by Hew Strachan
Implicit in Weber’s formulation was his recognition that the threat was insidious. Even in late July 1914 Germany had preferred to see itself as the guardian of the civilization of western Europe against Russia. Animosity towards Britain was moderated by the common inheritance of Protestantism. But by the same token, Britain’s decision to side with the enemy required more explanation. Its entry into the war was construed as a massive betrayal. Within days, Britain had replaced Russia as the focus for German hatred. Friedrich-Wilhelm Foerster rationalized Britain’s behaviour in terms of a dualism not unlike that used by British commentators in regard to Germany. In 1914 the evil, imperialist side of Britain had triumphed over its better, peace-loving aspect. Others were less forgiving: Britain’s decision was selfish and exploitative. The war did not confront Britain itself with any direct threat, and its effects could not be morally uplifting when Britain had no intention of committing itself wholeheartedly to its conduct. War, by definition, could not be a source of spiritual elevation when its motivation was economic gain. The clash of philosophies was rendered in popular terms. Britain’s decision to side with France and Russia was evidence of its perfidy, and its determination to do so was driven by its pursuit of mammon. Neither honour nor spirit was part of its conceptual vocabulary.76
Thus, the outbreak of the war itself marked a change in patterns of thought. Ernst Troeltsch saw it as evidence that ideas stemmed from events, not events from ideas.77 The reworking of the legacies of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution was not simply a means by which Germany rediscovered its cultural roots; it also helped put a shape on time. The long nineteenth century, which began in 1789, had ended in 1914. If the first date marked the French Revolution, the second marked the German one. The ‘ideas of 1914’, however much they tapped into the thought of Kant, Hegel, or Fichte, were essentially a new departure. In Die Ideen von 1914 (The ideas of 1914) (1915), Rudolf Kjellen, a Swedish economist, associated the French Revolution with freedom and the ongoing German revolution with its replacement by order and responsibility. Johann Plenge picked up these points in 1916 with 1789 und 1914. Die symbolischen Jahre in der Geschichte des politischen Geistes (1789 and 1914. The symbolic years in the history of the political spirit).
Germany’s mission, according to Kjellen, was ‘leadership without domination’. World powers had followed one of two models—the Roman, with its tendency to centralize and dominate in a political sense, and the Greek, with its patriarchal presumption of superior values. Britain had veered to the latter, but had not abandoned the former. Germany’s task was to promote a third way.78 ‘German freedom’, Ernst Troeltsch explained, ‘has no craving for world domination, either materially or spiritually. Germany wants freedom of coexistence for various peoples and not the extermination of different possibilities of development nor stereotyping in the name of some alleged law.’79 Herein were the intellectual foundations for the national liberation movements which Germany sponsored for India, Persia, Tunisia, Egypt, Ireland, and elsewhere. The challenge was to relate means to ends. To beat the British, it had first to join them. Germany’s ability to implement the new order was predicated on its achieving world-power status through victory on the battlefield.80
Britain was a declining power, as Gerhart von Schulz-Gaevernitz had argued in 1906.81 It therefore had a vested interest in the status quo, because only thus could it buttress a position which it could no longer sustain by other means. Germany, on the other hand, was in the ascendant, a young nation with a young Kaiser, prepared to embrace innovation in the sciences and the arts. The world’s need to advance forced it to fight: progress was impossible without Germany’s acceptance of its role as a revisionist power. The idea that Germany went to war as an escape from its domestic dilemma, as a way of resolving the challenge to its conservative elites and of evading pressure for constitutional change, assumes a mood of cultural despair. But many of the Kaiser’s own generation saw doors opening, not closing. Adolf von Harnack, the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, expected the marriage of traditionalism and modernism to lead ‘to an unprecedented increase in the vitality of the German organism’.82 Karl Helfferich, banker not Junker, born in 1872, likened Wilhelm’s reign to the Renaissance. In Deutschlands Volkswohlstand 1888–1913 (Germany’s national wealth, 1888–1913), published in 1913, he believed that Germany’s economic development was proving Marxism wrong.83 For many Germans the example of France suggested that full-blown parliamentary government implied atrophy, decay, and disorder. The war intensified Germany’s responsibility for renewal. ‘The German eagle’, Paul Natorp wrote in Krieg und Friede (War and peace) in 1915, ‘is not like the bird of Minerva, which, according to Hegel, first begins its flight at dusk. We signify the morning chorus of a new day not only for Germany, but also for mankind.’84
