Even during the years of its early activity the Pan-German League demonstrated the characteristics that made it the object of such controversy and alarm in Germany and elsewhere. The organization championed an extravagant and aggressive program, which seemed to call for unrestrained building of warships to challenge the British, the demise of the Habsburg monarchy, and constructing an empire to comprehend an ethnic community so far-flung that it embraced Boers in South Africa. In mobilizing support for these and other patriotic causes, the League displayed an evidently uncontrollable dynamism which led it, in the name of patriotism, into open conflict with the German government.
Studying the roots of the Pan-German League’s controversial behavior requires suspending the narrative in favor of a different kind of analysis. The next several chapters will be devoted to the study of the cultural context within which the League operated; they will address the problem of why the men who attended the League’s rallies and became active in the organization found this behavior meaningful. These chapters will explore the character of the beliefs, concerns, and anxieties the Pan-Germans harbored, the kinds of people they were, the question of why the League’s program and activities appealed to them, and the avenues through which they translated their beliefs, concerns, and anxieties into effective political action. The analysis begins, in the present chapter, in the intellectual world of the Pan-German League, the realm in which one finds not only the extravagant contours of the organization’s program, but more subtle images and themes which provide hints about the concerns that made this program attractive to certain kinds of people.
Despite the controversy that surrounds it, the concept of ideology is, for several reasons, the best description of this intellectual world. The concept suggests, in the first place, a highly structured belief system, a systematized representation of reality.1 Ideology is ‘political cosmology’, in which the word ‘political’ pertains in the broad sense to power relationships in and among social groups. Ideology thus connotes intellectual system, the attempt to bring conceptual order to a world in which questions of power are being debated. This order comprehends the temporal as well as the spatial dimensions of the social world. It involves an interpretation of the past (of the derivation of power relationships), an analysis of the present (either to justify or to repudiate these relationships), and a set of precepts and imperatives for future conduct. Ideology makes political action meaningful by rooting it in the context of an intelligible past and present and a desirable future.2
Jean-Paul Sartre has written of antisemitism as a ‘passion and a conception of the world’.3 His characterization is true of ideology in general. Ideology differs from concepts such as belief and opinion, not only in being more systematic and comprehensive – which is what Sartre meant by a ‘conception of the world’ – but in so far as it demands – as a ‘passion’ – more than casual commitment to its validity. The term ‘secular religion’, which several commentators have used to describe ideology, emphasizes this point. Like theology, ideology is a tightly articulated system, with limited tolerance for ambiguity, skepticism, or dispute.
One additional element in the concept of ideology deserves particular emphasis. Ideology is an eminently self-conscious system of thought. It is no coincidence that ideologies arise commonly within social groups whose values are being challenged in confrontation with other groups; in the systems they formulate, ideologists develop images of themselves and of their own groups as well as of the groups that threaten them.4 Often this self-consciousness is not the most conspicuous dimension of ideology, but it is accessible in the symbolism, metaphors, rhetoric, and imagery of which ideology is constructed. E. P. Thompson has alluded to this dimension in speaking of the ‘psychic energy stored – and released – in language’.5 And in a somewhat different context, J. P. Stern has referred to ideological statements as the ‘public presentation of intimate thinking’.6 Construing ideology in this manner, attempting to connect intimate thinking with an intellectual system publicly professed is not without risk, and the risk increases in geometric ratio to the level of intimacy being analyzed. It is, none the less, essential to bear in mind the symbolic riches contained – and often disguised – in these systems.
The analysis of the Pan-German League’s ideology will deal first with the organization’s program and the broader view of history and politics that underlay it. The analysis will then turn to another part of what one might call, with Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, the League’s ‘symbolic universe’; it will examine the self-conscious realm in which more fundamental anxieties and aspirations found guarded expression.7
An obvious objection remains to using the concept of ideology in connection with the beliefs of the Pan-Germans. The diffuseness of the League’s interests lends the impression that the organization’s program lacked any system or concentration.8 It is tempting to conclude with Professor Whiteside, who has dealt with the evidently no less disheveled program of the Austrian Pan-Germans, that the views of the League were a ‘congolomerate that defies logical analysis’.9 Other historians have reached similar conclusions about such views and prefer to speak of a ‘feeling and mood’, of a ‘feeling of discontent that had no clear source or goal’, rather than of a systematic view of politics that would justify the label of ideology.10
The objection is plausible, but it overlooks the enormous effort leaders of the Pan-German League devoted to systematizing their program and outlook. These men recognized the liabilities posed by their diffuse concerns, and their efforts to systematize their views represented a response to this problem. The search for what they referred to as the ‘key’ to political change, for ‘theoretical clarity’, or ‘fundamental premises with the status of dogma’ – in other words, the search for ideology – demonstrated how difficult it was for them to harbor ‘feelings of discontent’ in an intellectually unordered context.11 ‘We have always felt the need to arrive at a unified view of the world’, wrote Paul Samassa in 1908.12 And the Pan-Germans did formulate what another leader proudly called a ‘self-contained [geschlossene] national Weltanschauung’.13 It is a system of thought which does not defy logical analysis.
Admittedly, it is not easy to find any single coherent statement of this ideology. The Pan-Germans possessed no seminal documents analogous to the writings of Marx and Engels. Ernst Hasse was the League’s most influential and systematic ideologist until his death in 1908. He formulated his views in countless public lectures and in articles he wrote for the League’s journal and publication elsewhere. Fragments of what was to be Hasse’s comprehensive treatise on politics appeared separately between 1905 and 1908 under the title of Deutsche Politik.14 A number of other pieces of literature were of particular importance in articulating the League’s ideology. These included the pamphlet series, Kampf um das Deutschtum, in which writers surveyed the condition of Germans throughout the world, and two pseudonymous books by Hasse’s successor as the League’s chairman, Heinrich Class – his Deutsche Geschichte, which supplied the League with a coherent if unoriginal schema of historical analysis, and his manifesto of 1912, Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’.15 Beyond these sources, the Pan-German League’s ideology must be pieced together out of a myriad of fragments, commentary by leaders of the organization in speeches, in pamphlets which the League published officially or semi-officially, and in articles by a large number of members in the Alldeutsche Blätter.16 Although by no means free of contradictory details, these fragments do come together with remarkable coherence.
The basic premise in the Pan-German League’s ideology was that German national development was incomplete, that it had not reached its fulfillment in 1871. The critical deficiency in the German Empire was that it was not a genuine Nationalstaat: its frontiers failed to comprehend the German nation. The Reich of 1871 accordingly could never be more than a Vorstaat, a preliminary, albeit necessary phase, during which forces were maturing that would push the process of national development to completion.17 This premise implied two further propositions, which reflected ideas that had dominated the early history of patriotic societies in the German Empire and found synthesis in the ideology of the League. These propositions were the central importance of ethnicity in human affairs and the urgency of imperial expansion.
The Pan-German League was a foremost advocate of the variety of nationalism known both to contemporaries and to subsequent historians as völkisch. The distinguishing feature of this variety was to challenge the proposition, advanced in Marxist and other materialist doctrines, that human existence was governed by economic forces and that the fundamental unit of human organization was social class. Pan-Germans insisted that human life was instead founded on groups (Völker) that were ethnically defined – by language, culture, tradition, and race (this last concept remained until shortly before Hasse’s death ill defined and unsystematic in the thinking of the League’s ideologists). Ethnicity, belonging to one of these units, was an existential fact, the most natural and genuine characteristic of any human being. However, of more programmatic relevance than the psychological dimensions of ethnicity were its political implications. In the eyes of the Pan-Germans, a natural, eternal, and pre-political bond of unity existed among all people born into a given ethnic unit; the function of politics, of the state, was merely to give organized expression and protection to the ethnic community.18 The claims of the Volk were accordingly higher than those of the state. Political society was fluid, the ethnic community transcendent and eternal. ‘The only thing that possesses stability in the flux of a thousand years of development is the Volk’, Hasse wrote. ‘States, as conglomerations of ethnic groups, come and go; and even more transitory are political constitutions and social conditions.’19 Hasse’s observations were directed at the German constitution of 1871, which, he was convinced, would eventually disappear. For although political units were transitory phenomena, the greatest goal of political evolution – the closest approximation to political perfection – was identity between Volk and Staat.
