II

Berlin

Wie sind zu Tanzem Blirger rings geworden...
A L F R E D W O L F E N S T E I N 1914

The banging of windows and the crashing of glass are
the robust sounds of fresh life,
the cries of something new-born.
E L I A S C A N ETTI

On the Yser Canal, where the young reserve regiments of
volunteers attacked, there now lies our ver sacrum . . .
Their sacrifice for us signifies a sacred spring for all of Germany.
F R I E D R I C H M EI N EC K E 1914

VE R S A C R U M

"Germany has declared war on Russia-- swimming in the afternoon." Such was Franz Kafka's pithy diary entry for August 2, 1914.1 The days of that summer were long and full of sunshine; the nights were mild and moonlit. That it was a beautiful and unforgettable season is part of the lore of that summer of 1914, part of its poignancy and mystique. Yet it is not to evoke sun and spas, sailing regattas and somnolent afternoons-- important as such imagery is for our poetical sense of that summer before the storm -that we begin this chapter with a reference to weather; it is very simply be cause the fine days and nights of that July and August encouraged Europeans to venture out of their homes and to display their emo tions and prejudices in public, in the streets and squares of their cities and towns. The massive exhibitions of public sentiment played a crucial role in determining the fate of Europe that summer.

1. How burghers everywhere have become dancers.

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Had it been a wet and cold summer, like that of the previous year or the next one, would a fairground atmosphere conducive to soap box oratory and mass hysteria have developed? Would leaders then have been prepared to declare war so readily? There is evidence that the jingoistic crowd scenes in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris, and London, in the last days of July and in the early days of August, pushed the political and military leadership of Europe toward confrontation. That was certainly the case in Germany. And Germany was the matrix of the storm.

After the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, together with his wife, on June 28 at Sarajevo during their imperial visit to the provinces of Bosnia and Herzogovina, it was only because of staunch German backing that the Austrian government decided to pursue an intransigent policy in dealing with Serbia, which, it was suspected, had given both moral encouragement and material support to the terrorist group that carried out the plot against the Austrian heir apparent. In Berlin, at critical stages of the decision making, large demonstrations showed the public's desire for steadfastness and commitment to an aggressive and victorious resolution of the crisis. Excitement, already high in early July, grew to fever pitch by the end of the month.

On July 25, a Saturday, in the early evening, large crowds milled about in the streets, awaiting Serbia's answer to Austria's draconic ultimatum of the twenty-third, which made a number of demands that were clearly difficult for the Serbs to accept. The German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was so unsure of the public's response to the ultimatum, and so concerned that Berliners might respond negatively, that he warned the kaiser not to return just yet from his annual Norwegian cruise. A quixotic Wilhelm was deeply offended by the suggestion but presumably anxious nevertheless: "Things get madder every minute! Now the man writes to me that I must not show myself to my subjects!"

But Bethmann had completely misjudged the public mood. A reporter for the Tiigliche Rundschau has left us, in breathless prose, a picture of the crowds storming newspaper delivery vans for news of the Serbian response, tearing open newspapers, and reading with fierce involvement. Suddenly a cry erupts: Et jeht los! -- a Berliner's way of saying, "It's on!" Serbia has turned down the Austrian ultimatum Et jeht los!

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That is everyone's phrase in this hour. It cuts to the quick. And all of a sudden, before one is aware of its happening, a crowd has gathered. No one knows anyone else. But all are seized by one earnest emotion: War, war, and a sense of togetherness. And then a solemn and festive sound greets the evening: “Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall.”

At about 8:00 P.M. a large mass of humanity moves along Unter den Linden, Berlin's grand central boulevard, toward the Schloss, the imperial palace. At the armory there are loud cries of Hoch Osterreich, and at the Schloss the crowd bursts into the song "Heil Dir im Siegerkranz."

Another throng, thousands strong, moves to the Moltkestrasse, to the Austrian embassy, where it encamps, singing, "Ich hatte einen Kameraden, " :one of the most popular of German marching songs. The Austrian ambassador, Szogyeny-Marich, finally. appears on a balcony and is cheered madly. He retires, but the singing and shouting continue, and he feels compelled to appear once again to salute the expressions of solidarity. A reporter for the Vossische Zeitung, a Berlin liberal paper, notes, "German and Austrian, student and soldier, merchant and worker, all feel as one in this deadly serious hour." 3

After dark, at about 11:00 P.M., a large crowd gathers at the Brandenburg Gate and then moves to the Foreign Office on the Wilhelmstrasse and finally on to the War Office. Other groups collect at the Zoologischer Garten, on the Kurfiirstendamm, and on the Tauentzienstrasse. The mass of mankind in front of the Schloss and another throng in front of the Reich Chancellor's Palace mill about until well after midnight.

Bethmann's secretary, Kurt Riezler, notes in his diary that Bethmann is so strongly affected by the sight of the large and enthusiastic crowds that his mood lifts perceptibly from one of foreboding, especially when he hears that similar demonstrations are taking place throughout the Reich. Indeed there are even some ugly incidents, on Saturday and again on Sunday, that hint at the intensity of public emotion.

"A Roar Like Thunder Sounds."

Long Live Austria!

"Hail to You in Victory Wreath."

"l Had a Comrade."

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In Munich at the Cafe Fahrig on Saturday night the crowd becomes giddy singing patriotic songs. After midnight the band leader is told by the owners to wind things down and finally at 1:30 A.M. to stop playing. The clientele, however, has not had enough, and when efforts are made to close the establishment for the night some of the patriots begin to break chairs and tables and to smash plate glass windows with bricks.

The next afternoon, also in Munich, a Serb expresses himself about the world situation and is quickly surrounded by a large angry crowd, which is on the point of lynching its prey when police arrive. The Serb is rescued and ushered into a local restaurant. But the crowd is baying for blood and tries to storm the restaurant. A larger detachment of police, led by the police prefect himself, has to intervene. The Serb is hidden for several hours before he is sent on his way by a side door.

In Jena, Charles Sorley, a nineteen-year-old visiting student at the university and son of the professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge, writes home to his parents on July 26th:

The drunken Vefbindungen (Student fraternities.) are parading the streets shouting "Down with the Serbs." Every half-hour, even in secluded Jena, comes a fresh edition of the papers, each time with wilder rumours, so that one can almost hear the firing at Belgrade. 5

The Russian naval attache in Berlin reports on the same day, the twenty-sixth, that the main streets of the capital are so full of demonstrators proclaiming support for Austria that people who have lived in the city for over thirty years are saying that they have never witnessed such scenes.

The kaiser reaches Potsdam on July 27. He will move to his Berlin palace on the thirty-first.

The next week, on Thursday the thirtieth-- one day, that is, before news of Russian mobilization reaches Berlin-- excited crowds reappear, and they remain an almost permanent feature of the German

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capital for the next seven crucial days. On that Thursday they assemble in front of the Foreign Office on the Wilhelmstrasse, at the Kranzler-Ecke, a major intersection on Unter den Linden and the site of the famous Kranzler Cafe, and in front of the Schloss at the end of Unter den Linden. From Friday afternoon, the thirty-first, when the kaiser declares at 1:00 P.M. a state of drohende Kriegsgefahr, or imminent danger of war-- which puts border patrols on alert and restricts civilian use of postal, telegraph, and rail communication-- the Berlin public that pours into the streets dearly views war as inevitable.

Everywhere that afternoon can be heard patriotic shouts. "In wake of the decision that has finally been made," notes the Berlin correspondent of a Frankfurt paper at 3:00 P.M. that Friday, "everywhere tension has given way to jubilation."' While officials insist that the declaration of Kriegsgefahr is by no means synonymous with a declaration of war and that the latter depends on a Russian refusal to rescind mobilization orders, the German public assumes otherwise and regards the outcome of the crisis a foregone conclusion. Housewives start a rush on grocery shops. Many store owners seize the opportunity to turn an extra penny: salt, oatmeal, and flour all go up in price markedly. In the food sections of the large department stores in midtown Berlin tinned goods are snatched up. In late afternoon, on police orders, some large stores are shut.

As the extra editions of newspapers appear that Friday afternoon with the latest information, Unter den Linden fills with humanity. Many come to await the arrival of the kaiser from Potsdam. At 2:45 the royal car appears. It has great difficulty in making its way to the imperial palace. The cheers are deafening. The kaiser's car is followed by that of the crown prince and princess and their eldest sons. They in turn are followed by the princes Eitel-Friedrich, Adalbert, August Wilhelm, Oskar, and Joachim. Then comes a line of limousines bearing imperial advisers. Every car, from first to last, is greeted with hurrahs and patriotic songs. The Reich chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, and the chief of the general staff, Moltke, arrive for consultations, stay briefly, and leave, accompanied on both their arrival and departure by wildly enthusiastic acclaim. Other members of the royal family also gradually leave the palace, and each automobile must struggle to make its way through the excited crowd, which the Berliner Lokal Anzeiger estimates at fifty thousand. All the major decision makers are confronted

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directly by the massive outpouring of enthusiasm from the Berlin public. None of them has ever witnessed such demonstrations before. None of them can ignore the popular mood. Aside from the cars of the dignitaries, traffic is rerouted away from Unter den Linden, and Berlin's most resplendent street -which houses the university, the Opera, the Royal Library, a number of government ministries, as well as theaters, cafes, and embassies - becomes the stage for a monumental Greek drama.

