‘It may perhaps seem curious to the outsider’, wrote a Pan-German author of the situation in Styria, ‘that a small people like the Slovenes, with scarcely more than a million souls, could seriously threaten the position of the great German people.’1 It does seem curious. So does the alarm shown by Franz Winterstein, the leader of the League’s chapter in Kassel, who, upon learning that the Bohemian String Quartet was going to perform the music of Dvorák, Tschaikowsky, and Josef Suk at a concert in his city, protested to the concert’s organizers about the cultural pollution they were encouraging and threatened them with a boycott.2 Curious too was the behavior of Adolf Fick, who vacationed in Alsace in order to check the progress of Germanization by counting French and German headstones in local cemeteries.3 This behavior and the anxieties it reflected might be dismissed as idiosyncratic, were it not for the fact that these men were held up for emulation in the pages of the Alldeutsche Blätter, a journal devoted to an ideology that made their behavior appear not only laudable but imperative.
This kind of behavior, the anxieties and exaggerated apprehensions in the ideology of the Pan-German League, the militancy of the organization, and its uncontrollable impulse to opposition against official authority all betrayed a dynamism that is no less critical to the history of the organization than it is difficult for the historian to analyze with much confidence. Identifying the social foundations of ideology, the homologies that made the symbolism in the League’s vision attractive to specific social groups, does not fully explain this dynamism. In fact, these homologies and the social composition of the Pan-German League would seem instead to have implied an uncritical devotion to the authority of the state. The effort to understand the dynamism of the organization requires venturing into the less historically accessible realm of psychology and recognizing that the social experience of the men who were active in the Pan-German League was emotionally difficult, that it involved psychological strains which colored their behavior and their view of the world.
The ideology of the Pan-German League was a vivid vision of fear. The symbolism of the flood, the premonitions of catastrophe, the obsession with enemies, the anxieties about disorder, about the failure of authority and loss of control, all suggest a view of the world which, if not pathological, was at least psychologically problematic. This impression is confirmed in other features of the Pan-Germans’ ideology, which betrayed the extent to which their anxieties affected their perception of events.
It needs no further emphasis that a cardinal tenet in the Pan-Germans’ ideology was the presence everywhere of enemies. At a deeper level than the programmatic, this conviction lent structure to the ideology, once the Pan-Germans had concluded that however diverse these enemies appeared, they were all ultimately linked in a single conspiracy, united in its hostility to Germans. This conspiracy, which one writer referred to as a ‘league [Gesellschaftsverband] against Germans in all zones and realms’, united Poles with Czechs, Czechs with Russians, Poles and Czechs with socialists, Catholics with socialists, Russia with Japan, and ultimately all of these, and many more, with one another.4 ‘Enemies all around us’ (Feinde ringsum) was more than a slogan; it was a premise. ‘A broadly based conspiracy has developed with the aim of harming Germandom’, was the analysis of one leader in 1908.5 The situation had not improved in the view of another, who concluded several years later that ‘the enemies of Germans [Deutschfeinde] throughout the world are holding together’.6
Opinions differed among the League’s publicists on the precise nature of the ties that bound the nation’s enemies together. These men all agreed, however, that the conspiracy was animated by cunning agents – ‘agitators and seducers’ all the more powerful and dangerous for their anonymity.7 These agents were ‘uncommonly clever’; they worked by stealth, slowly to subvert the integrity of Germandom, and the repertory of their skills included extraordinary adaptability, ‘concealing their ultimate aims’, posing ‘behind the mask of harmlessness’, remaining ‘behind the scenes’, and violence.8 They had also succeeded in ‘wonderfully organizing’ their forces, establishing networks and secret ties, and eliminating internal opposition to their power.9
Some of these agents were identifiable. Pan-Germans saw the hand of the Jesuits, that ‘general staff of the battle order which is mobilized against the German Empire’, everywhere at work.10 They attributed similar powers and intentions to the British monarch, Edward VII.11 Evidence of the presence of other agents was less distinct but no less alarming, as the local chapter in Eisleben attested in 1903, when it laid out a series of lectures on the ‘three internationals which endanger Germandom’. These were, in close if improbable alliance, the Black International of ultramontanism, the Red International of socialism, and the Gold International of high finance.12
The tendency of the League’s writers to descry supremely unified hostile forces was evident in the very language they used. These linguistic purists thought nothing about desecrating the language with dreadful neologisms which reified abstract concepts and the most diverse collections of people. ‘Slaventum’, ‘Angelsachsentum’, ‘Engländertum’, ‘Polentum’, ‘Jesuitismus’, and even ‘Fremdtum’ (these words do not lose much in translation as ‘Slavdom’, ‘Anglo-Saxondom’, ‘Englishdom’, ‘Poledom’, ‘Jesuitism’, and ‘foreigndom’) conveyed the impression of large blocks organized by superhuman agents who tolerated no dissent.13 These writers also emphasized, by their frequent use of the passive voice and the impersonal pronoun ‘man’, the impression of anonymous forces difficult to identify.