The emphasis in the League’s ideology on ethnicity as the foundation of national identity betrayed the influence of the ethnic conflicts of the 1880s. These conflicts were no less evident in another of the Pan-Germans’ beliefs: ethnic communities existed in a perpetual state of conflict, frequently violent. At stake was the survival of each group as an ethnic unit; each accordingly found itself in a struggle for its very existence.20 In this struggle, Hasse and other Pan-German leaders were convinced, an ethnic community had but one avenue to survival, and this was expansion.21 On the subject of expansion, lines of reasoning came to the fore that originated in the colonial movement of the 1880s. The principal threat to the Volk, the Pan-Germans argued, was strangulation for want of outlets for surplus population and areas for economic growth. An expanding economy and population growth made territorial expansion ineluctable. The Pan-Germans did not, however, like many in the Colonial Society, restrict their gaze to overseas areas. Emphasizing the fluidity of politics, Hasse and the others pointed out that the world was everywhere being constantly repartitioned, and that the survival of the German ethnic community demanded the mobilization of all its power in a genuinely national state and then the occupation of more land wherever on earth this land might become available.22
Imperial rivalries of the late nineteenth century were also reflected in the Pan-Germans’ vision of the character of the impending struggle. This was to involve four great antagonists, and the prize was to be power and domination on a worldwide scale. The four contenders were Great Britain, backed by the immense resources of its empire, the United States on the strength of its economic might, Russia, with the support of the rest of the Slavic community in Europe, and finally the German nation.23 For Germans the risks were greater than for the others, because of their strategic vulnerability in the heart of Europe, their ethnic dispersion, and because of the economic disadvantages they faced for having arrived late in the race for empire. None the less, failure to enter the struggle, Pan-Germans insisted, would result in Germany’s fall to a second-rank power, like France, and its eventual extinction as an ethnic unit.
The Pan-Germans’ most controversial project derived directly from their beliefs about ethnic conflict and the impending struggle for world power. This project was to be simultaneously the fulfillment of the political development of the German Volk and the necessary precondition for successful competition around the world with the other international giants. The Pan-Germans were by no means the only people in Wilhelmine Germany to be fascinated with the idea of establishing some form of central European union under German domination, but their project was the most grandiose.24 It was informed by the constant interplay of ethnic and economic considerations; if the one set determined the extent and political significance of the Mitteleuropa union, the other underlined its urgency and the role it would play in the struggle for world power. The basic idea was that the borders of the German state were to expand to include all areas of the European continent in which Germans were the dominant ethnic element. This expansion would, its proponents contended, represent the natural culmination of German national development; it would both enlarge enormously the German Wirtschaftsgebiet and provide the most logical territorial outlets into which the German population could be redistributed.25
However logically conceived, the project raised theoretical problems. It was by no means clear which parts of Central Europe the consolidated areas were to comprehend. This problem sprang directly from another: the Pan-Germans found it difficult to define precisely who was German. That people whose first language was German belonged in the union seemed clear enough, but prominent spokesmen in the League insisted that common linguistic roots also made the Flemish and Dutch populations components of the German ethnic community and hence that the lands in which these people lived represented deutscher Volksboden – a realm which also included, in the eyes of most Pan-German leaders, areas which Germans had once colonized in the Habsburg monarchy and in Baltic Russia.26 The logic of this argument suggested that the German ethnic community was ultimately a Germanic unity, which would include, in addition, Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons. By the turn of the century, however, after the experiences of the Boer War, the growing rivalry with the United States, and ethnic tensions with Danes in North Schleswig, this broader vision, which the League’s ideologists referred to as Pan-Germanismus in distinction to Alldeutschtum, had lost much of its appeal.27
The dimensions of the Pan-Germans’ vision were nevertheless breath-taking. The German community in Mitteleuropa was, by general consensus in the League, to include the German Empire, the Habsburg lands, Switzerland, Holland, Luxemburg, Belgium, and – less out of ethnic considerations than because it lay at the mouth of the Danube – Romania.28 The League made no secret of its expectation that full political unity would be the end result, although in the short run political unity appeared impractical, owing not the least to the resistance of Swiss Germans and Flemish separatists to the idea.29 Even the possibility of a direct annexation of the Cisleithanian Habsburg territories, which surfaced during the uproar over the Badeni decrees, faded after the turn of the century because the idea found little support in Austria beyond the circles of the Austrian Pan-Germans.30 The creation of the great German political unit, the Nationalstaat in Central Europe, would therefore, most Pan-Germans agreed, be the product of extended evolution, impelled by the logic of ethnic solidarity, economic pressure, and, should it prove ultimately necessary, military force. The first step was to be the establishment of a Central European customs union, similar in form to the Zollverein.31 Its destiny would be similar to that of the Zollverein too: the bonds of dependency so created would prepare the way for the creation of community-wide legal and political institutions.
The centrality of this project in the program of the Pan-German League sometimes left the impression that the organization had opted for a course of continental expansion at the expense of acquiring colonies overseas.32 The Central European state was, to be sure, to guarantee the ethnic integrity as well as the economic vitality of the German nation; in this sense it was, probably for most Pan-Germans, the primary goal.33 Its construction did not, however, by any means rule out pursuit of Weltpolitik; the Central European state was in fact the indispensable precondition of an effective colonial policy overseas. The new state would be far more formidable than the old in the worldwide struggle between Germany and its antagonists. Consolidation with Belgium and Holland would bring to the German nation the colonial holdings of these two states; revenues produced by a common community-wide tariff were to be used to construct the fleet needed to enforce German colonial claims.34 And the combined economic resources of the new state would enable Germans to compete around the world with their British and American rivals. Having the requisite military and economic power, the German nation would, for purposes of further settlement and economic support, at last build an overseas empire commensurate with the nation’s continental power.
The specific demands that the Pan-German League raised all derived from this vision. The supremacy of ethnicity in human affairs and the inevitability of conflict for world power were the propositions that determined the perspective of the League on all contemporary issues. So fundamental were these propositions that the range of issues they comprehended was extremely broad, as one leader revealed in answering the question, ‘What is national?’ He replied:
Given this broad definition of their concerns, it is not surprising that contemporaries and historians alike have found the Pan-Germans’ program diffuse. In every area, however, the League’s position was to advocate policies calculated to promote the Nationalstaat they envisaged.36 At home, the League called for making the existing Reich more national, by suppressing the use of languages other than German. As long as they defined language as the chief determinant of ethnicity, Pan-Germans advocated the imposition of the German language on ethnic minorities living in Germany, as well as the undercutting of their cultural and economic positions by means of population redistribution.37 Building the Nationalstaat also implied the unremitting support of German ethnic consciousness everywhere on earth, particularly in the Habsburg monarchy, which was to be one of the core areas of the new state and where the supremacy of the German element seemed most immediately threatened. The worldwide aspirations of the new state required the vigorous quest for colonial empire overseas; and this quest demanded a navy.
