by Jack Beatty
In fact, by 1914 everywhere but on the extreme right the French had renounced going to war to recover the “lost provinces.” Indicatively, “about half of all recruits, and quite a few junior officers, were unaware that France had lost territory to Germany in 1870.” At the height of the Zabern affair, the German embassy in Paris held a dinner in honor of President Raymond Poincaré, a Lorrainer, the first French president to accept such an invitation.24
But assuming Gooch and Bülow were correct about French irredentism, Bismarck doubted they would have desired revanche any less if he had left the map of France intact. “What the French nation will never forgive us is their defeat as such,” he maintained with his accustomed realism. “Even if we were now to depart France without any territorial concessions, without any indemnities, with no other advantage than the glory of our arms, the same hatred and vengefulness would persist among the French people … Any peace we may conclude, even without territory changing hands, will be but an armistice … We shall demand Alsace-Lorraine … merely to protect ourselves against the next attack.” The annexed provinces would form a “glacis” between that future French attack and south Germany. Troops were garrisoned in Zabern, about thirty miles from the new French border, to implement Germany’s forward defense strategy.25
Before its annexation by Louis XIV in 1679, Alsace had long been ruled by the House of Habsburg, and remained German speaking under the French. The lingua franca didn’t concern Napoleon: “What matters that?—Though they speak in German, they saber in French!” In Alsace-Lorraine the French Revolution “had had a profound influence—the Marseillaise was composed in Strasburg—while the movement to unite Germany had passed them by untouched.” Bismarck spoke of binding Alsace-Lorraine to Germany with “Teutonic patience and affection,” but the latter—some would say oxymoron—proved weaker than the bonds of memory linking its people to France. Under a policy of “Germanization,” French language instruction was forbidden in most primary schools and French banned on street signs and on tombstones. Teutonic thoroughness turned “cafe” into “Kaffee,” “concert” into “Konzert,” the city of “Nancy” into “Nansig,” and “Alsace-Lorraine” into “Elsass-Lothringen.”26
The army also served as a school of Germanization; the draft swept deep among Alsace-Lorraine’s young men. The army’s treatment of its Alsatian conscripts may be guessed from the generic training methods documented by the left-wing socialists, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Beaten, bound to trees, and forced to eat their own excrement, recruits, the socialists charged, committed suicide at a rate fourteen times higher than the general population. That was how the army trained Germans. To Prussian officers and sergeants Alsace-Lorraine was still “the enemy’s country.”27
Jacob Burckhardt foresaw dire trouble for Germany in the annexation. Even “outside of war,” he maintained, Alsace-Lorraine would “constantly provide at least the din of war,” and this would make for “a quiet state of siege in Germany itself,” putting at risk “constitutionalism and other such relics.” Vindicating Burckhardt’s prophecy, the Zabern Affair quickened rumblings of a right-wing putsch to declare a state of siege, suspend the constitution, and disband the parliament.28
German papers considered Zabern, the home since 1888 of the Ninety-ninth Prussian Infantry regiment, the “most German town in Alsace-Lorraine.” The occasional brawl aside, soldiers and civilians got on tolerably well. But Zabern had never seen a soldier quite like Lieutenant Gunther Freiherr von Forstner before.
Just turned twenty, Baron von Forstner was notorious for being a bully on the training ground and a lout in the town. And that was before he insulted all six hundred thousand Alsatians. In late October 1913, a recruit with a police record started a scuffle on the rifle range. Forstner chastised the hothead, saying that if he wanted a fight he could easily find one in town, though, the lieutenant added, he ought to avoid fights. However, should “some Wackes” in town start something, the recruit should fight back, with bullets, if necessary. “And if that happens,” the official report quotes him speaking within earshot of the whole squad, “and you happen to waste one of them, OK. For every one of those dirty Wackes you bring me, you get 10 marks.” Wackes—vagabond, bum, coward—sounds anodyne to the American ear, yet “in normal circumstances even Alsatians used it with care, and non-Alsatians at their peril.” The regiment had banned its use in 1903. That knowledge would have dissuaded prudent mortals from using it, but Lieutenant Forstner was one of the “sun-Gods” of Wilhelmine Germany. In ordering at least one member of his squad to repeat, “I am a Wackes, I am a Wackes” how could he sense the danger to himself ? The odds approach certainty that this Wackes was among those who leaked the story to the local newspapers.29
Eight thousand people lived in Zabern; mobilized by the news, a thousand of them, a few shouting “Vive la France!,” gathered outside the army barracks to protest Lieutenant Forstner’s presence among them. Now began a campaign of harassment against Forstner. In restaurants and on the streets, hecklers dogged him, small boys, picking up on the rumor that during a recent bender he had soiled his bed, yelling “Bettschisser!”