Late that night a crowd of several thousand is still gathered in front of the chancellor's residence on the Wilhelmstrasse, and shortly before midnight begins chanting for the chancellor. Bethmann finally appears and makes a brief impromptu speech. Invoking Bismarck, Wilhelm I, and the elder Moltke, he insists on Germany's peaceful intentions. However, should the enemy force a war on Germany, she will light for her "existence" and "honor" to the last drop of blood: "In the gravity of this hour I remind you of the words Prince Friedrich Karl called out to the Brandenburgers: Let your hearts beat before God and your fists upon your enemy!”

The next day, Saturday, August I, scenes that are even more hectic and exuberant are enacted. In the morning, normally a regular end to the working week, with businesses, schools, and offices functioning until noon, things are hardly normal. The Moabit criminal courts, for example, cannot proceed as scheduled because defendants, witnesses, and even judges and lawyers simply fail to appear. In front of the royal palace a crowd estimated at anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 gathers, spreads like a sea from the old museum and the steps of the cathedral, through the Lustgarten and across the large square to the terrace of the Schloss, and is led in a rousing sing-along by the band of the Elisabeth regiment. The regiment is in fact stuck. It was due, after the changing of the guard at the palace, to move across the square to the Lustgarten. But it was trapped by the crowd and is now unable to move. And so it leads the fervent singing. "The enthusiasm knew no bounds," the Frankfurter Zeitung correspondent cables at1:55 P.M., “and when as a finale the united will of the masses elicited the 'Pariser Einzugsmarsch' (March celebrating the entry into Paris.) the enthusiasm reached its high point.”

Again members of the royal family arrive at the palace in the very midst of these celebrations, as do Bethmann, the chancellor, Moltke, the army chief of staff, and Tirpitz, the naval minister. The crowds remain through the afternoon as fateful consultations take place.

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They sing, they chatter, they cheer. Finally, at 5:00 P.M., the kaiser signs the order for general mobilization; and an hour later, in St. Petersburg, Count Pourtales, the German ambassador, calls on the Russian foreign minister, Sazonov, to hand him a declaration of war. The momentous decisions of the last days have all been made against the backdrop of mass enthusiasm. No political leader could have resisted the popular pressures for decisive action.

At about 6:30, a cry goes up-- "We want the kaiser!" The curtains at the middle window of the palace part, the French doors open, and the kaiser and his wife appear to a thunderous welcome. Wilhelm waves. The noise, the songs, and the cheering slowly abate. Finally, the kaiser speaks. Germans are all one now, he tells the throng. All differences and divisions are forgotten. As brothers they will achieve a mighty victory. The short speech is greeted with more jubilation and more songs-- "Die Wacht am Rhein"("The Watch on rhe Rhine") and the traditional battle hymn of the Protestants, "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.” ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.")

The activity that evening, throughout the city, resembles an enormous celebration after a successful first-night performance by a cast of hundreds of thousands. Berlin has a cast party. Pubs and beer gardens are full to overflowing everywhere. Pianos, trumpets, violins, and entire bands accompany the raucous singing of patriotic songs, over and over, into the morning hours, when, in an alcoholic or simply emotional stupor, Berliners finally tumble, still smiling, into their featherbeds.

Almost two thousand emergency marriages are performed that Saturday and early Sunday in greater Berlin. The electric atmosphere prompts all manner of organizations and social groups to declare publicly their loyalty to the German cause. Campaigners for homosexual and women's rights, for instance, join the celebrations of nationality. The Association of German Jews in Berlin issues its declaration on Saturday, August I : "That every German Jew is ready to sacrifice all the property and blood demanded by duty is self-evident," it proclaims in one of many exuberant assertions. 10

On Sunday morning at 11:30 an open-air interdenominational church service takes place at the Bismarck monument in front of the Reichstag. Thousands are in attendance for this ceremony of

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incomparable symbolism and suggestion. The band of the Fusilier Guards plays, and the service begins with the Protestant hymn "Niederliin dische Dankgebet," ("Low Country Prayer of Thanks.") with its opening words, Wir treten zum Beten vor Gott den Gerechten. (We come to pray before our just God.) The court preacher, Licentiate Dohring, leads the service, and for his sermon he takes the text "Faithful unto death." The war, he says, has been forced on Germany, but "we Germans fear God yet otherwise nothing in this world." The entire congregation then repeats the Lord's Prayer, and the service ends with the Catholic hymn, based on a fourth-century tune, "Grosser Gott wir loben Dich." ("Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.") Protestant and Catholic are reunited in Germany. The secular crowds on previous days often sang hymns. Now, appropriately, the religious service is followed by secular songs. Church and state, too, have become one. The kaiser, aware of the importance of this kind of symbolism, attends a service at the old garrison church in Potsdam, where Frederick the Great, among other Prussian rulers, lies buried.

In early August Germans wallow in what appears to them to be the genuine synthesis of past and future, eternity embodied in the moment and the resolution of all domestic strife-- party versus party, class against class, sect against sect, church in conflict with state. Life has achieved transcendence. It has become aestheticized. Life has become a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in which material concerns and all mundane matters are surpassed by a spiritual life force.

Elsewhere in Germany, whether in Frankfurt am Main or Frankfurt an der Oder, in Munich, in Breslau, or in Karlsruhe, the scenes are similar. Princes are mobbed. The military is idolized. Churches are packed. Emotionally Germany has declared war by Friday, July 3I, at the latest-- certainly on Russia and on France. Given the intensity of public feeling, it is inconceivable that the kaiser can, at this point, turn back. He would never survive such a failure of nerve. And of course in the next days the crucial decisions and the declarations of war follow: first against Russia, then against France, and finally against Britain.

The last major antiwar gatherings in Berlin had taken place on Tuesday, July 28, when twenty-seven meetings were organized throughout the city by the Social Democrats, well-attended meetings,

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several of which culminated in marches. The Berliner Tageblatt estimated that seven thousand workers met at the Friedrichshain Brewery and two thousand at the Koppenstrasse. After these meetings the two groups moved together toward the Kiinigstor, about ten thousand strong. Fifty police eventually blocked the march, and as the first rows of marchers pushed toward the police, blank shots were fired. The demonstration was quickly dispersed, with only a few skirmishes and minor injuries. Thirty-two German cities experienced similar antiwar gatherings. These were the last significant antiwar rallies. By the critical weekend-- Friday, the last day of July, and Saturday and Sunday, the first two days of August-- the Social Democrats, confronted by the mobilization of the tsar's armies and hence by a heightened Russian threat, and also by renewed nationally minded demonstrations, began to rally to the nationalist cause. Some socialist leaders were themselves caught up in the orgy of emotion. Others felt that they could not swim against the tide of public sentiment. A number of deputies on the left of the party, summoned to for a caucus meeting, left their homes still adamantly opposed to the war and determined to vote against war credits, but faced Berlin repeatedly by scenes at railway stations en route of public support for war, they changed their minds. By August 3, a day before the vote on credits in the Reichstag, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) caucus swung overwhelmingly to a pro-war position. On that Monday, the Bremer Burger-Zeitung, before and again during the war positioned on the left of the party, trumpeted in headlines DO YOUR DUTY!” Gustav Noske said later that had the SPD caucus not approved the war credits, socialist deputies would have been trampled to death in front of the Brandenburg Gate. In sum, not only were the monarch and government influenced by the outpourings of public feeling, but virtually all opposition forces were swept up in the current as well.

Kurt Riezler ruminated, some days after, on the effect of the public emotion:

The incomparable storm unleashed in the people has swept before it all doubting, halfhearted, and fearful minds . . . The nation surprised the skeptical statesmen. 12

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The crowds, in fact, seized the political initiative in Germany. Caution was thrown to the wind. The moment became supreme. Hours, years, indeed centuries, were reduced to moments. History had become life.

Many were never to forget the mood of those August days. Ten years later Thomas Mann would refer to those days as marking the beginning of much that was still in the process of beginning. Thirty five years later Friedrich Meinecke, the doyen of German historians, would experience a shiver when he thought about the mood of that August, and he confessed that, despite the disasters which followed, those days were perhaps the most sublime of his life.13

O V E R T URE

To argue that Germany was a "belated nation" has become almost a cliché of historical writing on that country. Certainly the social and economic trappings of modernity -urbanization, industrialization, colonies, political unity-- all came late to Germany in comparison with France and in particular with Britain.

In l800, when France and Britain had at least a century or more of centralized government behind them, the German territories were still a quilt-like configuration of close to four hundred autonomous principalities, only loosely federated in an association with the paradoxical name of Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. In a part of Swabia in an area of 719 square miles were to be found ninety states. Cities were few and hardly comparable with either Paris or London. Berlin in 1800 had a population of about 170,000 and was little more than an administrative center of Prussia. No nationally organized industry like the English cloth trade existed to develop commercial ties, no national religion to encourage religious unity. For many Germans the greatest achievement in German history was the Reformation. That a development which divided the German-speaking peoples instead of uniting them should be so regarded spoke volumes on German identity. In the early eighteenth century a bride wrote to her betrothed, "Nothing is more plebeian than to write letters in German." Fifty years later Frederick the Great agreed wholeheartedly. Of the German language he wrote-in De la litterature allemande (On German Literature. ) that it was "half-barbarous, breaking down into as many

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different dialects as Germany has provinces." "Each local group," he added with scorn, "is convinced that its patois is the best." 1 Even a century later, by l 850, when, in the wake of Napoleonic reform, which destroyed the Holy Roman Empire as an official structure and encouraged the beginnings of social mobility and industrialization, when Prussia had clearly begun to assert herself as the strongest and most ambitious of the German states, Berlin, though now a growing financial, commercial, and railway center, still had a population of only 400,000.