Enough has been written about the location of the Pan-German League’s program along the intellectual pedigree of National Socialism that little more need be said here. The vision of the League unambiguously anticipated the program of the Nazis, to the point of including a Stufenplan, in which continental hegemony was to be the foundation for worldwide empire.38 The documentable intellectual sources of the Pan-Germans’ program include most of the people commonly featured in the gallery of precursors of National Socialism – Friedrich List for the commercial consolidation of Central Europe,39 Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn for the aggressive belief in the mission of the German ethnic community,40 a vulgarized Nietzsche for the glorification of power,41 Charles Darwin and especially Heinrich von Treitschke for the vision of world politics as perpetual conflict.42 The grossdeutsch political tradition also occupied a conspicuous place in the League’s ideology.43
Although they were more effectively disguised than other sources, offshoots of the German liberal tradition were fundamental in the ideology of the Pan-German League.44 Establishment of the German Empire in 1871 dealt a severe blow to the aspirations of liberals to popular representation in shaping foreign policy, but these aspirations lived on, not only among the left-liberal political parties. The rivalries in the 1880s between the government and the patriotic societies were a sign of the persistence of these aspirations in groups whose political inclinations were National Liberal. The Pan-German League’s program was the most unrestrained statement of the same populism which had animated the older societies. Demands for popular representation resurfaced in rival claims to custodianship over the national symbols, in the proposition that the Volk and not the state was the ultimate repository of national authority, and in the demand that the government heed the voice of public opinion, as articulated by the Pan-German League, in questions of national policy.
Several other points about the League’s program deserve comment. The first concerns the extent to which the Pan-Germans represented an eccentric or unique phenomenon in Wilhelmine Germany. One can argue that the League’s program expressed the aspirations of broad segments of the German middle class, that the organization was, in Dirk Oncken’s words, ‘the actual carrier of the idea of world power in the German public’.45 As popular enthusiasm over colonies in the 1880s and over the navy in the 1890s demonstrated, the idea that Germany’s mission was to exercise power on a worldwide scale was hardly the exclusive property of the Pan-German League. Nor was active concern for the fate of Germans outside the Reich. Yet the Pan-German League was, in important respects, a distinctive phenomenon. Its distinctiveness lay in the radical single-mindedness with which its leaders combined all these more popular issues into a single systematic view of the world and pursued the logic of their position to the point of active opposition to the government. The League’s program was unique, in other words, to the extent that it was ideological, that it rested upon a tightly articulated and rigid view of the world, one which prescribed a difficult and frequently unpopular course of political action.
The ideology of the Pan-German League was a national religion, which displayed structural parallels with the Christian vision of fall and redemption. The event that Pan-Germans regarded as the analogue of the fall in German history was the Thirty Years’ War, the catastrophe which brought political fragmentation, cultural stagnation, and the beginnings of the diaspora of emigrant Germans throughout Europe. To Bismarck fell, in the Pan-Germans’ view, the role of national Messiah, in the sense of both redeeming the nation from the consequences of the fall and offering the promise of regeneration in the true Nationalstaat of the future. The year 1871 accordingly marked the beginning of the penultimate phase of German history, the mobilization of the nation’s forces, and the spreading of the German Gospel in preparation for redemption in national unity and world power.
The word ‘redemption’ (Erlösung) may seem contrived in this context, for, as Roy Pascal has observed in connection with German literature of this period, it is loaded with metaphysical overtones.46 The word appeared constantly in the literature of the Pan-German League, however, as did others with explicit religious connotations, such as ‘diaspora’ and ‘Gospel’.47 The frequent religious allusions and the structural similarities to the Christian cosmology betrayed the emotional intensity of the Pan-German League’s ideology. The intensity cannot be adequately captured in a bloodless analysis of the logical cohesion of the League’s program; the intensity, and the anxieties that underlay it, were more apparent in the imagery which pervaded the ideology.
The imagery in the literature of the Pan-German League was very rich, and religious metaphors were but one of the funds from which Pan-German writers drew. The imagery and the rhetoric in which the League’s ideology was couched revealed a great deal about the emotional implications of the League’s program. In this rhetorical or semeiological realm – in the images and metaphors in which they depicted who they were and what they aspired to do – lay indications of the central concerns which occupied the Pan-Germans.
Theirs was foremost a rhetoric of conflict. They devoted an enormous volume of literature to ethnic struggle, for they described conflict everywhere, although for evident reasons most of their commentary dealt with the situation in Austria-Hungary. One of the first pronouncements that the League issued set the tone: ‘Recent history means nothing other than the struggle of everyone against Germandom.’48 The italics betrayed the anonymous author’s inability to squeeze any more emphasis out of the words available to him. Words like ‘struggle of desperation’ (Verzweiflungskampf) and annihilation (Vernichtung) also made their appearance early to reveal how rapidly the level of rhetorical intensity had escalated.49
Pan-German writers employed a variety of images to describe ethnic conflict. Military imagery was one of the more obvious genres. Germans, embattled by hostile ethnic groups, were ‘soldiers in our army, which is only too small’; the task at hand was hence the ‘mobilization’ of larger forces.50 In the military idiom, the confrontation between Danes and Germans in North Schleswig became a ‘situation of revolutionary war’; in the Prussian east, on the other hand, the struggle was ‘nothing short of real war’ (ein regelrechter Krieg).51 Medical pathology was another source of images that Pan-Germans used to describe the threat their antagonists posed. To portray the Polish minority, for instance, they invoked the image of a cancer, suggesting propensities to grow imperceptibly but with fatal irresistibility.52
Of all the imagery with which Pan-German writers and speakers described ethnic conflict, the most common involved the play of elemental forces, especially water. ‘The conditions in the Ostmark and in Austria-Hungary have deteriorated to the point where all Germans must join together today’, warned one leader in 1908, ‘in order to resist the impact of the flood tide [Hochflut] of Slavic and other foreign peoples.’53 In the Prussian east the danger was ‘an advancing Polish flood’, which threatened to ‘inundate [überschwemmen] the provinces with foreigners’.54 In South Tirol it was an ‘Italian flood’, which ‘surged around’ (umbrandet) German settlements in the area.55 In Carinthia, where the flood was Slovene, it menacingly ‘washed around’ German landholdings in the provinces.56 Further to the north, in Bohemia, the Czech flood ‘approached ever closer to the borders’ of Germany.57 In fact, the flood tide of enemies had already penetrated into the heart of the Reich, in the form of the ‘growing inundation of our fatherland with foreigners’, of ‘overflooding by elements who speak more than one language [gemischtsprächige]’, or in the form of the ‘overflooding of German technical universities with disagreeable foreigners’.58
