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V I Sacred
Dance . . . where
the object is creation and production, there is the province of Art; K A R L V O N C LA U S E W I T Z Wir werden solchen Fruhling, bald verschattet, (Such a spring, soon in shadows, E R N S T B LA S S W A R G O D In Germany before the war a substantial gulf existed between social, economic, and political reality and cultural ideals. The German attempt to resolve this duality led them to a Drang nach vorne, a "push forward," an effort of will and exploration that, many Germans hoped, would lead to a spiritual, albeit secular, transcendence of material concerns and limitations. Geist and Macht, spirit and might, would be reconciled in a state of surreal harmony, of Dionysian activity together with Apollonian tranquility, in which means and ends, object and subject, would be fused. Archaism and modernity would become one. Technological innovation and industrial progress would, in a grand synthesis, combine with a spirit of pastoral simplicity. Society and culture would no longer be conflicting realms but an indissoluble whole. 192 In the jubilation of August 1914 Germans genuinely believed that this goal had been achieved, that the condition of war had in fact brought about a condition of peace; of "overcoming." Conflicts and differences had been set aside, and Germans had finally achieved that unity, spiritual and physical, which Bismarck had tried, but in the end failed, to bring about. "Among the most beautiful things that the war brought," wrote one commentator, "is the fact that we no longer have a rabble." 1 Mobilization was uplifting: the mob disappeared and only Germans remained, a nation of spiritual aristocrats. For Friedrich Naumann, Max Weber, and others on the moderate left, the spirit of August amounted to a realization of the sozialen Volksstaat, the people's state, in which the political left and right, the worker and the bourgeois, cooperated voluntarily and productively. And not only were Germans resident in Germany united; they were fused inseparably now with the various racial minorities within Germany's boundaries and with their brothers in Austria. Ernst Toller, who was to become an irrepressible opponent of the military and political establishment, was as caught up in the orgy of nationalism in 1914 as everyone else. "The nation recognizes no races anymore; all speak one language, all defend one mother, Deutschland.” The euphoria of those August days was millenarian. "Victory" had already been won, by the very eruption, the very enunciation, of the "ideas of August.'' Victory on the battlefield would be a mere formality. It was inevitable, an inevitable byproduct of the German act of national self-assertion. "We will conquer!" insisted a student of law from Leipzig on August 7. "With such a powerful will to victory nothing else is possible.'' 3 Six weeks later he was dead. The mood of August was, as we suggested earlier, essentially aesthetic. Form had been used and then transcended, by a supreme act of creative will, to achieve beauty of, so it was thought, a lasting and ultimate nature. "German morals and German customs speak to us like newly discovered sources of everything beautiful," wrote a Bonn professor. And a "magical power" for the future was what another commentator called Germany's spiritual unity and idealism. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke and many others bowed in humble and awed obeisance to the "War God." Und wir? GlUhen in Bines zusammen, In ein neues Geschopf, das er todlich belebt." (And we? We glow as
One, Invigoration by death: such was Germany's "rite of spring." 193 The German concept of Pflicht, or duty, was filled with this idealism. If British duty and French devoir were rooted in a sense of history as foundation and building block, German Pflicht was anchored to a view of history as myth, as poetic justification of the present and future. Doubts about the validity of history, about the ability of historians to produce objective accounts of the past, had of course penetrated the cultural climate of the entire western world before the war. Historians themselves, in the second half of the nineteenth century, were skeptical about the drift of western civilization; they posited as an alternative to materialism and standardization a renewed emphasis on spirituality and "inner experience." But in Germany by the end of the century the process was much farther advanced than elsewhere. Early in the nineteenth century Schopenhauer had defined history as "the long, difficult and confused dream of mankind," and derided all pretensions to objectivity and universality. He did not receive much attention during his lifetime; but in the second half of the century his star began to rise. In 1870 an admirer of Schopenhauer's, the historian Jacob Burckhardt, who, though Swiss, was trained in Berlin and exerted his greatest influence on German colleagues, wrote, "If anything lasting is to be created it can only be through an overwhelmingly powerful effort of real poetry." Poetry, he said in agreement with Aristotle, is more profound than history.” In Burckhardt, history and art moved together. Theodor Mommsen, the historian of Rome, who earlier in his career had had positivistic inclinations, was following a similar path by 1874 when