The SPD-led government also inherited a civil service that had been socialized, schooled, recruited and trained in the imperial era and whose allegiance to the republic was correspondingly weak. Just how weak was revealed in March 1920, when many provincial and district governors continued working in their offices during the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch and thus implicitly accepted the authority of the would-be usurpers. The situation was most acute in the province of East Prussia, where the entire senior bureaucracy recognized the Kapp–Lüttwitz ‘government’.30
The first office-holder to tackle this problem with the required energy was the new Social Democrat Interior Minister Carl Severing, a former locksmith from Bielefeld, who had risen through the ranks of the SPD as a journalist-editor and sometime Reichstag deputy. Under the ‘Severing system’, grossly compromised individuals were dismissed and representatives of the governing parties vetted all new appointees to ‘political’ (i.e. senior) civil service posts. It was not long before this practice had a marked effect on the political complexion of the senior echelons. By 1929, 291 of the 540 political civil servants in Prussia were members of the solidly republican coalition parties SPD, Centre and DDP. Nine of the eleven provincial governors and 21 of the 32 district governors belonged to the coalition parties. The social composition of the political elite was transformed in the process: whereas eleven out of twelve provincial governors had been noblemen in 1918, only two of the men who served in this post over the years 1920–32 were of noble descent. That this transition could be effected without disrupting the operations of the state was a remarkable achievement.
Policing was another area of crucial importance. The Prussian police force was far and away the largest in the country. Here too, there were nagging doubts about political loyalty, especially after the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch, when the Prussian police administration failed unequivocally to declare its allegiance to the government. On 30 March 1920, only two weeks after the collapse of the putsch, Otto Braun announced that he intended to institute a ‘root and branch transformation’ of the Prussian security organs.31 Personnel reform in this area was not particularly problematic, since control over appointments lay entirely in the hands of the interior ministry, which, with one brief break, remained under SPD control until 1932. Responsibility for overseeing personnel policy fell to the decidedly republican head of the police department (from 1923) Wilhelm Abegg, who saw to it that adherents of the republican parties were appointed to all key posts. By the late 1920s, the upper echelons of the police force had been comprehensively republicanized – of thirty Prussian police presidents on 1 January 1928, fifteen were Social Democrats, five belonged to the Centre, four were German Democrats (DDP) and three were members of the German People’s Party; the remaining three declared no political affiliation. It was official policy throughout the police service to base recruitment not only upon mental and physical aptitude, but also upon the candidate’s having a record of ‘past behaviour guaranteeing that they would work in a positive sense for the state’.32
Yet doubts remained about the political reliability of the police force. The great majority of officers and men were former military men who brought military manners and attitudes with them into the service. Among senior police cadres, there was still a strong old-Prussian reserve officer element with informal links to various right-wing organizations. The mood in most police units was anti-Communist and conservative, rather than specifically republican. They saw the enemies of the state on the left – including the left wing of the SPD, the party of government! – rather than among the extremists on the right, whom they viewed with indulgence if not sympathy. A police officer who openly proclaimed his pro-republican allegiance was likely to remain an outsider. The Centre Party functionary Marcus Heimannsberg was a man of modest social origin who rose swiftly through the ranks under the protection of SPD Interior Minister Carl Severing. But he was widely resented among his fellow senior officers as a political appointment and remained socially isolated. Others who were less protected suffered the discrimination of their colleagues and risked being passed over for promotion. In many locations, policemen of known republican sentiment were ostracized from the gregarious – and professionally important – after-hours sociability of the regulars’ table at the local pub.33
Ultimately, the record of the Prussian state government has to be judged in the light of what was realistically possible in the circumstances. A purge of the old judiciary would have run against the ideological grain of the Centre and liberal parties, as well as the right wing of the SPD, all of whom held dear the principle of the Rechtsstaat in which the judge enjoys immunity from political interference. It is certainly true that some right-wing Prussian judges handed down biased verdicts in political cases, but the importance of these verdicts was diminished by the frequency of amnesties for political offenders and has probably been exaggerated in the literature on ‘political justice’ in the Weimar Republic.34 It is clear that in the longer term, the new retirement age and the new state guidelines for judicial appointments would have facilitated the formation of a comprehensively republican judiciary. As far as the civil service is concerned, an all-out purge of government personnel was out of the question, given the shortage of qualified republican substitutes and the moderate outlook of the Prussian coalition. In the case of the police, installing a pro-republican leadership cadre while retaining the services of the bulk of officers and men from the old regime looked like the best way to ensure the stability and effectiveness of the service, especially in the unstable early years. The coalition governments thus opted to pursue a policy of gradual republicanization. What they could not know was that the German Republic would be extinguished before there was time for this programme to fulfil its potential.