Variations on the theme of the flood included the image of the storm, both directly, as in the ‘storm flood of nationalities in the Habsburg monarchy’, and in the figurative sense, as in storming a fortress (anstürmen).59 Germans in Austria confronted the ‘on-storming masses of people hostile to them’, or a ‘Slavic onslaught [Ansturm], which threatens to annihilate everything German’; in the federal elections of 1903, the city of Leipzig faced the ‘burst of the waves of the on-storming revolutionary party’.60 Streams, another related image, appeared repeatedly in the Pan-German literature too. One writer warned, for example, of the ‘wild Slavic stream’ in Austria, which, if not resisted, would soon ‘break devastatingly into the Reich’.61 Another drew attention to the ‘Stream of Italian immigrants’ into South Tirol, which, he noted, had recently ‘risen significantly [angeschwollen]’.62
Examples could be multiplied to emphasize how attractive Pan-German writers and speakers found the imagery of water. Their preference for it was pronounced, even though alternative images were available to them to symbolize the threat. The imagery of conflagration, for instance, appeared only occasionally, albeit colorfully. Thus did one writer describe revolutionary events in the Russian Baltic provinces in 1905–6: ‘As in house-fires the small blue flames flitter above the roof, disappear, and return until they spot the places where they take hold, so too did the revolutionary movement dart about the land, at first unsure and tentative.’63 But while the imagery of fire had many of the same connotations as water, it was less appealing to the Pan-Germans, although one can only speculate why. Both fire and flooding became uncontrollable; both penetrated and demolished. Fire, however, was not normally the result of natural causes; and flooding, unlike fire, usually left something behind, to be taken over from these who had been driven out. Polish communities could take root, springing up ‘like mushrooms after the rain’ in soil inhabited by Germans before the flood.64 In addition, water flowed; its impact spread, through in-fluence (Beeinflussung), initially in subtle ways.65
The feature of the watery imagery that appealed most to the Pan-Germans was, in any event, the connotation of forces beyond control. Flooding, storms, and streams symbolized the advance of elemental forces, which penetrated ineluctably and destroyed positions occupied by Germans. On only a few occasions did Pan-Germans speak positively of storms or currents, and even on these occasions the phenomena retained their elemental power. A resolute policy with respect to Austria’s ethnic minorities could thus work like a ‘purifying storm [Gewitter] in the intolerable humidity of the present European situation’.66 Much more commonly, storms, streams, and floods were destructive, turbid (trüb), and they unleashed forces that broke bounds.67
Pan-Germans described the forces threatening Germans throughout the world in much the same terms as they would a natural catastophe.68 The imagery they employed to describe the Germans who were facing the catastrophe was not entirely consistent metaphorically with flooding and storm, but it was none the less effective. The dominant image was that of the outpost (Vorposten), on guard against the initial signs of danger, charged with serving as the first line of resistance. If the flood connoted hostile forces out of control, the outpost symbolized solidity, rootedness, and control. The specific imagery varied widely. Pan-German writers spoke of forward walls (Vormauer), a fortress (Burg or Festung), outer forts (Aussenforts), and outworks (Vorwerke), all of which were drawn from a military idiom.69 Other commentators adapted the imagery to the metaphors of water. The outposts now became dams, dikes (Schutzwälle), roofs against the storm, or rocks (Felsen); most commonly, however, they became islands in the hostile sea.70 The city of Budweis in Bohemia, a center of the struggle between Czechs and Germans, was thus, in the words of one observer, ‘an island of the German language [Sprachinsel], ever more powerfully overflooded by the Czech bay, which sends out streams [ausbuchtet] in all directions’.71
The Germans who inhabited this ‘island empire of German colonies in Eastern Europe’, or who manned the ‘posts around which the battle rages’, were the heroic pioneers (Vorkämpfer) of the German cause.72 Theirs was a lonely, dangerous, but elite role. Selected to provide the first line of defense, they operated bravely at a distance from the citadel of the German community, the Reich itself; they faced the risk of being fully isolated, left in the lurch, and abandoned to the flood.73 The facts of distance and separation, and the attendant risks, defined the pioneer, for the image applied not only to Germans living in Eastern Europe, but to German officials isolated in the ethnically troubled parts of the Reich, and to German settlers and businessmen overseas.74
It is not difficult to discern at least one deeper level of meaning beneath the imagery in this literature. Outposts and pioneers were self-images of the Pan-German League. In its efforts to awaken national awareness and to encourage a forceful foreign policy, the League was, its spokesmen assured the membership, performing ‘pioneer services’ or ‘pioneer work’.75 The local chapter in Posen, revivified after several years of inactivity, announced to the rest of the League in 1904 that once again German men were ‘at their posts’ in Posen.76 Pan-German writers described both themselves and the pioneers in the field with the same formula words, especially with the word ‘wacker’, which carries connotations of both bravery and honesty.77 In the imagery of the flood, the mission of the League was to be a rock in the sea, a lighthouse, or an island.78
The idea of distance or separation, which was essential to the role of the pioneer, also figured in the League’s self-image. Here the distance was less geographical than temporal or emotional. Years of opposition to the German government left an ideological imprint, in the idea that the League’s mission was to act as a national ‘pacemaker’ or ‘pathbreaker’, in the sense of anticipating policies before their time had come.79 ‘We are really nothing but people who have arisen a little earlier than many of our contemporaries who continue to sleep’, as one commentator put it.80 This role separated the League from the main ‘stream of conventional attitudes’ and compelled its members (for the water was everywhere) to ‘swim against public opinion’.81
The role of national pioneer was-difficult and lonely. It was only partially eased by the realization that being the ‘conscience of the German people’ required temporary divergence from popular attitudes, but that the role would ultimately be vindicated with the general acceptance of the League’s views.82 Still, the heroism implied in this posture had accents of martyrdom, particularly after the tension with the government became severe. In 1909, for example, a speaker encouraged members of the chapter in Eisleben not to grow weary of their national responsibilities, even if ‘progress was only slow and they were persecuted [angefeindet] on all sides’.83 Speakers at other rallies urged members to persevere in the face of ‘hate-filled, mendacious persecution of the League’, ‘fanatical opposition’, or the ‘scorn and ridicule’ of their opponents in Germany.84
The theme of martyrdom casts the flood metaphor into another perspective. The metaphor is loaded with religious and emotional connotations. In Christian imagery it is a Satanic force. Freudian psychoanalysts have noted how it stimulates ambivalent feelings of fascination, attraction, and danger.85 Common to both the Freudian and Christian symbolism is the idea that the flood represents powerful forces which resist confinement in their proper limits, be these limits defined as moral precepts or ego injunctions.
Well might the Pan-Germans have found the metaphor of the flood attractive to describe their enemies, who they were convinced were advancing everywhere. These enemies included nearly everyone in the world who was not a German, as well as many people who were. The list was headed by all the non-German ethnic groups in Central Europe, foremost among them the Poles and Czechs. The category extended to all people who were nationals of Germany’s rivals, actual or potential – English, French, Russians, Americans, Italians, and Japanese. It included Germans whose patriotic credentials were tainted in any manner with international loyalties, particularly Catholics and socialists.
