The recent historiography of the Pan-German League has confuted the thesis of Mildred Wertheimer and other American revisionist historians of the 1920s that the organization had minimal influence. However, another point that American historians argued in the 1920s is incontestable: Germans had no monopoly on patriotic societies in the decades prior to the First World War. Abstracting from an abundance of examples, one might define these societies as voluntary associations whose primary purpose was to mobilize the members of a given national group, irrespective of class, rank, or confession, in support of national symbols and what were called ‘national causes’. The Pan-German League had, by this definition, counterparts in virtually every country in Europe, as well as in the United States – in organizations such as the Primrose League, the Action française, the Navy League of the United States, and the Societa Nazionale Dante Alighieri.
Comparative study of these organizations would be rewarding, and until it occurs, generalizations about them must remain impressionistic and tentative. With this caveat, the prewar patriotic societies did seem everywhere to display a number of similarities. Most obviously, their programs and demands were alike. Everywhere they called for military preparedness, the uncompromising defense of national interests, the pursuit of empire, and the building of the navies universally regarded as the sine qua non of a successful imperial venture. The generalization is also safe that the appearance of these patriotic groups represented an aspect of the growing democratization of Western societies, of the ‘participation revolution’ of the late nineteenth century, the intrusion of the masses into the political arena, or, to use Hans Rosenberg’s expression, the development of a ‘political mass market’.1 These societies appear, however, to have appealed to specific sectors of this mass market. Their memberships comprised in the main people of the middle class, whose distinguishing characteristics were education or the possession of commercial or industrial capital, even if only on a modest scale.2 This characteristic suggests that however idealistic their inspiration, a function of patriotic societies everywhere was to defend the status conferred by property and education against the threat posed by other social strata, which were themselves mobilized in the late nineteenth century but which had neither property nor education.
These generalizations cannot take the study of patriotic societies very far, for the history of these organizations is unintelligible if divorced from the national contexts in which each of them operated. Their appeal, success, influence, and significance varied greatly from one country to another, affected by manifold differences of context – social tension, political structure, confessional and ethnic conflict, and political culture. The history of patriotic societies in England was no less intimately tied to the efforts of the Tory Party to adapt to a mass constituency than was the history of such societies in France related to the issues of royalism and the status of the Catholic church. In Germany, too, the history of patriotic societies was decisively colored by a number of factors unique to the national context.
Voluntary associations that served patriotic goals had a long history in Germany even before unification. Numerous student corporations, shooting clubs, choral and gymnastic societies, and other organizations effectively promoted the idea of unification; their achievement, in fact, was to elevate the nation to the status of a popular symbol.3 In so far as these associations appealed to specific constituencies (such as students) or nurtured patriotism as an adjunct to pursuing other ends (such as choral recreation), they were of a different order than the patriotic societies which were founded after unification. The later societies appealed to all Germans and defended patriotic causes as their primary goal.
In Imperial Germany major patriotic societies first appeared in the 1880s, but their political impact and significance were conditioned by forces and circumstances that developed during the first decade of the Empire’s existence. The first of these was the character of the Imperial German political system, which took shape in the 1870s, the product of both the constitution and political evolution in the first years of the new regime. The constitution of 1871 severely limited the power of the democratically elected federal parliament, by lodging primary jurisdiction over domestic affairs with the individual Länder (most of whose parliaments were not democratically elected), by carefully excluding control over foreign and military policy from the competence of the Reichstag, and by failing to make federal ministers responsible to this body. As Michael Stürmer has shown, the federal chancellor also took great pains, in the first years of the new Empire, to stifle tendencies that might imply the upgrading of the Reichstag’s status, be these in the direction of enlarging the competence of the parliament or of establishing de facto ministerial dependence on a single stable parliamentary coalition.4 Another aspect of this campaign to attenuate the development of a genuine parliamentary system was Bismarck’s resort to quasi-plebiscitary intimidation of the Reichstag; in a manner that suggested parallels to the regime of Louis Napoleon, he attempted on several occasions, most blatantly in the elections of 1878, to mobilize public opinion directly in order to produce a pliable Reichstag.5
The limited power of the Reichstag diminished the status of the political parties which inhabited it and led quickly to the establishment of an alternative system of political representation and influence. Although extra-parliamentary pressure groups of many descriptions appeared throughout Europe at the end of the century, the peculiarities of the political system lent them special importance in Imperial Germany. Because the political parties proved to be only one avenue for the articulation of interests, and often a not very effective one at that, these extra-parliamentary Verbände soon made their presence felt in the offices of government agencies, of political leaders, and in the forum of public opinion, where they represented the interests of their assorted constituencies in questions of tax and tariff reform, social policy, military contracts, and countless other matters.6
The significance of the Verbände extended well beyond their lobbying. They soon developed into what Thomas Nipperdey has called a ‘secondary system of social power’.7 More than the political parties, these groups were vehicles of political mobilization in the ‘participation revolution’ of the late nineteenth century. Many of them had memberships far larger than most of the political parties. The Verbände thus quickly found a role in the plebiscitary politics of the German Empire, for they were in a position to mobilize their formidable constituencies, often with the connivance of the government, in order to exert popular pressure on the Reichstag. This role had unfortunate effects, however. The political mobilization that took place under their aegis was usually oriented toward the parochial interests of the major subgroups of German society – those associated with agriculture, industrial or commercial capital, industrial labor, and Catholicism.8 Because the Verbände were immune to the need for parliamentary compromise, their pursuit of their constituents’ interests worked less to integrate the subgroups for which they spoke than to perpetuate the cleavages which divided them.