he suggested in his rector's address to the University of Berlin that "the writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than to the scholar.” The effect of the so-called Prussian school of historians, among them Johann G. Droysen, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke, and of social and historical thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey and the neo-Kantians was to contribute significantly to the German tendency to search for answers to man's problems not in the outside world but in one's imagination. History was, in short, more a matter of the present than of the past and of intuition rather than of rational analysis. Nietzsche's tirades against objectivity became increasingly popular after his death in 1900; and, as we have seen, widely read cultural critics like 194 Julius Langbehn and Houston Stewart Chamberlain called for the complete aestheticization of life. History's truths could be approached only intuitively, not by a critical method. History was art, not science. German thinkers were in the vanguard of the reorientation-- or dismantling -of nineteenth-century historical thought, in the revolt against empiricism and positivism, and in the reaction to a social, political, and cultural order identified with western liberalism and materialism and with a long-standing Anglo-French hegemony in the world. German patriotic fervor in 1914 did include historical associations-- with the wars of unification of Bismarck, the "wars of liberation" against Napoleon, the rise to power within Europe of Prussia under the Hohenzollerns, especially under Frederick the Great, the rebellion of Luther against the church of Rome, the adventures of Frederick Barbarossa and Otto the Great, the missionary endeavors of the Teutonic Knights, and even the victory of Arminius in A.D. 9. Nevertheless, the very newness of the German nation-state, the paucity of evidence of German influence in the world on secular institutions of law and government; the fact that the German historical bequest to the world was largely spiritual, in music, philosophy, and theology; all this gave the German version of history and of nationalism in 1914 a strongly idealistic content, and, by comparison with Britain and France, a version devoted much more to a heralding of the future than to an understanding of the past. In 1889, on the very edge of his mental collapse, Nietzsche told Burckhardt that he was "every name in history."10 Of his band of men at the front, Gerhart Pastors used similar language in April 1915: "Luther, Bismarck, Diirer, Goethe-- a whole heaven of stars lights up in us.” And for Wilhelm Klemm the war was a "fantastic reality." 11 In other words, history, poetry, dream, and the individual moment were all combined into one exhilarating sensation. As a corollary, German Pficht involved more than a defense of the fatherland, more than an adherence to a social code of service; it contained a strong subjective ingredient consisting of personal honor and will. Honor, here, was more than blind obedience to the rules of behavior, more than loyalty to tradition; it involved personal inspiration and initiative. The individual was not just a particle within a utilitarian association called society; the truly German individual was the nation, the embodiment of community. And the nation, in turn, was simply "a higher human being," as one writer put it. 13 195 The nation had been telescoped into the dynamic individual. This was in line with the thinking of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: the world did not exist except as one's own creation. The nation was a creation of one's imagination, a poetic truth, an ethical, not a social construct. Will was linked with honor. Will was the means by which honor was
enacted. Will was a creative, not a repressive force. It was synonymous with
an aggressive, inspired implementation of the code of duty. To the criticism
of Germany's enemies and of her own political left before the war that the
country was an Obrigkeitsstaat,
a hierarchical state, in which blind obedience was the only value, one writer
responded, with a bow to Rousseau, that the weaker a person is, the more he
commands; the stronger he is, the more he obeys. 14
Germany had become a nation of Titans. Gerhard Anschutz, a professor of law
inclined to the political left who
would play an important role in drafting a democratic constitution for
Germany after the war, could write in 1915, "The word militarism, which
is being used throughout the world as a swear word against us, let it be for
us a badge of honor." 15 The young
soldier Walter Harich echoed these sentiments when
he wrote that the German comprehension of what a military order meant was
exactly what gave Germany the upper hand in this struggle: "We know full
well that we are fighting for the German idea in the world, that we are
defending German feeling against Asiatic barbarism and Latin
indifference." 16 "Do more than your duty" was the regimental motto of the
24th Brandenburgers, and that captured the idea of personal initiative
complementing communal dictate. "Things go beyond mere strength
here," wrote Walter Harich from the front
lines; "here the impossible is made possible." 17 What
convention considers unlikely, the creative will of the individual soldier renders
