By 1890 the agitation of the three new patriotic societies had helped bring currency to a conception of the German nation that was based on ethnicity and transcended the political frontiers of the Reich. This ethnic or ‘völkisch’ nationalism also found nurture in several other large organizations during the 1880s, most importantly in the national networks of the gymnastic and choral societies, in the Evangelischer Bund, and in the militantly nationalistic Vereine deutscher Studenten.1 That the tensions between this völkisch nationalism and the officially endorsed conception of the Staatsnation did not produce open opposition to the government was due in no small part to the immense power that Bismarck, the most prominent advocate of the ideology of the Staatsnation, enjoyed himself as a national symbol. Yet even while Bismarck remained in office, there were signs of where advocacy of völkisch nationalism might lead once he departed.
By the end of the 1880s most of the organizations that made up the colonial movement had been amalgamated in the German Colonial Society, but no analogous consolidation had taken place among the Colonial Society and the other patriotic societies, despite the social similarities and ideological affinities that linked all these organizations. The possibility of an amalgamation was obvious, though, and in 1886 an attempt was made. The failure of the attempt was enlightening and of far-reaching importance for the subsequent history of patriotic societies in Imperial Germany.
The venture was doomed from the start, for its moving spirit was the most volatile of the patriotic societies, the Society for German Colonization, and the prominence of Carl Peters in the undertaking provoked well-grounded suspicions among the other organizations. In the spring of 1886 Peters and a group of his associates began to plan a congress of representatives of all the major patriotic societies; its purpose was to be defining common national goals and creating a common cover-organization. Immediately the planners encountered problems. Neither the Colonial Association nor the School Association would join in sponsoring the congress, for they calculated that Peters hoped to use it and any new organization that might arise out of it to raise money for his own continued expeditions to East Africa.2
The other organizations were also uncomfortable with some of the ideas expressed by Peters’s group. However clearly these ideas inhered in a broadened conception of the German nation, they had political implications that the leaders of the other societies were not willing to draw. ‘Germandom all over the world’, read one public announcement of the congress, ‘is beginning again to think seriously about its great common Fatherland, and the urge is everywhere becoming alive to establish a closer union [Zusammenschluss] with fellow Germans [Landesleute] at home.’3 This proposition was unobjectionable, as was the call for closer economic and cultural ties between the Reich and Germans abroad. However, even as it abjured any interest in politics, the announcement disclosed the fundamental threat that the new nationalism posed to the old. ‘The responsibilities we face in this area are not political; governments need not concern themselves with carrying them out. They are instead general national responsibilities, and the people have to demonstrate themselves, in carrying them out, how much moral power resides in the people.’ It is difficult to overstate the importance of this assertion. It was an open challenge to the government’s exclusive claim to control the national symbols, an unambiguous statement of the contradiction between Bismarck’s concept of the nation-state, which was authoritarian in tendency and lodged ultimate responsibility for defining and defending the national interest in the state, and völkisch nationalism, which was populist in tendency and lodged this responsibility in the hands of representatives of the Volk itself.4 The ideological foundations of a national opposition to official authority were here already in evidence.
Despite the reservations of the School Association and the Colonial Association, Peters and his friends did convoke the congress, which met in Berlin in September 1886, attended by some 600 people. It proceeded without incident, as delegates explored the dimensions of the new ‘national questions’ which had been defined in the past ten years – colonial policy, emigration, and the vigorous defense of the German language and culture abroad. The culmination of the congress was the founding of the General German League for Representation of German-National Interests (Allgemeiner Deutscher Verband zur Vertretung Deutsch-Nationaler Interessen), a cover-organization to coordinate the activities of all other societies whose goals were promoting ‘German-national interests directly or indirectly’.5
This General German League was stillborn. Its true purpose was not difficult to discern; the new group was, as its historian has observed, ‘in the final analysis merely a broadened version of the Society for German Colonization’.6 Of the twenty-five men who sat on the executive committee, fifteen were from Peters’s organization; the Colonial Association and School Association refused to become involved. The failure of the General German Association was due in part to organizational rivalries – the phenomenon that the Germans called Verbandspatriotismus – which were to frustrate subsequent attempts to unify the patriotic societies on a national scale. Other factors contributed to the failure. Peters soon returned to Africa, so the new organization lost its main source of energy. When he later returned to Germany, he found his Society for German Colonization itself absorbed into the new German Colonial Society. Moreover, the kind of militance that Peters’s organization embodied did not, in 1886, find much resonance beyond the confines of Peters’s own circle. The tensions between Bismarck and the Colonial Society did not reach a head for another few years.
Yet the militance, the suspicion of the government, and the combative perspective on world politics which animated the General German League did survive, as did sentiment in favor of unifying all the patriotic societies. Although their voice was fairly submerged within the Colonial Society, the militants of the colonial movement found an organ in 1888 with the establishment of the Deutsches Wochenblatt, whose editor, Otto Arendt, and whose principal contributors, including Ernst Hasse, the banker Karl von der Heydt, and Julius Graf von Mirbach-Sorquitten, were all associates of Peters and had been among the organizers of the congress of 1886.7 And in 1890 the political situation in Germany changed so basically that a national opposition to the government, which was implicit in the views of these men, could organize.
The dismissal of Bismarck from the chancellorship in 1890 marked a break in the political history of the German Empire second in significance only to the start of the war in 1914. Criticism of the German government on national issues had been stifled as long as Bismarck continued to exercise power. His dismissal – both the fact and the circumstances – changed the situation in the most fundamental way. Bismarck himself now went into opposition against the ‘New Course’ of his successor, Leo von Caprivi, and the young emperor.8 Henceforth there would be two poles of national authority in Germany, the one symbolized by the emperor and his government and the other by the former chancellor. And Bismarck, whatever his views about the patriotic societies and about their ideas of the German nation in the 1880s, did not hesitate now to make common cause with them as long as it served his own political interests to do so.9 Ironically, Bismarck in retirement endowed with his own enormous symbolic capital a populistic ‘German-national’ ideology which he had, as chancellor, resolutely opposed; and he became himself the symbol and focal point of a national opposition to the policies of his successors.
This opposition was an increasingly important feature of German politics in the 1890s, for Bismarck’s dismissal coincided with the onset of a period of profound economic, social, and political change. The lapse of the anti-socialist laws in 1890 and then the massive acceleration of German industrial growth opened the way for the intrusion of the socialist labor movement into the political arena. The mobilization of the urban working classes was, however, but one facet of a broader current, in which new social groups became self-conscious and organized for political action.10 In part as a response to the threat of the socialist movement, Catholics, peasants, and small-property owners congregated in their own mass-based voluntary associations, through which they began to bring pressure on the established political parties.
The Caprivi government presided over the initial phases of these structural changes, many of which it sought to encourage or exploit – by means, for instance, of tariff reform to promote industrial growth, liberalized social legislation to discourage the growth of the Social Democratic Party by means other than repression, and concessions to Catholics in order to win their support in the Reichstag. These policies had their victims as well as their beneficiaries, however, and the Caprivi years were marked by intense political antagonism, in which the government itself was one of the principal contenders.