In this constellation of social and political power, the foundations of which had been well laid by 1880, patriotic societies were to play a special role. Once major issues of direct patriotic significance appeared in the forum of political debate, the logic of the German political system encouraged the formation of extra-parliamentary groups to serve as protagonists. Patriotic societies would operate in much the same manner as other Verbände, but their status and significance in the German system were in some respects unique, for the constituency whose interests they claimed directly to serve was that of all Germans. Because they sought to mobilize broad support in various national issues, patriotic societies were ideally suited for plebiscitary use. Indeed, their significance would stand in direct relation to the political importance of just these national issues as sources of domestic consensus and integration in a society which was jarred in the late nineteenth century by prodigious growth and dislocation – a society whose divisions on the most fundamental political issues were epitomized in (though by no means limited to) the spread of the Social Democratic labor movement, which was ideologically committed to the overthrow of the whole Bismarckian system.
The characteristics of the Imperial German political system attached special significance to extra-parliamentary organizations, while the failure of this system to generate domestic political consensus put a premium on national issues as an alternative source of cohesion. The establishment of the German Empire also vitally affected the character of the national issues that were to occupy patriotic societies. Simply stated, the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 created as many problems with respect to German national consciousness as it solved.9 The nationalism officially propagated in the new Empire was a civic religion; the national community that was to be the object of civic loyalty was coterminous with the new political entity that had emerged in the heart of Europe.10 Although it could build on political traditions that extended at least as far back as 1848, this ‘official nationalism’ had shallow roots. The symbolism of the new nation-state was meager and included, as Theodor Schieder has pointed out, little more than a flag, an army (which was not really national), and the monarchy.11 Even the question of what, beyond the defense of the new national frontiers, lay within the purview of the national interest remained initially ill defined. In these circumstances, one of the primary challenges the new national government faced was to create the symbols, traditions, and values to buttress a national self-consciousness focused on the Reich. To this end the government used all its resources, from the schoolroom and pulpit to the academic community and the ministries in Berlin. No one, however, was more central in this undertaking than Bismarck, who, because of the role he had played in the founding of the Reich, emerged as the principal custodian of the grail of national symbols, in which he himself occupied a leading position. For the duration of his tenure in office, Bismarck remained unchallenged as a symbol of German national identity and interest; his was in fact the power to determine the very connotations of the word ‘national’, and he exercised this power frequently, as he brandished the word to defend his own policies and political friends while using the label Reichsfeind to attack his enemies.12
Even more than his formidable political power, Bismarck’s status as a national symbol gave ascendency to a rather narrow, political definition of the ‘German nation’ during the first two decades after the Reichsgründung. This cataclysmic event in 1871, however, itself ensured the development, within the German Empire, of rival symbols and forms of national consciousness, which, though initially no match for those officially enshrined, were to become far more potent after the departure of the Great Man.
The root of the rivalry lay in the fact that the official nationalism seemed to do violence to the most compelling of all symbols of national unity. Millions of people whose first language was German lived outside Imperial Germany, throughout Central Europe and in scattered colonies of settlers in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The events of 1870–1 had a profound impact on many of these Germans; identification with the accomplishments of the powerful new state was a source of pride, but because most of these people were not citizens of the Reich, their view of the national community tended to be cultural and ethnic rather than political, except in so far as a grossdeutsch political tradition survived the year 1866.13 This more inclusive ethnic definition of the German nation clashed with Bismarck’s own, and the chancellor displayed a conspicuous disinterest in the affairs of German-speaking people outside the Empire, whom he regarded as a potential threat to his attempts to stabilize the settlements of 1866 and 1871.14 The Imperial constitution reflected Bismarck’s attitude; it provided that the citizenship of any German would lapse automatically after ten consecutive years’ residence outside the Reich.
Indifference toward Germans outside the Reich became increasingly difficult to maintain, in large part because of the impact that the foundation of the German Empire itself had on emerging patterns of ethnic conflict in Central and Eastern Europe. German unification encouraged the development of ethnic consciousness not only among Germans outside the Empire, but among many other groups as well – Magyars, Czechs, Poles, Italians, and Slovenes, to name only some of the major ones. This process was already well underway in 1871, and it was lent impetus not only by the unification of the German states, but by social and economic change in Central Europe at the end of the century, which produced large-scale demographic redistribution and brought ethnic groups into increasing contact, self-awareness, and conflict.