The so-called failure of German liberals and social democrats to remain true to their beliefs in 1914 becomes more comprehensible when set against the rhetoric of reform rather than reaction. During August 1914 the SPD press was ready to redirect its ire from Russian tsarism to the British bourgeoisie.85 In Die Sozialdemokratie (1915) Paul Lensch used Hegel to argue that Britain had fulfilled its world-historical role, that individualism and liberalism, the British way, had been absorbed, and that now it was Germany’s turn to pioneer the nationalization of social democracy.86 For the liberals, national survival and national identity were sufficiently central to make the appeals of 1914 not uncongenial. Friedrich Naumann argued that British liberalism was inappropriate to Germany, with its different traditions and its greater deference to order and authority. Neither he nor Max Weber could embrace full-blooded parliamentary government with the enthusiasm of a Gladstonian. While their suspicions of the popular will would not have been unfamiliar to mid-nineteenth-century British liberals, their articulation of the alternatives carried collectivist overtones that sprang from very different roots. The people and the state should be united in terms which clearly tapped into the ideas of Kultur. The state itself would implement social reform on the worker’s behalf but without itself being fully democratic. Instead, a dualism of democracy and monarchy, das soziale Volkskaisertum, would represent a new synthesis.87
The immediate effect of the war was to solidify the intellectual underpinnings of the monarchy rather than undermine them. The balance of the Bismarckian constitution provided a security against the irrational excesses of the masses, while the unity provide by the crown eliminated the divisions and instability characteristic of republican France. ‘We Germans’, Kalweit, the chairman of the Danzig church consistory explained, ‘are born monarchists.’ That did not mean blind allegiance to princes, but that they saw the value in the embodiment of the idea of the state’s unity and will in a living person. The words ‘monarchy’ and ‘democracy’ too easily suggested an antithesis, Kalweit argued. He preferred to use Kaiserherrlichkeit and Volksmacht, which not only linked abstractions to people but also—more debatably—implied convergence.88
Therefore, for many liberals and even some socialists German freedom was distinct from the freedoms of revolutionary France or liberal Britain. In December 1915 Kurt Riezler tried to define these opposing conceptions of freedom. The west European powers practised ‘freedom without regulation, with the fewest possible concessions by the individual to the state, freedom through equality, the formula of the French Revolution’. German freedom, on the other hand, had evolved out of its reaction to the ideas of 1789, and had been defined by Fichte as freedom through the state, an organization set above the individual. The latter was ‘ready to concede to the state in all respects, as the state’s strengths should be the function of a freedom in which every man is ranked according to his own strengths, but not valued equally’.89 One gain for the individual was the sense of meaning which arose from sharing in a common endeavour. But more important was the freedom for the spirit which order bestowed. Ernst Troeltsch, who before the war had written on the significance of Protestantism for the modern world, was t
he key figure in linking this balance between public duty and inner life to Lutheranism. In Die deutsche Freiheit (The German freedom) (1915) he emphasized that the ‘progress in the idea of freedom’ which 1914 signified ‘in the first place must be a thing of feeling and life style, but then also the clearly recognisable spirit of our public arrangements’.90