The antagonism was played out in the rhetoric of national issues, as both proponents and opponents of the government’s policies attempted to appropriate the national symbolism for their positions. In this contest the government was at a disadvantage, for the opponents of its policies now had at their disposal a national symbol more powerful than even the government itself. From his lair in Friedrichsruh, which had the aura of a national shrine even before his death in 1898, and in the newspapers to which he had access, Bismarck dispensed his endorsement to a number of new organizations that appeared in the early 1890s with the immediate goal of challenging policies of the Caprivi government. Agrarian opposition to the commercial treaties which the government was negotiating took militant form in the Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte), a huge organization which, though geographically concentrated in East Elbia (where it was populated by peasants but dominated by large Conservative landholders), exerted a powerful influence in agricultural areas throughout most of the rest of the country.11 The moderation of Prussian policy toward ethnic minorities in North Schleswig and the eastern provinces also called forth militant organizations for the defense of German interests in these areas – first, in 1891, with the founding of the German Association for North Schleswig (Deutscher Verein für das nördliche Schleswig) and then, in 1894, in the much larger Society for the Eastern Marches (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein).12 Anxieties fostered by the growth of the Social Democratic Party after its legalization led directly, in 1893, to the formation of the German-National Commercial Employees Union (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen- Verband), which by the eve of the war had succeeded in organizing more than 100,000 commercial white-collar workers.13
The organizations that sprang up in opposition to the New Course displayed great diversity, particularly if one includes the antisemitic political parties, which underwent a resurgence during this period.14 Not all of them were, strictly defined, patriotic societies. The Agrarian League and the Commercial Employees Union fell more properly under the rubric of interest group. All of these organizations, however, used the symbolism and rhetoric of nationalism in speaking for social groups threatened by trends that the Caprivi government’s policies appeared to promote – German residents near the northern and eastern frontiers, landholders large and small, artisans and other small business-people, and white-collar workers. If one agrees to subsume the policies of the Caprivi government under the heading of ‘modernization’, Peter Leibenguth’s characterization of these new organizations seems apt: they were ‘collective movements [Sammlungsbewegungen] of a modern current of protest cast in anti-modern terms’.15 While they made use of modern techniques of political mobilization outside the terrain of the established parties, they exploited anxieties that grew out of rapid urbanization, industrialization, the mobilization of the urban working classes, and the drive for emancipation among Germany’s ethnic minorities.
Some of these generalizations also apply to the patriotic societies founded in the 1880s; the colonial movement can be seen as the attempt of people threatened by a crisis of modernization–in this case a cyclical down-turn – to use modern tools of popular mobilization to avert or divert it. But the new generation of organizations, which took form after 1890, differed from the older patriotic societies. Although the level of tension between them and the government vacillated during the next twenty years, the new organizations were more vocal and explicit in the manner they claimed to discern the true interest of the German nation and disputed the claim of the government to be the sole representative of the national cause. Custodianship of national symbols and values was now in dispute, in a situation made conceivable only by the dichotomization of authority brought on by the fall of Bismarck, who now lent the force of his symbolic authority to the new organizations.16
Of all the new organizations, the one that most dramatically illustrated the problems inherent in the new situation was the patriotic society that was born in ferocious protest against the Caprivi government’s colonial policy. On 24 June 1890 the government published the draft of a treaty it had just concluded with Great Britain. The treaty provided for British cession of the island of Heligoland in return for Germany’s relinquishing claims to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba off the coast of East Africa, the coastal settlement of Witu in Kenya, and substantial areas in southern Kenya and Uganda that had hitherto been in dispute. Whatever the strategic advantages in the acquisition of Heligoland, the treaty could not have been a more demonstrative negative gesture toward the colonial movement. It not only handed over to Britain much of the territory seized by Peters and the other explorer-heroes of the 1880s, but it also announced the abandonment of future German claims to colonial expansion in East Africa.17
Amidst lively debate over the treaty in the press, the German Colonial Society convened at the end of June in Cologne to address the issue at its annual congress.18 None of the delegates were pleased about developments, and those who had been associated with the Society for German Colonization were furious. It was, however, a sign of how far the ties between the Colonial Society and the government had already grown that the society’s leaders decided to limit their protest to a mild and carefully worded expression of disappointment over the treaty.19 The Colonial Society was clearly not an organization capable of vigorous opposition to official policy.
But one was on the way. Even as the congress of the Colonial Society was agonizing in Cologne about how to respond to the Heligoland treaty, prominent newspapers throughout the country, among them the Kölnische Zeitung, printed a manifesto, entitled ‘Germany Awaken!’ The document not only denounced the treaty in the strongest terms, calling it a new Olmütz, but called explicitly for counter-measures: ‘Shall this treaty become reality? No, no, and again no! The German people should rise up unanimously and declare that this treaty is unacceptable.’ Announcing that what Germany had achieved in 1871 was ‘too little in comparison to the horrible sacrifices in blood it cost us’ and that the country urgently needed more territory, the manifesto noted that the other powers were partitioning the world while Germany looked idly on. In these circumstances, it concluded, even the most loyal Germans were forced to recognize that ‘there are circumstances in which it is the most holy obligation to the Fatherland to respond to a measure of the government with a resolute [mannhaft] and decisive “no” !’20
This document, which in its tone and pugnacity rivaled anything Carl Peters had written, was the work of several Germans who resided in Zurich, chiefly an ophthalmologist by the name of Adolf Fick. Predictably, it struck a resonant chord among Peters’s supporters in the Colonial Society, who began to consider reviving the General German League of 1886. Preparations took shape in the summer of 1890 around two poles. The first was Zurich, where hundreds of letters endorsing the manifesto flowed in from the Reich and elsewhere. The other pole was Hanover, where a still obscure but highly energetic and persuasive young civil servant, Alfred Hugenberg, took the lead in contacting people, many of whom were already active in other patriotic societies. On 28 September 1890 a group of eight men, including Hugenberg and Johannes Wislicenus, who was professor of chemistry in Leipzig and Fick’s father-in-law, met in Frankfurt to discuss the project. Here they decided to enter into negotiations with Peters, who was the logical man to lead the organization.
Peters agreed early in 1891 and mobilized his allies behind the project to create an organization like that of 1886, but this time ‘with broader goals and forms appropriate to the times’.21 Just what these might be was the main topic of discussion at a meeting in Berlin on 9 April 1891, which officially constituted the organization and baptized it simply the ‘General German League’ (Allgemeiner Deutscher Verband). Peters led the meeting, which was attended by members of the Reichstag and Prussian diet, university professors, high officials, and west German businessmen. They agreed that the goals of the league were to be broadly defined, in order to synthesize in a single program the ideas of imperial expansion and ethnic solidarity among Germans throughout the world. Accordingly, the program called for:
(1) Activation of patriotic consciousness at home and combating all tendencies opposed to national [völkisch] development.
(2) Fostering and support of German ethnic [deutsch-völkisch] aspirations in all countries in which members of our people have to fight for the affirmation of their distinctiveness, and the consolidation of all Germans around the world for these ends.
(3) Promotion of an active and effective policy of German power in Europe and overseas, especially the continuation of the German colonial movement toward tangible results.22
The organization that emerged out of this meeting was clearly the direct product of frustration in the colonial movement, but it was a great deal more. It was designed to mobilize a broad range of disaffection over official policies and, more specifically, to consolidate into a single group the more militant sectors of the other patriotic societies – those not reluctant to oppose the government should circumstances warrant it. The symbol of ‘Germandom everywhere on earth’ was comprehensive enough to appeal to members of the School and Language Associations as well as the Colonial Society.23 And in the language of the League’s program this symbol also implied the possibility of German’s expansion on the European continent as a central goal.
The composition of the national leadership of the General German League was a reflection of the groups that the new organization brought together. Initially the dominant group was the disaffected sector of the Colonial Society, many of whom had financial interests in east Africa and had long been close to Peters. This group included Karl von der Heydt, Alexander Lucas, who was director of the German East Africa Company, Hübbe-Schleiden, Theodor Reismann-Grone, Wilhelm Schroeder-Poggelow, Paul Simons, Ernst von Eynern, Friedrich Krupp, Emil Kirdorf, and Fabri.24 The second principal group consisted of what might be called ‘German-national academics’, highly educated men, some of them university professors, whose interest in German activity abroad was less financial than cultural and who had been active in the School and Language Associations. Prominent among these were Ernst Hasse, Adolf Lehr, Paul and Johannes Wislicenus, and Ludwig Ennereccus. The prevailing political persuasion in both these groups was National Liberal, but the founders of the League included several leaders of the Conservative and Free Conservative parties, who hoped to use the new organization more than incidentally as a forum of opposition to the government’s program of tariff reform. Wilhelm von Kardorff, Hermann Graf Arnim-Muskau, and Mirbach-Sorquitten were prominent in this group.25 The final major component in the leadership of the new organization consisted of Germans residing abroad, although they were not, for evident reasons, numerous at the founding meeting. The German community in Zurich, led by Adolf Fick, was the most active.