This ethnic conflict was an enormously complex phenomenon.15 In some cases, as in Russia and Hungary, it involved deliberate attempts by governments to enforce the language and customs of a dominant nationality in schools, churches, and public business.16 In other areas the struggle went on under the cover of more tolerant official policies, but it was scarcely less bitter. Germans were involved practically everywhere in one capacity or another, but their role was most conspicuous in two areas in which they had laid claim to be the dominant ethnic group, in the Cisleithanian lands of the Habsburg monarchy and in the German Empire itself.17
In Austria, Germans made up the largest single national group, and their hegemony over the others was an established fact, anchored in German domination of the civilian and military bureaucracies and in the status of German as the official language of the land. Although the Austro-German government’s tolerance for ethnic diversity was magnanimous by comparison to Magyar rule in the monarchy’s Transleithanian lands, German hegemony came under attack on many fronts. The prototypical and most intense confrontation was between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Here the motive force was the development of coal-mining and a textile industry (both of which were largely under German ownership and management) and the demographic changes this development occasioned, principally the large-scale movement of cheap Czech labor from the mid-lands into German areas near the perimeter of the monarchy. The resulting ethnic tension transcended class cleavages, however; it not only brought Czech industrial workers into conflict with German managers, but farm workers into conflict with landowners, Czech and German merchants into competition for customers, and the educated of both national groups into a struggle for administrative positions and public office.18 At stake was the integrity of ethnic groups as cultural entities; the recurrent issue was language, the most conspicuous mark of ethnic identity. Professor Kann has called this conflict over language ‘dreary’, but to the participants it was hardly that.19 It was intensive and it flared up everywhere questions of language were even remotely touched – in elections to municipal councils, local school boards, and church vestries, in land sales and savings banks, and in mixed marriages.
To the north the patterns were similar. The German Empire hosted three major ethnic minorities, whose claims for cultural autonomy or political severance from the new state were sources of growing tension after 1871. The most serious confrontation, because the minority was the largest and most geographically mobile, was between Germans and Poles in the Prussian eastern provinces, but the character of this antagonism differed mainly in degree from tensions between Germans and Danes in North Schleswig and between Germans and French in Alsace-Lorraine. Again the main motive forces were economic change and the demographic movements this change produced. The demand for farm labor to work the great estates in the Prussian east attracted Polish immigration from Russia, while the growing demand for cheap industrial labor in the coal mines of the Ruhr extended the Polish migratory movement from eastern to western Germany.20 The policy of the German government with regard to Poles, as well as to the Danes and French, was Germanization, but the government pursued the policy with varying degrees of intensity and applied it inconsistently. In the north and east the policy included the attempt to promote German landholding, but as in the Habsburg monarchy, the principal issue was language, specifically the attempt to enforce the use of German in official business, schools, churches, and public meetings. The response of the minorities was to resist this policy by every legal means, and occasionally more.
In both the German Empire and Austria the ethnic conflict called forth its own characteristic form of social organization, the Schutzvereine, or national protective association. These organizations sprang up among every ethnic group in central Europe, and the range of their activities was extremely diversified. Some, like the Polish Marcinkowsky Association, provided professional training and economic assistance to their co-nationals, in the form of mortgage subsidies, grants, and low-interest loans. Many of these associations were in fact no more than credit unions, savings banks, or consumer cooperatives. Others supported schools, museums, and other cultural institutions for their co-nationals. Still others, such as the reading circles and choral and gymnastic societies, might be more appropriately classified as cultural societies, except that one of their purposes was to promote contact, cohesion, and self-awareness among members of the same ethnic group.21 These associations encompassed hundreds of thousands of people, and they constituted the institutional framework of ethnic conflict throughout Central Europe.
The patterns of ethnic struggle that emerged in Central Europe in the 1870s had a vital impact on patriotic societies that appeared in the German Empire in ensuing decades, as did the institutions of this ethnic struggle. With only a few exceptions, patriotic societies in Imperial Germany were to be centrally concerned with Germans who lived on the periphery or outside of the Empire, specifically with the effort to preserve a sense of ethnic identity among these people as they came in contact with other cultures. This concentration reflected a concept of the German nation that was broader in its definition and symbolism than Bismarck’s, so that a certain tension between these patriotic societies and the German government was implicit from the beginning. In addition, many of these organizations imbibed their goals and their style in emulation of the Schutzvereine. This feature served further to distinguish patriotic societies from other Verbände in the German political system. Not only did these societies engage, like other Verbände, in direct lobbying and the mobilization of public opinion, but they also took on a broad variety of what they called ‘practical activities’ designed to support the economic position and cultural cohesion of Germans outside the Reich. Much of their activity, then, consisted of a running, small-scale war with the protective associations and cultural institutions of other ethnic groups throughout the world.
Hans Rosenberg has argued that the ‘Great Depression’, the long-term economic down-swing which began in central Europe in 1873, conditioned social, political, diplomatic, and cultural developments in this part of the world for the next quarter century.22 Rosenberg’s provocative thesis has come under fire for being deterministic and too schematic, but in some areas its validity is difficult to dispute. One can certainly trace the founding of patriotic societies in Imperial Germany directly to this economic trend, for its effects were to make Germans in the Empire acutely aware of Germans outside of it.