The real threat to Prussia’s existence did not in any case stem from the state civil service, but from powerful interests outside the state that remained dedicated to the downfall of the republic. The threat of a Spartakist uprising was neutralized in 1919–20, but the extreme left continued to attract significant electoral support – indeed the Communists were the only party whose tally of votes increased with every single Prussian election, from 7.4 per cent in 1921 to 13.2 per cent in 1933. Less ideologically homogeneous but equally radical and determined and far more numerous were the forces mustered on the right. It is one of the salient features of Weimar politics in Prussia (as in Germany more generally) that the ‘conservative interest’, for lack of a better term, never accommodated itself to the political culture of the new republic. The post-war years saw the emergence of a large, fragmented and radicalized right-wing opposition that refused to accept the legitimacy of the new order.
The most important organizational focal point for right-wing politics in Weimar Prussia before 1930 was the German Nationalist Party, or DNVP. Founded on 29 November 1918, the DNVP was in formal terms a successor organization to the Prussian conservative parties of the pre-war era; the first DNVP programme was published on 24 November 1918 in the Kreuzzeitung, the conservative organ founded in Berlin during the 1848 revolutions. Taken as a whole, however, the DNVP represented a new force in Prussian politics. East-Elbian agrarians were no longer so dominant within its social constituency, since the party also catered to a large contingent of urban white-collar employees, ranging from clerks, secretaries and office assistants to middle and upper management. Of the forty-nine DNVP deputies elected to the Prussian Constituent Assembly on 26 January 1919, only fourteen had served in the Prussian Landtag before 1918. The party was a rainbow coalition of interests ranging from pragmatic moderate conservatives (a minority), to enthusiasts of a monarchist restoration, ultra-nationalists, ‘conservative revolutionaries’ and exponents of a racist völkisch radicalism. In this sense the party occupied an uncomfortable position somewhere between the ‘old’ Prussian conservatism and the extremist organizations of the German ‘new right’.35
The politico-cultural matrix of the old East-Elbian provincial conservatism no longer exi
sted. It had been in flux since the 1890s; after 1918, it dissolved entirely. First there was the damage inflicted on conservative networks by the revolution of 1918–19. Virtually the entire apparatus of privilege that had sustained the agrarian political lobby was swept away. The abolition of the three-class franchise destroyed at one stroke the electoral basis for conservative political hegemony, while the abdication of the crown and the proclamation of a republic decapitated the old system of privilege and patronage that had secured for the agrarian nobility an unparalleled leverage on public office. Even at regional and local level, the recruitment policies of the new SPD-led government soon began to change the scene, as provincial governors and district commissioners of the old school made way for republican successors.