Because Carl Peters soon left for Africa once again, Heydt became chairman of the General German League as it began its activities in the spring of 1891. Lucas was named treasurer and Hans von Eycken general secretary and editor of the organization’s newsletter. An executive committee and an honorific national board of directors, both drawn predominantly from the ranks of those who had attended the founding congress, made up the rest of the national leadership.
The first problem the new League confronted was the question of its own structure. On the urging of Hugenberg, the national leadership decided to emulate the other patriotic societies, despite the competition the practice would provoke, and to set up chapters, or at least contact men (Vertrauensmänner) in as many localities as possible throughout the country.26 In another respect, the League’s structure was initially modeled more after the School Association than the Colonial Society; in order to create as broad as possible a basis of active local support, decentralization was to be the key. The first chapter was established in Berlin, and by the summer of 1891 it had attracted over 500 members.27 It proved more difficult to set up chapters elsewhere in Germany, where the League had to rely on the energy and dedication of any men whom it could recruit as local leaders. By early 1892 chapters had taken root in Hamburg, Hildesheim, Heidelberg, and Essen. The pattern was similar everywhere. One of the national leaders –Hugenberg in the case of Hildesheim, Reismann-Grone in Essen – organized rallies to commemorate a patriotic occasion, such as Bismarck’s birthday in April, at which membership cards were hawked and local people pressed into positions of leadership.28 In this manner ten local chapters were established in Germany by the middle of 1893, their size varying from 1,600 in Berlin to thirty in Pritzwalk.29
Opposition to the Caprivi government made creation of the new League possible, and the organization’s leaders sought immediately to legitimize its role by obtaining the endorsement of Bismarck, who had himself gone on record against the Heligoland treaty – shamelessly, for this treaty was, as Caprivi himself had pleaded, entirely in accord with the tendencies of Bismarck’s own colonial policy. Representatives of the League made the ritual pilgrimage to Friedrichsruh, where, they assured the membership, Bismarck ‘took note with great interest of the activities and expansion of the League’.30 The League’s publicists portrayed the former chancellor as the inspiration for the organization and all the policies it was itself now advocating.31 The success of this courtship was finally sealed in 1895, when Bismarck agreed to become an honorary member of the League.32
The new organization was in a position to capitalize on a number of other developments during the early 1890s. The deterioration of the relationship between Russia and Germany after the lapse of the Reinsurance treaty, the acceleration of Russification in Poland and the Baltic provinces, and growing ethnic tension in Austria-Hungary all had direct implications for German communities outside the Reich and lent credibility to the League’s demand for more forceful protection of their interests.33 The tenor of Caprivi’s colonial policy, which was set by the Heligoland treaty, made plausible the League’s contention that the government needed to be prodded. In this atmosphere of frustration and concern the local chapters of the League frequently developed around a core of disgruntled members of the Colonial Society or School Association.34
Given these favorable circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that the General German League did not develop more rapidly during the first three years of its existence. In fact, these were years of crisis, in which the very survival of the organization was constantly in question. It was an apt comment on the real situation that the League could boast fewer local chapters in Germany than abroad. Outside the Reich chapters were founded in fifteen cities, including Brussels, Christiania, Lausanne, San José in Costa Rica, and Cairo; in these cities they usually comprised members of the resident German communities who came together with the encouragement of the German embassy or consulate.35 Within Germany, though, it was by no means clear how many people actually belonged to the League or where they lived. In 1892, 21,000 membership cards were in circulation, but certainly no more than a quarter of these had been purchased with membership dues.36
The General German League faced a variety of difficulties. Association laws restricted recruitment in some states, particularly in Bavaria and the Kingdom of Saxony. These laws forbade national political organizations to maintain formal ties to local chapters, and officials in these states routinely classified the League as a political organization.37 Other problems stemmed from the decision to make the League’s appeal as broad as possible and to keep the organization decentralized. Dues were set very low, at 1 Mark, of which the local chapters kept half. The strategy failed to attract the masses of members who were anticipated, and it also failed to provide sufficient revenues to cover the most basic expenses, such as postage and secretarial help, to say nothing of sustained propaganda.38 The bulk of the revenues came from the pockets of some 400 men who purchased lifetime memberships for 20 Marks apiece.39 Publication of the newsletter was sporadic, so lines of communication between the local chapters and the national leadership were weak. For most of the first three years of its existence, the General German League thus consisted primarily of a couple of hundred people in the Berlin chapter.
These people could not get along. Immediately after the chapter’s establishment they faced divisive questions about the organization’s make-up. It was perhaps inevitable that an organization which took shape in the political atmosphere of Berlin in the early 1890s and which styled itself the representative of patriotic interests would have to confront the issue of whether Jews had any role in it. Opinion was sharply divided between those members with ties to the Conservative and antisemitic parties, who insisted on the statutory exclusion of Jews from the League, and those, most of whom were National Liberal in inclination, who rejected this idea.40 The dispute almost led to the dissolution of the Berlin chapter before it was resolved against the antisemites; but the tensions did result in a substantial loss of membership and made it difficult for the Berlin group to exercise any national leadership.
So too did the renewal of debate over the League’s mission and structure in 1893. This time the issue was the proposal of Heydt and Schroeder-Poggelow to transform the League into a political party, a Nationalpartei, which would build on foundations putatively laid by Bismarck and become a ‘union of all patriots, not on the basis of a feckless program of mediation’ – an obvious allusion to the New Course – ‘but a firm and decisive intervention [Auftreten]’.41 The proposal brought further controversy into the League, for Hugenberg and others defended the original concept of an organization above the parties. The dispute also antagonized members of the League who had strong ties to the existing parties, and many of these men dropped out of the League before the idea of a new political party was quietly dropped.
The cumulative result of administrative disorganization, financial crisis, and disunity in the leading chapter was to bring the General German League to the verge of collapse in the spring of 1893, when (as far as anyone could determine) membership fell below 4,000. Having concluded that administrative overhaul was the only alternative to disbanding the League, members of the national board of directors met in Berlin early in July 1893 to face the problem. The meeting laid the foundations for the League’s resurgence under new leadership and a new name.
The first conclusion to emerge from this meeting was that Heydt and Eycken had been unable to provide energetic leadership. They now resigned. Heydt’s place as national chairman fell to the man who would occupy the chair for the next fourteen years and exercise a decisive influence on the League’s development. Ernst Hasse was born in 1846 in the town of Leulitz in the Kingdom of Saxony, where his father was pastor. After serving with the Saxon army in the Bohemian campaign of 1866, he began studies at the university in Leipzig, first in theology, then in law. War interrupted his studies in 1870, and he was wounded several times during the siege of Paris. In 1873 he transferred to the university in Berlin, where he studied statistics with Ernst Engel. Returning to Leipzig with a doctorate in 1875, Hasse became director of the Saxon Statistical Bureau, a post he held for the rest of his life. Ten years later he resumed academic work, taking his Habilitation in Leipzig, where he was named ausserordentlicher professor and and began to lecture on statistics. He also lectured on colonial policy, a subject in which he had developed a consuming interest after his return to Leipzig. In 1879 he founded the Leipzig Association for Commercial Geography and Colonial Policy, and in the 1880s he was a leading figure in the colonial movement during its consolidation, sitting on the national board of directors of the Colonial Society. He was also active in the Leipzig chapter of the School Association.42
Hasse’s dedication to both imperial expansion and the defense of German culture abroad epitomized the currents that combined to form the General German League. His temperament well befit the militance that distinguished the League from the earlier patriotic societies. He was a man of boundless but humorless enthusiasm, volatility, and impatience. His was a limited and rigid intelligence, but he was also disarming in his openness. Bernhard von Bülow called him, only half disparagingly, one of the most candid souls he had ever met.43 These qualities made him a tireless leader of the League, but they also made him extremely sensitive to criticism, unable to understand the calculations of people (like Bülow) less guileless than he, and prone to fight back at little provocation.