One of the reasons why Rosenberg’s thesis about the centrality of economic crisis is plausible is that so many people were conscious of a crisis. Hans-Ulrich Wehler has documented the prolonged public discussion which took place in Germany after 1873 about the causes and implications of the economic down-turn.23 Although the discussion was fed from many sources and reflected diverse concerns and interests, a consensus emerged rapidly. At the root of the problem, so ran the argument, lay overproduction, the incapacity of the German domestic market to absorb the products of an expanded industrial plant. The economic consequence, documented vividly in growth statistics, was stagnation; the social repercussions promised to be more foreboding – reduced wages, strikes, unemployment, and violent disorder. In the lugubrious atmosphere of the mid- and late 1870s publicists also turned to another phenomenon which now struck them as far more alarming than it had before. Auswanderung, the emigration overseas each year of tens of thousands of Germans, had begun to take on massive proportions decades earlier without arousing much concern in Germany over its social or political implications. Paradoxically, even as migration dropped off significantly in the 1870s, writers began to view it as the direct consequence of economic stagnation and social unrest, and they equated the phenomenon with an irredeemable loss of manpower and talent for the fatherland.24
General agreement reigned not only about the origins and likely repercussions of the economic crisis which Germany confronted, but also about a solution to the problem. Empire emerged as the antidote to all social, economic, and demographic facets of the crisis. The stimulus afforded to German industry and commerce by imperial markets and products would reinvigorate the German economy and reduce social tension. Empire would also solve the problem of emigration, not by curtailing it but rather by redirecting it into new areas, where the establishment of settlement colonies would protect emigrant Germans from the threat of assimilation into foreign cultures, enabling them to retain both their ethnic identity and their ties to the fatherland. These themes were the subjects of a flood of literature which appeared in the late 1870s from the pens of influential publicists such as Ernst von Weber, Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, and Friedrich Fabri, whose tract, Does Germany Need Colonies? (Bedarf Deutschland Kolonien?), which appeared in 1878, was the most influential of all.25 The ideas of these writers constituted an unabashed program of social imperialism: a domestic crisis, which threatened to bring far-reaching changes to the structure of social and political power in Germany, was to be defused by exporting it.
The virtue of this program was its broad appeal. It spoke directly to the interests of export merchants and industrialists. It also appealed to masses of people, chiefly civil servants and small businessmen, whose anxieties derived from social insecurities born of the depression. If the economic benefits of empire extolled by colonial publicists attracted the one group of people, the other responded more to the ‘emigrationist’ vision of settlement colonies as new centers of opportunity abroad and a vent for social tension at home.26
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this ideological consensus in the development of national self-consciousness in Imperial Germany. Fabri and the other publicists of the 1870s characterized imperial expansion as something far more than a venture to serve the interests of select entrepreneurs and émigrés; they identified empire as a national symbol and an issue which would have vital consequences for the interests, integrity, and survival of the entire national unit. No less significant was the change that the ideology of social imperialism implied in the definition of the national unit itself. The emigrationist argument was particularly emphatic that the strength and vitality of the Reich were inextricably linked to the fate of Germans living abroad and that the assimilation of these people into other cultures represented an irreparable loss to the German nation. The German nation, in other words, could no longer be coterminous with the frontiers of the Reich; the nation comprehended people who spoke German and carried German culture everywhere in the world. And although most of the discussion of Germans outside the Reich was devoted to overseas emigration, the concept of the German nation inherent in the emigrationist literature clearly included German-speaking people living elsewhere in Europe as well. In sum, the discussion surrounding the economic crisis of the 1870s produced an ideological consensus on a necessary solution, but this solution required a redefinition of the national symbolism. These symbols now included empire, culture, and language; they implied a vastly broadened perspective on the definition of national issues, as well as on the definition of the national community itself.
This broadened perspective marked the popular agitation that began during the 1870s in favor of overseas expansion. The agitation took many forms, from the entreaties of chambers of commerce and other merchant associations to the activities of local geographical societies and other organizations that were founded to promote interest in the fate of Germans who had emigrated. Because expansion could only take place with the intervention or support of the state, all of this agitation was ultimately directed toward Berlin, and its ultimate goal was the modification of the official symbols of the nation.
The most important of the groups to appear in this period was the Central Association for Commercial Geography and German Interests Abroad (Zentralverein für Handelsgeographie und deutsche Interessen im Auslande).27 It was founded in Berlin in 1878, and its leading personality was the statistician Robert Jannasch. Its program was a synthesis of the most common economic and emigrationist arguments in favor of overseas expansion: German settlements abroad, their numbers multiplied and their contacts with the German homeland assiduously cultivated, were to become the secure foundation for German commercial expansion. The appeal of this synthetic program was evident in the establishment of similar groups in other cities, including Barmen, Chemnitz, Munich, Würzburg, Jena, Kassel, and, in view of later developments most significantly, in Leipzig, where another statistician, Ernst Hasse, founded the Association for Commercial Geography and Colonial Policy (Verein für Handelsgeographie und Kolonialpolitik). Each of these groups, which maintained a loose affiliation with the Central Association in Berlin, brought together two rather distinct social groups – on the one hand, merchants, bankers, industrial exporters, and other businessmen who were attracted by the commercial or social benefits of imperial expansion, and, on the other hand, academics whose primary interest lay in the cultural and demographic implications of emigration.
This loose organizational network provided the bases for the first two major patriotic societies in Imperial Germany. One of these owed its immediate origins to the impact of the Great Depression in Austria. Here the economic slump had by 1879 undermined the political position of the German liberals, the upper-middle-class advocates not only of industrial capitalism with minimal state interference, but of administrative centralism, which meant the continued hegemony of the Germans who dominated the central bureaucracy. Elections in 1879 revealed the liberals’ weakened position and occasioned a fundamental reorientation in Austrian politics, with the formation of the so-called ‘Iron Ring’ of the new premier, Eduard von Taafe.28 The props of this new parliamentary configuration were assorted anti-liberal groups, including representatives of the Czech minority, whose support the Taafe ministry purchased with concessions to their demands for autonomy, including establishment of a Czech university in Prague and a language ordinance whose effect was to place Czech on virtually an equal footing with German as the administrative language in Bohemia and Moravia.
