Iron Kingdom

by Clark, Christopher

  The army was without a doubt one of the central institutions of Prussian life after 1871. Its presence was felt in everyday life to an extent that would be unimaginable today. The army, whose public standing had been low for much of the nineteenth century, emerged from the wars of unification in a nimbus of glory. Its role in the foundation of the new Germany was commemorated throughout the imperial era in the annual Sedan Day festivals that recalled the victory over France. The military establishment acquired a new kind of public resonance. Its prestige found expression in the imposing buildings that sprang up in garrison towns to accommodate serving troops and regimental administrations. There was an elaborate culture of military display in the form of parades, marching bands and manoeuvres. Military men took pride of place in virtually every official public festivity.95 And the proliferation of military imagery and symbols infiltrated the sphere of private life: the photograph in uniform was a prized possession, especially for recruits from poor rural families where photographs were still a costly rarity; the uniform was worn with pride, even on holiday; military insignia and medals were treasured as mementos of deceased male relatives. The Prussian Reserve officer commissions – there were some 120,000 by 1914 – were a hotly sought-after status symbol in bourgeois society (hence the efforts of former Jewish volunteers to secure access to the corps). School children in garrison towns sang martial songs and marched in their playgrounds. Huge numbers of former servicemen joined the rapidly growing veterans’ associations and military clubs; by 1913, the Kyffhäuser League, the central organization of veterans’ clubs in Germany, counted some 2.9 million members.96

  In other words, the military wove itself more deeply into the fabric of everyday life after 1871. Assessing the precise significance of this fact is far from straightforward. According to one influential view, the militarization of Prussian-imperial society widened the gap between Germany and the western European states, stifling the critical and liberal energies of civil society, perpetuating a hierarchical approach to social relations and inculcating millions of Germans with political views that were reactionary, chauvinistic and ultra-nationalist.97 But was the Prussian experience really so unusual? Prussia was not alone in seeing an expansion of military cultures during the last four decades before the First World War. In France, too, veterans and servicemen flocked to join military clubs and associations – in numbers comparable with Prussia-Germany. A comparison of the militarization of national commemorations in France and Prussia-Germany after 1871 reveals close parallels.98

  Even in Britain, a predominantly naval power that prided itself on the emphatically civilian quality of its political culture, the National Service League attracted some 100,000 members, including 177 members of the House of Commons. The league’s propaganda combined a paranoid perspective on questions of national security with racist presumptions about the superiority of the British race.99 In Britain, as in Germany, the late Victorian era saw a massive unfolding of imperial ceremonial. The ‘civility’ and anti-militarism of British society were perhaps more a matter of self-perception than a faithful representation of reality.100 It is also worth noting that the German peace movement developed on a scale unparalleled elsewhere. On Sunday 20 August 1911, 100,000 people gathered at a peace rally in Berlin to protest against the brinkmanship of the great powers over the Moroccan Crisis. There was a wave of similar protests in Halle, Elberfeld, Barmen, Jena, Essen and other German towns throughout the late summer, culminating in a mammoth peace rally in Berlin on 3 September, when 250,000 people thronged to the Treptow Park. The movement subsided somewhat in 1912–13, but at the end of July 1914, when war was clearly imminent, there were once again large peace rallies in Düsseldorf and Berlin. The response of the German public to the news of war was not, as used to be claimed, one of universal enthusiasm. On the contrary: the mood in the early days of August 1914 was muted, ambivalent and in some places fearful.101