Disparate as the groups were that fell into the Pan-Germans’ category of enemy, they were in several respects united. All of them were powerful, dangerous, supremely clever, and they all shared a common motive – hatred of everything German. Everywhere they looked, Pan-German commentators saw the same forces at work. ‘Precisely at this moment’, wrote one of them in connection with a conflict between German and French students at the university of Lausanne in 1908, ‘one sees how on all sides hatred of Germandom becomes apparent.’86 Among the Catholic clergy it was a ‘fanatical hatred of Protestantism and ferocious ridicule of every patriotic feeling’, in Italy it was a ‘scarcely contained resentment [Groll] of us Germans’, in the Prussian east it was a ‘demonic hatred of Prussia and its government’, while in the city of Prague, Czech ‘mania and hatred’ celebrated ‘their wildest orgies’.87 Consumed with hatred, these omnipresent enemies shied from nothing in their attack: they were fanatical, shameless, unscrupulous, ‘simultaneously insidious [heimtückisch] and brutal’, perseverant, ruthless, given to violence, and they interpreted attempts at conciliation by Germans only as signs of weakness.88
Because they saw their enemies in this light, Pan-German writers had only a limited understanding of the causes of animosity toward Germans. But the limitations of their understanding were themselves enlightening. The most common explanation was well formulated by a speaker in 1910, who concluded at the League’s annual congress that ‘we have as many enemies as we count those who envy us’.89 The concept of envy was extremely attractive to Pan-Germans, for it provided an analysis that not only absolved Germans of any responsibility for the hostility they faced, but made this very hostility a cause for self-respect. The concept also had broader implications. Envy connoted a desire for something to which one was not entitled or, more broadly, an unwillingness to accept limitations legitimately imposed. In this sense, envy was generically related to other qualities Pan-Germans identified in the motivation of their enemies. Prominent among these were lack of respect for Germans, arrogance, unruliness (Ungeberdigkeit), impudence (Frechheit), haughtiness (Hochmut), presumption (Ueppigkeit or Anmassung), immoderation (Masslosigkeit), ill breeding (Unerzogenheit), impatience, and impertinence (Unverschämtheit).90 All these characteristics shared the sense of transgression against appropriate constraint, order, or authority. So too did two other, more psychologically charged words which occupied a prominent place in the vocabulary of the Pan-Germans: these were ‘penetrate’ (eindringen) and ‘violate’ (vergewältigen). Foreign firms penetrated the German market, foreign words (sprachliche Eindringlinge) the German language.91 Czechs lured German children into their schools, one alarmed writer observed, ‘in order to commit on them an act of the most brutal spiritual [geistige] national violation’.92
The countless variations in the Pan-German literature on the theme of transgression against limit, the constant imagery of this theme in the flood, reflected these writers’ ultimate concern. Above all, they feared the total breakdown of legitimate constraint and order. Their most foreboding vision was the triumph of the flood, the overwhelming of outposts abandoned to their fate, and then the fall of the now isolated citadel itself. The result would be the disappearance of limit, restraint, and order – chaos, in a word, the most frightening situation imaginable. And imagine it these writers did. As he watched the turmoil in Austria at the turn of the century, one writer was convinced he was witnessing the penultimate phase of the drama:
A more pertinent question was what would the storm annihilate. The answer was the very concept of order. ‘Chaos knows no crown’, wrote Heinrich Class with respect to the monarchical order. ‘If it breaks in over the German people, it is going to swallow everything that stands out [alles ragende].’94
The concept of order underlay the symbolism in the Pan-German literature; it was the key to understanding the League’s political cosmology. Anxiety over the disorder sown by ethnic conflict was a Leitmotif, varied endlessly. Another motif, subject to less variation, was the Pan-Germans’ vision of a specific kind of order.
The imagery in the ideology of the Pan-German League betrayed a paramount concern for order. The flood symbolized the overwhelming of legitimately prescribed confines, transgression against proper limit – in sum, disorder, whose culmination was chaos. The outposts and the pioneers who occupied them stood for resistance to disorder, for discipline, stability, and the preservation of a proper system of confines.
The symbolism extended further. The concept of order implied a stable regularity in human affairs, a clearly defined pattern of relations among people or groups of people who were, by definition, not equal. The ideas of regularity and stability, which were basic to order, demanded that patterns of precedence and subordination be cemented by authority and deference. Order comprehended, that is, both the claim of the superordinated to represent or to have prior access to some source of strength or truth, and the disciplined recognition by the subordinated of the validity of this claim.95 Authority and discipline buttressed the order of relationships among all elements of a social or political system, for they defined legitimate spheres of existence and activity, the proper bounds of aspiration and ambition. In the Pan-German League’s idiom, the concept of order dictated that those people entitled to exercise authority, ‘die Obrigkeit’ in the abstract, enjoy attitudes of ‘reverence and deference’ (Ehrfurcht und Ehrerbietung) from those who stood under this authority.96 The negation of order was of course the principle of insubordination, the abandonment of deference, of the proper limits imposed by order, and the repudiation of the authority of those in positions of superordination.
In the literature of the Pan-German League the flood symbolized the negating, destructive principle of insubordination, which began in its early stages with the subtle undermining of authority and culminated, if unchecked, in swamping the whole structure of order. Conversely, the pioneers represented authority as well as order. Their claim to authority derived from their advanced, exposed position; as vanguards of the nation, they stood out as leaders, men who had been the first to perceive the patterns of ethnic conflict which were the stuff of history, and who foresaw the impending struggle for national survival.
Order meant for the Pan-German League specific patterns of authority and precedence. Although they ultimately merged, these patterns applied to two realms of human organization, the ethnic and the social. That ethnic conflict was an inevitable feature of human history was axiomatic in the Pan-Germans’ view of the world. However, this proposition was not easily reconciled with another, which implied that ethnic conflict was somehow contrary to the proper order of things, which dictated that nations were unequal and that the German nation stood atop the ethnic hierarchy. Pan-German writers variously invoked nature, history, and providence to fortify their claim that of all the ethnic groups in the world, the Germans were the superior and hence entitled to exercise authority, precedence, and domination (Herrschaft) over others.97
This claim was bold, but Pan-Germans could adduce specific criteria to measure the quality of ethnic groups. ‘We are the best warrior nation in the world’, proclaimed one writer at the turn of the century. This virtue was evidently not sufficient, though, for he went on to insist that ‘we are the ablest [tüchtigste] nation in all areas of knowledge and the fine arts. We are the best settlers, the best seafarers, even the best businessmen.’98 Other writers subsumed these virtues under the heading of ‘culture’, which they construed to be the collective achievement of the Volk, the expression of its soul and worth.99 The most obvious and tangible manifestations of Kultur were science and the advancement of knowledge (all of which Germans designated Wissenschaft), art, technology, commerce, and a series of qualities that characterized people who could be said to be ‘civilized’ (to partake of Gesittung), such as intelligence, diligence, and sincerity (Redlichkeit).100 The concept of culture also had important political connotations. The Cologne chapter alluded to these when, late in 1908, it passed a resolution endorsing the proposition that the Austrian state owed its ‘existence and endurance [Bestand] exclusively to German culture’.101 In this respect, culture was practically synonymous with political order: it connoted collective traits that were ‘staatsschöpferisch und staatserhaltend’ – traits, that is, which promoted and sustained stable relationships of power and authority in a unified state.102
The superiority of German culture, of those ‘noble characteristics’ which constituted the ‘most precious spiritual blossom of the human race’, entitled the German nation to authority and precedence in the ordered structure of relations among the nationalities of the world.103 The subordinate position of other ethnic groups was justified by the inferiority of their cultures, specifically in the case of other ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe (and here the lessons of 1871 were evident), by their inability to create political order in their own states.104 Pan-Germans insisted in fact that the culture these other ethnic groups had attained in the past they owed primarily to German settlers, colonizers, and missionaries. The role of Germans had historically been to serve as precepts, as ‘pioneers of all culture’, or, in the more earthy expression preferred by some writers, as ‘ethnic fertilizer’ (Volksdünger) for others.105 Prominent among the benefits brought by Germans during this process of ‘elevating barbarians to cultured nations’ were the virtues and institutions necessary for political order, such as legislation, administration, and a system of justice.106
In the final analysis, Pan-Germans believed, the root of ethnic struggle was the insubordination of other nationalities, their refusal to acknowledge the superiority of German culture and the respect and authority to which this superiority entitled the German Volk. One image used to express this belief was that of rebellious students threatening their teacher – as desperate an act of disorder as Germans could imagine.107 But hostility toward Germans implied not only the rejection of their precedence in the ethnic order of the world, but the repudiation of the principle of ethnic order itself. ‘Hatred of Germans’, wrote one commentator on the basis of his experiences in Hungary, ‘is the sign of a true renegade.’108 Only in this light can one understand why the United States presented such a foreboding spectacle to the Pan-Germans. The fact that Germans did not occupy the positions of leadership to which their cultural contributions entitled them was far less frightening than the fact that Germans (and others) were losing their very ethnic identity, that in the United States, in the ‘mass grave of Germandom’, the very idea of ethnicity, and hence of ethnic order, had been undermined. Into this morass emigrant Germans were sucked, sank, were abandoned and forgotten.109 The melting pot was ethnic chaos.