Taafe could scarcely have foreseen the vehemence of the reaction his policies provoked among large groups of Germans, who were alarmed over what appeared to be a generalized assault on their culture and their dominant role in the monarchy. The initial center of the storm was the university in Vienna, where a group of recent graduates, including Viktor Adler, Heinrich Friedjung, and Engelbert Pernerstorfer – a remarkable troika whose subsequent careers became radically divergent – established in May 1880 the German School Association (Deutscher Schulverein). The purpose of the organization was to lend financial support to the construction of German schools ‘on our linguistic frontiers and in linguistically mixed areas’, where, the founders noted, ‘thousands upon thousands of children of German parents grow up without a German school and hence are lost to the German people’.29 The dramatic growth of the School Association was symptomatic of how widely their anxiety was shared among Austrian Germans. By early 1881 22,000 people had joined, and the group’s membership continued to expand rapidly for the next several years; in 1887 it stood at 120,000 in 1,174 local chapters throughout Austria.30
The national protest in which the School Association was born reverberated for decades in the Habsburg monarchy, soon radicalized under the leadership of men such as Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, who had been present, though only in minor capacities, at the founding of the School Association. The reverberations also extended immediately across the frontier into Germany, where interest in the Austrian crisis was widespread. Large amounts of money flowed from Germany into the coffers of the School Association; citizens of the Reich became members, and in a number of German cities local chapters were formed. The role of mediator and coordinator fell to the Central Association for Commercial Geography in Berlin, which in June 1881 acceded to the School Association as a chapter and used its own network to encourage the formation of local chapters in some fifty other German cities.
Difficulties soon arose, however, which made it necessary to reorganize the German chapters independently of the Austrian parent. In the first place, the intentions of the German groups were significantly broader than those of the Austrians. The Austrian School Association limited the range of its support to areas in the Austrian sector of the monarchy; the Germans proposed in addition to support German schools not only in the Hungarian part of the monarchy, but throughout the world. The Germans’ interests coincided, that is, with their imperial aspirations, which most Austro-Germans did not share. If philosophical differences with the Austrians raised the possibility of establishing an independent school association in Germany, a court decision, which interpreted the Austrian law of associations to forbid Austrian organizations from establishing local chapters in foreign countries, made this step unavoidable.
Accordingly, on 15 August 1881 the General German School Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein) was founded in Berlin.31 In part because local groups had already been in contact with Vienna or tied to the Central Association in Berlin, the growth of the new organization in Germany was rapid. In 1883 membership stood at over 9,000, and there were seventy-six local chapters; by the end of the decade the General German School Association comprised nearly 40,000 members and 356 chapters.32 Expansion did not take place without friction, however. The plans of the Berlin group called for a centralized organization, with the seat of power in Berlin itself, as it was in the Central Association. These plans ran aground on particularist suspicions among groups outside Prussia, especially in the Kingdom of Saxony, where interest in the work of the School Association was very strong because of the geographical proximity of the Habsburg territories, and in Baden, a center from which emigration had earlier radiated. Because of this resistance, the School Association remained decentralized. The local chapters were autonomous, empowered not only to retain most of revenues they raised through dues, but to undertake support work independent of central headquarters in Berlin.
The goal of the School Association, as announced in its statutes, was ‘to preserve for Germandom those Germans living outside the Reich and to support them as much as possible in their efforts to remain German or to become German again’. The means envisaged were considerably more modest than this ambitious goal might have suggested. The association was to ‘support and, if circumstances dictate, construct German schools and libraries, furnish German books, distribute appropriate literature, [and] place and support German teachers’.33 The organization chose thus to cast a blind eye to the possible political ramifications of its program and to limit its activities to cultural support. This strategy was encouraged by the autonomy of the local chapters, which made it difficult for the School Association to speak with a single voice on political issues. The strategy also conformed to the philosophy of Richard Boeckh, who was the organization’s most eloquent and articulate ideologue during the first two decades of its existence. Boeckh was a Herderian. He regarded the German nation as but one of many ethnic units, a cultural community defined by the bonds of language, but one with no prior claims over others.34 This vision appeared increasingly anachronistic in an age of militant ethnic conflict, but the militance of the School Association remained relatively muted in the period before the war. Although the organization did engage in some propaganda as an advocate of the interests of Germans abroad, the focus of its activity remained in the field of raising money for the practical purposes of school support.
The founding and initial expansion of the School Association in the early 1880s coincided with the intensification of the economic slump and an upsurge in emigration. These phenomena in turn stimulated the organizational consolidation of the colonial movement. As in the case of the School Association, the Central Association for Commercial Geography played a leading role, but it was eventually swallowed into a larger national organization.
The history of the colonial movement in the 1880s has been recounted many times, so it is necessary here only to mention the highlights.35 The proliferation of local societies to promote colonial expansion suggested the need for a stronger organizational framework than the Central Association could provide. The need became more acute after 1881, when Friedrich Fabri founded the West German Association for Colonization and Export (Westdeutscher Verein für Kolonisation und Export) in order to emphasize the interest of Westphalian businessmen in colonies. At the same time, the colonial movement took on political overtones in a manner the school-support movement never did, for it became linked to the fate of the National Liberal Party, at a time when this party, its ranks decimated in the secession crisis, found itself badly in need of a new integrating issue.36
A coalition of National Liberal Party leaders, spokesmen of north and west German export interests, and colonial publicists provided the initiative for the first amalgamation within the colonial movement with the founding, in Frankfurt, of the German Colonial Association (Deutscher Kolonialverein) in December 1882. Well aware that the preservation of a broad popular coalition demanded careful balancing of economic and emigrationist arguments, leaders of the new organization branded colonial expansion a national issue, citing every plausible reason – ‘the need to expand our markets, the growing significance of overseas trade, the deep impact of emigration on our social and economic life [and] the national interest in maintaining a lasting and firm tie between our excess population [überschüssige Kräfte] and the Fatherland’37 The goal of the new organization was to promote colonial expansion by means of mobilizing popular sentiment in favor of it.
