David Blackbourn

The peculiarities of German history: bourgeois society and politics in nineteenth-century Germany

This book investigates the role of bourgeoisie society and the political developments of the nineteenth century in the peculiarities of German history. Most historians attribute German exceptionalism to the failure or absence of bourgeois revolution in German history and the failure of the bourgeoisie to conquer the pre-industrial traditions of authoritarianism. However, this study finds that there was a bourgeois revolution in Germany, though not the traditional type. This so-called silent bourgeois revolution brought about the emergence and consolidation of the capitalist system based on the sanctity and disposability of private property and on production to meet individual needs through a system of exchange dominated by the market. In this connection, this book proposes a redefinition of the concept of bourgeois revolution to denote a broader pattern of material, institutional, legal, and intellectual changes whose cumulative effect was all the more powerful for coming to be seen as natural.

The Catholic Church in Europe since the French Revolution.

The persistence of the old regime in nineteenth-century Europe has been a familiar theme in recent historical writing. Monarchies sedulously inventing new traditions to bolster their popularity, parliamentary upper chambers stubbornly defending their prerogatives, landowning nobilities entrenching their power and privileges: These have been the motifs of an important revisionist historiography, a reaction no doubt to the overdrawn picture of a nineteenth century dominated by industrialization, a rising bourgeoisie and inexorable progress to parliamentary government (see Mayer 1981). The revisionism has been salutary, even if it has been more convincing in some respects than others. What comes as something of a surprise is the relative neglect of that classic institution of old regime Europe, the Roman Catholic Church. Internally declining, the butt of Enlightened intellectuals and political radicals at the end of the eighteenth century, the church in the last two hundred years has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for survival and rejuvenation. From Pius IX to John Paul II, Rome has centralised its power, mobilised the faithful and

Peasants and Politics in Germany, 1871-1914

The peasant on the land does not have all these [educational opportunities]. The plough and the shovel are his pen, with which he writes his diary on the tilled earth. If the railway lines rush past the end of his fields, and the four corners of the earth meet above his head in the telephone wires, he remains tied to the soil, held within his small circle. (Georg Heim, the Bavarian ’Peasant Doctor’) ’

Politics as Theatre: Metaphors of the Stage in German History, 1848–1933

ALL the worlds a stage, as we know, and the concept of a theatrum mundi is a venerable one. So too is the specific idea of politics as theatre. As an idea it may not seem very remarkable. Politics lives off metaphor, after all, and theatrical metaphor might seem especially appropriate to describe political activity. Do we not refer naturally to the political stage, to politicians assuming roles, to dramatic political scenes? This very naturalness, derived from repeated usage, presents a challenge. For one of the tasks of the historian is to show how what has come to seem natural came to seem so: to restore the novelty of artefacts and institutions we take for granted, to recover the impact of ideas and metaphors worn smooth by repetition. I want to argue below that metaphors of politics as theatre can be more than just a figure of speech: that they had specific and revealing meanings in the period of German history from the revolutions of 1848 to the advent of National Socialism.

The Conquest of Nature and the Mystique of the Eastern Frontier in Nazi Germany

German subjugation of Poland in 1939 and early military successes against the Soviet Union after June 1941 unleashed grandiose projects for German settlements in the east. These proposed the uprooting of tens of millions of people. Germans and other approved races would be the settlers. Some of the original inhabitants would be “Germanized”; the rest were marked down for destruction, slave labor as “helot” peoples, or “resettlement” further east. This is now fairly well known, thanks to a striking shift of emphasis among recent historians of the Third Reich, away from the years 1933–1939, toward the six wartime years that followed. Scholars have familiarized us with the planning for a “German East”: Its brutality and soured utopianism, its dynamism that was always colored by interagency disputes. Many different elements and motives in those plans have been drawn out: a belief in geopolitical destiny; the loot and plunder of materials and manpower; the technocratic zeal of planners and “experts”; the drive for Lebensraum, or “living space”; the perceived need for military security on the border; the imperative of provisioning the Wehrmacht; and the underlying (although in practice highly inconsistent) belief in German racial superiority, with its corollary, the sense of a mission to bring German “order” to the backward east.

Reviews : Roger Chickering. We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886-1914, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1984. xiv + 365pp. £20.00

Writing on the Pan-Germans and other radical nationalist organizations reflects the changing historiography of Imperial Germany very well. The West German view up to the 1960s branded the League as a fanatical and destructive minority which seduced a part of the German people with its skilful propaganda. This approach neatly turned two tricks at once. It suggested a reassuring analogy between radical nationalism and National Socialism as ,aberrations’-, and it correspondingly denied any parallel between the aggressive intentions of Germany’s rulers in 1914 and Hitler in 1939. The historiographical revolution which followed the work of Fritz Fischer turned this approach on its head. In the work of historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the Pan-Germans and similar organizations became the ’opinionmanagers’ of a ruling dlite clinging to political power, a means by which governments stabilized an archaic political system by deflecting tensions outwards into a bellicose foreign policy. In recent years this influential view has itself come under attack by English revisionist historians. Radical nationalist organizations (like contemporary organizations of the peasantry and lower middle class) have been viewed less as vehicles for manipulation from above,

Roman Catholics, the Centre Party and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany

Catholic anti-Semitism in Germany has received nothing like the attention given to its counterparts in France and Austria, and the reasons for this are not hard to find. France and Austria were predominantly Catholic countries, whose indigenous traditions of anti-Semitism drew upon and reflected this background. This is true of the anti-Semitism espoused by the Croix de Feu and Austrian ‘clerical fascists’ in the interwar years; it is also true of the anti-Dreyfusard movement and Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party in Vienna before 1914. The position in Germany was clearly very different. There Catholics themselves formed a minority, and were likely for that reason to be more circumspect about supporting political movements which preached anti-Semitism. It is well known that Catholics provided the National Socialists with very little of their popular electoral support prior to the seizure of power in 1933, just as few of them supported the anti-Semitic political parties of Stocker, Liebermann von Sonnenberg and others before 1914. They voted instead for the Centre, the party of German Catholics and one in which the role played by anti-Semitism has commonly been regarded by historians as slight.

Class and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Center Party and the Social Democrats in Württemberg

Between 1890 and 1914 the Center party was, in Friedrich Naumanns words, “the measure of all things” in German politics. Throughout this period it possessed a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and held the balance of power between left and right. Its importance from the standpoint of Bismarcks successors as chancellor stemmed from the electoral and parliamentary decline of the National Liberals and Conservatives, the parties which had formed the Kartell through which Bismarck governed the Reichstag. After 1890 these no longer commanded a majority, and other parties had to be won over by the government. With the Social Democrats permanently hostile, this narrowed the governments choice down to the Progressives and Center, either of which would give the Kartell parties a majority, and both of which were to be used to this effect. However, the Progressives were used only sparingly (above all during the Biilow Bloc of 1907–9) because of their increasing shift to the left. The historic reason for this was the partys antimilitarism; and this move to the left was reinforced by fears among Progressive leaders that their supporters might otherwise defect to the Social Democrats. The Center was therefore the only alternative. For most of the Wilhelmine period successive chancellors depended for their parliamentary majorities on the Center, which in turn showed itself willing to become a “party of government.”