likely. The impossible is made possible by a spiritual transcendence of mere
obligation, mere performance, mere duty-- a duty
that in Anglo-French culture is nothing other than a selfishly utilitarian
function. From the start of the war the phrase die heilige Pficht, sacred duty, was standard
currency. On his way to the front by train in September 1914, reveling in the
sunny and serene Eifel landscape around Trier and in the desolate gray of a
rain-soaked Lorraine, the young law student Franz Blumenfeld
was provoked to denounce war as something "dreadful, unworthy
of human beings, stupid, outmoded, and in every sense
destructive," but at the very same time he exulted in the idea of
sacrifice and personal commitment:
"For the decisive issue is surely always one's readiness to
sacrifice and not the object of the sacrifice." 18 Here war as reality, as a product of history and the
external relations between states and peoples, is denounced and lamented, but
as idea, inspiration, and means, it is applauded. 196 While every belligerent state was inclined to use its past cultural accomplishments to buttress present resolve, in Germany that process went a step farther. History lost its integrity and independence as past achievement and became a handmaiden of the present, the voracious, all-consuming present. As soon as Fritz Klatt awoke on August 28, 1914, he was aware, he claimed, of the meaning of that day. It was Goethe's birthday. He immediately picked up Goethe's Westostlicher Divan, a collection of poetry; as he pointed out in a letter, the volume "really and honestly lay right beside my pistol." As the association of Goethe with an instrument of death indicates, war as the apotheosis of German cultural endeavor was another central theme in the German concept of Pficht. War is not only the supreme challenge for culture; the willingness to wage war to prove superiority should be the goal of any culture. War and true culture, as opposed to false culture, thus become synonymous. In October 1914, young Hans Fleischer was near Blamont on the edge of the Vosges Mountains. On a day in rest quarters he went for a stroll and came across a chateau, that of Baron de Turckheim, in a state of almost total devastation. A priceless library, paintings, furniture, and paneling had all been smashed. But in one corner of the ruin Fleischer found a grand piano, a Steinway to boot, untouched by the war's rage, and under the piano he found some scores. What did he choose? A piano version of Wagner's Die Walkiire. He sat down, played, and sang-- energetically, he wrote--the Lied von Liebe und Lenz. And then he left. "I had been at home, made German music, and now once again I could return to the war." 20 But What makes the scene so poignant is that the young man had not left the war. There it was, surrounding him. The piano, the music, the ruins, the war, all blended into one sensation. Hence it was so exquisite and memorable. Goethe, Wagner, and everyone else in the pantheon of German culture had become a war lord. When Romain Rolland, in an open letter to Gerhart Hauptmann, asked, "Are you the grandsons of Goethe or Attila ?" the answer was bound to be "Both!" 197 Despite the initial confidence, the "inevitable" victory on the battlefield did not come. It did not come in 1914 nor in 1915. The rhapsodic mood of the first days and weeks of the war could not possibly be maintained. The danger existed that cleavages between a spiritual essence, attained in August, and a debilitating reality, represented by material concerns both at the front and at home, would return. The reality of trench life as well as issues of wages, prices, and the organization of the war effort at home, all threatened the sublime spiritual achievement. By 1915 rifts had reappeared on the home front as more and more members of the Social Democratic Party began to raise questions about war aims and political reforms. The conduct of the war-- the resort to gas and to unrestricted use of submarines-- introduced more problems. Was this war really a defensive war forced on Germany, as the general staff and government claimed? The response of the political and military leadership to this threat to the nation's unity was to intensify the war effort, to match the initial spiritual totality of the war with a material totality. By 1916 the less aggressive, more pensive and conscience-ridden political leadership, symbolized by the chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was under attack and by mid-1917 it had been pushed aside. In July 1917 Germany became, to all intents and purposes, a totalitarian state under the control of her military. Even the kaiser had become little more than a puppet ruler, responding to the demands of the high command in the persons of Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff. All the while, as military stalemate continued in the west, as casualties mounted into millions, as kitchens emptied nor only of sons but even of pots and pans for making bullets, as food shortages became more and more serious, as hardship was piled on hardship, the myth of victory was further embellished by the reality, not just the idea, of sacrifice, self-denial, and fare. Death took on a creative function. Death became invigorating. War now held moral value of its own, without regard to foresight or