Within a year the Colonial Association had incorporated most of the existing colonial societies into its ranks. But the future of the organization, and indeed of the entire colonial movement, was decisively affected by the actions of the German government. Bismarck’s colonial policy has been the topic of a long debate, out of which a number of conclusions have emerged. Although the chancellor was not directly involved in the founding of the Colonial Association, he was well aware of the developing colonial movement and ever alive to the possibility of exploiting it politically. Whether or not he regarded the acquisition of colonies as an attractive strategy for defusing the domestic tension occasioned by the depression is a good deal less clear than is his contempt for the idea that colonies were essential as outlets for emigration. In all likelihood, Bismarck viewed colonialism skeptically, and when he did move in 1884–5 to establish German colonial claims in West Africa and the Pacific, his decision was influenced little, if at all, by the arguments of the Colonial Association; the decision was instead the product of Bismarck’s calculations about domestic politics, specifically his seizing the opportunity to isolate the left-liberals, who were known to oppose formal colonies because of the expense, and to reinforce a parliamentary coalition among the parties of the right.
Whatever his calculations, Bismarck’s move to acquire colonies had the most far-reaching ramifications for the history of patriotic societies in Germany. In establishing the colonies and in defending this decision in the press and the Reichstag, Bismarck seemed to confirm the proposition that the colonial publicists had long been advocating –that empire was a national issue and that the development of the German nation had not come to a conclusion in 1871. By lending the incalculable authority and prestige of his imprimatur to these propositions, Bismarck appeared to incorporate empire into the shrine of national symbols and with it a conception of the German nation that looked far beyond the frontiers of the Reich.
Bismarck’s action produced immediate results, some of them unanticipated and uncomfortable. The growth of the Colonial Association accelerated rapidly in an atmosphere of adventure and accomplishment, and in anticipation of further colonial acquisitions. By early 1885 membership stood at more than 10,000.38 The Colonial Association also now found a rival. The new organization was the brain-child of the most colorful and troubling personality in the history of the German colonial movement. Carl Peters’s psycho-biography would be a fascinating study; until it appears, there seems to be little reason to dispute the judgment of Fritz Ferdinand Müller, who, upon surveying the amalgam of sado-masochism, delusions of grandeur, self-doubt, and irrepressible ambition in his personality, pronounced Peters a psychopath.39 He was, in any event, an extremely erratic and obstreperous man. Animated by visions of a ‘German India’ – a vast German empire in East Africa, which would serve the needs of German settlers and traders and would become the foundation of German world power – Peters and a group of friends established the Society for German Colonization (Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation) in the spring of 1884. Unlike the Colonial Association, whose activities emphasized propaganda, Peters’s organization was founded in order actually to establish colonies; the role of its membership was accordingly to fund Peters’s own expeditions to East Africa. Largely because the Colonial Association’s leaders believed Peters to be an irresponsible adventurer (and they were right), they withheld financial support from him, so he was reduced to relying on contributions from the small businessmen and subaltern officials who attended the rallies he staged and made up the bulk of his society’s membership.
With this support Peters did in fact lead a team to East Africa late in 1884, where he signed a series of treaties with tribal chieftains proclaiming German sovereignty over large tracts of land.40 The problem was that Peters acted without the approval of the German government; indeed, he simply ignored a directive to desist from Bismarck, who was. growing increasingly uneasy about possible diplomatic complications with England. At home, though, Peters’s adventures had made him a hero in the colonial movement, and Bismarck found himself compelled in February 1885 to declare a German protectorate over the areas Peters had claimed.
Bismarck was getting the first taste of a problem that was to plague his successors. He discovered the difficulty of harnessing people like Peters, who claimed to act in the national interest (and Bismarck himself had just declared empire to be in the national interest) and who enjoyed loud popular support. In trying to put reins on Peters, Bismarck found allies in the larger mercantile and industrial interests that dominated the rival Colonial Association. Peters’s vulnerability was his need for more money to continue his work in Africa. After lengthy negotiations Bismarck provided it, but at a considerable price. In 1887 the German government chartered the German East Africa Company as the official concession company to develop and trade in the region. The charter provided that Peters and his friends were to be shareholders, but they were swamped by the infusion of large amounts of money from Hamburg and Westphalia.