Germany, of course, had few natural boundaries apart from the sea to the north and the Alps to the southwest. Otherwise the great central European plain dominated her geographical sense of self--the broad highway for all invaders, marauders, and movements of peoples since the advent of the Germanic tribes themselves from the east in the fourth and fifth centuries. The lack of territorial, ethnic, religious, and commercial definition was a hallmark of German history, and the legacy was a tradition of regionalism, particularism, and provincialism, not to mention insecurity and mistrust." "Germany? But where is it? I do not know how to find the country," exclaimed the joint voice of Schiller and Goethe at the end of the eighteenth century. 2 Metternich, the Rhinelander who resettled in Austria, remarked at the Congress of Vienna that the idea of "Germany" and of "a German people" was an abstraction.

When political unity did finally come in the years 1866 to 1871, it came in part as the outgrowth of social change whose most consequential feature at the time was the development of an entrepreneurial spirit in a segment of the middle class. Equally important, the Prussian leadership recognized the power-political necessities of the European state structure, seized the initiative, and pursued a policy of conquest and centralization. New and traditional elements combined, then, to forge a German political unity, such as it was.

Yet despite a surface unity, the strong regionalist traditions in Germany could not be eradicated overnight, and consequently the German Reich that emerged under Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns on the one hand and a middle-class elite on the other was a curious constitutional amalgam of federalism and centralism, of democracy and autocracy, of provincialism papered over by "national" necessity, of middle-class ambition and aristocratic restraint. Although a spirit of political wholeness

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was an aspiration in a segment of the German population, particularly within some of the middle strata, regional loyalties and a sense of diversity remained the reality, and the old elites were able to retain a good deal of their pre-eminence because they recognized the diversity -most of their privileges were, in fact, based on it -and expended considerable energy in "managing" it.

Otto von Bismarck had presided over German unification in the l860s. He had become Prussian prime minister in 1861 and had skillfully guided Prussia through three wars-- against Denmark, Austria, and France-- that culminated in the creation of a united German state in l 871. He remained chancellor of the new German Reich for almost two decades until his forced resignation in 1890. While Bismarck's conservative ideals aimed at the establishment in Germany of a harmonious, well-integrated society governed by an appreciation of Prussian traditions and institutions, the effect of his brilliance as a political tactician over thirty years was quite the opposite. In the end his tactics had perhaps a more significant impact on German development than did his goals.

With his constant need for a scapegoat, an enemy to finger-- he pointed to the liberals as the source of all ills in the 1860s, to the Catholics in the 1870s, and to the socialists in the l880s-- and with his successful refrain "The Reich is in danger," he increased existing class tensions, religious divisions, and ideological differences. In the short run Bismarck had great success as a political manipulator; in the long run he failed strikingly to realize his ideals. His dismissal in 1890 from the chancellorship by the new emperor, Wilhelm II, was the most eloquent comment on his failure. It is one of the succulent ironies of history that Bismarck, the "iron chancellor," who helped to unify Germany and make it a great international power, also fragmented and weakened the country further. Germany was in many ways more divided when Bismarck left office than when he became Prussian prime minister.

His effect, then, on Germany was a paradoxical one: he helped instill in Germans a craving for national wholeness, an illusion of unity, greatness, and strength, but at the same time, by playing on the disintegrative, centrifugal tendencies in Germany in his "divide and rule" approach to life and politics, he promoted these tendencies. The accentuation of differences rather than of similarities made the quest for wholeness all the more urgent and all the more a matter, in view of the reality,

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of spiritual transcendence. Lacking objective definition, the idea of Germany and German-ness became a question of imagination, myth, and inwardness-- in short, of fantasy.

Now there was, of course, a well-established pattern in the German past of taking the external world, the impressions of the senses, of visible reality, and of relegating them to a position secondary in importance to the world of spirit, inner life, and "true freedom." In the Lutheran tradition, religion was a matter of faith rather than of good deeds or doctrine. In the German classical humanist outlook, freedom was ethical not social; innere Freiheit, inner freedom, was far more important than liberty and equality. For the German idealist, Kultur was a matter of spiritual cultivation, not external form. German-ness was, by necessity, a matter of spiritual association rather than geographical or even racial delineation. Bismarck, instead of weakening this internalization of life, this mythopoeic quality, accentuated it. Bismarck "Prussianized" Germany and at the same time turned Germany from the reality of a geographical expression into a legend.

Yet Bismarck's political achievement-- this appearance of national unity against a backdrop of deep, historically rooted schisms-- was possible only because it coincided with Germany's social and economic development in the second half of the nineteenth century. That development set the stage for Bismarck's stratagems and reinforced their effect. It was characterized by overwhelming speed and a corresponding disorientation in the populace. While in Britain Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, could refer to "the moving age" in which he lived, and Tennyson could speak of his era as "an awful moment of transition," the statistics for social and economic transformation in Germany suggest that no other country had a greater right to summon up impressions of movement and transitoriness. There appears to be a direct relationship between the assault on old fixities and the growth of new myths.

If Britain led the way in changing the mode of life on our planet from the rural agrarian to the urban industrial, Germany more than any other state took us toward our "post-industrial" or technological world, not only in an objective sense, in that her inventors, engineers, chemists, physicists, and urban architects, among others, did more than those of any other nation to determine our modem urban and industrial landscape, but also in an experiential sense, in that she more intensively than

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any other "developed" country has given evidence to the world of the psychic disorientation that rapid and wholesale environmental change may produce. The German experience lies at the heart of the "modem experience." Germans often used to refer to themselves as the Herwolk Europas, the people at the heart of Europe. Germans are also the Herwolk of modern sense and sensibility.

Iron and steel were the building materials of the new industrial age. In the early 1870s British production of iron was still four times that of Germany; its production of steel doubled Germany's. By 1914, however, German steel production equaled that of Britain, France, and Russia combined. Britain, the leading exporter of both iron and steel to the world for a century, by 1910 was importing steel from the Ruhr.

Energy use is another indicator of industrial development. In Britain coal consumption between 1861 and 1913 multiplied two and a half times; in Germany in the same period it multiplied thirteen and a half times to draw almost equal. But it was in the new industries of chemicals and electricity, which became in our century the foundations of further growth, that the German advance around the turn of the century was astonishing and at the same time suggestive of the staggering potential of the German economy.

In 1900 British output of sulfuric acid-- used in petroleum refining and in the manufacture of fertilizer, explosives, textiles, and dyes, among other things-- was still nearly double Germany's, but within thirteen years the relation was almost reversed: by 1913 Germany produced 1.7 million tons and Britain only 1.1 million. In dyestuffs German firms-- mainly Badische Artilin, Hochst, and AGFA-- controlled 90 percent of the world market by 1900. In electrical manufacturing the developments were equally stunning. The value of German electrical production by 1913 was twice that of Britain and almost ten times that of France; Germany's exports in this area were the largest in the world, almost three times those of the United States. The value of all German exports more than tripled between 1890 and 1913.

Within little more than a generation, less than one prolonged lifetime, Germany had moved from a geographical assemblage, with limited economic ties among its parts, to become the most formidable industrial, not to mention military, power in Europe.

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To achieve this required mammoth changes in demographic patterns, in social and economic organization, and in the labor force. Germany's population increased from 42.5 million in 1875 to 49 million in 1890 and 65 million in 1913. In the latter period the population of Britain, by comparison, grew from 38 to 45 million, and that of France from 37 to only 39 million. On the eve of the Great War the prospect was that Germans would soon outnumber Frenchmen two to one. In 1870 Germany's population was two thirds rural; by 1914 that relationship had been reversed, and two thirds of all Germans lived in an urban setting. In 1871 there were only eight cities with a population of over 100,000, whereas in 1890 there were twenty-six, and by 1913, forty-eight. By then twice as many laborers worked in industry as in agriculture, and over a third of the population consisted of industrial workers and their families. The concentration of German industry was another of its striking features. By 1910 almost half of all employees worked in firms using more than fifty workers, and the capitalization of the average German company was three times that of the average British firm.

The speed of urbanization and industrialization in Germany meant that many workers were first-generation urban dwellers, confronted by all the attendant social and psychological problems that the shift from countryside to city entailed. The concentration of industry and population also produced the rapid growth of a managerial class, of service personnel, and of municipal and state bureaucracies. As Gesellschaft, or society, overwhelmed the sense of Gemeinschafr, or community, as speed and bigness became the dominant facts of life, work and social questions, ambition and job enjoyment became abstract notions, beyond the individual and his scale of personal reference, a matter of theory and intuition rather than experience and knowledge. The rural pre-industrial setting had been replete with its own social problems and indignities, but it Is undeniable that industrialization, particularly the rapid industrialization undergone by Germany, brought with it a disturbing measure of depersonalization that material well-being could not expunge or rectify. The so-called new middle class-- this enormous army of semiskilled white-collar workers involved primarily in management and service-- was a sudden and direct offshoot of the later phases of industrialization and was perhaps even more prone to a sense of isolation and hence vulnerability, than the laboring classes. The concentration of industry and of commerce meant that this social group was particularly large in Germany.

