by Peter Watson
Schliemann had a colorful life, although—it is almost certainly true to say—not quite as colorful as he would like us to believe.26 For Schliemann, while undoubtedly romantic, was a proven liar, and maybe a liar on an epic scale. Born in 1822 in Neu-Bukow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, he was yet another son of a pastor. He had a whole career, a whole life, before he took up archaeology—as a grocer’s apprentice, a cabin boy, an agent in an import/export firm in St. Petersburg, where he prospered and learned Russian and Greek. He started a bank in Sacramento, California, making a fortune in six months by buying and reselling gold dust, returning to Russia, where he met his first wife, Ekaterina. She thought Heinrich was richer than he was, and when she discovered her mistake, she withheld conjugal rights. This had the desired effect, and he cornered the market in indigo, to such effect that Ekaterina bore him three children. In the Crimean War (1854–56), Schliemann further cornered the market in saltpeter, brimstone, and lead, all needed in ammunition, and made a further fortune from the Russian government. Only after all this, in the late 1860s, did Schliemann turn to archaeology.
Schliemann sank himself into the Greek world, going so far as to divorce Ekaterina (in America, after a series of subterfuges) and advertise for a Greek wife in the Athenian press—he chose her from a clutch of photographs submitted.
By the nineteenth century, the actual site of Troy was far from certain (in the eighteenth century people could fall out for a lifetime arguing where it was). Nowadays, there are scholars who doubt that it ever existed or that the Trojan War ever took place, and who think therefore that Homer’s classics are works of fiction. Nonetheless, over the centuries three sites have competed for the honor. Until Christian times, few doubted that Troy was identical with the “Village of the Ilians” at the hill of Hissarlik, near the Simois River. The geographer Strabo, on the other hand, opted for Callicolone, farther south and farther inland, which had two springs close together, which Homer describes and are not found at Hissarlik. Later travelers favored Alexandria Troas, an impressive set of ruins on the coast, but much farther south still.
Schliemann was not a scientific historian, nor an archaeologist, something that would rankle with Curtius. But Schliemann was the first to use excavation to test a hypothesis, and this use of the “experimental method,” according to many, makes him the true father of archaeology.27
His excavation of Hissarlik started in 1869. Part of the land where the great mound was located was owned by the controversial American consul in the area, Frank Calvert, and he and Schliemann formed what would become an uneasy partnership.28 Over the years, Schliemann (and others) discovered several layers on the site, as many as seven—or even eight—cities, one on top of the other. Two problems dogged him. One was the massive trench he dug to enable him to inspect all levels quickly, and that, in view of what happened—or didn’t happen—later, may well have destroyed the evidence that could have decided matters one way or the other. This trench showed shards of material quite high up in the sequence that were obviously much older than the period of the Trojan War. The second problem was his discovery, in May 1873, of the so-called treasure of Priam. This was found at a level quite inconsistent with the Trojan War, and rumors quickly spread that he had bought the pieces on the black market and put them together to make a synthetic hoard. The entries in his notebooks didn’t tally either.
The discovery of the treasure of course made for a romantic story, and with it Schliemann found the fame he undoubtedly sought. However, the controversy surrounding the treasure has never gone away. It was looted in Berlin at the end of the Second World War and only recently put on display in Moscow.
Nor was his reputation enhanced by his later digs at Mycenae. Here his achievement is more solid because little was known of the Mycenaean civilization at that point, and Schliemann uncovered a series of shaft graves and some wonderful gold ornaments “that are now the glory of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.”29 Here too, however, the famous gold mask found in the fifth shaft grave does, for many people, bear a mustache that is particularly nineteenth-century in character.
Schliemann dug elsewhere—at Tiryns, Orchomenos, and Crete—before returning in 1882 to Hissarlik. By now he had the sense to enlist a proper professional archaeologist as his assistant/partner, and it was this man, Wilhelm Dörpfeld (“Schliemann’s greatest find”), who had worked with Curtius at Olympia, who may well have found the real Troy.30 In the spring of 1893, two years after Schliemann’s death (on December 26, in Naples), Dörpfeld opened up the southern side of Hissarlik and immediately struck walls far more magnificent than Schliemann had ever found, with a pronounced “batter” or angle, as mentioned in Homer (when Patroclus tries to scale the wall), together with an angular watchtower and two important gates. Inside were large, noble houses, from the layout of which he was able to deduce that they were arranged in concentric circles. No less important, Dörpfeld found everywhere the remains of Mycenaean pottery, exactly the same as Schliemann had found at Mycenae. Finally, he found evidence of a great fire that had ended the site, designated as Troy VI.
Not everyone accepts that Troy VI is Homer’s city—the American Carl Blegen later argued for Troy VIIa—and maybe it never will be settled. It is also unlikely we shall ever again have an archaeologist as colorful and controversial as Schliemann.