  ‘Militarism’ was, moreover, a diffuse and internally fissured phenomenon. A distinction has to be drawn between the essentially aristocratic and conservative ethos of the Prussian officer corps and the very different identities and attachments involved in the ‘militarism of the little people’. The legendary corporate arrogance of the Prussian officer caste and its disdain for civilian values and norms were essentially a distillation of the old spirit of East-Elbian noble corporate exclusiveness admixed with the defensiveness and paranoia of a social group determined not to relinquish its traditional pre-eminence. By contrast, the ethos of many veterans’ clubs was plebeian and egalitarian. A study of soldiers from the annexed Prussian provinces of Hessen-Nassau who joined military clubs over the period 1871–1914 has shown that many of these were landless rural labourers, craftsmen and poor smallholders. They did not join out of enthusiasm for military service, but because membership provided a way of asserting their value, status and entitlements vis-à-vis the self-sufficient large-holding peasants who dominated their communities. Membership of the veterans’ club was thus a ‘vehicle of participation’. Viewed ‘from below’, what mattered about the military was not the imposition of deference between ranks, but the equality among men who served together.102

  It was, in any case, the German navy, rather than the Prussian army, that captured popular enthusiasm for German national aggrandizement. Through his promotion of a massive naval construction programme from the late 1890s, Kaiser William II made his bid to establish himself as a genuinely national and German imperial ruler. The German naval programme soon attracted huge public support. By 1914, the German Fleet Association (Deutscher Flottenverein) counted over 1 million members, the great majority of them middle and lower-middle class. The navy was perceived as a genuinely national service, free of particularist territorial ties, with a relatively meritocratic approach to recruitment and promotions. The wave of technological innovations that transformed fleet-building around the turn of the century also attracted interest; ships were exciting because they were at the cutting-edge of what German science and industry could achieve. The fleet also carried the promise of a more expansive German global policy under the banner of Weltpolitik.

  The army, by contrast, bore the burden of its association with the particularist power structure of Prussia. The most radical popular militarist organization of the pre-war years, the Defence Club (Wehrverein), whose membership numbered around 100,000 by the summer of 1914, was actually highly critical of the ‘conservative’ militarism of the Prussian elite, which they saw as reactionary, lethargic, narrow-minded and crippled by otiose class distinctions. They had a point: until 1913, parts of the Prussian military command opposed army expansion on the grounds that this would dilute the aristocratic esprit de corps of the officer caste by flooding the upper ranks with middle-class aspirants.103

  ARMY AND STATE

  The failure to integrate authority over civilian and military affairs had been one of the defining flaws of the Prussian constitution of 1848–50. The 1848 revolutions, as we have seen, constitutionalized Prussian politics without demilitarizing the Prussian monarchy. This was a flaw that the new German Empire inherited from the old Prussian state. The question of control over military spending remained unresolved. The constitution of 1871 stipulated on one hand (art. 63) that ‘the Emperor determines the effective strength, the division and the arrangement of the contingents of the Reich army’, and on the other (art. 60) that ‘the effective strength of the army in peace will be determined by legislation of the Reichstag.’104 The indeterminacy of these arrangements gave rise to periodic conflicts between the executive and the legislature. Of the four Reichstag dissolutions decreed during the life of the Empire (1878, 1887, 1893, 1907), three occurred for reasons related to the control of military expenditure.105

  The Prussian army remained a praetorian guard under the personal command of the king, largely shielded from parliamentary scrutiny. The executive organs of the German military in turn remained embedded in the sovereign institutions of the old Prussian state. There was, fo
r example, no imperial minister of war, just a Prussian one with responsibility for imperial military affairs. The Prussian minister of war was appointed by the Emperor (in his capacity as King of Prussia) and swore an oath of loyalty to the Prussian, but not the imperial, constitution. He was responsible to the Kaiser in most matters, but answerable in budgetary questions to the Reichstag. Yet he appeared before this body not as Prussian minister of war (for this post was formally quite unconnected to the imperial legislature) but in his complementary role as a Prussian plenipotentiary to the Federal Council.