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Nevertheless, all sectors of German society were caught up in the momentum and the centrifugal tendencies of the age. Hence, ironically, as consolidation took place on one level-- in the population, industry, and the state structure-- disintegration characterized the social, political, and, perhaps most significantly, psychological realms. The upshot was a preoccupation with the administration of life, with technique, to the point where technique became a value and an aesthetic goal, not merely a means to an end.

T E C H N I Q U E

The cult of Technik, the emphasis on scientism, efficiency, and management, reached a peak in Germany in the late nineteenth century. Reinforced by the material developments and concerns of an industrializing age, it was nevertheless founded on long-standing and well entrenched cultural and political traditions: on an awareness of weakness and diffusion and a recognition that survival was dependent on an effective management of resources both natural and human.

The survival of the Holy Roman Empire for almost a millennium was a tribute to the ability of Germans to manage and manipulate what, for at least the last two centuries of its existence, was nothing more than a skeletal construct that, in Voltaire's famous phrase, was not Holy nor Roman nor an Empire. But the history of Prussia provided the most striking example of effective management.

That history, from the time of the great elector in the seventeenth century through the career and achievements of that most Machiavellian of anti-Machiavellians, Frederick II-- who wrote his tract Anti Machiavel shortly before he attacked Silesia in 1740 to seize it from Austria-- through the great reform period of the Napoleonic era and right up to Bismarck's famous 1862 speech to the finance committee of the Prussian lower house, in which he denounced the parliamentary efforts of the liberals and called for a policy of "iron and blood," the entire history of this mechanically constructed state emphasized and venerated management. Good and efficient administration was the key to survival and control. "A well-conducted government," Frederick II declared in his Testament of 1752, "ought to have a system as coherent as a system of philosophy." 1 For Frederick, the philosopher-king, means were as vital as ends. The Prussian bureaucracy was to become a model of efficiency throughout the world.

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It was in large part this overwhelming emphasis on means and technique that was the basis of the nineteenth-century German accomplishment in education, which in turn was the most important single human component, as opposed to the mere availability of natural resources, of Germany's rise to industrial and military pre-eminence in Europe by 1914. The rest of Europe began introducing compulsory elementary schooling in the 1870s because in the best of cases less than half of school-age children were receiving some education, but in parts of Germany such legislation went back to the sixteenth century, and by the Napoleonic period French travelers like Madame de Stael and Victor Cousin were full of enthusiasm and praise for the extent and quality of education in the German states. Defeat, initially, at the hands of Napoleon furthered educational reforms and improvements. By the l860s the proportion of school-age children in Prussia attending school was nearly 100 percent, and in Saxony it was actually over 100 percent because many foreign students and children under the age of six and over fourteen were in school. If, as is often stated, the great revolution in education in the nineteenth century came at the primary school level, then Germany was by far the most advanced and revolutionary country in the world. Renan was to say that the Prussian victory over France in 1870- 1871 was a victory of the Prussian schoolmaster over his French counterpart.

The achievement in secondary and higher education was almost as impressive. Germany was much less prone to channeling students at an early age into areas of study; her secondary education was more diversified than elsewhere; and her universities were not only the most open and "democratic" in Europe, they were world-renowned centers of scholarship and research. Henry Hallam said in 1844, "No one Professor at Oxford, a century since, would have thought a knowledge of German requisite for a man of letters; at present no one can dispense with it.” And some years later the historian John Seeley remarked, "Good books are in German.” Even before unification the German states were actively involved in founding and promoting institutes of learning and centers of research, and after unification the pace of state involvement was accelerated. Moreover, technical and vocational training was not left to private enterprise, as was generally the case in Britain, but remained a matter of national and state concern.

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German scientific and technological accomplishment in the half century before 1914 is universally recognized, but what is less appreciated is the degree to which Einstein, Planck, Rontgen, and other internationally famous men were merely the best known of a large and active band. State encouragement of technical education and research brought forth an astonishing harvest. One example in an area of technological development that by its nature suffocates sensationalism, and is therefore perhaps all the more noteworthy, is the coal-tar industry. The six largest German firms in that industry took out, between 1886 and 1900, 948 patents; their British counterparts took out only 86.

The cult of technicism and its vitalist connotations had reverberations in much of German society by the last years of the nineteenth century. In most quarters a concern with newness and inevitable change was manifest, even within the old landed aristocracy, where in the past change had usually been regarded with skepticism and chagrin. In his last novel, Der Steichin, finished in 1898 and set in the Prussian countryside, Theodor Fontane had one of his characters, a rural pastor, say:

A new age is dawning, a better and happier age I believe. But if not a happier age, then at least an age with more oxygen in the air, an age in which one can breathe better. And the more freely one breathes, the more one lives.

Among much of the rural gentry change was now regarded as unavoidable, especially in the wake of the agricultural depression that in the second half of the 1870s had made economic survival for the landed classes complex and difficult. The important consideration was not to allow change to get out of hand; one had to control it somehow.

German conservatism moved in the Bismarckian era-- with Bismarck setting the example-- from a dogmatic concern with beliefs and principles to a preoccupation with interests. This new opportunism was perhaps best symbolized by the creation of the "rye and iron" alliance, a marriage of convenience between large-scale agriculture and heavy industry, which parented Germany's turn to economic protectionism in 1879. "Nothing could be less conservative," argued Wilhelm von Kardorff, "than to fight for forms which in the course of time have lost their importance." 6

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But the rest of the German body politic was also caught up in a reformist wave by the first years of the twentieth century. This was evident in, among other things, the burgeoning of pressure groups and nationalist societies, whose membership was interested not in the preservation of the status quo but in the rejuvenation of the whole political process. Among the political parties themselves the beginnings of a distinct reorientation were noticeable. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) moved toward a more moderate position, showing a clear willingness to reject its previous negativism. The left liberals in turn showed an interest in becoming a party of social and political reform, one that would conciliate left and right, "democracy and monarchy." And finally, an influential segment within the Catholic Center Party also sensed that a more conciliatory attitude toward socialism was necessary and that reform should receive more emphasis in the party's program. In short, the basis for a loose democratic reform movement was laid in German politics in the years before 1914.

The elections of 1912 produced a stunning result. The three political tendencies that Bismarck at one point or another had called "enemies of the Reich" and hence traitors-- left liberals, Catholics, and socialists-- won two thirds of the national vote. One out of every three Germans voted for a socialist candidate, and the SPD became by far the largest political group in the Reichstag. The party thus reaffirmed its prominence as the largest socialist organization in the world and leader of the socialist international movement. Though obviously concerned about the large socialist gains, the left liberal Friedrich Naumann nevertheless remarked in the days after the elections, "Something new has begun in Germany in these past days; an era is approaching its end; a new age has dawned." 7

The general impulse in Germany before 1914 was, then, starkly future-oriented. Where there was dissatisfaction or anxiety, it was to be overcome by change. The entire German setting at the fin de siecle was characterized by a Flucht nach vorne, a flight forward.

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C A P I T A L

The capital city of, in the first instance, the state of Prussia and then of a united Germany made all its visitors instantly aware of newness and vitality. Berlin was representative in many ways of the transformations that Germany as a whole was experiencing. In comparison to other European capitals, Berlin was a parvenu city, in its sprawling development in the second half of the nineteenth century more like New York and Chicago than its Old World counterparts. Walther Rathenau in fact called it "Chicago on the Spree."

Berlin's central location in Europe made her, as it did Germany in general, an immigrant center, attracting and temporarily housing transients from the eastern territories, from Russia, the Polish lands, Bohemia, and settlers heading in the other direction from France and even from Britain. This was her fate from the time of the great elector onward, and real Berliners-- that is, fourth-, third-, or even second generation inhabitants-- were always, it seemed, a minority. In the first half of the nineteenth century the city grew steadily as Prussia asserted herself within the German Confederation and particularly as the Zollverein, the German customs union, founded in 1832 with its headquarters in Berlin, expanded both in size and activity. Well before unification in 1871 Berlin was undeniably the financial and commercial capital of the German states, but in this role she was more a clearinghouse and communications center than the hub of German or even Prussian industry; that developed in the Ruhr heartland, in Silesia, and in parts of Saxony. Although in the second half of the century Berlin did develop important industries, appropriately the new electrical and chemical industries in particular, she remained the embodiment and symbol of technicism and management. In relation to her ballooning administrative function, especially after unification, she grew mightily in size. In 1865 her population stood at 657,000; by 1910 it was over two million, and if one included the surrounding suburbs, which were to be incorporated into "greater Berlin" in 1920, her population was already close to four million by the eve of the war. It is estimated that about half of her new population came from the agricultural lands of eastern Prussia.