Hasse’s residence in Leipzig posed problems for an organization headquartered in Berlin, and these problems were only partially resolved while Hasse was sitting in the Reichstag as a National Liberal between 1893 and 1903. To supervise the routine administration of the League, Hasse chose, as successor to Eycken in the office of national secretary in Berlin, his friend and associate Adolf Lehr.44 Seven years older than Hasse, Lehr had been trained as an industrial chemist and engineer. He served in these capacities with a number of firms before his appointment in 1875 to direct the Allgemeine- Unfalls- Versicherungs-Bank in Leipzig. His path did not cross Hasse’s for another thirteen years, when the enactment of a federal program of a social insurance made necessary the liquidation of Lehr’s bank. Lehr then decided to take a doctorate. In 1888 he appeared as a 49-year-old student in Hasse’s seminar on statistics, and the two men soon became fast friends. Because Lehr was wealthy, he was able to move to Berlin in 1894 to run the affairs of the League, as both secretary and deputy chairman, with only a modest salary. In 1898 he too won a seat in the Reichstag (as a National Liberal from a Saxon district), which he occupied until his death in 1901.
Lehr was a good complement to Hasse. ‘In fact’, Hasse once recalled, ‘Lehr was my mentor and my moderator.’45 Having spent much of his life in managerial positions, Lehr was more flexible and open to compromise than Hasse. He developed a reputation among government officials as the leader of the moderates within the League, but his differences with Hasse were temperamental rather than philosophical; on all fundamental issues they agreed.
Lehr’s appointment was one of the conditions Hasse laid down when he agreed to accept the chairmanship of the League. He insisted on more. The organization was over 5,000 Marks in debt, its revenues entirely inadequate. To deal with this problem, Hasse persuaded Heydt and other wealthy members to pledge a fixed amount of money for the next three years to a ‘Guaranty Fund’, which collected a sum in excess of 8,000 Marks each year and made possible the elimination of the debts.46 This expedient provided only a short-term solution, though; with the expiration of the Guaranty Fund in 1899 the financial problems returned, only partially mitigated by the decision in 1897 to raise the dues from 1 to 2 Marks.47
Financial concerns were related to the organizational changes Hasse initiated. He insisted on establishing closer ties between the local chapters and the national leadership; the principal avenue was to be a new weekly journal, the Alldeutsche Blätter, which began publication in 1894 on the strength of a subsidy from Heydt and a subscription charge of 4 Marks for all members who chose to take it.48 Hasse also pressed the local chapters to keep more systematic accounts and records of their membership, and to send regular reports on their activities to Berlin. More than any changes in the formal structure of the League, however, Hasse and Lehr brought a new spirit of dedication and energy to the top of the organization, and this spirit percolated down into some of the local chapters.
Finally, the organization changed its name. This decision symbolized a new beginning, but it was also necessary in order to avoid confusion with another small organization in Berlin, the General German Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Verein), about which little is known, except that its leader was Albert von Levetzow, the president of the Reichstag.49 In mid-1894 Hasse’s group absorbed Levetzow’s, and the General German League officially became the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband).
These changes did produce some encouraging results in 1894 and 1895. Membership rose from 5,600 in mid-1894 to 7,715 at the end of the next year; subscriptions to the journal increased from 2,200 to 3,586.50 The financial deficit disappeared. Eleven local chapters were founded or revived. Most of the thirty-three locals that the League comprised at the end of 1894 were still abroad, but most of the membership lived in Germany.51
The modesty of these gains disabused most of the national leaders of the idea that the Pan-German League would ever become a mass-based cover-organization for all German patriots.52 Yet this perception of the League’s limited popular appeal did not accompany a restriction of the range of the organization’s concerns. Unlike the Colonial Society and School Association, which confined themselves to well-defined areas of activity, the Pan-German League claimed prior jurisdiction in all national issues, from colonies to the Polish problem, from the protection of Austro-Germans to the attack on foreign words. All this it combined with noisy attacks on the government, one of whose spokesmen, the Foreign Minister Alfred Marschall von Bieberstein, once characterized the organization as simply a ‘gathering point for accusations and complaints’.53 Hasse realized that the diffuseness of the League’s program not only invited such remarks but was one of the causes of the League’s weakness.54 It is an apt comment on the political mentality of the League’s leaders, though, that they resisted attempts to limit the scope of their organization’s programmatic jurisdiction.
The formation of a rival organization imposed some limitation on them, however. One of the chief areas of the League’s interest during the early 1890s was the situation in the Prussian eastern provinces, specifically the threat posed to Germans in the area by the Caprivi government’s liberalizing the policy of Germanization.55 The establishment in September 1894 of the Society for the Eastern Marches presented the League with a formidable rival which focused its attention exclusively on the Polish problem. The society was well backed financially by the large landowners close to its three founders, Ferdinand von Hansemann, Hermann Kennemann, and Heinrich von Tiedemann-Seeheim. Actively encouraged by the Prussian bureaucracy after the fall of Caprivi and the resumption of more intensive Germanization, the organization quickly spread a network of local chapters throughout the provinces of Posen, West Prussia, and Silesia, through which it not only coordinated an intense anti-Polish propaganda campaign, but undertook to support German landholders and businessmen financially.
Clearly the Pan-German League could not compete in this part of the country, and a division of labor between the two patriotic societies seemed the logical solution for both. It was difficult to reach. Buoyed by its initial success, the Eastern Marches Society announced, to the alarm of the Pan-Germans, that it intended not to restrict its work to the Prussian east, but to establish chapters all over the country – a decision which could only result in direct competition with the Pan-German League.56 Negotiations to prevent this competition fell through, and the Eastern Marches Society did take up agitation in western Germany. Its leaders soon discovered, however, that with the exception of areas such as the Ruhr, into which Polish labor had immigrated, interest in the Polish problem was not acute west of the Elbe River.57 Conversely, the Pan-German League found itself all but excluded from the Prussian east; the League did not, however, draw the programmatic consequences and eliminate or deemphasize Polish policy among its concerns. Neither organization abandoned its pretensions to invade the territory of the other, but by 1897 an informal truce had set in; henceforth the Eastern Marches Society concentrated its organizational effort in the east while the League worked primarily west of the Elbe.58
The expansion of the Pan-German League became dramatic once the organization found a compelling national issue on which to concentrate its activity. Paradoxically, the League’s benefactor was the brunt of its criticism, the German government. The management of national symbols had become problematic with Bismarck in opposition, particularly since the emperor and Caprivi themselves recognized the value of Bismarck’s own use of social imperialism and his techniques of rallying public opinion directly on national issues.59 Just how problematic the situation could become was evident in 1893, when the government orchestrated a campaign in favor of a program of expansion and reform in the army – always one of the most powerful national symbols – only to find Bismarck criticizing aspects of the program.60 Even after his public reconciliation with Bismarck in 1894, the monarch’s position as custodian of national symbols was insecure. One strategy for reinforcing it was to create, or resurrect, a symbol that would be directly associated with the monarchy.
The circumstances that led to the popular campaign in favor of a navy were very complicated. They included strategic considerations, the emperor’s infatuation with the idea of a battle fleet to rival Great Britain’s, inter- and intra-agency rivalries in Berlin, the calculation that construction of the fleet would have a stabilizing impact on German domestic politics, and diplomatic tension between Germany and Britain over South Africa, which set in after the Jameson raid late in December 1895.61 The most dramatic signal of the emperor’s intentions came on 18 January 1896, when, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the German Empire, William announced that the ‘German Empire has become a world empire. Everywhere in the most distant parts of the earth live thousands of our compatriots. German wares, German knowledge, German industriousness go overseas. The value of what Germany has put on the sea numbers in the thousands of millions. You, gentlemen, face the grave obligation of helping Me to incorporate this greater German Empire firmly into our homeland.’62 In the context of contemporary discussion, the hints about the urgency of expanding the German navy could scarcely have been more clear. The impact of the emperor’s remarks on the Pan-German League was electrifying, and well might the organization’s leaders boast that in these remarks ‘we find the program of the League’.63 The emperor appropriated, in any event, a broadened conception of the German nation implicit in the idea of Weltpolitik; and he incorporated empire and a battle fleet into the symbolism over which the monarchy claimed custody.