All this came at a time of unprecedented economic disruption. The removal of restrictions on strikes and collective bargaining by farm labourers and the repeal of the old Servants’ Law raised the pressure on wages across the farming sector. Tax reforms dismantled the fiscal exemptions that had always been a structural feature of Prussian agriculture. The new republic was also far less receptive to the protectionist arguments of the farmers than its imperial predecessors; grain tariffs were lowered to facilitate industrial exports and there was a dramatic rise in food imports, even after the reintroduction of a reduced tariff in 1925. Under the impact of rising taxes and interest rates, galloping debt, wage pressures and the misallocation of capital during the inflation, many food producers – especially among the larger estates – went into bankruptcy.36 These pressures did not let up after the currency stabilization of 1924. On the contrary, the later years of the Weimar Republic were a period of unpredictable price fluctuations, depression and crisis for the agricultural sector.37
There was also a religious dimension to the dissolution of what remained of the old conservative milieu. For the Protestants of the Church of the Prussian Union who comprised the majority of the population in the East-Elbian provinces, the loss of the king was a more than merely political event. The Unionist Church had always been a specifically royal institution: the King of Prussia was ex officio supreme bishop of the Union, with extensive patronage powers and a prominent place in the liturgical life of the congregation. William II in particular had taken his ecclesiastical-executive role very seriously indeed.38 The termination of the monarchy as an institution thus brought a measure of institutional disorientation to Prussia’s Protestants, heightened by the loss (to Prussia and Germany) of substantial Protestant areas in West Prussia and the former province of Posen, and by the openly secular and anti-Christian demeanour of some prominent republican political figures.39 That the Catholic Centre Party had managed to secure an influential place at the heart of the new system was a further irritant.
Many Prussian Protestants responded to these developments by turning their backs on the republic and voting in great numbers for the DNVP, which, despite early overtures to the Catholic electorate, remained an overwhelmingly Protestant party. ‘Our special difficulty,’ one senior clergyman observed in September 1930, ‘lies in the fact that the most loyal members of our church are opposed to the existing form of government.’40 There were signs of an accelerating fragmentation and radicalization of religious rhetoric and belief. It became fashionable after 1918 to rationalize the legitimacy of the evangelical church through an appeal to its national and ethnic-German vocation. The Union for German Church, founded in 1921 by Joachim Kurd Niedlich, a Protestant teacher at the French Gymnasium in Berlin, was one of many völkisch religious groups founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Niedlich became well known as the exponent of a racist Christian creed rooted in the notion that Jesus had been a heroic fighter and Godseeker of Nordic lineage. In 1925, the Union merged with the newly founded German Christians’ Union. Their joint programme included calls for a German national church, a ‘German Bible’ reflecting the German moral character, and the promotion of racial hygiene in Germany.41
The influence of ultra-nationalist and ethnocentric thinking was not confined to the margins of church life. After 1918, the care for the German Protestant communities marooned in territories transferred to the new Polish Republic took on symbolic importance. Protestants, especially in the truncated state of Prussia, equated the predicament of their church with the condition of the German people as a whole. ‘Volk and Fatherland’ was the official theme of the second German Protestant Church Congress held in Königsberg in 1927.