Almost every visitor to the capital of the new Reich was struck by the corresponding air of newness that permeated the city. Victor Tissot, a Swiss writer, saw it in 1875 and remarked:

Heinrich Heine speaks of the surprise and magic that Paris produces for the stranger. Berlin, too, achieves surprise, but hardly any magic. One is surprised that the heart of the new empire, the city of intellect, exudes far less of a capital’s spirit than Dresden, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, or Munich. What Berlin displays to its visitors is modern and absolutely new. Everything here bears the mark of an adventure, a monarchy put together out of bits and pieces . . . There is nothing less German, in the sense of the old German, than the face of Berlin . . . When you've explored these straight streets and for ten hours seen nothing but sabers, helmets, and feathers, then you understand why Berlin, in spite of the reputation that events of the last years have bestowed on it, will never be a capital like Vienna, Paris, or London. 1

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In the next decades the city was unable to rid itself of its aura of newness, this rather indelicate fragrance of the nouveau riche; rather, that flavor was enhanced by technological change. The liberal economist Moritz Julius Bonn, reminiscing about experiences in the German capital in the last years of the century, noted that in Berlin

everything was new and extremely clean; streets and buildings were spacious, but there was a lot of tinsel meant to look like gold . . . The place was not unlike an oil city of the American west, which had grown up overnight and, feeling its strength, insisted on displaying its wealth.2

Berliners, unlike the natives of other German cities and other European capitals, seemed to be fascinated by the very idea of urbanism and technology and even developed, as Friedrich Sieburg put it, a romanticism from "railway junctions, cables, steel, and track . . . noisy elevated trains, climbing towers." Contrary to the Parisian, who tried to retain a local and community atmosphere in his quartier, the Berliner enjoyed and consciously promoted his city's cosmopolitanism and sense of novelty ' It was this energy which was to attract, in the last prewar years, artists and intellectuals from other German cities, such as Dresden and Munich, and even from Vienna, to the more haphazard and more ebullient atmosphere of Berlin.

In the years before the war Berlin was able to exert as a capital city nothing near the cultural control of a Paris or London or even Vienna on its own country, but this lack of influence heightened the city's own sense of newness. Berlin was a capital created, so the argument ran, by will and imagination rather than historical momentum. Berlin was seen to represent the victory of spirit over conformity and tradition.

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Berlin was then, in many respects, an improvised capital, a symbol of mechanism and even transience, but it was as well an expression of energy and dynamism, a city with its eye on the future.

K U L T U R

By the turn of the century the futuristic vision entranced much of German society, even those people who decried the vulgarity of Berlin. The economy was expansionist. The population was growing at a staggering pace. After the military victories of the 1860s and 1870-1871, no one in Europe, let alone Germany, had any doubt that the Germans represented the most formidable landed military might in Europe and probably the world. By 1914 there was a consensus, both at home and abroad, that in economic and military terms Germany constituted the most powerful country in the world.

But while Germans may simply have acknowledged that their international success was the result of hard work, an excellent educational system, and a measure of military and political acumen, most were reluctant to accept such a mundane explanation of the nation's stellar performance. They dreamed of a fusion of worlds, physical and spiritual. Indeed, as the technical accomplishment grew in dimension, it was correspondingly more prone to fabulation. Necessity may have fathered invention, but invention then brought forth intention. The technical became spiritual. Efficiency became an end, not a means. And Germany herself became the expression of an elemental "life force." Such was the stuff of German idealism.

Thus, education as social concept was superseded by Bildung, or self-cultivation, which involved the nurturing of the spirit rather than of the social being. Military prowess born of geographical necessity gave way to Macht, or might, which was accorded a purity of being beyond conscience and stricture. And the state, as the instrument of public welfare, was replaced by der Staat, the idealized embodiment of the salus populi. Germans in the imperial era seemed particularly susceptible to secular idealist notions that ultimate reality was spiritual, and that the material world not only could but ought to be transcended by ideals.

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Not surprisingly, many Germans by the end of the century came to attribute to their supposed enemies those characteristics which they so wished to surmount in themselves. Thus they could argue that Anglo-French civilization, which since the sixteenth century had gradually established a political and cultural hegemony in the world, was based on rationalism, empiricism, and utility; in other words, on externality. This was a world of form, devoid of spiritual values: it was a culture not of honesty and true freedom but of manners, superficiality, and dissimulation. Notions of liberalism and equality were in the Anglo-French ethos merely hypocritical slogans-- Lug und Trug, lying and cheating. They masked the dictatorship of form, which was obvious in a Gallic preoccupation with bon gout and a British absorption in commerce. In such a context genuine freedom was not possible.

German Kultur, by contrast, was said to be concerned with "inner freedom," with authenticity, with truth rather than sham, with essence as opposed to appearance, with totality rather than the norm. German Kultur was a matter of "overcoming," a matter of reconciling the "two souls" that resided in Faust's breast. Richard Wagner's contribution to the German perception of Kultur in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was of particular importance. His vision of grand opera aimed not only at uniting all the arts but also at elevating his Gesamtkunstwerk , his total art work, to a position where it was the supreme synthesis and expression of Kultur, a combination of art, history, and contemporary life in total drama, where symbol and myth became the essence of existence. Even politics were subsumed into theater. Wagner's influence on German consciousness and his role in the emergence of a modern aesthetic as a whole are difficult to exaggerate. Bayreuth became a shrine to the transcendence of life and reality by art and the imagination, a place where the aesthetic moment was to encapsulate all the meaning of history and all the potential of the future. Many outside Germany as well were swept up by the Wagnerian promise: Diaghilev, Herzl, Shaw, for starters. "When I play Wagner," said Arthur Symons to James Joyce, "I am in another world."1 In the Berlin festival of 1914, just before the outbreak of war, Parsifal was performed at the Royal Opera House from May 31 to June 7, and then the entire Ring cycle was done from June 9 to 13.

Other, more ''vulgar idealists" called for a similar aestheticization of life. Julius Langbehn, in his immensely successful Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt As Educator.), urged Germans to turn away

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from what he saw as a preoccupation with materialistic pursuits and to become a nation of artists. Life ideally should follow art. Life should be both vision and spectacle, a panoramic art work, a quest for titanism, not a concern with codes of behavior and with morality. That was the sterility of bourgeois liberalism, said Langbehn, into which the Germans seemed to be slipping by the end of the century.

Langbehn's impact was reinforced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose enormously popular Grundlagen des neunzehnten jahr hunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) was published in 1899. Chamberlain, who derided any pretense to objectivity among historians as "academic barbarism," was a morose though highly talented and intriguing wayfarer in the modern odyssey into irrationalism, a striking symbol of the journey from bourgeois respectability, with prescribed world view and social values, toward narcissism and total fantasy. A sickly youth whose mother died early and whose seafaring father shunted hi m between relatives in France and school in England, Chamberlain matured as a "marginal" personality, subject to nervous disorders, without country, family ties, or social niche. His father planned to send him to farm in Canada, but the venture was abandoned because of Chamberlain's poor health. He drifted via Versailles, Geneva, and Paris, where in 1883 he lost a great deal of money in financial speculation, to Germany, having taken as a first wife a woman ten years his senior and having also been swept up in the Wagner cult. Despite his demonstrated abilities as a scientist, it was to be as a servant of the Wagnerian mythos that Chamberlain found his raison d'etre, first in Leipzig, then in Vienna, and finally in Bayreuth at the hearth of the Gesamtkunstwerk , where he eventually took as his second wife Wagner's daughter to complete the symbiosis. In a parallel development he was to become a proponent of a xenophobic and virulent Germanic ideology, which struck a responsive chord in the kaiser, Wilhelm II, and, after 1906, in the chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke, and which would lead in the last years of Chamberlain's life to a reciprocated admiration for Adolf Hider.

Chamberlain is an interesting character for many reasons: as an articulate racist who cannot be dismissed peremptorily as a fool; as a publicist and propagandist with prodigious influence. But from

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our standpoint it is his flight into a self-indulgent aestheticism that is of particular significance. Confronted in 1884 by financial disaster at the age of twenty-nine, he wrote:

I think it is my passion for Wagner which enables me to stand everything; as soon as the door of my office is closed behind me, I know it's no good fretting, so I eat a good dinner and stroll on the boulevard, thinking of the art works of the future, or I go to see one of my Wagnerian friends, or I write to one of my numerous Wagnerian correspondents.

He came to believe that man could be redeemed and ennobled by art and that Wagner's art in particular could bridge man's sensuous nature and his moral purpose. History existed only as spirit and not as an objective reality; its truths could be approached only by intuition, not by a critical method. Chamberlain may have vulgarized Johann G. Droysen, Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, and Wilhelm Windelband-- who shifted the emphasis in historical thought from the object to the subject; in other words, from history to the historian-- but he was also part of a broader cultural tendency, in an era of high industrialization, to look for answers to man's social problems not in the external world but in his soul. Correspondingly, the public view of that external world was increasingly influenced, in an age of rap idly developing communications, by these explosions of egomaniacal interpretation. ''Descartes,'' wrote Chamberlain, “pointed out that all the wise men in the world could not define the colour 'white,' but I need only to open my eyes to see it and it is the same with 'race.'” Chamberlain belonged to the group of mystical nationalists who gained ascendancy in German intellectual circles after the turn of the century and who, following Wagner, tried to spiritualize life by turning it into a quest for beauty. Like Langbehn and the poet Stefan George, who also looked on art as power, he wished to rum life into an art work, for only in such a context would man's total personality unfold. History too in the process had to become a wholly spiritual product.

The impassioned distinction that Germans began to make in the late nineteenth century between Kultur and Zivilisation was, of course, as much a reaction to the mirrored image of self as it was a response to observation of an outside world. Indeed, there was a strong, perhaps even preponderant element of self-criticism and wishful thinking in the distinction, as some of the more perceptive

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critics, from Schopenhauer through Burckhardt and Nietzsche, pointed out in their philosophical and historical speculations. That a Germany absorbed in Macht and technique should decry the English as stolid merchants and the French as Gallic buffoons, Nietzsche, for one, found profoundly ironic: the Prussian victory over France contained the seeds of defeat for German Geist, or spirit, he noted. Geist was becoming, by itself, a contradiction.

