Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

The experience of neglect extended well beyond the household. The war had a devastating impact on the public institution that normally supervised German children from the ages of six to fourteen. As the excitement of the war’s first weeks subsided, schools yielded to more urgent demands.60 School buildings were transformed into hospitals, their former occupants banished into whatever quarters they could find. In the small city of Speyer on the Rhine River, for instance, every schoolhouse hosted the army’s wards in the fall of 1914.61 Schoolteachers, too, increasingly heeded the call to the colors. In the town of Schwäbisch Hall in Württemberg, twenty of the school district’s sixty-six teachers were called up.62 By the end of 1915 one out of every four elementary schoolteachers in Germany was in the army; and the shortage of teachers became more paralyzing as the pressures of mobilization increased, despite efforts to recruit retired teachers back into the classroom. The shortage of teachers combined with shortages of space to make classes larger and instruction truncated. In Freiburg in 1916, 132 teachers – about half the prewar total – were expected to educate the city’s 10,175 public school students (the teacher–student ratio was 1:79).63 The dearth of farm labor recommended long vacations for schoolchildren in the summer and early fall, while coal shortages mandated long breaks from unheated schoolrooms in the winter. By the end of the war children in many parts of the country were in school only a few hours a week.

  The effect of some forms of neglect was palpable. The war made German children smaller physically. After the war, studies revealed that schoolchildren were on average several centimeters shorter and several kilograms lighter than prewar norms for their age groups.64 Children also suffered disproportionately from diseases bred by malnutrition, inadequate shelter, and poor hygiene. Shortages of animal fats put soap in short supply; as a result, clothes, underclothes, and linens (to say nothing of bodies, young and old) remained dirty. Intestinal disorders, chronic anemia, and tuberculosis were rampant, as was rickets, which, by one estimate, afflicted nearly 40 percent of Germany’s children. The fact that doctors observed great increases in nervousness and bed-wetting among children suggested that material deprivation exacted a psychological price as well.

  Like the young people of Ernst Glaeser’s fictional Class of 1902, children and youths were left to undergo formative experiences of life and love in a world largely unattended by adults.65 Military and civilian authorities soon grew alarmed at some of the consequences, which were epitomized in movie houses and the trashy literature that circulated clandestinely. To combat what they called the “moral dissolution” (Verwahrlosung) of Germany’s youth, the authorities enlisted young people into all manner of war-related activities, in hopes of providing constructive occupation for them and elevating morale on the home front generally. Placing children in the fields at harvest time fell into this category, as did door-to-door canvassing by schoolchildren to promote war bonds or to collect donations of money, household objects made of metal, and old clothes for the poor. A network of paramilitary organizations occupied hundreds of thousands of older boys with premilitary training – and real weapons – under the supervision of reserve officers. Nonetheless, a dramatic increase in criminality among young Germans, particularly among German boys, nurtured the worst fears. Cutting school was the most common offense, and it reached epidemic proportions. In the city of Cologne the rate of unexcused absences among schoolboys rose from 15 percent to 48 percent during the first three years of the war. The court records documented comparable increases in more serious crimes during the war (see Figure 8).

  Figure 8 Youth criminality Source: Moritz Liepmann, Krieg und Kriminalität in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1930), 98.

  That neglect played a major role in driving these figures was hard to dispute. A survey of young criminals in Berlin revealed that, in nine out of ten cases, the mother was either employed outside the home, incapacitated, or otherwise absent. Young people thus sought the support of one another, and much of their criminal activity became organized. Many of the informal youth clubs that took shape in German cities during the war became difficult to distinguish from gangs.

  The war also provided its characteristic endings to the German rites of youth. Children of all social classes found that portents of wartime adulthood awaited them after the age of fourteen. For boys, the prospect of armed service loomed within three or four years. Boys in secondary schools prepared for this passage in regular military training, which became part of their curriculum. The relaxation of child labor laws meant that many young people of the working class – boys in particular – experienced full-time employment in their early teens. By 1917 over 300,000 youths between the ages of fourteen and sixteen were at work in factories. Although many of them filled unskilled, low-paying positions, their wages represented an essential part of the family’s budget. The spectacle of young workers with money in their pockets nonetheless conjured up additional anxieties about the breakdown of order. Especially disquieting was the specter of the young male worker “in his silk waistcoat picking up prostitutes,” because his consumption challenged the social order, his promiscuity mocked the gendered order, and his impertinence was an affront to the authority of his parents.66 These anxieties prompted the military authorities to address the temptations of youthful dissolution in a number of decrees, which imposed early curfews, barred young people from movie theaters, and forbade them to smoke in public. Lower-class youths were the targets of most of the prohibitions. The same young people were also the objects of the most mean-spirited of these measures, which operated in military districts that housed major industrial centers (including Berlin). It prescribed compulsory savings accounts, into which young workers were required to deposit the major portion of their wages. This arrangement mollified the social prejudices that had inspired it, but it provided only a gratuitous indignity and material hardship to the working-class families that depended on the wages that it blocked.