In the aftermath of the emperor’s speech the agitators of the Pan-German League discovered an enormous popular receptivity to the idea of a naval build-up. Lecturers accustomed to speaking in half-empty halls now faced overflowing crowds. Local chapters that had ceased to exist except on paper awoke to resume activity; dozens of new chapters were established on the strength of naval rallies.64 The enthusiasm at these rallies was so great that a remarkably large amount of money was donated for an even more remarkable undertaking – to help build a warship. By the end of 1896 the Pan-German League had received over 11,000 Marks both from Germany and abroad for this purpose.65
The Pan-German League did not create this popular enthusiasm, but it certainly exploited and helped to mobilize it. Membership in the League rose from about 7,700 at the end of 1895 to 9,443 at the end of 1896 and to over 10,000 in the next four months.66 Nor was the League alone in mobilizing this sentiment. The Colonial Society, discouraged and stagnant after 1890 in the face of the government’s evident disinterest in colonies, also found the navy to be a galvanizing issue, which in the course of 1896 alone produced a 10-percent growth in membership.67 The Pan-German League, however, emerged early as the most energetic and enthusiastic organization; its speakers and publicists were the men who most conspicuously and tirelessly disseminated the arguments in favor of making Germany a naval power.68
The popular agitation in favor of naval expansion was of great interest to agencies of the German government, as was the leading orchestrator of the agitation. The relationship that took shape during the naval campaign between the Pan-German League and the government was an early indication of problems that would subsequently become acute: officials attempted to exploit the League in mobilizing opinion and in inter-agency competition, only to learn that the Pan-Germans were difficult to control and that their agitation could get out of hand.
The popular agitation became in 1896 an element in a dispute within the Geman naval leadership itself, between those who favored construction of a battle fleet based on capital ships and those who questioned both the military and political wisdom of this project and favored instead a more modest build-up, with the emphasis on the construction of cruisers, whose strength was thought to be in coastal defense and the protection of commerce. The battle-fleet conception found its leading spokesman in the Chief of the Naval Cabinet, Gustav von Senden-Bibran, and in Alfred Tirpitz, then the Chief of the Naval Staff; their ideas accorded with the sympathies of the emperor, who was a devotee of the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The main advocate of the more restricted program was the Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, Friedrich Hollmann.69
The one group of officials was more comfortable than the other with the activity of the Pan-German League, even though the League itself had, in 1896, developed no specific conception of the fleet it wanted built. Early in 1896 Senden met with Hugenberg and expressed his sympathy for a plan for country-wide agitation in favor of spending 200 million Marks on the fleet–a plan that envisaged, if necessary, dissolving the Reichstag and a change of chancellors.70 This contact lapsed, however, once Hollmann learned of it. Hollmann himself appreciated the utility of patriotic societies, as long as ‘they set as their goal the propagation of an awareness and interest in the navy’.71 This goal did not, in Hollmann’s eyes, include raising money to build warships. The Naval Secretary’s anxiousness about the Pan-German League was evident in the tone in which he rejected the more than 10,000 Marks which the League offered him in October 1896; such donations, he explained, would be better spent on some navy-related charity, such as the Frauengabe Berlin-Elberfeld.72 Undeterred, the League submitted early in February 1897 a proposal for systematic cooperation to Hollmann’s office. ‘We must join forces’, Hasse urged, ‘in order to force the government to submit a new, far-reaching plan of naval construction, which would be either accepted or rejected en bloc – with the possibility of dissolving the Reichstag.’ Then, in an ominous allusion to the Prussian constitutional crisis of the 1860s, Hasse warned that ‘if the manouver fails, the emperor must display the same awareness of his duty as did his grandfather’. The fleet that the League proposed to construct was to be larger than the Russian and two-thirds the size of the French fleet. With such a navy, Hasse concluded, ‘a basis would be laid for Germany’s world domination [Weltherrschaft]’.73 Hasse was candid enough to admit to Hollmann that the League’s cooperation with the Naval Office and its advocacy of such radical demands would enable the organization to remain at the vanguard of the popular naval movement. Hollmann was none the less opposed to all aspects of the proposal, but his own position was undermined when the Reichstag rejected parts of the modest program he submitted early in 1897.
Hollmann’s successor as Naval Secretary was much more alive to the potential of the kind of campaign the Pan-German League was proposing. It is no exaggeration to describe the role that Alfred Tirpitz assumed in 1897 as propaganda minister.74 He promptly restructured the Naval Office, adding a ‘Section for Information and General Parliamentary Affairs’, commonly known as the Information Bureau (Nachrichtenbüro ).75 This agency, headed by August von Heeringen, became the orchestrator of a massive campaign both to awaken popular support for a battle fleet, which now officially became the goal of German naval policy, and – in a manner clearly anticipated in the thinking of the Pan-German League – to bring irresistible pressure on the Reichstag to pass the necessary appropriations.76 Subsidized by official monies and by contributions from interested sectors of commerce and industry (many of whom had also been prominent in the colonial movement), the Information Bureau developed what the agency’s historian has called a ‘huge propaganda apparatus’, with ties to journals and newspapers around the country.77 Heeringen recruited professors and naval officers to lecture and write about the need for a large fleet; the flood of lectures and pamphlets was channeled toward strategic groups, for whom every conceivable argument was adduced, from industrial growth to the material benefits that would allegedly accrue to workers, and from Germany’s cultural mission in the world to the need to protect settlement colonies abroad.78
The patriotic societies figured large in the calculations of the Information Bureau. Heeringen’s office remained in touch with the leaders of the Colonial Society and, after some initial hesitation because of its radicalism, with the Pan-German League, where Lehr was the primary contact.79 The Information Bureau supplied the patriotic societies with pamphlets, information and subsidies for their own pamphlets, reserve officers for lectures, and slides to be shown at rallies.80
The campaign soon reached a new stage of intensity. After the passage of Tirpitz’s first naval bill in March 1898 and the exacerbation of diplomatic tension between Germany and Britain over South Africa and Samoa, an atmosphere prevailed in Germany in which the agitation of the Pan-German League enjoyed unprecedented success. The League grew dramatically, encouraged not only by the support of the Naval Office but by the availability of the money which Hollmann had turned down and which the League now diverted to purposes of propaganda. Membership increased from just over 10,000 early in 1897 to more than 17,000 a year and a half later. New chapters appeared throughout central, western, and southern Germany, particularly in the Kingdom of Saxony, where, as in Bavaria, the liberalization of association laws removed obstacles that had earlier blocked the League’s growth. During the same year and a half, the number of local groups in Germany grew from just over forty to more than one hundred. Rallies were frequently attended by more than a thousand people; they featured travelling speakers (often supplied by the Naval Office), who illustrated their talks with slides (also supplied by the Naval Office). In the enthusiasm and excitement, stimulated in part by the technological novelty of the slides, the chapters thrived. In Kassel the local group, on the verge of collapse early in 1897, suddenly revived late in the year at a large rally.81 The chapter in Constance, which boasted a membership of sixty-three at the end of 1897, expanded on the strength of several Flottenversammlungen to 170 just over a year later.82 These chapters only typified developments elsewhere.