Because they were convinced of the existence of a comprehensive conspiracy directed against the German nation, Pan-German observers were chronically suspicious and hypersensitive about all of its possible manifestations. Alert to attempts by their enemies to bluff and deceive them or, as one writer put it, ‘to throw sand in our eyes’, they found traces of the conspiracy in many unlikely places – in the pathetic German peace movement, in the French foreign legion, in the docile Casubian minority, and in the appearance of a handful of Poles in southern Brazil.14 A favorite pastime of these people was to pour over demographic statistics to confirm their fears about the deterioration of the Germans’ position in various parts of Europe; not even statistics that appeared to belie their fears could fool them, however.15
The world of the Pan-Germans was an arena of titanic conflict which, in the final analysis, reduced to the struggle of Germans against all their enemies. This vision was colored by what one might call political manicheanism; history and politics were a morality play, which pitted Germans against everyone else and whose dénouement would come in war.16 To the moralists in the League who conceived it, the script tolerated no ambiguity or neutrality. Their search for intellectual order led them to divide the world rigidly into categories of friends and enemies. And even if the latter far outnumbered the former, the schema at least afforded the League’s ideologists that degree of control that comes from having perceived the truth.
The ideology of the Pan-German League stands as a classic example of the kind of thinking that has in recent years spawned a tradition in historical writing in which historians have joined hands with psychoanalysts in the attempt to analyze political and social movements under the rubric of a ‘paranoid style’, a ‘paranoid orientation’, or something similar.17 The League’s ideology displayed all the standard symptoms that these writers have identified in the ‘paranoid syndrome’ – the preoccupation with enemies, the tendency to group these together in an all-embracing conspiracy, delusions of grandeur, hypersensitivity, dichotomization, and militant intensity.18
It is tempting to join these writers in appropriating from psychoanalysis the concept of paranoia to analyze the views and behaviors of the Pan-German League. Not only the conspiratorial thinking and militant suspicion, but the obviously problematic relationship to authority and the anxieties over loss of control, which protrude so vividly in the ideology, could thus be read, with little imaginative effort, as symptoms. Tracing the etiology of these symptoms requires more imagination, but the analysis would emphasize that the Pan-Germans were collectively employing an ego-defense mechanism in order to control threatening libidinal forces (which were probably the product of an unresolved Oedipal complex), by projecting these forces onto outside objects; these objects the Pan-Germans in turn perceived as the threatening forces in a hostile conspiracy.19
I have found the problems inherent in this line of analysis insuperable. It attributes collectively to a large group of men a defense mechanism which is, by definition, a profoundly personal phenomenon, one whose etiology and workings are complex and can be analyzed, if at all, only under therapeutic conditions unavailable to historians. The concept of paranoia is also troubling in so far as it connotes pathological emotional problems. It treats ideology as symptomatic of illness and implies that the people who articulated and subscribed to it were severely disturbed. Some of the Pan-Germans might well have been mentally ill – vide Carl Peters – but the vast majority of the men who harbored these ideological views appear, by any clinical definition, to have been entirely normal, functional members of their communities.