The involvement of big commercial and industrial interests in financing the East African venture also robbed Peters’s society of its raison d’être and paved the way for the final consolidation of the colonial movement. In 1887 Peters’s group merged with the Colonial Association to form the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft), which comprised a membership of 15,000. It was, however, an unequal partnership, for the same interests that had controlled the Colonial Association emerged in the leading positions in the new Colonial Society. Like its predecessors, the Colonial Society attempted to balance economic and emigrationist arguments in its program and propaganda; this balance reflected the divergent interests that coalesced in the Colonial Society, for while the men in the leadership were plainly interested in empire for money, most of the members were more receptive to emigrationist arguments.41
Both the German School Association and the German Colonial Society took form against the backdrop of dramatic events outside the German Empire. The third patriotic society founded in the 1880s was the product of the same new national self-consciousness, but its origins were less dramatic. Concern in Germany over the threat to the German language extended beyond the initial outrage which arose in reaction to Taafe’s linguistic concessions to the Czechs. This concern was reflected as well in a growing sensitivity about the purity and integrity of the German language itself. Several local societies for the protection of the German language were already in existence in 1885, when Hermann Riegel, an art historian and director of the ducal museum in Braunschweig, issued a public appeal for a national society. In January 1886 the General German Language Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein) was established, with Riegel as chairman, for the purpose of ‘fostering the genuine spirit and unique essence of the German language, awakening love and understanding for the mother tongue, and activating a sense of its purity, correctness, clarity, and beauty’.42 In the first instance, the organization proposed to purge the language of all unnecessary foreign words or expressions. This was evidently an appealing idea, for the association underwent a rapid expansion during the first years of its existence. By 1887 it had 7,000 members organized in ninety local chapters; in 1890 the membership stood at 12,000.43 Like the School Association, the Language Association formally eschewed political activity; it concentrated on publishing scholarly studies and drawing attention to the intrusion of foreign words into the manifold phases of public and private life. Merchants and bankers overeager to court foreign customers, government officials (especially diplomats in their devotion to French phrases), the military (whose system of ranks betrayed French influence too), and even sportsmen who found ‘tennis’ a more appealing game than Rasenballspiel all felt the indignation of the guardians of the language who congregated in the Sprachverein.
As innocuous as the Language Association’s activities might have appeared, it was idle to call them non-political. No less than the work of the School Association, the campaign of the Language Association had far-reaching political implications, for this campaign was also underlain by a concept of the German nation that was based on language and hence transcended the frontiers of the Reich. It was no accident that in 1906 the organization had twenty-four chapters in Austria-Hungary, one in Switzerland, and three in the United States.44
Although they were founded to serve different goals, the three patriotic societies which appeared in the 1880s had a great deal in common. Most apparent was the social complexion of their memberships. While the proportions of the configuration varied among the three, the same kinds of people predominated in each, and their distinguishing characteristics were wealth or a university education (see Appendix, Tables 5.6, 5.7, 5.8). Businessmen were a little more prominent in the Colonial Society, where the prospect of profits from empire no doubt appealed to the holders of commercial and industrial capital. The academically educated were more conspicuous in the School Association and the Language Association, and they included university-trained teachers, professionals, and civil servants. An analysis of the attraction of academics to these organizations is more complicated than explaining the presence of businessmen in the Colonial Society, for the profit motive played no significant role in the campaigns to defend the language and support schools. Because this analysis also bears directly on the Pan-German League, it is best postponed. It would, in any event, be misleading to draw too great a distinction between the Colonial Society and the other two organizations. Businessmen could be found in the School and Language Associations, while men of academic education were also prominent in the Colonial Society.
This social convergence corresponded to ideological affinities among the three organizations. Excepting those who admitted that they were only interested in empire for profit, the people who molded public thinking about empire spoke no less emphatically of defending German culture than did the men who sent money to schools in the Habsburg monarchy or protested against listing entrees in French on the menus of German restaurants. In this respect, the chief differences among the three societies were less social or ideological than in the geographical emphasis of their concern. The Colonial Society focused on overseas areas, arguing that the creation of settlement colonies would protect the bearers of German culture from assimilation. The School Association concentrated on the Habsburg monarchy, where the ethnic conflict was both most proximate and intense, while the Language Association found plenty to do at home. However, even the lines that marked geographical regions of concentration were fluid. The Language Association had chapters in German communities overseas, the School Association supported German schools in Latin America, and leaders of the Colonial Society were also interested in Eastern and Central Europe, both for the prospects this area offered for economic penetration and – in an era when the word Lebensraum had not taken on the connotations it suffers today – because the area seemed eminently suited for German settlement colonies.45
All three of the new patriotic societies shared a common conception of the German nation and invoked a broadened national symbolism. In the ideologies of all three the German nation comprised the entirety of the German Volk, an ethnic unit defined by language and culture. This definition linked the fate of Germans in the Reich with that of Germans everywhere else in the world. That this vision could only with the greatest difficulty be confined to the realm of culture and that in an age of ethnic conflict it had ultimately to raise questions of power and of Germany’s role in international politics was evident to many people. Not the least of these was Bismarck, who well recognized the challenge this vision posed to the official image of the Staatsnation and the difficulties it would raise in Germany’s relations to the other powers.46 Bismarck himself, however, was substantially responsible for the growing currency of a rival image of the nation. Whatever his own motives, his decision to acquire colonies in 1884–5 seemed to endorse a broader, ethnic view of the nation. So too did the laws he pushed through the Prussian diet in 1886, which marked the beginning of a new phase of the policy of Germanizing ethnic minorities – a phase whose chief characteristic was the attempt to establish German settlement colonies in the predominantly Polish areas of the country and, in this manner, to promote German culture by contesting the economic foundations of a rival culture.