Passions had cooled somewhat when, on November 14, Forstner stepped in it again. Lecturing recruits against deserting to join the French Foreign Legion, as more than a thousand Alsatians and Lorrainers reportedly did in 1912, he remarked that for all he cared they could “shit on the French flag.” A cartoon soon appeared in the window of a Paris ladies’ shop showing him performing that act himself. In the music halls, songs rang with his shame:
Forstner said, “I’ll lower my pants
And go on the flag of France.”
But, my lad, to pull off that gag,
You must first get your hands on that flag.
And if I know where it’s at,
You’ll go in your pants before that.
Making Zabern safe for Lieutenant von Forstner.
Not all the French were so lighthearted. Acting on an impulse shared by many of his countrymen, Paul de Cassagnac, a Bonapartist journalist, challenged Forstner to a duel.
The Staathalter, or governor, of Alsace, Count Karl von Wedel, appealed to the kaiser to have Forstner transferred. Wedel had weight with the Supreme Warlord. He could not have climbed so high in office, it was said, except for his ability to “terrorize” the kaiser over “certain profligate actions” in Vienna. In the early 1880s, as a lowly military adjutant, he had covered up a messy ménage à trois between the newly married Prince Wilhelm and two Viennese women. But the kaiser brooked no civilian interference with his army, which, on succeeding his father as kaiser in 1887, he addressed in rapturous terms: “And so we belong together, I and the Army.” He turned Wedel down. Forstner stayed, and Zabern was not spared the events that “made our town world famous,” in the words of a rueful resident.30
For the next act in Zabern, Forstner passed the baton of calamity to Colonel von Reuter, his commanding officer. Reuter had lost his father in the fighting in Alsace in 1870 and treated Alsatians as if they were collectively responsible. Thus, for leaking the Forstner chronicles, Reuter arrested nine Alsatian privates along with an Alsatian sergeant major with relatives working in a nearby factory and transferred the remaining Alsatians in Forstner’s company to other regiments. For printing the Bettschisser rumor, he had the offices of the Zaberner Anzeiger raided, and threatened to ban soldiers from patronizing any restaurant “where customers were even seen reading it.” But he neglected to inform Zaberners that Forstner had been confined to his house for six days for Wackes. The apparent double standard—for all the locals knew, Forstner was free and clear—kept emotions on the boil.
So Zabern youngsters continued to heckle Forstner, again on the loose, and his bulldog-guarded companion, Lieutenant Kurt Schad. Reuter assigned an armed guard to escort the officers on their errands. When the raillery persisted, he issued an ultimatum to the local prefect: Suppress disrespect for the army or I will.
On the evening of Novem
ber 30, he did. Sixty soldiers with fixed bayonets backed by two machine guns appeared at one end of the town square. Reuter sent half the force under Forstner to sweep one side, half under Schad the other. “The troops advanced; absurd scenes followed,” the Frankfurter Zeitung dryly commented.
Groups of blue-collar workers were leaving their night school classes, single men were en route to their favorite haunts, shoppers were walking home with the makings of their suppers. Suddenly the drums rolled, the soldiers’ hobnailed boots scraped the cobblestones, the civilians froze. Reuter expected them to cower before his bayonets. Instead they reacted like the audience at a light opera in which the goose-stepping soldiers were the extras. They laughed. One man was arrested for jeering, another for whistling, a third for standing in the way of the advancing skirmish line. Forstner was about to collar a fellow carrying sausage home, but on recognizing him thought better of it. “Lt. Forstner had had an affair with my wife’s sister,” he later testified, “who is only 14, and is currently in Paris.”
