Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The war-guilt clause also represented the legal foundation on which the Germans were required to pay all the material costs that the victor powers had borne during the war. The payment of these vast sums importuned the republic’s agenda for the next fourteen years. The Germans’ own enormous war debt, which had accumulated during more than four years of public borrowing, evaporated amid the spectacular inflation of the early 1920s. The systematic dilution of the currency with paper drove the logic of wartime finance to a grotesque climax. By design, it paid off the domestic war debt by destroying the currency in which it had been floated; but the same policy also brought the financial obliteration of much of the German middle class, whose savings had been invested during the war in the now worthless bonds. The peace settlement set the Germans’ international debt at $33 billion in reparations to the victorious Allies, a sum that putatively corresponded to their costs of war. The justice, wisdom, and feasibility of these payments remain to this day a subject of controversy. Reparations did nothing, in all events, to promote a stable German financial or economic recovery from the war. They helped instead to pervert patterns of public and private investment in this land; and they encouraged German reliance on an international capital market that was itself distorted by the massive transfers of financial resources that political decisions had now made necessary. The Great Depression, which paralyzed the German economy in 1929, was due in no small degree to the war, for the collapse of the international capital market in the wake of the Wall Street crash resulted immediately in the collapse of domestic investment in Germany, then the collapse of employment.

  The economic crises that punctuated the brief life of the first German republic were thus direct legacies of war. The political conflicts that flourished in this climate of crisis were themselves extensions of long-standing features of life in Imperial Germany, which the privations and resentments of war had exacerbated – so much so that the war appeared at times not to have ended on the German home front in 1918. The war’s outcome bred pervasive recriminations, in which few groups were spared blame, however unfairly: workers and Catholics for their indifferent loyalties, farmers and businessmen for their greed, urban dwellers for their importunity, public officials for their incompetence. In these circumstances, the search for a durable political consensus – much less one in favor of the republic – was fatally impaired. In assigning Germany’s former ethnic minorities to France, Denmark, and the new Polish state, the Versailles settlement did less to resolve this order of domestic conflict than to translate it into an issue of bitter foreign policy debate. The Weimar constitution provided for a much more centralized state, but it did not put an end to regional conflict, which surfaced in a series of violent episodes, such as the “beer-hall” putsch in Munich, in which separatism played a leading role. Regional conflict also registered in continued strife between urban and rural Germany, which was aggravated in the worldwide collapse of agricultural prices. Confessional discord persisted, too, although its focus shifted to anxieties among Protestants and Catholics alike about the secular policies of the Social Democrats, who now held office at all levels of government. These Social Democratic policies were oriented in general towards an ambitious program of public welfare and peaceful resolution of industrial disputes. They failed to bring social peace, however, in part because social grievances had been gravely exacerbated, while their principal locus had migrated during the war away from the main body of organized labor. It settled instead in the militant periphery of the labor movement, whose political voice was now the German Communist Party. The grievances were also rife in those sectors of the German lower middle classes that the war and the succeeding financial turmoil had most jeopardized. When the Great Depression then added mass unemployment to the litany of grief, it so swelled the ranks of those who were disaffected that one could more easily count those who were not disaffected.

  The cultural costs: memory wars

  In these troubled circumstances, the memory of the Great War became itself a matter of great discord, a marker as well as a focal point of political conflict. Reminders of the war were omnipresent in republican Germany, embodied most poignantly in the disabled soldiers who haunted the streets and importuned the public treasury for the costs of their rehabilitation and pensions. These costs were themselves a source of conflict in the angry political atmosphere of the new republic. So was the effort to channel memories of the war into more conventional and less perturbing objects.

  Monuments to the fallen soldiers soon appeared in communities throughout the country, in cemeteries, churchyards, and public places. Usually with public subsidies, they were erected on the initiative of local regiments, veterans’ organizations, schools, and parishes. A wide variety of designs, which included pyramids, obelisks, eagles, lions, steles, weapons, and human figures, testified not only to the inventiveness of the designers but also to the controversies that surrounded monuments of every design.17 The symbolic function of these structures was to situate the meaning of death in the Great War, an exercise that required addressing the meaning of the war itself. One popular practice, whose implications were politically ambiguous enough to attract broad support, was to build a special park or “heroes’ grove” (Heldenhain), in which fallen soldiers, whose bodies had remained in military cemeteries at the front, were symbolically recommitted to nature at home, in the form of specially placed stones or trees (usually oaks).18 Christian symbolism was also common in war memorials, because it fixed death at war within a transcendent and putatively apolitical narrative of sin, sacrifice, and human redemption.19 If only because it often found expression in the conventionally ornate architectonic forms of the Wilhelmine era, however, this symbolism modulated easily into another, political idiom. The Iron Cross was not just a cross. It was keyed to a secular narrative of national fulfillment, which, given the circumstances of the war’s end, was politically fraught.