The dramatic and unanticipated growth of the Pan-German League made necessary some organizational changes. In order to coordinate regionally the appearances of travelling lecturers, chapters began to form district associations (Gauverbände); these provided an intermediate administrative level between the locals and national headquarters in Berlin, where most of the agitation was coordinated.83 By mid-1899 district associations had appeared in areas where the naval campaign had been particularly successful – in Thuringia, Hessen, and Westphalia (where the Gauverband Berg und Mark coordinated the activities of chapters in Barmen, Düsseldorf, Elberfeld, Hagen, and several other cities).84
The naval campaign not only promoted cooperation among the League’s chapters; it made for closer relations among patriotic societies, especially between the League and the Colonial Society, which itself underwent dramatic growth after 1897.85 Cooperation helped defray the costs of rallies, which were usually so well attended that both organizations could recruit members. One patriotic society suffered, though, in the naval campaign. The Eastern Marches Society now found its recruiting efforts stifled in western Germany, where enthusiasm over the navy overwhelmed concern about the activity of Poles in Posen and West Prussia.86
Throughout the first stages of the naval campaign, relations between the Pan-German League and the Naval Office remained relatively unstrained. Pamphlets published under the League’s auspices by its official publisher, the J. F. Lehmann Verlag in Munich, reproduced information and arguments generated in the Information Bureau.87 The only signs of potential friction were in the shrill tone of some of the League’s literature and in hints that Tirpitz’s bills represented the barest minimum of what was needed.88 After passage of the first naval bill, the League called immediately for another, and when, late in 1899, a second bill was announced, the League’s spokesmen, though enthusiastic, could not resist criticizing its limited size.89
Tirpitz was shrewd enough to recognize the problems of relying on an organization such as the Pan-German League, whose own vitality seemed to depend upon keeping popular enthusiasm at a fever-pitch. Tirpitz himself had other concerns. His plan for constructing the fleet rested on the assumption that the build-up would have to proceed in carefully calculated stages, in order to ensure the support of the Catholic Center Party in the Reichstag and in order not to alarm the British during the initial stages of the build-up.90 The possibility that popular patriotic enthusiasm could overwhelm these calculations and increase the pace of construction made Tirpitz wary of the Pan-German League; it also made him receptive to the idea of a new patriotic society to promote the navy, one whose agitation the Naval Office could itself control.
The initiative for founding the German Navy League (Deutscher Flottenverein) did not come from Tirpitz’s office, but from a group of men associated with the heavy-industrial pressure group, the Central Association of German Industrialists (Centralverband deutscher Industrieller), many of whom had already contributed money to Tirpitz’s campaign.91 With the quiet encouragement of the Naval Office, whose primary concern was that any new popular organization lobbying for the navy remain in reliable hands, a group of industrialists, merchants, and shipbuilders officially constituted the Navy League in April 1898, shortly after the Reichstag had passed the first naval bill. The real locus of power in the organization was indicated in the fact that its executive secretary was a journalist, Viktor Schweinburg, who was known to have close ties to the Centralverband and to Friedrich Krupp.
Tirpitz could be comfortable with the new Navy League. Its leaders insisted that the role of their organization would be loyally to support the building program of the Naval Office and, in general, to educate the German people about naval matters. Because this conception conformed so well to his own views about the proper role of a patriotic society, Tirpitz supported the new group with all the means at his disposal. These were considerable. It was a matter of policy that the federal and Prussian bureaucracies were to support organizations deemed to serve worthy patriotic causes.92 With Tirpitz’s blessing, these bureaucracies now came so thoroughly to the aid of the Navy League that they turned the organization into something different than other patriotic societies in Imperial Germany: it became virtually a semi-public institution. The federal and Prussian ministries of the interior and most of the Prussian bureaucracy treated Schweinburg to full cooperation.93 Instructions went out from Berlin to all Oberpräsidenten in Prussia to recruit prominent citizens to lead committees charged with establishing provincial federations of the Navy League.94 The Oberpräsidenten in turn instructed the Regierungen and Landräte in their provinces to encourage formation of local chapters and, to this end, the Landräte mobilized local officials, particularly those in the railroad and postal services, in their administrative districts.95 Officialdom in other German states emulated the Prussian example. Here too the initiative for setting up the infrastructure of the Navy League passed from state offices to mayors and other local officials.96 To emphasize the official grace in which the new organization stood, as well as to ensure its political reliability, the government showered orders and distinctions on the men who were active in it; prominent members of the German royal houses were persuaded to become protectors of the state and provincial federations, while Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the emperor’s brother, became the Navy League’s national protector.97
The result of this breath-taking display of official support was to create an enormous organization, which easily outnumbered all the other patriotic societies combined. By 1902 membership in the German Navy League stood at more than a quarter million – a figure that was in part the product of the low annual dues, only 50 Pfennige, which the organization charged.98 Revenues from membership dues were none the less lavish, and they made agitation possible on a scale with which neither the Colonial Society nor the Pan-German League could compete.
Because they had no appreciation for the calculations that led Tirpitz to foster another patriotic society, the Pan-Germans resented the establishment of the Navy League and the official favors it received. Spokesmen for the Pan-German League argued, with good reason, that their own organization had been an effective leader of the naval agitation and that another patriotic society was worse than superfluous, for it would fractionalize the naval movement.99 They were also hurt when still another organization invaded an area of their strength, this time German communities abroad. In June 1898 the Central Association of German Navy Leagues Abroad (Hauptverband Deutscher Flottenvereine im Auslande) was founded, largely under the auspices of the Colonial Society; this organization also enjoyed the encouragement of the government, though not on such a massive scale as the Navy League, through the avenue of German embassies and consulates.100
Fragmentation of the naval movement did not occur, however. Dues were so low in the Navy League that many people could afford memberships in it and another patriotic society. Because popular enthusiasm was so widespread, the three major societies involved in the naval agitation were able to cooperate. That this cooperation could produce formidable pressure became apparent during the campaign in favor of Tirpitz’s second naval bill early in 1900. From the Pan-German League came the idea of a petition ‘with a colossal number of signatures’, which ‘would be of aid to the government in the desired manner against possible opposition in the Reichstag’.101 Lehr then approached Heeringen in the Information Bureau with the idea, and the two agreed that the coordinated efforts of all the patriotic societies were needed to produce enough signatures – Lehr calculated a minimum of 100,000 – to have an impact.102 The Lehmann Verlag became the central clearing house, as thousands of petititons were sent out for distribution at naval rallies sponsored by the Pan-German League, the Colonial Society, and the Navy League. At the time of the bill’s passage, early in June 1900, petitions had arrived in Berlin bearing nearly 300,000 signatures.103
The swift passage of the navy law of 1900 would doubtless have occurred even had the Reichstag not seen the mountains of petitions the patriotic societies submitted. Yet the petitions did indicate how effectively these organizations were learning to mobilize public opinion on national issues. The naval campaign also marked a high-point in cooperation between the Pan-German League and the government; with one notable exception, the League’s mobilization of patriotism would henceforth run contrary to the intentions of leading agencies of the German government. In fact, the seeds of this conflict had already begun to sprout during the years of the naval agitation.
A critical posture toward the policies of the German government was an inherent characteristic of the Pan-German League from the day of its founding. This posture implied a conflict with the government over custodianship of national symbols and the authority to define the national interest. The availability of Bismarck as an alternative pole of national authority made opposition on patriotic grounds possible, but the fall of Caprivi in 1894 and the abatement of the ‘Bismarck fronde’, of which the League had been one of the most vocal components, made it far more difficult. So too did the active attempt to associate the monarchy with the dramatic new national symbol taking shape in Germany’s shipyards. Then, in 1898, when Bismarck died, he disappeared as a rival pole of national authority and was himself apotheosized as a national symbol – in a shrine the monarch could henceforth claim to guard alone. In these circumstances, criticism of government policy on national issues became more difficult and uncomfortable, for it came dangerously close to criticism of the monarchy itself and all that the monarchy symbolized.
Criticism of the monarchy or even the monarch was, however, not the intent of the Pan-German League. The League’s position was not to oppose the monarchy’s authority but rather to insist on a kind of joint custodianship over the national symbols, an arrangement in which the monarch would, in questions of the national interest, seek and heed the advice of those who represented the Volk – a role that leaders of the League claimed themselves to perform. Even when they denounced the government’s policies, these men emphasized their loyalty and insisted that their criticism was only ‘advice for positive improvements given by honorable patriots’ and that the criticism was directed neither at the institution of the monarchy nor the person of the monarch, but rather at the Reichstag or the ministers who were constitutionally charged with advising the monarch.104 The Pan-German League’s opposition was reluctant. The organization would no doubt have preferred to cooperate with the government as it did during the naval campaign; it valued the occasional contacts it developed with officials, and it was gratified when its demands were embodied in policy.105 However, given the extravagance of these demands, government after government was to prove wanting and become the brunt of the League’s attacks. And because these attacks focused on national issues, the implication became difficult to evade that the League was challenging not only the wisdom of the emperor’s ministers, but their authority – and ultimately the authority and custodial power of the monarch himself over the national symbols.