If self-criticism and self-hatred were evident in German idealism, there was still an underlying optimism embedded in a metaphysical or romantic faith that Germany represented the essential dynamic of the age, that she was in the vanguard of movement and change in the world of the early twentieth century, and that she was the foremost representative of a Hegelian World Spirit-- a view captured in a line of doggerel that became the main claim to posthumous fame of one Emanuel Geibel of Liibeck, a contemporary of Bismarck: Denn am deutschen Wesen soil die Welt genesen-- By the German soul the world will be made whole.

C U L T U R E A N D R E V O L T

If central to the self-image of the European avant-garde before 1914 was the idea of spirit at war, Germany as a nation best represented that idea; and if central to an emergent modem aesthetic was a questioning of what were perceived to be the prevailing standards of the nineteenth century, Germany best represented the revolt.

Her political system was an attempt to produce a synthesis of monarchy and democracy, centralism and federalism. Her universities were admired for their research. She had the largest socialist party in the world, looked to for leadership by the entire international labor movement. Her youth, women's rights, and even homosexual emancipation movements were large and active. These mushroomed in the context of a Lebensreformbewegung, which, as the word suggests, aimed at a reorientation not only of basic habits of living but of fundamental values in life. According to the 1907 census, 30.6 percent of German women were gainfully employed. No other country in the world could match that figure.1 Berlin, Munich, and Dresden were vibrant cultural centers. Picasso said in

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1897 that if he had a son who wished to be an artist, he would send him to Munich to study, not to Paris. In the introduction to his catalogue for his second postimpressionist exhibition, in 1912, Roger Fry, obviously identifying post-impressionism with experimentation in general in painting, wrote, "Post-Impressionism schools are flourishing, one might almost say raging, in Switzerland, Austro-Hungary, and most of all in Germany." 3 Strindberg, Ibsen, and Munch got a warmer reception in Germany than in their own countries. In the decorative arts and in architecture Germany was more open to experiment, more ready to accept industry and base an aesthetic on it, than either France or Britain. While, for example, the British cultural establishment was thoroughly critical of the construction of the Crystal Palace, Lothar Bucher reported in 1851 that the German popular imagination was enchanted by it: “The impression produced on those who saw it was of such romantic beauty that reproductions of it were seen hanging on the cottage walls of remote German villages." 4

We have already seen how the Paris critics of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees associated it with German experimentation and ahistoricity. The movement that German architects, craftsmen, and writers fostered "proved strong enough," in the judgment of one critic, "to yield a universal style of thinking and building, and not merely some revolutionary sayings and deeds of a few individuals." 5 In modern dance it was in Germany that Isadora Duncan and Emile Jaques Dalcroze founded their first schools. Diaghilev naturally gravitated toward Paris in his tournees in the west, because after all it was the heart of western culture he wanted to conquer, but his seasons in Germany met with more ready acceptance though with equal applause. After the opening of Faune on December 12, 1912, in Berlin, he cabled to Astruc:

Yesterday triumphant opening at New Royal Opera House. Faune encored. Ten calls. No protests. AIl Berlin present. Strauss, Hofmannsthal, Reinhardt, Nikisch, the whole Secession group, King of Portugal, ambassadors and counts. Wreaths and flowers for Nijinsky. Press enthusiastic. Longanicle Hofmannsthal in Tageblatt. Emperor, Empress, and Princes coming to ballet Sunday. Had long talk with Emperor who was delighted and thanked the company. Huge success.6

Germany's essential ethos, then, before 1914 involved a search for new forms, forms conceived not in terms of laws and finiteness but in terms of symbol, metaphor, and myth. As a young student of art

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Emil Nolde was in Paris from 1899 to 1900. He often went to the Louvre to copy pictures. One day he had almost completed a copy of Titian's Allegory of Davalos when a stranger behind him remarked: "You are no Latin. One sees that from the intensity of character of your human figures." 7 Whether the story, related by Nolde in his memoirs, is true, it represents well the German perception of self at the beginning of the century: the German, so he thought, was far more spiritual than his neighbors.

"German creativity is fundamentally different from Latin creativity," wrote the artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. -The Latin takes his forms from the object as it exists in nature. The German creates his form in fantasy, from an inner vision peculiar to himself. The forms of visible nature serve him as symbols only . . . and he seeks beauty not in appearance but in something beyond.”

Germany, more extensively than any other country, represented the aspirations of a national avant-garde-- the desire to break out of the "encirclement" of Anglo-French influence, the imposition of a world order by a Pax Britannica and French civilisation, an order codified politically as "bourgeois liberalism."

While in some quarters in Germany there was a feeling that Kultur was under attack from superficiality, caprice, and ephemera, and that steps had to be taken to consolidate it-- as Langbehn and Chamberlain, among others, suggested-- and while there was a good measure of anxiety in all classes, a mood that naturally concerned governments and leaders, there was still a strong sense of confidence, optimism, and mission, a belief in die deutsche Sendung, a Germanic mission. The feeling was widespread that the reform wave was something larger and more meaningful than any of its specific-- and in some cases unacceptable-- parts, and that it constituted the heart and soul of the nation.

Friedrich Gundolf and Friedrich Wolters, two of the disciples of the poet Stefan George, addressed this idea when they insisted in 1912 that there was nothing immoral or abnormal in homoeroticism. "Rather we have always believed that something essentially formative for German culture as a whole is to be found in these relations." The vision was of a culture committed to "heroized love." 9 Germany in fact had the largest homosexual emancipation movement in Europe on the eve of the First World War.

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August Bebel felt it necessary to make a Reichstag speech on the subject as early as 1898. Homosexuality in the kaiser's entourage was well known even before the journalist Maximilian Harden decided to expose it in 1906. Magnus Hirschfeld led the campaign in Germany to revise paragraph 175 of the civil code, and by 1914 his petition had 30,000 doctors, 750 university professors, and thousands others as signatories. Berlin by 1914 had about forty homosexual bars and, according to police estimates, between one and two thousand male prostitutes. 10 None of this is meant to suggest that Germans welcomed or were prepared collectively to tolerate homosexuality publicly-- they were not-- but the relative openness of the movement in Germany does indicate a measure of tolerance not known elsewhere. Moreover, homosexuality and tolerance of it are, as many have suggested, central to the disintegration of constants, to the emancipation of instinct, to the breakdown of "public man," and indeed to the whole modern aesthetic.

Sexual liberation in fin-de-siecle Germany was not limited to homosexuals. There was a new emphasis in general on Leibeskultur, or body culture, on an appreciation of the human body devoid of social taboos and restrictions; on the liberation of the body from corsets, belts, and brassieres. The youth movement, which flourished after the turn of the century, reveled in a "return to nature" and celebrated a hardly licentious but certainly freer sexuality, which constituted part of its rebellion against an older generation thought to be caught up in repression and hypocrisy. In the 1890s Freikorperkultur, or free body culture -a euphemism for nudism -became part of a health fad movement that promoted macrobiotic diets, home-grown vegetables, and nature cures. In the arts the rebellion against middle-class mores was even more dramatic: from Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays, which celebrated the prostitute because she was a rebel, through Strauss's Salome, who beheaded John the Baptist because he refused to satisfy her lust, to the repressed but obvious sexual undercurrent in Thomas Mann's early stories, artists used sex to express their disillusionment with contemporary values and priorities and, even more, their belief in a vital and irrepressible energy.

The sexual themes in literature and art involved a measure of violence that was more striking and sustained in Germany than else where. Here again the fascination with violence represented an interest in life, in destruction as an act of creation, in illness as part of living. In Wedekind, Lulu is murdered; in

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Strauss, Salome murders; in Mann, Aschenbach dies from a combination of diseased atmosphere and unfulfilled sexual craving. In early German expressionism there was a motif of violence-- in theme, in form, in color-- which was more intense than that to be found in either cubism or futurism. Marinetti's futurist manifestoes trumpeted the destruction of monuments and museums and the burning of libraries, and Wyndham Lewis founded a journal named Blast to capture his intentions, but an element of histrionic performance and even jocularity dominated these endeavors. In the German expressionists Franz Marc and August Macke the violence was less a surface manifestation and more an expression of a profound spiritual excitement, of which their appearance, bordering on schoolboy innocence and charm, gave no hint. "Our ideas and our ideals must wear hair shirts," wrote Marc; "we must feed them locusts and wild honey, and not history, if we are to escape the fatigue of our European bad taste." 11

The fascination with primitivism, or, in another sense, the desire to establish contact with the elemental in the German spirit, reached many levels in Germany, particularly within the middle classes. The youth movement, with its urge to escape from an urban civilization of mere form and sham back into nature, was replete with such associations. It venerated Turnvater Jahn, the man who had founded gymnastic societies in the German states during the wars of liberation against Napoleon and who for a time in his own youth had lived in a cave and later had walked the streets of Berlin dressed in a bear skin. The tribal origins of the Germans were also evoked constantly at the turn of the century both in political and general discourse. In a notorious speech delivered to troops being sent to help quell the Boxer Rebellion, the kaiser called for a return to the spirit of the Huns. On July 8, 1914, the Berliner Tageblatt, a major Berlin daily of left liberal persuasion, began to serialize a novel by Karl Hans Strobl entitled So ziehen wir aus zur Hermannsschlacht. (So We Departed for the Hermann Battle.) The paper continued to publish episodes into August after the outbreak of war. The title referred to the famous battle of A.D. 9, when Arminius of the Cherusci tribe defeated the legions of the Roman general Varus in the forests north of modern-day Hanover. The enormous Hermann monument, which still stands in the Teutoburg Forest, had been completed in 1875. Many artists in addition to Marc and Macke found

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inspiration in the contemplation of the primitive. During a trip to the South Seas, Emil Nolde commented in early 1914:

Primitive men live in nature, are one with it, and a part of the whole. I sometimes have the feeling that they are the only real human beings left and that we on the other hand are malformed puppets, artificial and full of conceit. He regretted the whole process of imperialism, particularly the British version: so much essence had, he felt, been destroyed and replaced only by pretense."