Schliemann arranged with Bismarck for his discoveries to be displayed in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (five halls all marked “SCHLIE-MANN”) and this was soon built on. The growing national consciousness of the late nineteenth century would eventually be expressed (and not just in Germany) in museums as much as in military affairs. The Berlin Museum, on an island in the Spree and designed by Schinkel, had been approved in 1823 and featured a massive Ionic colonnade of eighteen columns. Only genuine sculptures were admitted (there were to be no casts), and antiquities of all periods were gradually assembled, designed to appeal to the public, the artist, and the scholar—in that order.31 But it wasn’t for another fifty years that the Berlin Museum accepted its first work of world importance: the altar of Zeus from Pergamum.
Pergamum was, of course, one of the great cities of the Hellenistic world, rising in importance after the death of Alexander the Great; it was the site of one of antiquity’s most famous libraries—2,000 volumes in all. There were many temples in Pergamum, but the glory was the altar of Zeus, on the highest hill. It was famous in antiquity for its brilliant sculptures and friezes, 120 meters in length. In the third century, Ampelius described it to his friend Macrinus as one of the Wonders of the World: “a marble altar forty feet high with very large sculptures; and it portrays the Gigantomachy” (the battle of the gods and the giants, before humans were formed).
By 1871, when Carl Humann, an engineer and architect from Essen who, like Schliemann, had a fascination with archaeology, first began to excavate at Pergamum, the city was run down, many of its ancient stone blocks plundered by Turkish builders. Humann’s brother, Franz, had acquired various rail and trade concessions from the sultan, and Carl worked with him. They secured permission to dig and were visited by Ernst Curtius as it soon became clear that spectacular discoveries were being made. Most notable were a series of slabs of bluish marble, which were sent on to Berlin. There, the new director of the sculpture gallery, Alexander Conze, came across a reference in Ampelius that caused him to realize that Humann had excavated—was still excavating—the Gigantomachy itself. In all, thirty-nine slabs were unearthed, ten free-standing statues, and many inscriptions. The next year another twenty-five slabs, including that of Zeus with his giant opponent, were uncovered, along with thirty-seven statues.
Because Turkey was then very poor, the sultan sold his interest to the Germans, and the altar of Pergamum became, with Priam’s treasure, the first great archaeological discovery to go on display in Berlin, in 1880. The Royal Museum in Berlin, under Conze, now gained an “overwhelming lead” in the display of treasures from the Greek lands.32
By then, the
French, British, and Americans had all established their own archaeological institutes in Greece and Italy. It was not only Mommsen, Sybel, and Treitschke who felt the call of nationalism.
22.
The Pathologies of Nationalism
Militarism as we know it, modern militarism, probably emerged in the eighteenth century when the rise of absolutism was accompanied by the growth of large-scale military organizations to support princely power.1 Even then, though, because most of the soldiers had to travel on foot, the size of armies was limited. That, as we have seen, changed with Napoleon’s introduction of the citizen army, which made fighting units much bigger and meant far more people had the experience of being in the military. In Prussia, after his victories, Napoleon confined the army to 42,000 men. The king responded by dismissing all the soldiers after twelve months and inducting another 42,000, a process he repeated the following year. In turn, the industrial revolution, the development of techniques of mass production, together with developments in metal technology resulting from the steam engine, meant that weapons were more plentiful as well as more terrible. The development of the railways added the dimension of greater mobility to war, marking another radical transformation. The rise of imperialism and colonial expansion later in the nineteenth century contributed a further twist, not least in the way the campaigns and victories in far-off lands helped glorify military values. These factors affected all nations.
That said, there were a number of elements special to Germany that caused people to identify “Prussian militarism” as something set apart. There was, for example, what has been called a “military revolution” in the 1860s.2 This was a unique short-service system, insisted upon by King Wilhelm I against Liberal opposition. It ensured three years’ obligatory service in the regular army and another four in the reserve, meaning Prussia had a far larger front-line army relative to its size than any other European power.
A second factor was the Prussian General Staff. This, according to Paul Kennedy, “rose from obscurity in the early 1860s to be ‘the brains of the army’ under the elder [Helmuth von] Moltke’s genius.” Before this date there had been no general staff beyond the quartermaster, other staff officers being recruited for specific campaigns, often not far in advance. Moltke now chose the best of the products of the War Academy and taught them to prepare for possible future conflicts, updating their plans as a result of the study of history, war games, and maneuvers. “A special department was created to supervise the Prussian railway system and make sure that troops and supplies could be speeded to their destinations.”3 Above all, the officers were taught Clausewitz’s doctrine of the decisive battle, and to be prepared to bring large bodies of men to converge on the crucial location, using their own initiative if communications were disrupted. This combination of factors gave the Prussians decisive—and relatively swift—victories in 1866 and 1870 where, in the latter case, within a fortnight of the declaration of war, three armies (300,000+ men) were sent to the Saarland and Alsace.