Although these problems did not culminate until the Daily Telegraph affair in 1908, they were defined before the turn of the century, during the tenure in office of Bernhard von Bülow. As the research of Peter Winzen has confirmed, many of Bülow’s ideas were consistent with the program of the Pan-German League.106 Like the Pan-Germans, Bülow anticipated Germany’s becoming a ‘world power’, which meant challenging British colonial and naval supremacy. Bülow also believed in exploiting national issues – he called it ‘beating the national drum’ – to promote domestic stability; he believed in mobilizing public opinion on these issues to bring pressure onto the Reichstag and in using patriotic societies as agents in this mobilization.107 These similarities in conception explain the enthusiasm with which the Pan-Germans greeted most of Bülow’s actions while he was Foreign Minister and then, in 1900, his elevation to the chancellorship.108
More telling in the long run, however, were the differences between Bülow and the Pan-Germans. Bülow’s conceptual world was governed by the category of power; he had no sympathy for ethnicity as a guide to policy. When he thought of expansion, he meant colonies overseas, not the continental expansion, undertaken in the name of consolidating the German community in Europe, which became a central feature of the program of the Pan-German League; such expansion, Bülow calculated, would merely enlarge the number of unhappy Catholics ruled from Berlin. In addition, an important difference of perspective made relations between Bülow and the League increasingly hostile. Bülow was fond of recounting an exchange that he had with Hasse in the Reichstag, which epitomized the problem. To Bülow’s charge that the League’s agitation was creating diplomatic complications for Germany with England, Hasse replied: ‘As a representative of the people it is my right and my duty to express the real sentiments of the German people. It is Your Excellency’s duty because you are the Minister, to see that our foreign relations do not suffer as a result.’109 This, of course, was easier said than done; and the shrill agitation of the League became an increasing source of embarrassment to Bülow, just as the constraints that considerations of diplomacy imposed on him became an increasing source of frustration to the Pan-Germans. Bülow was especially sensitive when Anglo-German relations were at stake, for it was of critical importance to him and Tirpitz that these relations remain as amicable as possible during the early phases of the German naval build-up. Anglophobia, however, was one of the primary sources of the Pan-German League’s success.110
The anti-British thrust of the naval campaign was unavoidable, and although Bülow, like Tirpitz, was annoyed at the tone of some of the Pan-German League’s propaganda, the two sides worked in relative harmony on the issue of the navy. The navy was, however, not the only issue on which the League capitalized during the last years of the century; and the League’s exploitation of these other issues, some of which also had anti-British overtones, brought it into conflict with Bülow’s diplomatic plans.
Two issues were of particular importance. The first concerned the Habsburg monarchy. In 1897 Austrian politics again erupted when the prime minister, Casimir Badeni, attempted to forge a parliamentary alliance similar to Taafe’s Iron Ring, by means of additional concessions to the Czech minority in the form of language ordinances which required civil servants in Bohemia and Moravia to speak Czech as well as German. These ordinances revived the ethnic conflict in the Habsburg monarchy with unprecedented ferocity. The most outspoken opponents of the ordinances were a group of parliamentary deputies, led by Georg von Schönerer and Karl-Hermann Wolf, who also called themselves Pan-Germans although they were not organizationally tied to the Pan-German League in Germany.111 The League did, however, become involved in the conflict. Its publicists advanced the provocative argument that defending Germans in the Habsburg territories might require dissolving the monarchy and annexing its Cisleithanian lands to Germany.112 Protests against the Badeni ordinances became the main theme at large rallies. The League also lent its support, though unofficially, to the so-called ‘Los-von-Rom’ movement–the attempt sponsored by the Evangelischer Bund to organize the defection of Austro-Germans from the Catholic church, an institution alleged to be an accomplice in the subjugation of Germans in the monarchy.113
The protests over the Badeni ordinances, which coincided with the growing excitement over the navy, served to reemphasize ethnicity as a foundation of the Pan-German League’s program. At the same time, the League found another issue, which combined like no other the questions of ethnicity and imperialism. Interest in the Boer uprising against British domination was intense in Germany after the emperor’s famous telegram of congratulation to Paul Kruger at the end of 1895. The Pan-German League took a special interest in the matter, though, once its publicists concluded that the Boers made up part of the German nation. ‘The Boers are German in blood (in descent), in language, in national character, and in all the rest of their ethnicity [Volkstum]’, one writer announced in 1896. ‘In South Africa too we have ethnic German territory [deutscher Volksboden] – as genuine as in Flanders or Holstein [sic].’114
The outbreak of war between Britain and the Boer republics in the fall of 1899 was the signal for a popular campaign in Germany even more extensive than the naval agitation. Styling itself as the ‘carrier and interpreter of general sympathy for the brave little brother-nation of Boers’, the League tapped the unexpectedly broad current of popular protest in Germany against the British war effort.115 Most of the hundreds of thousands of Germans who attended rallies in support of the Boers did not share all facets of the League’s perception of the conflict, particularly the idea of an ethnic community among Germans and Boers and the proposition that the Boer republics lay on German soil. However, even if their significance was only to give expression to what one report described as growing anger and profound outrage over the ‘brutal, illegal acts of violence perpetrated by English policy in South Africa’, these rallies were impressive.116 The audiences were larger than the League had ever encountered before, often numbering several thousands of people. The meeting held in Plauen on 18 January 1901 stands as a good example. The local chapter of the League filled the meeting hall with 900 people, turning another 600 away. After a short speech from the local leader and communal singing of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’, the lectures began. The first, on the subject of ‘England against Germany’, was the prelude to the main attraction of the evening, an account of combat in South Africa, which a Boer officer delivered in his native idiom with the aid of a local translator. Finally, an Austro-German from Bohemia appeared on the platform to speak of the plight of Germans in the Habsburg monarchy, after which a resolution was passed condemning both the British and Austrian governments.117 The enormous audiences, the presence of Boer soldiers and others who had seen action in the war, the careful orchestration of the agenda, the inclusion of themes, like the Austrian problem, that were central to the Pan-German program, and the passage of formula resolutions at the meeting’s conclusion characterized this agitation everywhere in Germany and demonstrated how well the League was learning techniques of mobilization.118
The League now also found it possible to undertake its own ‘practical’ support work. The rallies ritually included passing the plate for donations to the Boer cause, and the income was enormous. To coordinate the fund-raising, the central headquarters of the League issued an appeal for a ‘Boer Collection’ (Burensammlung) in October 1899; within six months over 200,000 Marks had flowed in, and at the end of the Boer conflict, in 1902, the League had collected more than a half million Marks.119 Most of this money the League channeled through Holland to Boer organizations for charitable purposes, but some of it the League retained for its own agitation, particularly for sending veterans of the war to local chapters, where they proved to be great attractions at meetings.
The result of all this excitement was to bring the Pan-German League to the peak of its prewar strength. Many of those who attended the rallies not only gave money to the Boers, but joined the League amidst the enthusiasm. Existing local chapters grew to several times their previous size; dozens of new ones were founded in the wake of Boer rallies. Shortly before the protests began in earnest, in April 1899, the organization comprised 157 locals; at least fifty new chapters owed their origins to the Boer protests, for early in 1902 the figure stood at 215. Membership rose during the same period from 19,400 to 22,300.120 Implicit in these statistics was a lesson not lost on the organization’s leadership: the excitement generated by international tension worked to the benefit of the League, and the League hence had a corporate interest in keeping this excitement at a high pitch.
The excitement quickly brought the League into conflict with the government. Although it officially endorsed the German government’s policy of neutrality in the Boer War, the League soon began to criticize what it charged was the government’s favoritism toward England.121 In any event, the desire of the German government to remain on good terms with the British government created a situation in which a clash with the Pan-German League was unavoidable. The Anglophobia fanned at the rallies that the League convoked to protest the Boer War became a source of growing concern to the British government and growing annoyance to the German government, especially as numerous other incidents, which crowded the years 1898–1900 (most significantly the Anglo-German dispute over Samoa), swelled the volume of the Pan-German League’s criticism of German policy.122
Some of this criticism Bülow found unobjectionable, if not opportune. The League’s demands for the fleet, even if they exceeded what the Naval Office thought feasible at the time, enabled the government to pose as if it were being driven, against its own will, by the force of popular opinion. But when the League’s criticism was no longer consistent with the intent of Bülow’s own policies, it became a real problem. Bülow was thus worried not only about the hostility the League was sowing against England, but about the League’s involvement in Austrian affairs, particularly its practice of sending Austrian Pan-Germans around the country as celebrated guests to speak before local chapters, where their lectures always featured criticism of the Habsburg government.