Because the Pan-Germans held ethnicity to be the basic feature of human affairs, they insisted that social order was a derivative of it and that culture implied a series of social postulates as well. The preservation of the dominant position of the German Volk in the ethnic order demanded social order within the ethnic unit. Social order in turn implied harmony, cohesion, and balance among all the component groups of German society, the acceptance by each of its proper sphere, and a general sense of contentedness (Neidlosigkeit).110
In the eyes of the Pan-Germans, social order further implied specific patterns and roles. At the foundation, as the ‘firmest pillar of Germandom’, stood the peasantry.111 In extolling the virtues of the peasantry – its diligence, piety, simplicity, and the modesty of its pretensions – the Pan-Germans had a lot of company in Imperial Germany.112 Their own appreciation of the peasantry was in part the result of their involvement in the ethnic struggle in eastern Prussia, which they concluded could only be won through massive settlement of German peasants on middle-sized plots in the Polish provinces.113 However, the virtues that the Pan-Germans found embodied in the German peasantry had broader implications for social order; the peasant represented culture in its most intuitive and innocent form. As he surveyed German peasant colonies in Russia, one writer was impressed at how ‘German order and neatness [Sauberkeit] characterized the villages and houses, German diligence makes the villages prosper in peaceful times, so they serve as models to others’.114 In Russia, as elsewhere, the German peasant represented the Volkspionier who displayed most instinctively the traits that distinguished German culture. Not surprisingly, these peasant traits had direct political relevance; they included ‘national reliability’, a sense of order (albeit with a certain – admirable – obstinacy), and a sufficient feeling of their own importance that peasants were content with their social station.115 The stability, rootedness, and independence afforded them by small property holdings and a close relationship to the soil preserved these traits in peasants and made them appreciate, like no other social group, the importance of order.
Only a little less emphatic was the tribute the Pan-Germans paid to the Mittelstand. In their view this social group included artisans, handicraftsmen, and other small businessmen – people who resembled the peasantry in their independence, their possession of modest amounts of property, and in the attitudes they were presumed to hold about the importance of social order and stability.116 The Mittelstand was accordingly another of the most secure repositories of German culture; it too could lay claim, in the Pan-German vision, to the status of ‘backbone of the nation’.117
One of the principal marks of the virtue and reliability of both these social groups was their devotion to the family, an institution in which Pan-Germans descried social order in microcosm. The family was an ‘auxiliary and military community [Hilfs- und Kampfgenossenschaft] in the stream of life’.118 A realm where each member had her or his structured role, the family was the essential ‘precondition for the healthy durability of the nation’, the breeding ground of national virtues, prominent among which the Pan-German writers identified ‘domestic discipline and order’.119
As the most reliable props for attitudes and institutions essential to the preservation of social order, the peasantry and Mittelstand were to enjoy special status within this order – but not at the top. In the Pan-German vision, the role of elite in the social order and the national community was reserved instead for another group, whose relationship to German culture was of a different character than that of peasants or artisans. The essential role of interpreting, refining, and mediating German culture was the most esteemed of all, and it entitled those who performed it to the authority of national leadership. These were the men whose access to culture was most immediate, conscious, and creative, by virtue of their being ‘cultured’. The distinguishing mark of these men was their Bildung, a concept difficult to translate from the German, for it simultaneously connoted culture and a special kind of education which is perhaps best described by the word ‘cultivation’. Bildung meant a general education of the whole person, training not only in academic subjects, particularly classical languages, but in ‘taste, judgment, and intellect’; it implied a certain autonomy and nobility of character unavailable to people without it. And it normally required a university education.120
In their admiration for Bildung and the values it connoted, the Pan-Germans were hardly unique in Imperial Germany. Most of their contemporaries did not, however, draw the same political conclusions as they did. The simultaneity of meaning in the word Bildung reflected a critical juncture in the Pan-Germans’ view of order. The juncture implied that the only men with a full appreciation for German culture were those who had absorbed it directly in the course of their university education. Trained to value ‘higher spiritual development’ and to ‘comprehend the great continuities of national development’, the academically educated were the ‘spiritual leaders of the Volk’, men entitled to elite positions of political authority and to dispense culture for the satisfaction of ‘the spiritual hunger of the Volk’.121 Cultivation brought entitlement to authority. It was also a sign of achievement and bore witness to the bonds that linked the elite to the broader groups that constituted the pillars of the nation; for the men of Bildung were themselves often distinguished children of the Mittelstand. Their achievement, culture, national consciousness, and their insight into the patterns of history put them at the apex of the social order; theirs was the role of pioneer, vanguard, and leader par excellence.
Culture was the governing principle of order; access to culture brought entitlement to precedence and authority. This principle applied, in the Pan-Germans’ view, to ethnic as well as to social relationships. Germans could lay claim to Herrschaft over other nationalities by virtue of their superior culture, while the academically educated were entitled to exercise authority within the German Volk by virtue of the mediating role they played with respect to this same culture. In the final analysis, though, the association between culture and order was tautological. Pan-Germans identified culture with order, or rather with specific patterns of social and ethnic subordination. The distinguishing characteristics of culture were precisely those habits of mind presumed to buttress these patterns of order – a want of pretension and an appreciation for limit, regularity, and stability.