hindsight. War became total. As the prospect of real victory became more remote, given the decimation of German manhood, the effectiveness of the British economic blockade, the entrance of the United States into the war in April 1917, and the growth of domestic opposition to the war, the paeans to the myth of victory became more strident and unrealistic. The lists of territorial war aims emanating from nationalist organizations and even from government circles began to lose all trace of reason and moderation. Were the Pan- 198 Germans or the Fatherland Party, the latter newly created in September 1917, to have their way, a future Germany would stretch from the Urals to the Atlantic, from the North Sea to the Adriatic. As the German front in the west finally crumbled in the late summer and autumn of 1918, Walther Rathenau, the Prussian Jew with a curious mixture of romantic and democratic inclinations who had been the superbly efficient mastermind behind Germany's mobilization of raw materials, called for a levee en masse, a nationwide stand against the foreign invader, recalling the suicidal fight to the end of the Miunster Anabaptists in the sixteenth century. The jubilation of August 1914 had turned to impassioned resolve in the middle years of the war, and then passed into hysteria. The path involved a continuation of the German journey inward. And yet, despite all the evidence of disintegration, the effort of integration remained the defining characteristic of the German war of 1914-1918, right up until the hour of Armistice, 11:00 A.M. on November 11, 1918. The overall orientation remained positive throughout. In the midst of death the emphasis was on regeneration, rebirth, life, "experience." "I see death and call out to life" were the words of Alfons Ankenbrand, who died at Souchez on April 5, 1915, aged twenty-one. Only with an awareness of such metaphysics can one comprehend how the Germans continued to fight the war. They were outnumbered from the start, They fought on two fronts. They buttressed and subsidized the Austrian and Turkish efforts. Their mobilization of men and materiel was extraordinary. They managed to knock Russia out of the war. They staved off an Allied assault that, after April 1917, included American economic and, in 1918, military might. In the summer of 1918 they came close, once again, to victory. An act of faith not dissimilar in some respects to that which fueled the Anglo-French effort sustained the Germans. In the end, however, the differences between faiths were more striking than the similarities. The Anglo-French faith had a rational foundation; the German faith was built on idealism and romanticism. The Anglo-French faith was social; the German, metaphysical. The German effort had been prepared by many of the same instruments of socialization as the Anglo French-- religion, education, military service, and other forms of state involvement in the private sphere. But the nature of German industrialization-- its lateness, relative speed, and highly concentrated form-- meant that 199 many of the social norms arid values accompanying commercial and industrial enterprise had not penetrated very far into the German social being and were, in fact, looked on with suspicion. German capitalism was, to borrow a later historian's adjective, "devalued."" In Britain, John Stuart Mill had seen in the "division of employments-- the accomplishment of the combined labour of several, of tasks which could not be achieved by any number of persons singly . . . the great school of cooperation." That "school of cooperation" had come late to Germany. The German achievement of spiritual unity, in 1914 and throughout the war-- an achievement supported by most of the socialists for most of the war-- was founded, as a result, more on private virtues than public values, on an effort of imagination rather than social reality. After he had been at the front for over a year, first in France and then against the Serbs, Gerhart Pastors had not lost an iota of his passionate commitment. From the banks of the Save River he wrote home in October 1915 of his fervent desire to get at the Serbs: "We have this physical urge to get at the Serbs face to face and to put our fists in their faces. If the order to move our position forward comes tonight, we'll feel as if we're going to heaven." Battle he still identified with heaven, with salvation, with a state of transcendence. In 1916, in an edition of student war letters that he prepared for publication, Philipp Witkop chose this brutal-idealistic passage, which associated fists smashing into faces with heaven, to end his volume. Britain quickly became Germany's principal enemy. She was the nation of commerce and dissimulation, of Hindler rather than Heiden, of bourgeois businessmen rather than heroes. Because, like a businessman out for personal gain, she had not placed all her cards on the table from the start in the July crisis, because she had declared neither her neutrality nor her support of France at the outset, she was accused of being responsible for the war. She was guilty, the argument implied, of inaction when she should have acted. Here was reasoning worthy of the modern aesthetic. The victim, not the murderer, is guilty. Inaction and contemplation are by definition impure, suggesting deviousness, calculation, and