The war, therefore, conferred on Germany the opportunity to propagate ‘a third way’ in political thought as well as in international relations, a path between capitalism and Marxism, individualism and collectivism. Johann Plenge’s celebration of the ‘ideas of 1914’ argued that ‘under the necessity of war socialist ideas have been driven into German economic life, its organization has grown together into a new spirit, and so the assertion of our nation for mankind has given birth to the idea of 1914, the idea of German organization, the national unity of state socialism’.91 Rathenau, who through the KRA had tried to apply the principles of corporatism to public life, was therefore both putting the Burgfrieden into practice and testing the principles of ‘the new economy’ for possible post-war application. Reflecting later in the war on what had been achieved, he was more hesitant than Plenge in referring to socialism. ‘The new economy’ was not so much a creation of the state as an organic growth, established through the resolve of citizens, enabled by the intermediary of the state freely to unite to overcome rivalry between themselves and to co-ordinate their different achievements and qualities. The key words were rationalization and responsibility rather than self-interest and profit: the result would be—and here Rathenau used the title of Wichard von Moellendorff’s 1916 publication—a Gemeinwirtschaft.92
For Paul Lensch, one of the advocates of state socialism, it was the primacy of the community which defined Germany as a modern state, just as it was the principle of individualism which now characterized Britain as backward. Lensch saw Germany’s lead over Britain as manifested in three fundamental attributes—universal compulsory education, universal suffrage, and universal military service.93 Militarism and socialism were therefore not in tension, but were supporting attributes of the new state. The pre-war argument of the right, that the army was the school of the nation by virtue of its ability to inculcate subordination and service to the community, was now assimilated further to the left. Scheler saw militarism in the sense of conscription as evidence not of barbarism but of a form of higher state development. This admiration for the close links between army and society in Germany was increasingly couched not in the Rousseauesque vocabulary of the nation in arms or of the citizen soldier, but in metaphysical exuberance. For Troeltsch, the Volksheer, ‘an army of the people’, was ‘flesh from our flesh and spirit from our spirit’.94 For Scheler, war was a manly activity which elevated honour and nobility, while subordinating the individual to the state. The experience of war made the collective personalities of nations self-aware: it realized the nation as a ‘spiritual total person’.95 Militarism in this sense not only gave meaning to the community, it also elevated Kultur over civilization. Nachum Goldmann, in Der Geist des Militarismus (The spirit of militarism) (1915), described the military spirit as the means to human progress because it combined equality of opportunity with the virtues of a meritocracy.96 A state which honoured the achievements of soldiers over all others also rewarded obedience, courage, self-confidence, and discipline: ‘order inside and order outside’, as Sombart put it. But in linking militarism back to spirit and to culture Sombart was moved to some of his more excessive statements. Militarism was ‘the manifestation of German heroism’, the union of Potsdam and Weimar: ‘It is Faust and Zarathustra and Beethoven scores in the trenches. Then the Eroica and the Egmont overture are also the most real militarism.’97
Sombart’s hyperbole, its reference to Goethe as well as Nietzsche, encapsulated the core of Entente objections to the German ideologies of 1914. Both Goethe and Nietzsche described themselves as Europeans who happened to be Germans. The presumption in Sombart’s writing was the opposite, that the rest of Europe needed to be Germanized. He saw the German people as the chosen people of the twentieth century; they were as much an elect as the Greeks and the Jews had been. Such a status imposed on Germany hard obligations.98 Ultimately it might have to fight the world to save the world. The messianic implications—and Gotthilf Herzog likened Germany’s burden to that of Christ99—incorporated the sense of mission developed by the war theology of the Lutheran church. Religion and nation became indistinguishable. In a sermon delivered in 1915 in celebration of the Reformation, Friedrich Rittelmeyer asserted that, ‘The German ability for understanding makes us particularly suited to be the nation to bring other, non-Christian nations to Christendom, the German capacity for honesty makes us especially suited to fight the fight between religion and natural science, and the German spiritual sense makes us particularly fitted to fight today’s battle against superficiality and shallowness, against the entire culture of materialist ostentation, which will invade mankind’.100
One German soldier wrote in August 1914: ‘Our victory enables Europe’s survival with an infusion into German culture off fresh blood. The victory will not come easily for us. But if there is any sense of right and of God’s direction in history... then the victory must be ours, sooner or later.’101 Eucken argued that it was this sense of mission which made Germany invincible.102 Germany could not lose, because ‘the defeat of Germanness would signify the collapse of mankind’,103 and it would not lose because defeat was impossible for a nation of believers. The longer the war lasted, the more Dryander and others harped on these aims. The very duration of the conflict became a test of faith and of spiritual resolve.104