It has become commonplace to discuss the Pan-Germans’ ideas about order in the context of ‘cultural despair’, a tradition of general hostility to modernity and the search for a harmonic order by resurrecting the simple virtues of a more pristine past. Although there is some truth to this view, it is too simple.122 The faith the Pan-Germans placed in the peasantry and the Mittelstand, the political quietism they found so attractive in these social groups, was consistent with this view, as was their glorification of a system of general education which pedagogical reformers were already attacking at the turn of the century as out of date. Yet the concept of ‘cultural despair’ fails to comprehend several important facets of the Pan-German League’s view of the world. Until the turn of the century, the accents in its ideology were optimistic, as the success of the naval campaign made its predictions about national fulfillment in the future seem plausible. The enthusiasm of the League for the navy pointed as well to an appreciation of industrial power which did not square with a longing for a pre-industrial past.123 The Pan-Germans’ vision of order was broad enough to reconcile industry and agriculture, modern and ‘pre-modern’ sectors of society; it was necessary only that each occupy its proper sphere.124
The principal justification for inserting the Pan-Germans into the tradition of cultural despair is their acute sensitivity about forces contained in industrialization which threatened to destroy not only the delicate balance between industry and agriculture, but the whole structure of social and ethnic order. Order was linked, in the Pan-Germans’ thinking, to rootedness, which normally meant ownership of at least a small piece of property. In so far as the social change associated with industrialization tended to cut these roots and to create a propertyless working class in big cities, it had dangerous ramifications. Mobility off the countryside was in fact one of ‘the fundamental evils of our national life’, Hasse lamented, for it created not only social unrest but ethnic disorientation.125 People caught up in this process lost ‘the tie to their German ethnicity’, observed another writer.126 One is reminded here of the forebodings that the Pan-Germans expressed about the ethnic disorder of the United States: peasants who wandered into the social chaos of the big cities lost touch with their sense of order, their culture, and hence their ethnic identity.127
Many of the schemes that the Pan-Germans advocated reflected a concern about the evils of urbanization, rootlessness, and social disorder. In the Prussian east and in North Schleswig, they promoted what amounted to a program of land reform, the large-scale settlement of an independent German peasantry; to this end, they even advocated breaking up large estates in the east that were worked by a landless (and usually Polish) proletariat. Pan-Germans also advocated various programs to bail out small businessmen. And, in speaking of the need for colonies, most of them were unsympathetic to the claims of the companies which were turning profits; they subscribed instead to the emigrationist argument that settlements abroad were essential as future bases for an independent German peasantry.128
The League’s ideologists professed sympathy for social reform, but their ideas were anchored in a socially conservative populism – in the conviction that preserving social order demanded the support and revitalization of the backbone of ‘the people’, which meant in the first instance the peasantry and artisanal Mittelstand. Pan-German theorists were far less comfortable discussing the plight of the industrial working class in the cities. The cultural values that ensured the cohesion of the social order were naturally to apply to this class too. Industrial workers were to display punctuality and discipline; they were to be ‘extremely diligent’ and, probably more important, ‘unpretentious’ (anspruchslos).129 Their just rewards were the fortunes of a ‘disciplined clan of workers’ (Arbeiterstamm) such as the one the Pan-Germans thought they had found in the small iron- and steel-processing plants in Remscheid (where the League congregated for its convention in 1913): many of these ‘simple men’ had, as one speaker noted, managed to ‘work their way up to proud heights’, although he did not specify what these were.130 None the less, large sectors of the working class refused to accept the place the Pan-Germans prescribed for them in the social order. Their ingratitude and pretentiousness knew no bounds. ‘The benevolent hand of bourgeois society’ they rejected ‘ungratefully and coarsely’131 They had forgotten the virtue of frugality: it was pointless to give them higher wages, one writer complained, for they would only squander these on luxuries, such as ‘more expensive walking sticks, more elegant prams, and modern hats’ -luxuries which, the writer did not have to add, were appropriate to some social stations, but certainly not theirs.132
The source of this problem lay, Pan-Germans believed, only partially in the rootlessness and temptations of the big city. The principal cause of the workers’ disrespect for order lay in a foreboding phenomenon. To the Pan-Germans, Social Democracy was simply the most ominous thing conceivable, the original evil, the repudiation of order.133 It was a Mephistophelian force, ‘the spirit of abnegation’ (der Geist, der immer verneint), of indiscipline, dissension, destruction, and discontent, the mortal enemy not only of property and social order, but of the principle of ethnicity as well.134 For the Pan-Germans, Social Democracy was the most palpable manifestation of the flood; it was the very spirit of chaos.135
The Pan-German League was understandably troubled when on several occasions, such as during the Boer War, its criticism of the German government ran parallel to that of the German Social Democratic Party. These parallels highlighted an apparent contradiction in the League’s position: it was not immediately clear how a group of men whose view of the world so emphasized order and authority could openly challenge the authority of the German government on national issues. This is one of the central problems in the history of the Pan-German League, and its resolution must take place on several levels of analysis. Here an ideological explanation is pertinent. Pan-Germans believed that the preservation of social order was contingent upon asserting German authority in the ethnic order or, to put it in slightly different terms, that the national consciousness essential to a stable social order demanded an aggressive foreign policy. They concluded, definitively after the Boer War, that the German government, as it was then staffed, was too weak and indecisive to conduct the policies necessary to check the forces of disorder at home and abroad.136 It was a measure of their concern that these men could, for entirely patriotic reasons, call into question the government’s exclusive guardianship of the national interest and demand that they themselves, as the spokesmen of the will of the Volk, be consulted in the determination of policy. Resisting the forces of disorder demanded that the authority of the pioneers be recognized.137 To deserve this recognition, however, the pioneers had themselves constantly to document their personal qualifications.
In 1900 the Alldeutsche Blätter revealed a new masthead. It depicted a single Teutonic warrior, clad in armor and winged helmet, standing beside an oak tree situated atop a cliff overlooking the sea. The warrior’s gaze carried out toward the rising sun, over the sea and the ships that were seen sailing on it. Entwined among the branches of the oak was a banner bearing the League’s motto, ‘Remember that you are a German!’ (Gedenke, dass du ein Deutscher bist!).
The imagery was not exactly subtle. The high cliffs and the oak symbolized order, defense, and stability; the sea, though calm and subject to a degree of human control (in the ships), threatened to become the flood once the sun, which indicated optimism, disappeared behind storm clouds. The lone warrior was of course the pioneer – exposed, living in danger, but vigilant at his outpost. In its heavy symbolism, the glorification of the Teutonic past, and in the knight’s heroic posture, which smacked none the less of sentimentality, one finds typified the aesthetic sensitivities the League’s writers cultivated.138 To dismiss it all as only so much kitsch, however, would be to overlook the messages this symbolism conveyed about the self-understanding of those who read the League’s literature. The warrior figure was particularly suggestive psychologically, for it embodied attitudes and character traits that the Pan-German writers held to be essential to German identity.
The problem of identity was one to which the Pan-Germans devoted a great deal of attention, both as an individual and a collective phenomenon. They held that identity and ethnicity were inseparable, indeed that ethnicity was prior to identity.139 The language one spoke was more than an appurtenance or something that one could, for convenience’s sake, ‘shed like a coat’; it constituted a fundamental part of every person’s psychological make-up and, for Germans at least, ‘the most holy’ component of one’s being.140 ‘He who knows not whether his character [Art] is German or French suffers from an imperfection that limits his entire development’, was the dictum of one writer.141 His sentiments were shared by another, who spoke more suggestively of the ‘national asexuality’ of the Social Democrats.142 In the same vein, still another writer condemned the very concept of bilinguality, which was being promoted in some circles in Alsace-Lorraine, as calculated to breed ‘national hermaphrodites’.143
Collective identity, no less than personal identity, was the product of ethnicity. It was self-evident to Pan-Germans that certain collective traits defined the essence of any ethnic unit and were central features of any nation’s culture. In speaking of their own essential national characteristics, these writers isolated a long list of traits, most of them exemplary as befit the claims they were making for the German nation. The list included German daring, German bravery, a German sense of freedom and independence (which bordered on obstinacy but which did not exclude German discipline), German honor, German loyalty, German courage, German simplicity, German pride, and German conscientiousness.144 There was, however, another, darker side of the German character. This comprised traits which, however laudable in an individual, were dangerous in their collective manifestation. Prominent among these were proclivities toward self-deprecation, cosmopolitanism, innocent complaisance and sentimentality, too much ‘concern for the welfare and plight’ of other nations, inordinate patience, and a tendency to become lost in profound, other-worldly meditation.145 These characteristics were commonly associated, in the Pan-German literature, with the virtuous but naive and dreamy figure of the ‘German Michel’ or with Hamlet, who was not German, but was evidently Germanic enough to epitomize the perils of indecision and overscrupulousness.146
The question is not germane whether these characteristics bore any semblance to reality or whether they were even compatible with one another (although it is challenging to imagine Germans who were simultaneously obstinate, disciplined, proud, self-deprecating, simple and yet given to intellectual profundity). Of greater interest is the fact that the character traits which most disturbed the Pan-Germans represented the psychological equivalent of social disorder. These traits implied, above all, lack of control. Sentimentality, complaisance, and naivete all suggested want of direction, of awareness, or an inability to take seriously forces that threatened, impinged, or penetrated. Hamlet’s problem was his inability to seize control; his critical failing was his wooliheadedness (the German word, Verschwommenheit, is much more suggestive, for it retains the implications of being overcome by water).147 Lack of control connoted passivity, femininity, and dependence upon external circumstances, the danger of ‘resignedly and inactively letting the future break in over us’, as Hasse phrased it, appealing again to the watery metaphor.148
Given this analysis of personality, the psychology in the ideology of the Pan-German League emphasized, as the analogue to the achievement of culture, the quest for self-transcendence, the effort to overcome essential German traits that were ill-suited to the rigors of ethnic struggle and defending social order. ‘We want to be the hammer, not the anvil’, was the slogan to which Pan-German writers appealed in describing the virtues in need of cultivation. These virtues connoted control, autonomy, independence, strength, masculinity, and self-assertion.149 Germans were to be self-conscious, energetic,150 self-aware (selbstbewusst), willfully perseverant, tough (zähig), purposeful (zielbewusst), steady (stetig), and, if necessary, ruthless (rücksichtslos).151 Above all, they were to be earnest – a characteristic which seemed in the Pan-German literature to subsume all the rest in its implication of self-control and awareness of the imperatives of a situation fraught with peril.