Yet for all the problems it raises, the concept of a paranoid style, if used cautiously, brings important insights into the history of an organization like the Pan-German League. The concept’s principal virtue is that it suggests the extent to which the League’s world-view and behavior reflected the play of powerful anxieties and other emotional forces. These forces had two effects of particular significance. They produced, in the first place, severe perceptual distortion. Because Pan-Germans perceived and understood history in terms of ethnic conflict and conspiracies, they blocked out information that indicated that their antagonists were themselves weak and that the groups that appeared to make up a monolithic conspiracy were themselves the victims of social, political, and ethnic conflict.20 In addition, the imperatives that resided in the Pan-Germans’ anxious vision were emotionally compelling. These imperatives prescribed vigilance and the pursuit of ruthless and aggressive policies. They allowed no laxity or compromise in the defense of the nation’s integrity in a world of enemies; and they pushed the men who shared the vision into the position of opposing official authority in Germany. The category of enemies was so comprehensive that it invited inclusion – if only as unwitting accomplices – of anyone who failed to share the Pan-Germans’ view of the world. The League’s oppositon to the German government thus rested ultimately upon the frightening belief that the men who conducted the country’s policies were abetting the conspiracy among Germany’s enemies.
The real problem with using the concept of a paranoid style is that it usually points to a level of psychological analysis so deep that it is inaccessible to historians. The ideology and behavior of the Pan-Germans unquestionably had a powerful emotional dimension, but the precise derivation, character, and intrapsychic function of the emotional drives that produced this behavior and receptivity to ideology in individual Pan-Germans must remain hidden to historians. This is not to abandon the effort to understand the problem of why these men thought and behaved as they did; it is rather to suggest that if historians wish to address the problem at all, they must do so at a different level of analysis.
The limitations of psychohistory have been sufficiently noted that they need not be rehearsed here.21 The use by historians of explanatory categories drawn from psychology has frequently rested upon such shaky evidence that skeptics have had little difficulty in dismissing the results of the venture as conjecture. The analysis that follows is probably not going to convert the skeptics, but two considerations recommend it. The first is that the Pan-German League presents an instance in which, to use the words of Tim Mason (one of the skeptics), ‘more mundane explanations do not match the extreme character of the behavior under discussion’.22 The behavior under discussion here is the receptivity to the notables in the Pan-German League for a militant ideology which prescribed opposition to official authority and which was charged with anxieties, an obsession with enemies, and a pronounced tendency toward rigid, conspiratorial thinking. And it is difficult indeed to see how one can explain this behavior without resort to psychology.
The second consideration which recommends a psychological approach to the Pan-German League is the availability of a model which, while admittedly vulnerable to some of the objections traditionally raised against psychohistory, offers historians the opportunity to link psychology and social history in a manner that most varieties of psychohistory, which have taken their analytical categories directly from Freudian theories of personality, have not. The model rests upon sociological and psychological concepts that are compatible and open, to a certain extent, to empirical verification. Parsonian role theory has supplied the sociology of the model; the psychology draws heavily from the developmental theories of Erik Erikson, in which the emphasis falls less upon the shaping of personality in ontogenetic, intrapsychic conflicts than upon the development of identity in the constant interaction between personality and social and cultural roles and norms.23
Simply stated, the model is based upon the premise that the psychological process of building identity is not exclusively ontogenetic, that it continues throughout a person’s life, and that social roles and cultural symbols encountered in adult life continue to have critical psychological significance. These symbols and roles are internalized: they are invested with emotional energy and incorporated into the system of ego-ideals and object-relations out of which identity and self-esteem are constructed.24 Throughout a person’s life an essential link accordingly exists between culture and society, on the one hand, and personal identity on the other. From this premise the conclusion follows that social or cultural upheavals or discontinuities are bound to have psychological consequences for large groups of people. Challenges to the validity of cultural symbols or the inability to act out accustomed social roles produces a blow to what psychologists call the ‘narcissistic integrity’ of the people affected and make necessary what Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt have referred to as ‘restitutional measures’ -psychological adjustments of a broad possible range, including the search for new ideal objects, the codification of regressive fantasies in ideology, or relapse into apathy.25 The point to be stressed is that when social and cultural dislocations challenge the personal identity and self-esteem of large numbers of people, the psychological responses can be highly emotional and difficult to predict, although social and cultural conditions – for example, the availability of culturally sanctioned objects for aggression – can decisively affect the character of the restitutional measures to which people resort.