dishonesty. Action is by contrast liberating, action is life, and he who acts therefore cannot be blamed. With Nietzschean heroics the Sermon on the Mount is negated. "Not who is guilty but what is guilty, that must be established," insisted Magnus Hirschfeld. Britain was the foremost representative of a life-denying order that Germany had to break out of-- a world that stifled true enjoyment, inspiration, and spirit.25 200 Many German professors who had had ties to England before the war took the unexpected British involvement as a personal slight and interpreted it as a damning comment on western culture as a whole. The theologian Adolf von Harnack never got over the blow. Belgium, so he and others concluded bitterly, was used by Britain simply as a pretext to strike at Germany. Britain, this Krimer-Nation, this "nation of shopkeepers," was simply out to destroy her economic rival. How else could one possibly explain her involvement? In a "poem" evoking the imagined death of Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, and his terrible fate before the judgment seat, Friedrich Jacobsen would decry England's war "for booty and filthy lucre." 27 On New Year's Eve of 1914, the officers and first battalion of the l5th Bavarian Infantry Regiment were gathered in regimental headquarters, and as the clock struck midnight, although they were facing the French near Dompierre, they greeted the new year with the shout Gottstrafe England. 29 (May God punish England.) Since the German rationale for the war was from the outset less specific than that of the French and British, the German interpretation of the war's continuation was correspondingly cloaked in mystical and romantic notions. A common theme was that the war represented ultimate experience and that, despite the horror and apparent waste, by total surrender to the energy of the war, by fusion of the German essence with the reality of war, a higher, more sublime form of national existence would ensue. Hence the war was both education and revelation. In the words of the soldier Ernst Wurche, “If the
meaning and goal of human life is to get beyond the mere form of existence,
then we've achieved a lot already in life and regardless of our fate today or
tomorrow, we know more than hundred-year olds and philosophers. No one has
seen more masks drop, more vileness, cowardice, weakness, selfishness,
conceit, no one has seen more virtue and silent nobility of spirit than we.
We have little more to ask of life: it has revealed more to us than others,
and beyond that there is no human claim - we shall wait patiently to see what
it demands of us. If it demands everything, it has after all given every
thing, and so a balance is struck.” 29 201 If at its start the war was synonymous for many Germans with beauty, its ever-increasing fury was regarded by many as merely an intensification of its aesthetic meaning. In other words, as its destruction mounted, the war continued to be spiritualized, or internalized, proportionately. After several weeks of rain, mud, artillery bombardments, and French attacks, the "good" side of the war had become even clearer to Gerhart Pastors: You become strong. This life sweeps away violently all weakness and sentimentality. You are put in chains, robbed of self-determination, practiced in suffering, practiced in self-restraint and self-discipline. But first and foremost: you turn inward. The only way you can tolerate this existence, these horrors, this murder, is If your spirit is planted in higher spheres. You are forced into self-contemplation, you have to come to terms with death. You reach, to find a counterweight for the ghastly reality, for that which is most noble and highesr.30 The word self is the motif that runs through this passage. As the external violence mounted, a man searched with greater urgency for peace in his self, in his soul. As the myth of inevitable victory fragmented, the fragments became new, even larger, even brighter, myths. In a prolific spasm, illusion gave birth to a host of illusions. Horror was turned into spiritual fulfillment. War became peace. Death, life. Annihilation, freedom. Machine, poetry. Amorality, truth. Over eighteen thousand church bells and innumerable organ pipes were donated to the war effort, to be melted down and used for arms and ammunition. As the assault on the physical and social fixities of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world was intensified, the resulting sensation was one of growing liberation from constraint, frontiers, forms. The promotion of this liberation continued to be the most important component of Pflicht writ large, of the sacrificial sequence of Le Sacre du printemps. C O N G R E G A T I O N To cite the letters of idealistic students and other intellectuals is to invite the complaint that a minority of the population-- the sector most engaged in the war intellectually-- is being offered as representative of the nation as a whole. What about German working-class men? Farm laborers? What about the majority of the fighting men? 202 Sources for their views are, of course, less readily available. These men rarely kept diaries, and no one seems to have been interested, or at any rate successful, in collecting or assembling their letters after the war. The main German military archives