Pan-German writers were convinced that one did not have to look far to see these virtues embodied, nor will psychologists accustomed to thinking in terms of projection be surprised at where they looked. All of Germany’s enemies had achieved them. ‘Let us learn from our opponents’ was accordingly the best plan of action; or, as another writer put it, more lyrically, ‘Willst du dich selber erkennen,/So sieh, wie die Andern es treiben!’152 As the ultimate model of national virtue and the epitome of the pioneer, however, the Pan-Germans claimed one of their own.
Inevitably, this was Bismarck. The adulation of the Pan-German League for the former chancellor was boundless. It reached, in fact, the point of deification, and the annual pilgrimages Pan-Germans made to Bismarck’s tomb were as replete with liturgical rituals as any religious service.153 Bismarck was ‘the very quintessence of Germandom’, the ‘teacher of the German people’; he was also featured in the watery metaphor, as the ‘great helmsman’ who did not fear the storm as he guided the ship of state Germania.154 He was, in addition, the embodiment of the more domestic virtues, as members of the League learned at the lectures they attended on subjects such as ‘Bismarck as a Human Being and Father’ and ‘Bismarck as Husband’.155 But the most important reasons why Pan-Germans worshipped the man, collected portraits of him, helped build monuments and museums to his memory, and poured over the literature being published about him were the personal traits that Bismarck had turned into public virtues – his moral strength, toughness, vigilance, purposefulness, and his supreme control over the political situation.156
Bismarck was, however, in some respects too removed and perfect to serve as the model pioneer. A more comfortable precept, because he embodied human weakness in a way the image of Bismarck could not, was the figure of the ‘loyal Ekkehard’, the hero of Josef Viktor von Scheffel’s historical novel of the same name. An intrepid leader in battle, Ekkehard was naive and oblivious of the machinations of his envious enemies. Banished into exile, he overcame these personal flaws and returned to become the emperor’s trusted adviser. Elements in this story of course ran parallel to Bismarck’s own career, and Pan-Germans often referred to Bismarck as the ‘Ekkehard of the German people’.157 But the image was also one they used to describe the psychological and political drama they saw themselves acting out. Ekkehard symbolized pioneering leadership inadequately appreciated, the transcending of personal weakness, and final vindication as trusted advisers to the policy-makers.158
Those who had, like Ekkehard, successfully dealt with the flaws in their make-up and had achieved the virtues demanded of the pioneer were, in the analysis of the Pan-Germans, fulfilled, ‘whole men’, ‘genuine personalities’; they could lay claim to ‘character’.159 In the opinion of Heinrich Class, who had an acute eye for this kind of ‘character’, Ludwig Possehl, the immensely wealthy Lübeck merchant, was one such, ‘a Herrenmensch through and through, ruthless in the pursuit of his own advantage but willing to make any sacrifice for the good of the whole community [dem grossen Ganzen]’.160 The industrialist Wilhelm Kollmann, another of Class’s friends, deserved the attribution of ‘character’ on the strength alone of having broken a wine bottle over the head of Bismarck’s critic, Maximilian Harden.161
The psychology of Pan-Germanism was intimately tied to the vision of order and conflict in society and politics. ‘Character’ was the psychological equivalent of culture; it entitled those who had achieved it to authority and positions of leadership.162 Conversely, ‘character’ was the guarantee of order, of the stable structure in which legitimate authority was recognized. Of German diplomacy the League demanded ‘character’; foreign policy was to be informed by brutal but ‘healthy national egoism’ which inspired fear among Germany’s enemies and compelled respect for German authority throughout the world.163 Ego was to be recognized as an ethnic as well as a psychological category: control, autonomy, independence, and initiative were as indispensable to the fulfillment of the German nation as they were to the individuals who collectively constituted it.164
The dependency in the Pan-Germans’ ideology between psychology and socio-ethnic categories of order and conflict was mutual. Preservation of social and ethnic order had psychological ramifications: it impinged directly upon personal feelings, for ultimately at issue was psychological order, a sense of personal identity and control. A strong, assertive foreign policy was not only the essential condition and guarantee of order; it created self-respect, feelings of honor, high prestige, and repute (Ansehen) for the German nation and for all those who had identified with it (pre-eminently, of course, its pioneers).165 Conversely, the consequences of a weak and passive policy – one without character – were in the end psychological; they included self-abnegation [Selbstentäusserung], humiliation, lack of respect, and, most painfully, an acute sense of shame.166 Shame was in fact the principal feeling awakened among Pan-Germans as they responded to international events. Comparisons between the navies of Germany and other countries, for instance, provoked a sense of ‘surprise and shame’.167 The marriage of a Hessian princess to the heir-apparent to the Russian throne in 1894 stimulated feelings of ‘shame and humiliation’.168
The Pan-Germans’ view of the world had several dimensions, linked by a number of correlates. The focus of the League’s program was on a strong foreign policy, which was to eventuate in the creation of a Central European nation-state, but the ramifications of a strong foreign policy were manifold. Its inspiration and ultimate consequences were psychological. Informed by the personal traits that made up ‘character’, a strong foreign policy solidified ethnic order in the world, allowing the nation with entitlement to precedence by virtue of its culture to exercise authority. Strong foreign policy also solidified the social order within the nation; it provided common national goals to promote cohesion and allowed the men who were entitled to precedence by virtue of their culture, Bildung, and character, to exercise authority. Finally, a strong foreign policy created a sense of psychological order; it inspired feelings of self-respect, honor, and personal control.
These several dimensions of the Pan-Germans’ ideology were entwined within the national symbolism and within the imagery of the pioneer, outposts, and the flood. Deutschtum, the German nation, the language, empire, Bismarck, and the navy all symbolized order. The League’s program called for the aggressive defense of these symbols, in the creation of a great Central-European nation-state with a wordwide empire. Creating this nation-state was to be more than a political achievement, however. It represented the ultimate dike against the flood, that counter-symbol of disorder in all its ethnic, social, and psychological manifestations. The political unification of the German nation symbolized the stabilization of order and the vindication of the pioneer’s claims to precedence, for that elite figure embodied the noble features of German culture, and his ‘character’ was the emblem of having achieved psychological order and control.
The Pan-German League’s claim to protect the national symbols was finally a claim to interpret them, to define just what these symbols stood for. The League’s interpretation emphasized the concepts and values of order, control, culture, education, property, and achievement. The prominence of these concepts and values was not fortuitous, for the symbolism in the ideology of the Pan-German League reflected the experience of the social group that made up most of the organization’s active membership.