” (public promoters whose standardized brief addresses can be seen as the predecessors of the modern advertising commercial) in 1917–18 and the repression of all opposition to the war (Propaganda und nationale Macht [Oldenburg, 1933], pp. 43–44, 22–23). The legal foundation for such repression—the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918)—has been described as the American version of the Enabling Act that suspended the Reichstag and gave Hitler dictatorial power in 1933. The sentencing of the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs to ten years’ imprisonment in the fall of 1918 could be subsumed under this comparison. Charles A. Beard, who found this instance of repression comparable to those in czarist Russia, commented: “Never before had American citizens realized how thoroughly, how irresistibly a modern government could impose its ideas upon the whole nation and, under a barrage of publicity, stifle dissent with declarations, assertions, official versions, and reiteration” (Charles A. Beard and Mary A. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, vol. 2 [New York, 1930], p. 640). Whether the systematic repression and ultimate silencing of German American culture (all the way down to those with Germanic-sounding last names) in 1917–18 might have served as a model for the discrimination against German Jews in the first years of the Nazi regime is a question that could well be posed in light of Nazi interest in American methods.
232. Quoted in Schäfer, “Amerikanismus in Dritten Reich,” p. 214. The Coca-Cola statistics are cited in Hachtmann, “‘Die Begründer,’” p. 39. The institute responsible for researching consumer habits was the Society for Consumer Research under the aegis of the Institute for Economic Research directed by Ludwig Erhard, later minister of economics and chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
233. “The content is utter nonsense,” Goebbels remarked of an American film, “but the depiction is very skillful” (quoted in Gassert, Amerika in Dritten Reich, p. 177). Hans Siemsen said similarly, “It’s always the same. But how charmingly these idiotic scripts are filmed!” Because they depict “thoroughly simple and natural people,” he observed, “these American films always make a pleasant impression despite their miserable scripts” (Die Weltbühne [1921], pp. 220, 221).
234. Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin (Berkeley, 1994), p. 112; Felix Müller, Der Filmminister: Goebbels und der Film im 3. Reich (Berlin, 1998), pp. 75–77.
235. Joachim Radkau, quoted in Thomas Kühne, “Massenmotorisierung und Verkehrspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert,” Neue Politische Literatur 41 (1996): 202.
236. Heinrich Hauser, quoted in M. Bienert, Die eingebildete Metropole: Berlin im Feuilleton der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1992), p. 188.
237. Quoted in R. J. Overy, “Transportation and Rearmament in the Third Reich,” Historical Journal 16 (1973): 401; Paul Kluke, “Hitler und das Volkswagenprojekt,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 8 (1960): 348.
238. Alexander Friedrich, speaking of Ford’s “factory of souls” in 1924, saw in it the aspiration toward total control, beginning with the workers: “The connection stretched beyond the period from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.; it was not just a matter of one of the seven thousand daily tasks: it concerned the whole human being” (Henry Ford, p. 19). In addition, he quotes Ford’s autobiography: “We need people who are able to form the formless masses politically, socially, industrially, and morally into a healthy, well-rounded whole” (p. 20). The idea of service was the attempt to extend this total connection to the buyer and the consumer. Hitler was an admirer of Ford, whom he considered the “leader of the growing Fascist movement in America” (quoted in James Pool, Who Financed Hitler? [New York, 1978], p. 90). R. J. Overy’s claim that Hitler read Ford’s autobiography during his imprisonment at Lands-berg (“Transportation,” pp. 400–01) is unsubstantiated but has been taken up by various others.
239. Kluke, “Hitler,” p. 342. The enormous success of the Beetle in the United States after World War II serves as an epilogue to the story. Around 1960, as the market for compact cars began to be tapped, not only the Volkswagen but the British Austin, the French Renault, and the Italian Fiat attempted to answer the call. How is it that the Volkswagen, which was rejected as “Hitler’s car” in 1949 when Germany first attempted to export it, soundly defeated its European competition within the space of a few years? Purely economic factors (low price, good service) do not provide a sufficient answer. More to the point, the Beetle’s success was tied from the very beginning to the folklore surrounding the car. It was a manifestation of the victor’s trophy, pure and simple. In the transformation from “Hitler’s car” to “the funny car,” the Volkswagen traveled the same route along which a once threatening enemy became a harmless, Chaplinesque comic figure. The fact that Volkswagen consumers came disproportionately from the ranks of the well-educated (60 percent had a college education) argues for this thesis. In line with their other Europe-oriented consumer habits, this group of people should have favored a French compact car like the Citroen 2CV, as their German counterparts did.
240. Eberhard Schütz, in Wolfgang Emmerich and Carl Wege, eds., Der Technikdiskurs in der Hitler-Stalin-Ära (Stuttgart, 1995), p. 136.
241. Frankfurter Zeitung, Dec. 11, 1938, quoted in Emmerich and Wege, Technikdiskurs, p. 142. After a long stay in Germany, Denis de Rougemont comments similarly in a May 1938 diary entry: “In the early days of the automobile, who would have believed that in twenty years men would be capable of driving these machines without thinking of anything in particular, in a perfect state of freedom of spirit? The totalitarian constraints [of driving] keep us hypnotized. Like an obsession, the cars ‘drive us,’ actually taking away all our freedom. With every thought, I risk an accident.… What will happen when these dangers excite only our reflexes? Will we find a new freedom?” (Journal d’une époque [Paris, 1968], p. 327).
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