were, moreover, destroyed by Allied bombing in the Second World War, and the records of postal censorship seem to have disappeared as well. Thus, there is only scattered and usually indirect evidence for the attitudes of non intellectuals toward the war. The relatively low incidence of military insubordination is, how ever, one piece of evidence that suggests, in a general way, that morale held and that working-class and peasant soldiers functioned in the context of the values described above. The following table enumerates cases of insubordination and misdemeanors, which were investigated but not necessarily tried by military courts, in the 4th Bavarian Infantry Division. The division spent most of the war on the Western Front. The misdeeds and offenses included absence without permission, desertion, cowardice, espionage, intentional injury to self, suicide, misuse of weapons, disobedience, abuse of authority, property damage, treason, acts against the postal law, criminal acts, and a variety of other misdemeanors. N U M BE R O F I N V ESTI G ATI O N S 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 January 63 12 47 87 February 26 18 41 59 March 33 23 46 70 April 40 27 42 47 May 20 22 54 80 June 24 14 52 II2 July 23 20 82 118 August 17 32 32 48 103 September 12 25 72 77 115 October 29 27 Bo 47 136 November 20 46 59 86 91 December 65 31 37 153 47 The months that stand out are December 1914 and January 1915; September through November 1916; July, September, November, and December 1917; and with the exception of April, all of 1918. 203 The first period coincides with the fraternization of 1914;the second with the failure of the Verdun offensive and the toll taken by the battle of the Somme; and the third and fourth reflect the general debilitation and test of morale as prospects for victory receded. That April 1918 saw a drop in the figures is to be explained by the initial successes of the Ludendorff offensive that spring. One sees that the figures increased as the war dragged on, but what should be emphasized is that the figures for insubordination never became excessive. In the German army, as in all armies, the usual grousing was heard, about provisions, food, equipment, strategy, and the creature comforts accorded to officers. In August 1917, for instance, an artillery battery complained, in a report that was to reach the supreme command, "that the staff officers possess better horses for recreational riding than the troops for fighting." The divisional command was incensed at this "unmilitary" remark and issued instructions that such comments be avoided in future. Orders were also distributed that summer that soldiers who had legitimate complaints about conditions and treatment were to make these complaints through proper channels and not merely grumble.' The French and British military archives are full of this kind of evidence as well; it suggests minor problems with morale-- perfectly understandable, given the nature of this war-- but hardly a major erosion of purpose. That the general approach to the war described above was not just the
property of intellectuals or adventurers-- men like Ernst Junger,
who before the war had run away from home and joined the French Foreign
Legion, or Ernst Wurche or Walter Flex-- is
indicated further by a popular novel of Reinhold Eichacker's
that went into its second printing in 1916. Briefe an das Leben: Von der Seele
des Schutzengrabens and von
den Schutzengraben der Seele (Letters to Life: From the Soul of the
Trenches and the Trenches ofthe Soul)is an unbearably
treacly tale of a soldier who goes off to the war
deeply in love with the young woman he had married twelve months earlier.
After a year in the trenches he comes home unexpectedly to find his wife in
the arms of another man. Without so much as a word, he turns on his heel and
rushes back to the front, only to learn shortly that his wife has taken her
own life. After lengthy rumination on the meaning of life and war he finds
his peace with her and also with the prospect of death. His final consolation
is that he will be reunited with her in eternity. In this story, as in so
much of the German war effort, the meaning of life is to be found only in
death. 204 Needless to say, German soldiers, like those of other nations, suffered from fatigue, depression, and trauma. They too found themselves fighting the war on instinct and inner resources, but for the German those inner resources had a predominantly metaphysical form, in contrast to the social and historical values that motivated the average Englishman and Frenchman. The war was a struggle of will and energy rather than material means; it was to perpetuate the "spirit of 1914," to realize eine grosse idee, a grand ideal. At the end came what appeared to be, for many, an absolute void-- defeat. Rudolf Binding knew, by July 1918, that "we are finished. My thoughts oppress me. How are we to recover ourselves? Kultur, as it will be known after the war, will be of no use; mankind itself will probably be of still less use.” An opponent, David Ghilchik, aware in October that the end was approaching for the Germans, remarked, "I would not be a German now for anything." Yet even the void was somehow capable, as we shall see, of manipulation and permutation. One could indeed, as it turned out, revel spiritually in the void. From