  As for the organs that administered the army in peacetime and at war, these were completely independent from the structures of civil authority. The military cabinet, the body responsible for personnel decisions (appointments and promotions), formally separated itself from the Prussian ministry of war in 1883, as did the Great General Staff, which was entrusted in the event of war with overall control of the operations of the field army.106 Both henceforth reported directly to the monarch himself. Rather than establishing authoritative organs of central military governance, William II further fragmented the command structure by creating, just a few weeks after his accession, a new military establishment known by the grandiloquent title ‘Headquarters of His Majesty the Kaiser and King’.107 He also stepped up the number of military and naval command posts that reported directly to the Emperor.108 This was all part of a conscious strategy to create an environment that would permit the untrammelled exercise of the monarchical command function.109 The Prussian-German military system thus remained a foreign body within the German constitution, institutionally sealed off from the organs of civil governance and ultimately responsible only to the Emperor himself, who came to be known from around 1900 in general parlance as the ‘supreme warlord’.110 The result was a perennial uncertainty about the demarcation between civil and military authority. This was Prussia’s most fateful legacy to the new Germany.

  Nowhere before 1914 were the potentialities of this ‘avoided decision’ at the heart of the Empire’s political fabric more disturbingly revealed than in the war of 1904–7 in German South-West Africa (modern Namibia), where an insurrection broke out in January 1904. By the middle of the month, groups of armed Herero had encircled Okahandja, a township in the centre-west of the colony, plundering farms and police stations, killing a number of settlers and cutting the telegraph and railway links to Windhoek, the administrative capital. The man charged with maintaining order in the colony was Governor Theodor Gotthilf von Leutwein, a native of Strümpfelbronn in the Grand Duchy of Baden who had been a serving soldier in the colony since 1893 and had held the post of governor since 1898. Finding himself unable to contain the uprising with the small local militia (there were fewer than 800 troops in a colony one and a half times the size of the German Empire), Leutwein requested that reinforcements be sent urgently from Berlin and that an experienced commander be despatched to take control of military operations.111 The Kaiser responded by sending Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha, descendant of a Prussian military family from Magdeburg, who had already held a number of overseas postings.

  Although both men were career officers, they occupied quite different positions within the Prussian-German political structure. As governor, Leutwein was the senior civilian authority in the colony and reported to the Colonial Department of the Prussian Foreign Office, which in turn reported to the imperial chancellor and Prussian minister-president, Bernhard von Bülow. Trotha entered the colony in a purely military role: he was not directly answerable to the political authorities, but only to the General Staff, which reported directly to the Kaiser. In other words, Leutwein and Trotha were locked into two quite separate chains of command. The two men personified the civil–military fault-line that ran through the Prussian constitution.

  The governor and the general soon found themselves at loggerheads over how to handle the insurgency. Leutwein’s intention had always been to manoeuvre the Herero by military means into a position where a negotiated surrender would be possible. His efforts and those of his subordinates focused on weakening the uprising by isolating the most determined element and negotiating separate settlements with other Herero groups. But General Trotha pursued a different approach. Having tried without success to encircle and destroy a large mass of Herero in a pitched battle at the Waterberg on 11–12 August 1904, he switched to a policy of genocide. On 2 October, the general had an official proclamation posted throughout the colony and read to the troops under German command. Composed in the pompous Wild West German of a Karl May novel, it closed with an unequivocal threat:

  The people of the Herero must leave the country. If the people does not do this, I will force it to with the Big Pipe [artillery]. Within the German borders every male Herero who is found with or without a weapon, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will take no more children or women. Instead I will drive them back to their people or order them to be fired upon. These are my words to the People of the Herero. [Signed:] The great general of the Mighty German Kaiser112

  This was not just an exercise in psychological warfare. In a letter composed two days later for his superiors on the Prussian General Staff, Trotha explained his actions. The ‘nation of the Herero’, he declared, were to be ‘annihilated as such’, or failing that, ‘removed from the territory’. Since a victory through straightforward military engagements appeared impossible, Trotha proposed instead to execute all captured Herero males and drive the women and children back into the desert area of the colony, where their death by thirst, starvation or disease was a virtual certainty. There was no point, he argued, in making exceptions for Herero women and children, since these would simply infect German troops with their diseases and increase the burden on water and food supplies. This insurrection, Trotha concluded, ‘is and remains the beginning of a racial struggle…’113