Closely linked with this shift in emphasis was an increasingly strident strain of anti-Semitism. A publication of 1927 by the Union for German Church declared that Christ, as the divine transfiguration of Siegfried, would eventually ‘break the neck of the Jewish-satanic snake with his iron fist’.42 During the 1920s, there was agitation by a range of Christian groups to end official collections for the mission to the Jews, and in March 1930, the General Synod of the Old Prussian Union voted to cease defining the mission as an official beneficiary of church funding.43 Dismayed by this decision, the president of the Berlin mission composed a circular letter to the consistories and provincial church councils of the Prussian state church warning against the insidious influence of anti-Semitism and observing that the number of clergymen within the Prussian Union who had ‘succumbed’ to anti-Semitism was ‘astonishingly and terrifyingly high’.44 High-ranking academics at the Prussian theological faculties were among those who saw in the Jewish minority a menace to German Volkstum, and a survey of Protestant Sunday papers in the years from 1918 to 1933 reveals the strength of ultra-nationalist and anti-Jewish sentiment in Protestant circles.45 It was in part as a consequence of these processes of reorientation and radicalization that the National Socialists found it so easy to establish themselves within the East-Elbian Protestant milieu.46
And what of the old Prussian elite, the Junkers, who had once ruled the roost in East-Elbia? This was the social group most exposed to the transformations unleashed by defeat and revolution. For the older generation of the Prussian military nobility, defeat and revolution brought a traumatic sense of loss. On 21 December 1918, General von Tschirschky, commander of the III Guards Regiment of Uhlans and a former wing-adjutant to the Emperor, ordered his regiment to form up for a final parade in Potsdam. ‘There he stood, the wine-loving old warrior, with his smart Emperor Wilhelm moustaches and a stentorian voice that thundered across the whole of Bornstedt Field – and the tears poured down over his rough cheeks.’47 Ceremonies of this type – and there were many such – were self-consciously historical rituals of renunciation and withdrawal, acknowledgements that the old world was passing. Siegfried Count Eulenburg, the last commander of the I Footguards, gave expression to this sense of closure in a ‘leave-taking ceremony’ orchestrated in the winter of 1918 in the ‘deathly stillness’ of the Garrison Church in Potsdam. There was a shared awareness, one participant recalled, that ‘the old order had collapsed and no longer had a future’.48
But these elegant performances did not typify the general mood within the Prussian noble families. Although some noblemen (especially of the older generation) accepted the verdict of events in a spirit of fatalism and withdrawal, others (especially of the younger generation) displayed a determination to remain the masters of the moment and to reconquer their ancestral leadership positions. In many areas of East Elbia, the nobility, operating through the agencies of the Agrarian League, was astonishingly successful in infiltrating local revolutionary organizations and orienting the politics of rural organizations away from leftist redistributive goals towards the agrarian bloc politics of the old regime. Noblemen dominated the Homeland League East Prussia, for example, an agrarian group that expounded ultra-nationalist and anti-democratic political objectives.49 Many younger noblemen – especially from the lesser families – played a prominent role in the formation of the Freikorps that crushed the extreme left during the early months of the Republic. These men experienced the ultra-violence of the Freikorps as liberation, an intoxicating release from the sense of loss and prec
ipitous decline that attended the events of 1918–19. The memoirs of noble Freikorps activists published during the early years of the republic reveal the total abandonment of traditional chivalric codes and the adoption of a brutal, uninhibited, anti-republican, hypermasculine warrior persona ready to deal out murderous and indiscriminate violence against an ideologically defined enemy.50
The extinction of the Prussian monarchy was an existential shock for the East-Elbian nobility – more perhaps than for any other social group. ‘I feel as if I can no longer live without our Kaiser and king,’ wrote the magnate Dietlof Count Arnim-Boitzenburg, the last president of the Prussian upper house, in January 1919.51 But the attitude of most nobles to the exiled king – and his family – remained ambivalent. For many representatives of the Prussian nobility, the ignominious circumstances of the monarch’s departure, and particularly his failure to preserve the prestige of his crown by sacrificing himself in battle, impeded any genuine identification with the last occupant of the Prussian throne. Monarchism thus never developed into an ideological formation capable of providing the conservative nobility as a whole with a coherent and stable political standpoint. Noblemen, especially of the younger generation, drifted away from the personal, flesh-and-blood monarchism of their fathers and forebears towards the diffuse idea of a ‘leader of the people’, whose charisma and natural authority would fill the vacuum created by the departure of the king.52 We find a characteristic articulation of this longing in the diary jottings of Count Andreas von Bernstorff-Wedendorf, descendant of a line of distinguished servants of the Prussian throne: ‘Only a dictator can help us now, one who will sweep an iron broom through this whole international parasitic scum. If only we had, like the Italians, a Mussolini!’53 In short, within the Prussian nobility, as across the East-Elbian conservative milieu, the Weimar years witnessed a drastic radicalization of political expectations.
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