Sombart was at pains to stress that the aim was not German expansion in a territorial sense: ‘we have more important things to do. We have our own spiritual existence to unfold, the German soul to keep pure.’105 For some commentators, including Paul Lensch on the left and Oswald Spengler on the right, it was this very characteristic of the First World War—that it was about ideas and principles, and their claims to universality—which likened it to a civil war. And that carried for them not the pejorative connotations of later generations, of brother fighting brother, but the devastation, intensity, and length of the Thirty Years War. Such conflicts were about the issues that really mattered, not about territory or treasury. The difference between civil war as traditionally defined and the world war as they defined it was that now nations rather than classes or social groups appropriated the monopolies in ideas, social structures, and economic organization. In this sense the Weltkrieg was a Weltbürgerkrieg.106
For Scheler, what determined whether a war was just was the commitment of those fighting it to the ideas that were at stake. The quality of those beliefs mattered less than the depth of conviction itself.107 Many of the ‘ideas of 1914’ were as subjective as Scheler’s definition implied; they represented sloppy thinking by academics anxious to integrate their disciplines with the currents of the day. Lumping was more important than splitting, connections more significant than divisions. The results were unscientific. Historians were happy to collude in history as spirit rather than as objective reality; philosophers sought to make politics moral, but instead politicized morality. By late 1915 some, not least in Germany, began to have second thoughts. A minority of German academics, including Troeltsch, recognized the need for an eventual accommodation, particularly with liberalism and the west. Max Weber and Hans Delbrück were both patriots, but were contemptuous of patriotic emotion. Delbrück was one of the few professors who had refused to sign the manifestos of October 1914, and he continued to emphasize more traditional definitions of militarism, with the consequent need for the army and the conduct of war to be subordinated to political direction.108 In 1917 the historian Friedrich Meinecke, who charted a course from enthusiasm to moderation, called for the demobilization of the intellect as a precondition for peace.109 But for most the war’s very nature confirmed and deepened the ideas first hatched in 1914. Its duration and intensity, its geograp
hical extension, its effects on the state and its relationship with its citizens, endorsed rather than undermined the idea that ‘the war’, as the Kaiser wrote to Houston Stewart Chamberlain on 15 January 1917, ‘is the battle between two world views’.110
The Kaiser’s conclusion was that such polarities could never be resolved by reconciliation or negotiation: ‘One must win, the other must go down!’ On his enemy’s side, J. W. Carliol saw the war in very similar terms, albeit much closer to its outbreak: ‘Underneath, and at the root of this Titanic conflict, antagonistic principles and powers, irreconcilable ideas and ideals, the ideals of faith and the ideals of force are contending. These are the sap of the contention: the very breath of its nostrils and the source of its vigour. But for them this war, with its world-encompassing issues, would never have come into being; and until one of them has been utterly vanquished it cannot reach its end.’111
Of course, an assessment of the impact of the ‘ideas of 1914’ requires some quantification of the transfer from published page to public thought. How successful were the intellectuals in shaping their contemporaries’ views of the war? By September 1915 the eighty-seven pamphlets so far published as a result of the initiative of the Oxford History School had a total print-run of 500,000 copies.112 Most of the German pamphlets appeared in a comparable series, Der deutsche Krieg. The absorption of this output in officially directed propaganda confirms at one level that what these economists, historians, and sociologists were doing was no more than saying what their governments wanted them to say. On the other hand, the effectiveness of propaganda is measured not by the nature of its message but by the degree of receptivity it encounters. On this reckoning, the determination of the belligerent states to appropriate the ‘ideas of 1914’ suggests that they were also what the people wanted to hear. Soldiers’ letters, not only of 1914 but later in the war, frequently mouthed the phrases and ambitions of the academics’ outpourings.113