  Generalizations about the long-term political consequences of the war on young people are as tempting as they are risky. One historian has argued that the absence of millions of fathers left unresolved oedipal tensions in a “youth cohort,” which was later drawn, as a consequence, to Hitler.67 Evidence suggests the particular vulnerability of the male cohort of “war youths” from the Protestant middle classes, boys who were born between 1900 and 1908 (or 1910). Their experience of the war was refracted through the propaganda, which enhanced the expectation that they themselves would soon see action. The abrupt military collapse in 1918 might well have awakened traumatic feelings of inadequacy among many of these “victory watchers,” who (and here the evidence is more substantial) subsequently devoured literature about the war or became active in militant nationalist organizations. Over three-quarters of the top echelons of the central National Socialist police agency, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, belonged to this cohort.68 But more than generational factors were at play. Young people who experienced the war in a working-class milieu were more likely to follow another political trajectory after the war, in which the militancy was wed ideologically to Marxism.

  The war also weighed heavily on the elderly. Some 2,500,000 Germans who greeted the war in 1914 had been born before 1855. For them, the ensuing experience was marked by many of the same hazards that afflicted the very young. They, too, were particularly vulnerable to malnutrition and exposure. Like children, they paid disproportionate costs for the decline in healthcare that accompanied the call-up of physicians for military duty. The mortality of the elderly would have been high in any circumstances because of their advanced age, but the war accelerated it, as the statistics showed (see Figure 9). Elderly German women displayed consistently higher mortality rates than their counterparts on the British Isles, who were spared the shortages of food and fuel to the degree that Germans endured. As these shortages accumulated in Germany, they hastened the deaths of the elderly to respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and pneumonia, which thrived in the conditions of war, as well as to the influenza that v
isited Germany in 1918.

  Figure 9 Mortality rates of women in Germany and England and Wales Source: Bumm and Abel, Deutschlands Gesundheitsverhältnisse, I, 53.

  The war imposed other, less tangible cruelties on the elderly. Old age brought little joy even in peacetime. Imperial Germany had the most progressive system of pension benefits in the world, but payments were not available to all retired workers, nor were they remotely adequate to sustain a modest household, especially given the ravages of inflation. For Germans who were poor, old age usually meant long-term reliance on family and friends in any circumstances. The war increased the material and psychological burdens of this condition on everyone involved, particularly on the elderly themselves, for, as their young relatives were being destroyed, their own labors were of little use even in the national emergency. Many of them found solace in church.

  Confession

  Social groups that were defined by generation, gender, and class transected still another category of social division in Germany. This one was based on confession – the social allegiances and practices that grew out of religious beliefs. Imperial Germany’s confessional divisions were pervasive and deep-seated. They remained central to civic life in Germany, and they figured prominently in the experience of war. The civic truce that was proclaimed to patriotic jubilation at the war’s beginning was supposed to suspend, if not dissolve, confessional conflict in the great national community then taking shape. This dimension of the Burgfrieden was critical to the success of the war effort, for both Protestant and Catholic churches were central agents of moral mobilization. In the first stages of the war, hopes for confessional cooperation appeared to be vindicated. The German Catholic church proved almost as convinced in its support of the war as did the Protestant church.

  This was a considerable feat. No sector of the population was more ardent a supporter of the war than the German Protestant Church.69 The close tie between Thron und Altar molded the political loyalties of the Protestant clergy, as well as their thinking about war. Many pastors found a compelling theological justification for war in the doctrine of the “two kingdoms,” which portrayed warfare as an inescapable feature of an earthly realm of sin and depravity. But the Protestant approach to war in 1914 was hardly fatalistic; it betrayed the ease with which Protestant theology had long lent its sanction to the aggressive designs of German nationalism. The fact that the coalition arrayed against Germany included Catholic France and Orthodox Russia supported the belief that the country was fighting in the name of the true – Protestant – Christianity and that the triumph of German imperial ambitions corresponded to the designs of God.

  The outbreak of the war thus brought the amplification of themes that were already well defined in Protestant thinking, which now became known generally as Kriegstheologie, or “war theology.”70 Its tenets and tenor were well captured in the German curse hurled at the apostate Protestant power: “May God punish England!” War theology resounded throughout German Protestantism, from top church officials and theology professors to parish priests. It provided a powerful representation of the war, which it framed in the light of divine will and German destiny. Apart from the blood-curdling sermons, many of which were published in order to quicken public morale, Protestant services were difficult to distinguish from the patriotic rallies that secular authorities organized. Secular patriotic themes intruded into the liturgy, and patriotic songs were sung in lieu of hymns. These rituals continued throughout the war. They culminated, in 1917, in an orgy of Protestant self-congratulation in connection with the Lutherfeier, the four-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses. There were only a few voices of doubt, caution, or moderation. The most important of these were associated with the journal Die Christliche Welt and its editor, Martin Rade, who taught theology at the university in Marburg.71 But, even when they were not censored, these voices were drowned out in a loud Protestant chorus that sang of annexations and a victorious peace until the bitter end.