It was this system that, under Bismarck’s leadership, would come to dominate Europe, what Nicholas Stargardt calls “the new militarism,” shifting the European center of gravity to Berlin.4 It was underpinned by the fact that, from the 1860s on, when the new Prussian military system took hold, the trend to industrialization intensified, a matter that cannot be ignored. How quickly the balance shifted among the Great Powers is shown most vividly in the statistics:
TOTAL POPULATION OF THE GREAT WESTERN POWERS (MILLIONS)
Russia
1890: 116.8
1913: 175.1
% CHANGE: 149.9
United States
1890: 62.6
1913: 97.3
% CHANGE: 155.4
Britain
1890: 37.4
1913: 44.4
% CHANGE: 118.7
France
1890: 38.3
1913: 39.7
% CHANGE: 103.6
Germany
1890: 49.2
1913: 66.9
% CHANGE: 135.9
Austria-Hungary
1890: 42.6
1913: 52.1
% CHANGE: 122.3
PER CAPITA LEVELS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION
Russia
1880: 10
1913: 20
% CHANGE: 200
United States
1880: 38
1913: 126
% CHANGE: 332
Britain*
1880: 87
1913: 115
% CHANGE: 132
France
1880: 28
1913: 59
% CHANGE: 211
Germany
1880: 25
1913: 85
% CHANGE: 340
Austria-Hungary
1880: 15
1913: 32
% CHANGE: 213
RELATIVE SHARE OF WORLD MANUFACTURING OUTPUT
Russia
1880: 7.6
1913: 8.2
% CHANGE: 8.0
United States
1880: 14.7
1913: 32.0
% CHANGE: 18
Britain
1880: 22.9
1913: 13.6
% CHANGE:–41
France
1880: 7.8
1913: 6.1
% CHANGE:–28
Germany
1880: 8.5
1913: 14.8
% CHANGE: 74
Austria-Hungary
1880: 4.4
1913: 4.4
% CHANGE: 0.05
These figures are not, of course, in themselves evidence for militarism, but taken together they do underline Germany’s material progress, both a symptom and a cause of greater nationalistic feeling, and they are in any case paralleled by changes in military capabilities:
MILITARY AND NAVAL PERSONNEL OF THE POWERS
Russia
1880: 791,000
1914: 1,352,000
% CHANGE: 171
United States
1880: 34,000
1914: 164,000
% CHANGE: 482
Britain
1880: 367,000
1914: 532,000
% CHANGE: 145
France
1880: 543,000
1914: 910,000
% CHANGE: 168
Germany
1880: 426,000
1914: 891,000
% CHANGE: 209
Austria-Hungary
1880: 216,000
1914: 444,000
% CHANGE: 206
WARSHIP TONNAGE
Russia
1880: 200,000
1914: 679,000
% CHANGE: 340
United States
1880: 169,000
1914: 985,000
% CHANGE: 583
Britain
1880: 650,000
1914: 2,714,000
% CHANGE: 418
France
1880: 271,000
1914: 900,000
% CHANGE: 332
Germany
1880: 88,000
1914: 1,305,000
% CHANGE: 1,483
Austria-Hungary
1880: 60,000
1914: 372,000
% CHANGE: 620
Germany was at the very heart of Europe, geographically speaking, and the very speed of its transformation was an issue in itself. “This alone was to make ‘the German question’ the epicentre of so much of world politics for more than half a century after 1890.” The quality of Germany’s military personnel was dramatically underlined by one study that showed the number of illiterate recruits in Italy was 330 out of 1,000, 220/1,000 in Austria-Hungary, 68/1,000 in France, but only 1/1,000 in Germany.6
The Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League) and the Deutscher Flottenverein (German Navy League) were only too happy to reinforce this tendency. The Pan-German League was formed after Kaiser Wilhelm II had ceded Zanzibar to Britain in exchange for the island of He
lgoland.7 This strategic withdrawal did not go down well with certain sectors of the German public, especially as it followed quickly the dismissal of Bismarck. A young collaborator of Krupp’s, Alfred Hugenberg, founded the Pan-German League, and its expansionist policy soon received the support of thousands—if not tens of thousands—of Germans, some of whom, like Ernst Haeckel, Max Weber, and Gustav Stresemann, were distinguished in other fields, though others, like the British-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain, were little more than rabid racists. In 1908 Heinrich Class became the leader of the movement and made it even more extreme, advocating a merciless struggle against the Social Democratic Party, campaigning for the expulsion of Jews to Palestine and the annexation of lands to the east of the Dnieper. Their views overlapped with Treitschke’s but many others among Germany’s ruling elite became convinced of the need for territorial expansion “when the time was ripe.” Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz in particular argued that Germany’s industrialization and overseas conquests were “as irresistible as natural law.”8 Not that Germany stood out too much in this regard—imperial belligerence was just as prevalent at the time in Britain, France, and Japan.
But there could be no doubting that Germany’s military build-up was more impressive than anyone else’s, the most awesome aspect being the rapid expansion of its navy after 1898, which under Tirpitz was transformed from the world’s sixth largest to the second largest, after Britain’s Royal Navy.9 A final factor that set German militarism apart from anyone else’s was her geographical location. She was, as David Calleo put it, “born encircled.” Because Germany lay at the center of a continent, Germans were always prone to see themselves as encircled—and threatened—by France, Britain, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. This meant that Germany relied far more on statecraft than did other nations and, after Bismarck had been dismissed, that crucial ingredient was lacking.10