  In a letter addressed to the Colonial Department of the Prussian Foreign Office at the end of October – in other words, to the civilian colonial authority in Berlin, Governor Leutwein defended his own very different view of the situation. As he saw it, Trotha had worsened the conflict in the colony by undermining the efforts of Leutwein’s subordinates to negotiate an end to the fighting. Had these initiatives been followed up, Leutwein argued, the insurgency might well already have been resolved. At the centre of the crisis was a problem of demarcation. In adopting an avowed policy of indiscriminate murder and displacement, Trotha had exceeded his competence as military commander.

  I take the view that my rights as governor have been compromised. For the question of whether a people is to be destroyed or hunted across the borders is not a military question, but a political and economic one.114

  In an exasperated telegram of 23 October 1904, Leutwein asked for ‘clarification of how much political power and responsibility still rest in the hands of the Governor’.115

  The chancellor and Prussian minister-president, Bernhard von Bülow, shared Leutwein’s misgivings about Trotha’s extremism. The ‘comprehensive and planned extirpation’ of the Herero, Bülow informed the German Emperor, would be contrary to Christian and humanitarian principle, economically devastating and damaging to Germany’s international reputation. Yet although he was the most senior political figure in Prussia and the Empire, he had no authority over General Trotha or his superiors on the Prussian General Staff, and thus no means of resolving the crisis in the colony through direct intervention. Only in the person of the Kaiser did the civilian and military chains of command converge. In order to achieve his objectives, Bülow had thus to manoeuvre the Emperor into countermanding Trotha’s shooting order of 2 October. This was duly done, after a tug of war with the General Staff over various technical details, and a new imperial order was sent out to the colony on 8 December 1904. For the Herero, it was too late. By the time the order to stop shootings and forced displacements arrived, a substantial part of the indigenous population had already perished, most of them in the waterless areas of the Omaheke on the eastern side
of the colony.116

  The constitutional chasm between the civil and the (Prussian) military authority structures remained open throughout the life of the German Empire. It exacerbated the situation in Alsace-Lorraine, where civil administrators and corps commanders clashed over various issues, most famously the Zabern incident of October 1913, when insulting remarks by a young officer set off a train of minor clashes with the local population that culminated in the illegal arrest of some twenty citizens. The military had clearly overstepped the boundaries of their competence and there were loud protests from the civil authorities. But the Kaiser took the view that the prestige of ‘his’ army was at stake and openly supported the soldiers against the civilians. There was a national uproar over the case. Only with great difficulty did the chancellor succeed in persuading the Emperor to take disciplinary action against the main military culprits.117

  Was there a specifically Prussian dimension to the war that broke out in August 1914? A war on two fronts, encirclement by a coalition of European powers – these had traditionally been Prussian, rather than Saxon, Badensian or Bavarian nightmares. Of all the nineteenth-century German states, only Prussia had to meet the challenge of exposed frontiers adjoining the territories of great powers in east and west. In this sense, the Schlieffen Plan, with its carefully weighted western and eastern spearheads, was an intrinsically Prussian device. To many contemporaries, moreover, it seemed obvious that the mobilization of 1914 belonged within a sequence of earlier Prussian ‘appointments with destiny’: 1870, 1813, 1756. Reference to these precedents cropped up everywhere in the public discussion that greeted the news of war in 1914. These invocations of continuity concealed, of course, the fact that the constellation of 1914 was born out of the fundamental changes wrought by German unification. This was a war of the German Empire, not of the Prussian state. When contemporaries invoked the ‘memory’ of earlier Prussian wars, they were in fact projecting the nationalist preoccupations of 1914 on to the Prussian past: 1813 was (falsely) remembered as a national German uprising against the French; Frederick the Great’s pre-emptive strike of 1756 was refashioned into a ‘German, even Pan-German’ feat of arms.118