On his side of the square, Lieutenant Schad encountered unexpected resistance. A bank teller returning home from work objected to Schad’s accusation that he had laughed. Schad arrested him for his “smiling grimace.” “I had every man I suspected of laughing at us arrested,” Schad subsequently explained. “As they were too cowardly to laugh at our faces, we had to be guided by presumption.” Judges emerging from the courthouse, struck dumb by the spectacle, were slow to obey Schad’s command to keep moving—Reuter had ordered the arrest of “everybody who stood still even for a second”—so the lieutenant arrested them. They protested to Reuter. “This is where jurisprudence ends,” he told them. “Mars rules the hour.”
A district commissioner, representing the civil authority, pleaded with the colonel to withdraw his troops. He refused: “I am in command here now.” People were just “standing about,” the commissioner indicated to Reuter. What was wrong with that? “I intend to prevent this standing about at any cost,” the colonel came back. And he did not “intend to let people laugh in this way. If it continues, I shall order the troops to shoot.” Asked later if he would have shot people for laughing, he replied, “Certainly!” The “prestige and honor of the whole army” was at stake.
In a celebrated speech, Léon Gambetta had prophesied that “till [the Germans] have restored our ravished provinces … the peace of the world will remain at the mercy of an incident.” A massacre in Zabern would have qualified.31
There was no massacre. Twenty-seven people were arrested, and jailed for the night in the barrack’s coal cellar. The next day, a Sunday, order returned to Zabern, though that evening a young molder was arrested for singing. “The official report regrettably neglects to say what.”32
It was awkward for the army that responsibility for the coup reached up the chain of command. “I … informed Col. Reuter personally that he was himself to arrest demonstrators,” General Berthold von Deimling, Reuter’s Strasburg-based superior, reported to Berlin, “and use armed force in case of resistance, should the jeering continue.” Reuter also based his action on a cabinet order issued by the king of Prussia in 1820 that “permitted and obliged” the army to suppress riots when the “civil authorities are excessively hesitant to request military aid.” No one had heard of this order; no officer before Reuter had invoked it. It was a military regulation, not a civil law, and even though the New York Times headline over its November 30 story read GERMAN BAYONETS STOP ALSATIAN RIOT, the Zaberners had not rioted, only stood about. Some had laughed.
The editorial voices of liberal Germany were beginning to unlimber on the army—the Hamburger Echo denouncing Reuter’s action as “the dictatorship of the bayonet”—when the inexorable Lieutenant Forstner drew the only blood shed in the Zabern affair.33
Forty-eight hours after Zabern passed under the rule of Mars, on a dawn march through an outlying village, his company encountered a group of factory-bound shoe workers. Taunts were shouted and Forstner ordered his men to pursue and arrest the quickly scattering taunters. One, Karl Blank, was not quick enough. Furiously protesting his innocence of the name-calling, Blank pronounced a curse on Forstner, who slashed Blank’s skull with his saber, opening a deep cut. Forstner later testified that Blank was about to strike him, but the jury at his court-martial doubted this as Blank was restrained by five men.
Fear of insult, not injury, goaded Forstner. As the New York Times noted, “Lieutenant von Forstner said he acted [according to] the prevailing German assumption that an officer was irretrievably dishonored if he permitted himself to receive a blow.” Forstner was the victim of a “military code … ill-adapted to the conditions and requirements of the modern world.” Under that code, a blow from Blank would have required Forstner’s “resignation from the army.”34
It also would have required Forstner to strike at Blank, a person unsatisfaktionsfahig—so low socially as to be incapable of giving satisfaction in a duel—“with his entire energy and with the highest brutality of which he is capable,” according to a manual of army etiquette. A cabinet order of the 1880s forbade the police from interfering in such moments of Ehrennotwehr—“the defense of honor in extreme emergencies through unusual measures.”