Many people were captivated, some incensed, both at home and abroad, by the cultural effervescence in Germany. In the German middle strata there was hardly universal appreciation for the plays of Wedekind, the art of Marc and Macke, or the "body culture" and rarefied idealism of urban youth. The working classes, needless to say, were hardly attuned to the pretensions of bourgeois bohemians. But, interestingly, none of this seemed to negate the general identification by most Germans with the ideas of newness, regeneration, and change. Foreign observers had a similar response. The Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana was thinking primarily of Germany when he wrote:

The spirit in which parties and nations beyond the pale of English liberty confront one another is not motherly nor brotherly nor Christian. Their valorousness and morality consist in their indomitable egotism. The liberty that they want is absolute liberty, a desire which is quite primitive. 13

Santayana denigrated German "egotism," what he saw as the emphasis on private virtues and public conformism, an attitude that indicated to him the backwardness of German social and moral development. Nevertheless, despite the sarcasm and chagrin, he too sensed the vitality at the heart of German affairs: "The German moral imagination is . . . in love with life rather than wisdom." In the early days of August 1914, H. G. Wells would speak of "the monstrous vanity" that characterized the Germans. 15

Igor Stravinsky was more favorably disposed. By February 1913, he had heard Strauss's Elektra twice and in a letter he wrote:

l am completely ecstatic. It is his best composition. Let them talk about the vulgarisms that are always present in Strauss - and to which my reply is that the more deeply one goes inco German works of art, the more one sees that all of them suffer from that . . . Strauss's Elektra is a marvelous thing! 16

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By "vulgarisms" Stravinsky presumably meant the "elemental" aspects of the work and also the challenge to the public which the work entailed. Moreover, if much of modern German art was concerned with fundamentals, the implication was that German culture as a whole, consumers as well as creators, was more attuned to experimentation and novelty. To be "elemental" was to rebel against suffocating and stultifying norms, against meaningless conventions, against insincerity. All this was at the heart of the German interpretation of Kultur. If individual Germans were not always clear in their attitude toward change, the culture promoted change with a vengeance.

Nowhere was there more dramatic evidence of this than in the area of foreign relations and foreign policy goals. In her aggressive attitude toward other states and peoples, Germany showed little comprehension, especially after the turn of the century, of the anxieties, wishes, and interests of allies, neutrals, or foes. Thus, British fears about German naval ambitions, French concern over German colonial claims, and Russian wariness about German postulations on the subject of a middle European customs union stretching from the North Sea to the Adriatic, and from Alsace to the borders of Russia, received little sympathy in Germany, either in the corridors of power or among the general public.

In 1896 the government openly adopted what came to be called Weltpolitik, or "world policy," in contrast to a foreign policy centered hitherto on Europe. Weltpolitik was not a foreign policy imposed on Germans by the machinations of a small clique of advisers surrounding the kaiser. It reflected a widespread feeling, promoted by a host of eminent intellectuals and by public associations, that Germany must either expand or decline. This shift in policy, accompanied as it was by the inauguration of a naval building program and an obstreperous pursuit of additional colonies, naturally aroused concern abroad about Germany's long-range intentions. Within Germany, however, these foreign queries were interpreted as nothing but veiled threats. Given Germany's geographical location, her recent consolidation as a nation-state, and the amalgam of insecurity and self-assertion in her make-

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up, it was not unnatural that Germans began to fear that a conspiracy was afoot, led by England, that perfidious Albion, to encircle and crush Germany, and in the process to crush newness, spirit, incentive, and adventure. British pretensions about free trade, an open market, and a liberal ethic were, on the world level, sheer hypocrisy-- so it was argued in Germany. Britain was a country bent on retaining its international position, on arrogantly maintaining control of the seas, on dictatorially denying the right of any other nation to build a navy and to pursue an imperial policy. British pronouncements about the rule of law, about democracy and justice, were, given her foreign policy, obviously a sham. In the international context Germans were inclined to regard their country as a progressive, liberating force that would introduce a new honesty into power arrangements in the world. By contrast, Britain was, from the German point of view, the archconservative power, intent on maintaining the status quo.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had ascended the German throne in 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, was an appropriate representative of this burgeoning and blustering Germany. Walther Rathenau would say of him that "never before has a symbolic individual so perfectly represented an age."17 Wilhelm not only embodied the contradictions and conflicts of the country he ruled; he sought a resolution of those conflicts in fantasy.

In reality he was a soft, effeminate, and highly strung man whose closest friends were homosexuals, men to whom he was drawn for the warmth and affection he could not find in the sharply circumscribed world of officialdom and the confines of traditional, male dominated family life. Nevertheless, the image that he felt constrained to present of himself was that of the supreme war lord, the epitome of masculinity, hardness, and patriarchal resolve. Yet, although he centralized government and administration in Germany to an unprecedented degree, and although he sired seven children, he seems to have found little satisfaction in his role either as ruler or as father. Confronted by the dichotomy in himself between weakness and power, with neither extreme being acceptable, he resorted to the same behavior as that of the nation collectively-- interminable play acting. Bertrand Russell had the impression that the kaiser was above all an actor." Of Wilhelm's dismissal of Bismarck in 1890, Prince Bernhard von Bulow remarked that Wilhelm himself wanted to play the part of Bismarck. 19

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Wilhelm's histrionic nature, his love of pomp and circumstance, and his life of fantasy were remarked upon by many. His attention span was short; consequently, briefing reports for him had to be terse yet dramatic. His restless nature demanded constant excursions and constant titillation; he was the modern tourist as opposed to the traditional traveler. His closest friend, Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, was a reasonably accomplished poet, musician, and composer, who regarded himself principally as an artist forced by social circumstance and parental pressure into the drab life of the civil service. Wilhelm delighted in the arts, particularly in lavish spectacle. He had a keen interest in opera and theater and repeatedly astonished professional people with his expertise. If his tastes were for the most part conventional, he at least was occasionally tolerant of experimentation, and he expressed a particular affection for the Ballets Russes.

The interest of the kaiser and court in dance had some odd but revealing overtones. Not infrequently, apparently, Dietrich Count von Hiilsen-Hiiseler, chief of the military cabinet, would attire him self in a tutu and, before the kaiser and assembled guests, usually a mixed audience though never including the empress, would perform admirable pirouettes and arabesques. One such performance was to be Hiilsen's last. In 1908, at the home of Max Egon Fiirst zu Fiirsten berg, another close friend of Wilhelm's and an important foreign policy adviser, Hiilsen danced and suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. One can perhaps all too readily dismiss such entertainment as an amusing juvenile prank, worthy of a campfire skit, but in light of the paradoxes in both the kaiser's character and the cultural dynamics of his nation, Hillsen's acclaimed performances take on considerable symbolic importance. Even setting aside the sexual implications of the Hiilsen episodes, one can say that, although Wilhelm regarded art in the public domain as a means to cultivate ideals in society and particularly to educate the lower orders, in his private life and personal sensibility he was inclined to look on art in vitalistic terms.

Wilhelm was, however, interested not only in the arts; he had an insatiable appetite for new technology. In a speech in 1906 he heralded "the century of the motor car" and forecast perceptively that the new age was "the era of communication." 21 He saw in himself and in his own interests an image of the German soul, where ends and means, art and technology, were one. The art historian

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Meier Graefe found the kaiser a synthesis of Frederick Barbarossa and a modern American, an insight that correctly suggested that history had no integrity for Wilhelm and was little more than a plaything for a gargantuan ego. Not surprisingly Wilhelm was excited by H. S. Chamberlain's view of history as spirit rather than objective reality, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which he had erected in the center of Berlin in honor of his grandfather, together with the horrendous Siegesallee, which cut through the Tiergarten and linked the West End with Unter den Linden, displayed the totally mythical nature of his historical sense. Theodor Fontane had a response similar to that of Meier-Graefe: "What I like about the kaiser is his complete break with the old, and what I don't like about the kaiser is this contradictory desire of his to restore the ancient." 22

There was a comparable tendency in the art of the period, where the themes of apocalypse and atavism were central motifs-- the marriage of the primitive and the ultramodern along with the denial of history that this entailed. Although lacking in profundity, the kaiser's mind worked in a similar direction. Modern art had become event. The kaiser, too, liked to pretend that he was an event.