  The marriage of nationalism and Protestant theology accompanied the rejuvenation of parish life in Protestant communities after decades of growing secularization and religious indifference. Attendance increased at church services and other activities. Protestant churches became bulwarks of the war effort at home. Beyond stoking public morale, they provided private solace and spiritual support at a time when these services were in heavy demand. Parishes were centers of sociability for young and old. Protestant churches and their auxiliaries, particularly their women’s organizations, had long been prominent in local charities; and the war brought the expansion of these efforts. Finally, the contribution of the Protestant clergy extended to the fighting front. Close to 1,000 Protestant clergymen served as chaplains to the army and navy, many of them frustrated that they could not, by law, themselves bear arms in combat.

  Most of the generalizations that described the experience of the Protestant churches in wartime applied as well to German Catholicism.72 The clerical hierarchy rallied to the war effort. So did Catholic university students.73 Catholic parish life took on renewed vigor, as priests and lay organizations became props of both spiritual life and civic charity in a time of great duress. In Catholic parishes, too, as one clergyman noted, one heard “sermons that could have been given almost as easily in a patriotic assembly or a class in civic loyalty.”74 At the front, Catholic chaplains ministered to Catholic regiments. The vigor of Catholic support for the war betrayed a determination to show that their national loyalties were no less genuine than Protestants’. Catholic thinking on the subject of war was governed in principle by the doctrine of the “just war,” the legitimacy of which was never in question. In practice, this principle admitted of such flexible interpretation that German and French Catholics alike could appeal to it. The German Catholic representation of the conflict resembled the Protestant vision in remarkable respects. Catholics, too, insisted that the German armies represented a special vehicle of God’s will, which had ordained, among other things, the punishment of French Catholics, who had fallen from the true faith into secularism, rationalism, and modernism. In the eyes of some Catholics, the war offered the hope of healing the great schism in German Christianity and the reconstruction of a single church on German soil. This hope was baseless, but the readmission of the Jesuits to Germany in 1917 kept alive the Catholic hope for some form of confessional reconciliation.75

  Despite these wartime affinities with the Protestants, Catholic support for the war proved less unequivocal. As the war dragged on, evidence of fatigue surfaced at the grass roots in sectors of German Catholicism that bore the heaviest privations, particularly in its working-class wing, whose political leaders began in 1916 to speak out in favor of a compromise peace. In 1917 the position of German Catholics became more problematic. In August Pope Benedict XV, who had assiduously guarded his neutrality in a conflict that had enveloped two-thirds of his entire flock, called publicly for a negotiated end to the slaughter. This development, which seemed to deploy the church’s highest authority on behalf of a compromise peace, drove tensions into the open that had been building not only within Catholicism but between Germany’s leading confessional groups. The papal peace note encouraged left-wing Catholics who were advocating a negotiated peace, but it encountered little sympathy among the Catholic aristocracy or upper bourgeoisie, nor among the high clergy. The German Catholic leadership attempted to quiet the calls for an end to the war, noting that the Pope had spoken out not as the spiritual leader of Catholicism but as the secular ruler of the Vatican state. The specter of discord among German Catholics over continuation of the war also revived other confessional tensions. Prominent Protestants who had protested against the return of the Jesuits to Germany began publicly once again to question the patriotism of German Catholics.

  Whether or not Germany’s 500,000 Jewish citizens constituted a confession was a principal object of debate during the war.76 Prejudices against Jews had been widespread in Germany on the eve of the war. The
y took many forms, including systematic exclusion from public service; but only the radical nationalists were prepared to call for stripping German Jews of their civic rights, on the grounds that Jews belonged to a foreign ethnic or racial group. The vast majority of German Jews themselves argued that they were distinguished from other Germans by confessional allegiance alone, that Judaism represented a set of religious beliefs, like Protestantism or Catholicism. The war appeared at first to ratify this view. In the spirit of the Burgfrieden, German Jews, like German Catholics, demonstrated the authenticity of their patriotism. More than 10,000 volunteered for service in the first weeks of the war. As young Jewish men marched willingly to their deaths at the front, Jewish organizations of all descriptions joined in the mobilization of matériel and morale on the home front.77 In the same spirit, the army’s leadership removed a major barrier to Jewish civic equality when it agreed to commission Jewish officers, while the deputy commanding generals suppressed the writings of prominent anti-Semites.

  The spirit of accommodation soon dissipated amid the growing frustrations of war. Incidents of anti-Semitism multiplied within the army, and the restraints on anti-Semitic propaganda slackened at home, as old stereotypes adjusted quickly to new conditions. The stalemate, food shortages, inflation, and bureaucratic chaos begged for explanation, which the figure of the Jew now offered as the symbol of profiteering, slacking, and defeatism. In 1916 the military authorities connived in this symbolism when they undertook a census of Jews in the army.78 Reports of the census became public; the results did not. The army thus lent credibility to the accusation that Jews were evading military service; so did the fact that the Prussian army thereupon ceased promoting Jews to be officers. The statistics from the census, had they been released, would have showed the charges of evasion to be as baseless as the proposition that Jews stood out among the war’s profiteers – an idea that rested largely on the fact, which was indisputable, that Walther Rathenau, who had organized the mobilization of raw materials, was a Jew.