defeat would come the idea of "the stab in the back," the notion that Germany had not been defeated at the front in honorable combat with the foe but had been laid low by calumny abroad and treachery at home. The nation most recently enraptured with newness, with experiment and a rejection of old forms, would project, in a supreme feat of mental acrobatics, her own revolt onto her perceived foes, without and within. The traitor would become the betrayed, the rebel would become the victim, the defeated would become the conqueror, as in Dada anti-art would become art. Back in October 1914, on the evening of the day Antwerp fell to the Germans, a grand dinner party was held at the Esplanade in Berlin. Decorum dictated that dress at society functions should remain modest, in keeping with the gravity of the hour. Women would avoid wearing, for instance, decolletee dresses. But on this evening one lady arrived with an extremely transparent and low-cut dress, appropriate for a gala ball at the height of the social season. "You are very smart tonight, madame," someone remarked. "Yes," was the reply. "I put this on to celebrate the fall of Antwerp; but wait until you see the dress I’m keeping for the day when England is beaten!"' 205 We have no record of what the lady in question wore in defeat, but if the way Josephine Baker was received in Berlin after the war gives any clue, then the victory costume hinted at here-- the emperor's clothes-- would have been just as appropriate in defeat. Are these valid generalizations? Exceptions to them are not difficult to find. General disaffection and opposition to the war did mount in Germany as the struggle progressed. In 1916 food riots broke out in parts of the country. In April of that year Catholic religious authorities in Bavaria were told by their bishop that countering disaffection with the war was their most important duty. Over the next two years, especially during the bitter winters, there was to be no shortage of disaffection. The initial political home of the skeptics was in a minority wing of the SPD. In April 1917, however, the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was founded on opposition to the war. It housed both political moderates like the prewar revisionist leader Eduard Bernstein and radicals like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In January 1918 a wave of strikes swept over the munitions industries, led by radical shop stewards opposed to the war and bent on extensive social and political reform. The recent success of the Bolsheviks in Russia was greatly admired in these quarters. At the front some signs of weariness and frustration surfaced in late 1917 and in 1918 as pacifist tracts reached certain sectors and as cases of insubordination increased. But the number of people involved in any of these activities was small. Most of the strikes were instigated by economic rather than political reasons, above all by the terrible food shortages. The army remained loyal. Among moderate elements at home, the war, by 1917 at the latest, had
become an existential riddle. By then for Max Weber it had "exhausted
itself spiritually." For Gustav Radbruch, a
professor of legal philosophy, it had taken on the appearance, by contrast,
of "something ghostlike," a blind and overwhelming monstrosity.
Both victory and defeat would be evils, with the former only slightly the
lesser of the two. Only in religion, he felt, was any kind of peace to be
found in the midst of this horrendous crisis. By 1917, for Hans Delbriick, Ernst Troeltsch,
Adolf von Harnack, and Friedrich Meinecke, the war threatened to destroy all traces of
European culture. The future, whose promise had been so dazzling in August
1914, now seemed to offer only darkness, a blackness
without compare. In a letter to his wife in February 1918, after the strikes
and disturbances of the previous month, Delbriick
admitted that he was terrified by the future. He wondered if after all the
sadness some terrible tragedy might still be in store for Germany. "If
the whole thing is not at an end soon, it's going to become gruesome." 10 206 And yet, despite all these premonitions and doubts, morale-- and resolve to continue-- held, even during the retreat in the autumn of 1918. Danger of a complete breakdown never existed, certainly not among the soldiers. When a breakdown did come, it was modest in scale and it came in the navy, which had sat in port for most of the war. In 1917 a mutiny of sorts had occurred in Wilhelmshaven among sailors protesting their treatment, dreadful rations, lack of leave, and close quarters. In the last days of October and in early November 1918, sailors mutinied in the ports of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, and the disturbances then spread rapidly through Germany as news of the impending Armistice broke. The army at the front, however, remained loyal to the end. Only behind the lines, in Germany, did relatively small numbers of soldiers join in the so-called revolution of 1918. Disillusionment with and alienation from the national effort were thus never rampant in Germany during the war. Where they existed, they were more prevalent among the civilian population than the fighting men. The language and literature of disillusionment would be on the whole a postwar phenomenon-- everywhere. 207 |