The Schlieffen plan, the only military strategy the Germans possessed for a two-front war, was a further fateful expression of the dominance of fantasy and of the preoccupation with the Faustian moment in German thought. The plan foresaw a rapid attack through Belgium, a sharp left wheel in the north of France, and the conquest of Paris, whereupon all resources could then be turned against Russia. The plan promised total victory in Europe on the basis of one major battle in the north of France. It was a grand scheme, a Wagnerian script, that elevated a limited tactical adventure to a total vision. The strategy was that of the gambler who sees himself as a bank director. The man whose fate it would be to implement the Schlieffen plan, Schlieffen's successor as chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke, displayed splits in his personality akin to those of the kaiser. Moltke had much more of a passion for the arts than for military matters. He painted and he played the cello. Privately he admitted, "I live entirely in the arts." 23 He was working on a German translation of Maeterlinck's Pellias et Melisande and was said always to carry a copy of Goethe's Faust.

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W A R A S C U L T U R E

In August 1914, most Germans regarded the armed conflict they were entering in spiritual terms. The war was above all an idea, not a conspiracy aimed at German territorial aggrandizement. To those who reflected on the matter, such aggrandizement was bound to be an offshoot of victory, a strategic necessity, and an accompaniment to German self-assertion, but territory was not what the war was about. Until September, the government and military had no concrete war aims, only a strategy and a vision, that of German expansion in an existential rather than a physical sense.

The idea that this was to be a "preventive war," to forestall the aggressive designs and ambitions of the hostile powers surrounding Germany, was certainly a part of the thinking of men like Tirpitz and Moltke. Yet these defensive considerations, while often discussed, were invariably subsumed by a grand sense of German power, whose time, it was felt, had come. The two aspects, the practical and the idealistic, were not mutually exclusive, as so many historians who have debated the war aims have implied; both were essential ingredients of the German personality on the eve of the war.

Despite sufficient evidence from the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Boer War that a major conflagration would involve long, drawn-out, and bitter fighting, few strategists, tacticians, or planners, German or any other, foresaw anything but a quick resolution to a future conflict. Despite a growing preoccupation by the military in the course of the nineteenth century with size and numbers, with war as a mass phenomenon, the vision everywhere was still of a war of movement, heroism, and quick decisions. Railways would get men to the front promptly; machine guns would be used in attack; mighty ships and mighty artillery would over whelm the enemy in short order. However, although materiel was important, war was regarded, especially in Germany, as the supreme test of spirit, and, as such, a test of vitality, culture, and life. War, wrote Friedrich von Bernhardi in 1911 in a volume that was to go through six German editions in two years, was a "life-giving principle." It was an expression of a superior culture. 1 "War," wrote a contemporary of Bernhardi's, was in fact "the price one must pay for culture." 2 In other words, whether considered as the foundation of culture or as steppingstone to a higher plateau of creativity and spirit, war was an essential part of a nation's self-esteem and image.

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At the outbreak of the war Germans were convinced, as Theodor Heuss, a staunch liberal and certainly no rabid nationalist, put it, of their "moral superiority," their "moral strength," and their "moral right."' For Conrad Haussmann, also on the liberal left, the war was a question of will: "In Germany there is a single will in everyone, the will to assert oneself." Of course this was to be a national effort, this war, but only because it was to be an effort by every German. "Since we have no Bismarck among us," declared Friedrich Meinecke, "every one of us must be a piece of Bismarck." 5 The SPD declaration on war credits in the Reichstag on August 4 even included the mythical word Kultur, associated earlier by socialists with class interests but now adopted as a symbol of each German's cause. It was a question, said the socialists' statement, of protecting the father land, in its hour of need, against Russian despotism, of "securing Kultur and the independence of our land."' The SPD press spoke of defending Kultur and thereby "freeing Europe"! "Therefore," wrote the Chemnitzer Volksstimme, "we are defending in this moment all that German Kultur and German freedom mean against a brutal and barbaric enemy." 7

About the actual vote in the Reichstag on war credits the socialist deputy Eduard David wrote in his diary, "The memory of the incredible enthusiasm of the other parties, of the government, and of the spectators, as we stood to be counted, will never leave me." After ward he went walking with his child along Unter den Linden. The emotional strain of that day had been such that he had to fight back his tears. "It does me good that my child is with me. If only she wouldn't ask so many unnecessary questions." The direct questions of the child were obviously a threat to the fantasies conjured up by the day's events.

For the artist Ludwig Thoma in Munich the war was a tragedy but also an unavoidable necessity. On August he was on his way to the train station, intending to go to the Tegernsee, when a crowd gathered in front of the station at the Schiitzenstrasse corner, and mobilization orders were read. "Gone was the pressure," wrote Thoma about his reactions to the situation,

gone was the uncertainty . . . And then I was struck by the impression of how this courageous and industrious people has to purchase with its blood the right to work and to create values for mankind. And a fierce hatred for those who had disturbed rhe peace pushed aside any other feeling.

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Germany had worked hard and successfully; the upshot was envy and jealousy among her neighbors. Thoma was outraged. Similar sentiments were expressed throughout the land. For Magnus Hirschfeld, the leader of the homosexual movement and no admirer of the country's bureaucratic establishment, the war was for the sake of "honesty and sincerity" and against the "smoking jacket culture" of Britain and France. To the argument that Britain was the home of freedom and Germany was the land of tyranny and oppression, Hirschfeld replied that Britain in the last century had damned her great poets and writers. Byron had been chased out of the country, Shelley forbidden to raise his children, and Oscar Wilde sent to prison. Lessing, Goethe, and Nietzsche had, by contrast, been greeted

in their country with acclaim, not humiliation. 10

If in Britain, France, and the United States millenarian notions were to surface in the course of the war-- the war to end all wars" and "the war to make the world safe for democracy"-- in Germany the mood was apocalyptic from the outset. The visions in the Allied nations had a strong social and political content to them, as in Lloyd George's promise of "homes fit for heroes." For Germans, however, the millennium was to be, first and foremost, a spiritual matter. For Thoma the hope was that "after the pain of this war there would be a free, beautiful, and happy Germany."

The war, for Germany, was, then, eine innere Notwendigkeit, a spiritual necessity. It was a quest for authenticity, for truth, for self-fulfillment, for those values, that is, which the avant-garde had evoked prior to the war and against those features-- materialism, banality, hypocrisy, tyranny-- which it had attacked. The latter were associated particularly with England, and it was to be England, of course, who was to become Germany's most hated enemy after she entered the war on August 4. Gott strafe England-- may God punish England-- became the motto even of many Germans who had been moderates before the war.

For many the war was also a deliverance -from vulgarity, constraint, and convention. Artists and intellectuals were among those most gripped by war fever. Schoolrooms and lecture halls emptied as students literally ran to the colors. On August 3 the rectors and senates of Bavarian universities issued an appeal to academic youth:

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Students! The muses are silent. The issue is battle, the battle forced on us for German Kultur, which is threatened by the barbarians from the east, and for German values, which the enemy in the west envies us. And so the furor teutonicus bursts into flame once again. The enthusiasm of the wars of liberation flares, and rhe holy war begins. 11

After the rector of Kiel University appealed to students, almost the entire male student body enlisted.

The association of the war with liberation and freedom, a Befreiungs-- or Freiheitskampf, was widespread. For Carl Zuckmayer the war represented "liberation from bourgeois narrowness and pettiness"; for Franz Schauwecker it was "a vacation from life"; for Magnus Hirschfeld the uniforms, stripes, and weapons were a sexual stimulant." When the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger remarked in an editorial on July 11 that the mood in Germany was one of relief, it captured what was probably majority sentiment. But the freedom was above all subjective, a liberation of the imagination. Emil Ludwig, who after the war became the scourge of those whom he considered to have been the 1914 war lords, was as caught up in the fever of August as everyone else. With an exuberance that he later clearly wanted to repress and hide -in his 1929 book July 1914 he referred to the masses as "the deceived" and talked about "the collective innocence on the streets of Europe" -he wrote "The Moral Victory," an article that appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt on August 5: "And even if a catastrophe were to befall us such as no one dares to imagine, the moral victory of this week could never be eradicated."

For Ludwig and many others the world seemed altered all of a sudden. "The war," as Ernst Glaeser would put it later in his novel Gahrgang 1902, "had made it beautiful." The Faustian moment that Wagner and Diaghilev and other moderns sought to achieve in their art forms had now arrived for society as a whole. "This war is an aesthetic pleasure without compare," one of Glaeser's characters would say.14 Glaeser was not inventing ideas after the fact. German letters from the front are full of associations between war and an. "Poetry, art, philosophy, and culture are what the battle is all about," insisted the student Rudolf Fischer." Franz Marc, after experiencing the war for some months, still viewed the war as a question of spirit:

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Let us remain soldiers even after the war . . . for this is not a war against an eternal enemy, as the newspapers and our honorable politicians say, nor of one race against another; it is a European civil war, a war against the inner invisible enemy of the European spirit.15

Hermann Hesse made similar associations. The war, ironically, was a matter of life, not death; it was an affirmation of vitality, energy, virtue. The war was a matter of art. "I esteem the moral values of war on the whole rather highly," he told a friend.

To be tom out of a dull capitalistic peace was good for many Germans and it seems to me that a genuine artist would find greater value in a nation of men who have faced death and who know the immediacy and freshness of camp life. 17

Otto Braun, a youngster of seventeen, was fervently caught up, as he left to join his regiment, in what he regarded as an act of creation-- "the rising form of a new era"-- and he prayed that he might play his part "in helping to create this new era in the spirit of the still sleeping godhead.''

In July and August 1914, Germany enacted her Friihlingsfeier, her rite of spring.

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