  The war monuments drew their meaning from a broadly understood set of cultural codes. Like the Iron Cross, many, if not most, objects (including oak trees) that paid tribute to the dead had direct associations with the national symbolism of Imperial Germany; and inscriptions on these monuments often left nothing to the imagination. Most organizations that commissioned the memorials wished to portray the fallen soldiers as national heroes and the wartime army as a close-knit, socially comprehensive front-line community to the end. It was difficult to do so without endorsing the “stab in the back” theory in one form or another: the premise that the warriors had been undefeated in the field. A monument in the city of Schwerin, which featured a kneeling warrior struggling to pull a dagger from his back, was unusually (and unnecessarily) direct. A more orthodox, but universally recognizable symbol of betrayed heroism was the figure of Siegfried, who stood atop many other monuments.20 Memorials that portrayed Friedrich Barbarossa, the archetype of the slumbering warrior, likewise keyed into a nationalist narrative of reawakening, regeneration, and revenge.

  Supporters of the new republic faced enormous disadvantages in trying to memorialize the war. Like their opponents, they rejected the war-guilt clause of the Versailles treaty (for they themselves had supported the war in 1914), but they also rejected the proposition that the loss of the war, the squandering of the sacrifice, was due to the home front’s collapse in the rear of an undefeated army. Their challenge was to reframe the narrative of the war, to find a plausible response to a jeremiad that had evidently come true: “If our enemies win,” as a Protestant pastor had put it in 1917, “all the sacrifices we have made in precious blood are in vain…All our efforts in vain, all the bleeding and dying in vain. Shame and disgrace, poverty and slavery our reward.”21 The republican rejoinder to this lament had also been adumbrated in 1917, in the Reichstag’s peace resolution. As the reward for Germany’s wartime sacrifice, it invoked an equitable peace, popular government, and the promise of social justice. Nor was this a far-fetched position. In January 1919, when delegates were elected to the assembly that was to
write the republican constitution, nearly 70 percent of the vote went to the parties that had supported the peace resolution. The Versailles settlement then dashed German visions of an equitable peace, leaving supporters of the new constitution to argue that the republican regime itself, the presumed vehicle of political liberation and social justice, offered the compensation for the sacrifices of war. Amid the political instability and social turmoil of the ensuing years, this was a difficult position to defend.

  As a consequence, many supporters of the republic found it objectionable to memorialize the fallen soldiers at all, arguing that the money spent on war monuments would be better used for the care of war widows, orphans, and disabled veterans. Several major veterans’ organizations, whose politics were predominantly Social Democratic, did confront the issue of memorialization, though their membership lagged significantly behind the principal coalition of veterans’ associations, which refused to recognize the army’s defeat in the field.22 Republican organizations sought to honor the fallen soldiers without idealizing the experience of combat or vilifying the revolution at the end of the war. The search for a republican symbolism appropriate to this effort steered towards abstract forms, such as the black granite cube that dominated the Neue Wache in Berlin. Republican commemorative rituals at these memorials were scripted in rancorous dialogue with their nationalist counterparts. They invoked the fallen soldier as witness to tragedy, suffering, and the harsh injustices of military life.

  The polarization of the war’s memory helped frustrate efforts to construct a national memorial, a German equivalent to the tombs of the unknown soldier in London and Paris. Instead, the German memorials proliferated in accordance with competing ideological agendas. A Tannenberg Memorial was constructed in 1927 in East Prussia with the support of nationalist groups; its heavy symbolism suggested a medieval castle, conjuring up the conquest of the east by the medieval Teutonic Knights. The republican counterpart was dedicated two years later in the Neue Wache in Berlin, the capital of Socialist Prussia. The collective memories that were anchored in these and other memorials corresponded to sectoral identities among progressives, conservative nationalists, and Social Democrats, while Communists (and their veterans’ association) condemned all the other camps for having supported an imperialist war of conquest. The conflict was ultimately less about the war, however, than the political system that had issued from it. The war figured as a symbolic marker in a virulent debate about the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic.

  With the memory of the war as a gauge of broader political sentiments, the supporters of the republic had cause for concern. The most prominent and resonant commentary on the war came from nationalists who repudiated the new regime. They included the political and military elites of the old, imperial regime, many of whom – high public officials, judges, professors, teachers, and clergymen – remained in office after the war. A spate of memoirs appeared shortly after the war from military leaders, including Ludendorff, Hindenburg, the former emperor, and the crown prince, as well as from lower-ranking officers such as Jünger. All wrote of an army triumphant, a front-line community of warriors, which remained united in camaraderie under fire until betrayed by the home front. Schoolbooks presented a similar picture, breaking off their accounts of military action in the spring or early summer of 1918.23 Career civil servants in the education ministries pleaded that the paper shortage forbade issuing new editions of these books. The role of judges in shaping the collective memory of war was on display whenever they presided over libel actions brought by leaders of the republic, whom nationalists had accused of engineering the “stab in the back.” One episode testified with particular force to the lie of the political land. Late in 1924 Ebert, who was now president of the republic, sued an editor who had charged him with high treason for his role in the Berlin strikes of 1918. The court found in Ebert’s favor on a technicality, but it ruled at the same time that the charge of treason was “demonstrably true.”24 Before he could appeal the finding, Ebert died of an ailment that he had been too preoccupied to have treated. Several months later Hindenburg – a symbolic figure of a much different order – was elected to succeed him as president of the republic.