Possibly as a result, the 1890s saw several notorious incidents. In 1892, on Berlin’s Postdammerstrasse, a civilian menaced by a dog asked the lieutenant-owner to restrain his pet, at which the lieutenant drew his sword and inflicted “gruesome cuts” on the civilian’s unoffending person. In 1895, jostled on a Hamburg street, an officer buried his sword in the jostler’s scalp. In 1896, while the Reichstag was debating whether dueling among officers should be outlawed, a tipsy Baden plumber leaving a café brushed against a table occupied by Lieutenant Baron von Brusewitz, who followed the plumber out, demanded that he apologize, and, when he refused, stabbed him to death. Knowing the cut of a keen blade, the military court of appeals that reviewed Forstner’s court-martial conviction primly noted that Forstner’s sword “had not been specially ground; it was only the lieutenant’s ordinary military sword.” Blank should have counted his blessings.35
The code called for officers to bear the legal consequences of Ehrennotwehr, sacrificing their freedom, if necessary, to defend caste honor. But in practice, even brutes like Lieutenant von Brusewitz could usually count on a pardon from the kaiser. Pardon was rarely necessary for the protagonists in an officer duel. Dueling was expected, encouraged, even required; an officer who refused a challenge from a fellow officer could be drummed out of his regiment.36
The Social Democrats (SPD) advocated criminalizing dueling, collapsing it into the categories of assault and homicide. The duel’s reactionary politics animated their campaign. “For us the duel is a purely political question,” they announced ahead of the 1912 elections. “We perceive the duel not as a means of preserving Junker class honor but as a symbol of Junker class rule, and even more: a device for the maintenance of class rule.” As dramatized in novels like Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1894), the German middle classes admired the aristocratic values epitomized by the duel. In social attitude and political outlook they were a heavily “feudalized bourgeoisie,” according to an influential interpretation first advanced by the Weimar historian Eckart Kehr. In the obeisance shown the “cobbler-captain” by the citizens of Köpenick, the socialist Karl Liebknecht found “a compendium of that art of militaristic education and its results, the most sublime of which is the veritable canonization of the officer’s coat by the whole of bourgeois society.” Bought off by reserve officer commissions and hopes of ennoblement—by the lure of a “von”—the German bourgeoisie identified up, with the Junker-officer class, not down, with Germany’s workers.* Unlike their French analogues, they refused history’s assignment—to supplant the aristocrats and Junkers of the ancien régime as the ruling class. Marx drew the contrast memorably: “In France the bourgeoisie conquered so that it could humble the people; in Germany the bourgeoisie humbled itself so that the people should not conquer.
” As the Social Democrats discovered in the next act of the Zabern affair, in a crisis the middle-class parties shrank from challenging their feudal masters.37
“The Alsatian Bogeyman” (1913). Olaf Gulbransson’s cartoon from Simplicissimus is an emblem of the culture war between the “two Germanys.” Liberal Germany excoriated the army’s conduct at Zabern while conservative Germany defended the army for restoring order.
Reuter attacked Zabern on Saturday night; Forstner struck Blank on Monday; Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg answered for their conduct before an enraged Reichstag on Tuesday.
Crying “Militarism, military dictatorship, high treason!” a Social Democrat from Strasburg set the tone for what the New York Times called “one of the most tempestuous seatings in the history of the Reichstag.” Giving the Zabern affair its signature headline, a deputy from Alsace denounced “sabre dictatorship.” “Every thrust at the Army was applauded to the echo everywhere in the House save from the ultra-militarist back benches,” the Times reported.38
In a sign of German militarism, Germany’s highest civilian official sat below the generals and admirals at royal banquets and appeared in the legislative assembly dressed like a soldier. Wearing the uniform of a major, Bethmann Hollweg, appointed chancellor in 1909, rose “to stand in the fiery rain,” as he described the ordeal to a friend. Initially he had criticized the army for having “transgressed its authority.” However, cocooned by his military cabinet in a castle in distant Donaueschingen, the kaiser accepted the army’s side of the story. Blaming the controversy on “journalist pigs,” he refused to meet with Count Wedel to hear the civilian side. Privately, the Austrian ambassador reported to Vienna, “the Kaiser … accuses [Bethmann] of too much partiality for the civilians against the military.” The kaiser expected his chancellor to defend his army. German citizens expected the government to defend their civil liberties. Alsatians required special attention. In 1911, Bethmann had persuaded the kaiser to grant a new constitution to the Reichsland (Alsace-Lorraine), providing for greater local self-government. Saber rule in Zabern, Bethmann knew, had jeopardized its objective—to knit the conquered provinces into the fabric of Germany.39