The difficulty Bülow faced was that he could not easily muzzle the Pan-German League. Unlike the Navy League, the Pan-Germans were unbeholden to the government for bureaucratic beneficence, nor were they in the government’s debt for financial favors, as was the Colonial Society -an organization in which a wink from the government sufficed to stifle criticism in connection with the Boer War.123 Bülow did, however, try several devices to bring pressure on the Pan-Germans. When protests arrived in the Foreign Office from the Austrian government over the manner in which Austrian Pan-Germans were using their tours in Germany as a forum to criticize the policies of the Austrian government, Bülow mobilized the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and Prussian missions in other German states in order to supervise the meetings in which Austrians were speaking and on occasion to have the local police shut these meetings down.124
This tactic was less practical as a means of restraining the expression of sympathy for the Boers – a phenomenon far more popularly based and less narrowly associated with the Pan-German League. So Bülow tried a number of other tactics. The first was to cultivate people in the Pan-German League’s leadership who were thought to be moderate, in the hope that these men would restrain the radicals. Arnim-Muskau, Udo von Stolberg-Wernigerode, who were the two leading Conservatives in the League’s leadership, and Reismann-Grone all received overtures in 1900; the first two men were receptive to Bülow’s pleas (Reismann-Grone was not), but their efforts to tone down the League’s criticism were a failure and resulted only in their own resignations from the executive committee.125 Their failure left Bülow with no choice but to humiliate the League publicly, a strategem to which he had already been resorting with increasing frequency. Newspapers known to have close ties to the government, such as the Kölnische Zeitung, the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, and the Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung, had begun in 1898 to run articles about the League, the thrust of which was to portray its leaders as a group of ‘colonial supermen’, ‘Superlativalldeutschen’ – men full of all the best intentions but no feel for the realities of foreign policy.126
The culmination of this strategem came in 1900. Tensions between the League and the government peaked when Bülow refused to hold an official reception in Berlin for Paul Kruger, who was on a European tour late in 1900. No pressure from Bülow, however, could prevent the Pan-German League first from staging a gala reception for Kruger in Cologne and then sending a delegation to pay honor to him at The Hague.127 The reverberations from the Kruger incidents extended into the Reichstag on 12 December 1900, when Hasse and Bülow faced off. Hasse attacked first. Beginning with the failure of the German government to make the gesture of receiving Kruger, Hasse went on first to denounce German policy in the South African war and then to condemn the entire course of German foreign policy since the fall of Bismarck. The government, Hasse concluded, had lost all touch with the mood of the German people.128 Bülow then took the floor and showed that he was more than a match for Hasse. So significant were his remarks in defining the Pan-German League’s subsequent self-image that they deserve to be cited at some length.129 Bülow assumed the posture of the responsible statesman, who had to face pressures of which the Pan-Germans could have no conception. Hasse and his friends, according to Bülow, could thus well indulge in the sentimentality that guided their views of the Boers. ‘Hasse has not spoken without a certain excitement, nor without pathos -noble pathos’, Bülow conceded. ‘It has also interested me to see how merrily Herr Hasse has been splashing around in the blue waves of the boundless ocean of the politics of conjecture [Konjekturalpolitik]’. The lines of Bülow’s strategy were already clear, but more was to come. Pointing out that Hasse’s support of Kruger put him in the same camp with the Social Democrats, Bülow addressed the League’s claim, as the representative of German public opinion, to exercise custody over the national symbols:
Bülow’s final blow included the formula which was to haunt the League throughout the prewar period. ‘I cannot’, he proclaimed, ‘conduct foreign policy from the standpoint of pure moral philosophy – Bismarck did not either – nor can I from the perspective of the beer hall [Bierbank]’.
The humiliation of Hasse and the Pan-German League was complete. Bülow’s contention that the government stood above public opinion in questions of foreign policy was less painful than the sarcastic tone of his remarks and his intimation that the League was a group of men who were not to be taken seriously. The most humiliating thing about Bülow’s response to Hasse was, as one member later observed, that it was ‘rude’ (unvornehm).130 It was also effective. Bierbankpolitik – a word that raised images of burghers pounding their fists on the tables of beer halls, their patriotic ire increasing in measure with the alcohol they consumed – now surfaced everywhere in the governmentalist press: ‘Pan-German’ became a formula word to connote any crazy scheme in foreign policy.131 As a further sign of the disgrace of the League, the German Colonial Society now began publicly to snub it.132
One of the reasons why Bülow’s remarks stung so much was that they were true. The rapid growth of the League at the end of the 1890s was in fact accompanied by the flow of great quantities of spirits in public halls around the country. But if Bülow hoped that calling a spade a spade would undermine Hasse’s position and make the League more docile, he was disappointed. The local chapters rallied immediately to Hasse’s defense, expressing their gratitude for his ‘manly intervention’ (mannhaftes Auftreten) in the Reichstag.133 Nor did Bülow’s attack seem on the surface to have any impact on the Pan-German League’s growth, which continued, on the strength of the protest rallies during the on-going Boer War, until the middle of 1901.
Yet Bülow’s public humiliation of the League did mark a turning point in the history of the organization. Like no previous incident, it signalled a definitive break with the government and pushed the League toward a more radical position of opposition, from which the organization would claim exclusive custody of national symbols and deny the government’s authority and competence to guide the nation’s fate.
The cost of taking this position soon proved to be high. Many members of the League were uncomfortable with the growing hostility toward official authority, and in the months following the scene in the Reichstag large numbers resigned, their departure initially concealed in the influx occasioned by the continuing war in South Africa.134 As the likelihood of a British victory in the war became apparent, though, an absolute drop in the League’s membership set in.
Those who remained in the Pan-German League were for the most part the militants who were willing to accept the public image of an organization whose mission was to oppose the government regardless of the consequences. The defection of the more moderate elements from both the national and local leadership left behind a group of men under whose influence the League’s criticism became more outspoken and bitter, as the organization adopted more consciously the self-image of the only true spokesman of the nation. Ultimately this role involved the attempt to forge a broad coalition of opposition to the government, whose policies, leaders of the League now concluded, were leading the country toward catastrophe.
Two events early in the new century well symbolized the beginning of a new phase in the League’s history. The first was the death of Lehr in 1901. This event eliminated another of the moderating influences in the national leadership, for Lehr was succeeded as deputy chairman by Heinrich Class, the leader of the local chapter in Mainz, a younger man who possessed none of Lehr’s patience or tact and who began to draw out the more impulsive side of Hasse. Class was soon joined in the national leadership by other younger men who shared his loathing for the Bülow government.
The second event was the final defeat of the Boers in mid-1902. Not only did this event remove one of the principal sources of the Pan-German League’s success, but it left behind deep resentments over the role which the German government had played in the war. These resentments were to figure heavily in the League’s adjustment to the crisis it was about to face. ‘When we look back on the course of the Boer War, it is difficult for us to control our bitter feelings’, wrote Paul Samassa, the editor of the League’s journal. If there was any consolation, it lay in the ability which the League had demonstrated to mobilize large numbers of people. ‘Because of the conflict between the feelings of the German people and the policy of the government’, Samassa concluded, ‘the feeling of co-responsibility for the fate of our own people was awakened in broad circles of people – people who otherwise have remained aloof from political activity and have found it almost a burden.’135
Samassa’s perceptions were widely shared in the League’s leadership. They also point to problems in the history of the Pan-German League that must now be confronted before the narrative can be extended into the organization’s years of crisis. These problems have to do with the sources and contours of the League’s view of politics, the reasons why this view appealed to specific circles of Germans, and the dynamics of a patriotic crusade which, when frustrated, turned openly against official authority.