  These institutional biases help explain the remarkable accents in the literary interest that the war attracted in the late 1920s. “Military nationalism” (soldatischer Nationalismus), which had animated the activities of right-wing veterans’ organizations, now invaded an emerging mass market for war literature.25 In best-selling books, such as Werner Beumelberg’s Barrage to Germany (Sperrfeuer um Deutschland) and Edwin Erich Dwinger’s The Last Rider (Der letzte Reiter), the war that “sold” was a romance, an idealized adventure in courage, discipline, and comradeship, as well as the violent vehicle of national regeneration. Remarque’s skillfully marketed All Quiet on the Western Front (and Lewis Milestone’s film of it) represented part of the same phenomenon; although the furious nationalist reaction confirmed impressions that it was an anti-war work, its message, particularly its treatment of soldierly comradeship, was not unambiguous.26

  The renewed interest in the war reflected a demographic fact: the transition to early adulthood of the large cohort of males who had been born between 1900 and 1910.27 These constituted the “war youth,” whose socialization had been dominated by the experience of war on the home front, particularly the mobilization of civilian morale, and, in the case of the older “victory watchers” in this cohort, by the expectation of military service. Many of these young males subsequently became active in the youth groups that were, like the veterans’ associations, affiliated with the several political milieus of Weimar Germany.28 Particularly among the right-wing youth groups, this experience entailed heavy exposure to military values, the heroization of fallen soldiers, and the idealization of the war. At the same time, organizations that were linked to other groups – Catholic, Socialist, and Communist – themselves cultivated ideas, such as sacrifice, discipline, and comradeship, that lent themselves to militarization.

  The National Socialists demonstrated the truth of this proposition. Their success in mobilizing social and political discontent in the name of national regeneration was inconceivable absent the war. For one thing, Hitler himself and many of his lieutenants were veterans of the conflict; and their ideas found resonance among the multitudes of ex-warriors who, like many other categories of people, were casualties of Weimar’s financial and economic crisis. National Socialism, the eclectic amalgam of these ideas, was vitally indebted to the war. In its very name, National Socialism, recalled slogans that had been current during the war. After the war, the Nazis embraced the most radical and uncompromising version of the “stab in the back,” insisting that the war had not ended in 1918. It continued, first against the domestic enemy, the “November criminals,” the Jews and their allies who dominated the republic; then, in the Nazis’ vision, it would culminate in the struggle of a Germany united, as in 1914, against its foreign enemies. The great goal remained German hegemony on the European continent, which had eluded the country’s rulers between 1914 and 1918.

  The memory of the Great War thus haunted the Third Reich.29 Its leaders genuinely believed in the “stab in the back” and were determined not to repeat the attendant mistakes. The war’s memory set much of the regime’s agenda, which was devoted first to mobilizing German society for another war, then to prosecuting it. The government moved early and ruthlessly to eliminate all opposition, lest domestic conflict again undermine the military effort. Hitler was also sensitive to the real grievances that had plagued German society during the war, however, and his policies were calculated to prevent their recurrence. The regime set out early to make the country self-sufficient in its food supply and to win over the industrial workforce, in part by means of material inducements, paid vacations and improved conditions on the shop floor. Hitler was also convinced that the Germans had lost the Great War in the essential realm of propaganda, and he took effective steps to repair this problem. Finally, th
e new rulers believed that the German army had mismanaged the Great War; neither at home nor in occupied Europe had military leaders been systematic, clear-sighted, or ruthless enough in their policies. Management of the next war was to reside accordingly in the hands of civilians.

  After it took shape in the shadow of the “stab in the back,” the German effort during the Second World War did in fact avoid many problems of the Great War. The Nazis solved the problem of German militarism, depriving the soldiers of control over the home front and occupied Europe (and eventually operational control of the war itself). Morale on the German home front did indeed remain high to the last, desperate stages of the conflict, thanks in no small part to the regime’s ruthlessness in suppressing dissent and stripping occupied Europe of food crops, other material resources, and agricultural and industrial labor. Paradoxically, however, this success only underscored the degree to which the National Socialist regime had misunderstood the Great War. As an historical analysis of the German experience during Great War, the “stab in the back” was a monument of perversity and intellectual folly. It occluded the real causes of Germany’s defeat in one world war and encouraged its leaders into another that they could not win. The reason for failure was the same in both cases. In the two world wars of the twentieth century, the country ventured a war against a coalition of forces that was far superior in the material resources indispensable to waging industrial war. The reason for German defeat lay not in the failure of the home front, which held up remarkably in the face of the colossal burdens it was called on to bear, but, rather, in the political decision to embark upon such wars in the first place.