Bismarck was mnning a great risk. In invoking the symbols and imagery of a new concept of the nation, he gained a large body of articulate and enthusiastic popular support, which he used to strengthen his hand vis-à-vis the Reichstag. The difficulty was that this popular enthusiasm could turn against the government once official policy no longer conformed to the expectations of the newly mobilized popular forces. Each of the patriotic societies represented in potentia a sorcerer’s apprentice, and the problems of keeping them under control were apparent even during Bismarck’s tenure in office. For the most part he succeeded, owing largely to the power he exercised as guardian of national symbols in Imperial Germany; it was simply inconceivable to call Bismarck unpatriotic in public. Bismarck was aided by the professed determination of the School and Language Associations to remain out of politics. The latter organization was more successful, and for its efforts was rewarded with the conspicuous encouragement of the German government, as many top officials documented, by joining the Language Association, their opinion that it was a proper and worthy patriotic undertaking. The School Association received no such encouragement, even though its decentralization kept its political profile low; the organization could not plausibly contend that subsidizing schools in Hungary, within the jurisdiction of a foreign ministry of public instruction, was an unpolitical act. As a consequence, Bismarck instructed officials to avoid any action that might be construed as governmental endorsement of the School Association’s work.47
The colonial movement presented much more serious problems. The organizations that mobilized popular support in favor of empire made no pretense of abjuring politics; and when, after 1886, Bismarck made it clear that he was no longer interested in expanding Germany’s colonial domains, he dealt a major blow to the expectations of the people who had vocally supported him earlier. Mounting frustrations in the Colonial Society produced open criticism of the chancellor, which leaders of the society, particularly Fabri, attempted to mute and keep ‘calm, factual’ and ‘sober’.48 Tensions between Bismarck and the Colonial Society nevertheless mounted; they peaked in 1889, when the chancellor again, with an eye to a possible clash with England, disavowed the attempt of Carl Peters to extend German holdings in East Africa.49 These tensions played a role in Bismarck’s fall from power in early 1890, in so far as they lowered the chancellor’s stock among the Kartell parties in the Reichstag, in which the Colonial Society was well represented.50
Ironically, however, even as the antagonism mounted between Bismarck and the Colonial Society, a relationship was growing that would in the future enable Bismarck’s successors to silence opposition to official policy within the Colonial Society and to control the organization effectively.51 German policy with respect to administering the new colonial holdings took shape during the last years of Bismarck’s chancellorship. The hallmark of this policy was to concentrate administrative responsibility in private hands and to reduce the public role – and cost – to a minimum, restricted mainly to the preservation of order. To this end, the government encouraged the formation of private joint-stock companies, such as the German East Africa Company, to develop the colonies economically, and it offered these companies a broad range of lucrative land and mining concessions, monopolies, state contracts, and subsidies, often with no conditions attached.52 The men who came to dominate the national leadership of the Colonial Society were the managers and leading shareholders of the colonial companies, and they needed no instruction on the advantages of close cooperation with the government, especially once the Colonial Society itself began as a corporate body in the 1890s to engage, with the blessings of the government, in a number of ‘practical activities’. These included construction of harbor facilities, railroads, and irrigation projects in the colonies, the establishment of steamship lines to the colonies, and the promotion of German emigration to colonial areas.
The relationship that developed between the German government and the Colonial Society, now the lobby for the colonial companies, was very cozy. The government, most immediately the Colonial Section of the Foreign Office, relied on the Colonial Society to raise private capital for investment in the colonies, to disseminate information for prospective settlers, and to lobby in support of government policies in the Reichstag.53 Leaders of the Colonial Society were regular advisors to the Colonial Section on all matters of policy, including the colonial budget and tariffs; representatives of the society also dominated the Kolonialrat, the board of citizens established in 1890 to advise the Foreign Office on colonial policy.54
The ties that evolved in the 1890s between the government and the German Colonial Society amounted to a condominium, and they made the expression of sustained antagonism toward the government virtually impossible within the society. After 1890 the Colonial Society supported the government’s policies consistently, even when these policies seemed to work to the detriment of German colonial interests and were in fact being so criticized by other patriotic organizations. Opposition did, to be sure, survive in some of the local chapters, but the structure of the organization was authoritarian enough that the national leadership could, without much difficulty, move, sometimes at the urging of the Foreign Office, to suppress it.55
The patriotic societies founded in the 1880s were to remain comparatively docile for the rest of the prewar period, but the early history of these societies revealed sources of great potential friction between them and the German government. At issue was the definition and custodianship of the symbols of the nation. While the German government sought to define the nation politically, as a Staatsnation within the frontiers of 1871, the Colonial Society, the School Association, and the Language Association all appropriated an alternative symbolism as they defined the German nation in the more comprehensive terms of language, culture, ethnicity, and empire. Excepting only a brief episode in the mid-1880s, during which Bismarck appeared to endorse the arguments of the colonial enthusiasts, the government rejected the alternative symbolism and, in keeping with the centrality of the monarchy in the symbolism of the Staatsnation, asserted its own exclusive authority to define the national symbols. The rivalry of symbolisms thus implied a rivalry over custodianship of the national symbols themselves. This rivalry between the government and the patriotic societies remained for the most part quiet during the 1880s, for a number of reasons. The structure of the societies that were established in this decade and the goals they set for themselves encouraged their docility; but so too did the fact that their incubation occurred during Bismarck’s chancellorship. As the patriarch of the new nation-state, Bismarck stood practically above attack in the realm of national issues. He remained the unrivalled custodian of the national symbols, and his authority was unchallengeable in defining and interpreting the national catechism. However, the enormous potential for opposition, which resided in the mobilization of popular forces in the name of emotionally laden symbols, became actualized immediately after Bismarck’s departure from power in 1890.