The appeal of this model is that it provides a social and cultural dimension for a psychological explanation of modes of thinking and behavior in the Pan-German League – modes that are impossible to understand in the more conventional terms of interest psychology. Most of the activists in the organization were men who, as custodians of authority and culture, performed prestigious roles in German society. These roles were ‘objective’ in the sense that they were culturally assigned to men who were academically educated and who represented the state in the higher realms of the public bureaucracy. That these roles also had psychological significance for the men who performed them, that these roles provided self-concepts and sources of self-esteem, is a conclusion invited by common sense and empirical research on elites in other cultures; and the Pan-Germans’ literature bore witness to it as well.26 The symbolism in this literature related directly to these roles. The Vorkämpfer or pioneer symbolized the custodial roles these men saw themselves playing. Deutschtum, the German nation, and all the other national symbols represented everything over which they believed they had custody – culture, authority, and order.
The cultural objects and the roles that Pan-Germans coded symbolically as pioneers, Deutschtum, empire, the navy, and all the rest, were internalized. In the sense specified by Roy Shafer, the pioneer was an ideal self-representation, and the national symbols were ideal-objects.27 All these ideals were emotionally vested components of the self-concepts of Pan-German leaders. The national symbols prescribed identification with a collectivity and a structured system of social and ethnic relations; the pioneer prescribed identification with cultural role. Just as performance of the custodial roles was culturally a source of status and prestige, identification with the ideals associated with these roles was psychologically a source of self-image, self-concept, and self-esteem.28
Identification with these ideals was of special psychological importance for men whose relationship to the custodial roles and objects associated with them was in some way marginal or otherwise problematic. This generalization applies to several of the groups heavily represented in the cadres of the Pan-German League. The first were those with prolonged exposure to a foreign environment, people whose ethnic identity was insecure for having incubated in a state of tension with the cultural environment in which they were born, grew up, studied, resided, or into which they married.
The second group consisted of those for whom a self-image of pioneer was insecure by virtue of their being new arrivals in the esteemed ranks of the custodians. These ‘new pioneers’ included the professionals with academic credentials but without the status of public officials and the public officials in the less traditional sectors of the bureaucracy. Although it is impossible to determine from available evidence, it is probable that many of these people were also upwardly mobile socially, so that their situation bears marks of the phenomenon that the sociologists call ‘status inconsistency’ or ‘status lag’.29 To the extent that these men were recent arrivals in roles that carried high status, their self-concepts tended to be tenuous and insecure; the status and respect these roles implied were clouded by incommensurate social background or by credentials that had yet to find unqualified acceptance. Ludwig Kuhlenbeck was a classic example of the problem. The son of a locksmith, he took the major step up the social ladder when he earned a university degree in law. He was haunted, however, by the insecurities of his social background: convinced that he was not being accorded due respect by his peers, he became insufferably defensive. After his irascibility had cost him the chance to pursue an academic career in Germany, he settled first for a career as an attorney and then for a teaching post at the French university in Lausanne, where his feelings of isolation and lack of respect only grew. Finally, his provocations of his French students led to his dismissal in 1908, when he returned to Germany to find company in the Pan-German League’s chapter in Naumburg.30
Kuhlenbeck’s career exuded marginality – the social marginality of the upwardly mobile, the cultural marginality of the new custodian, and the geographical marginality of residence abroad. Elements of career frustration also contributed to his insecurity, and the evidence suggests that Kuhlenbeck was not alone in having this problem. High-ranking military officers who were active in the League had also experienced career frustration. Many of them, including August Keim, Eduard von Liebert, and Alfred Breusing, were either non-noble or came from backgrounds that made social mobility a distinct feature of their careers (Liebert’s father was a major). Their backgrounds made them ill at ease with the social conservatism they encountered in the officer corps, and they retired in clouded circumstances.31 Career frustrations clearly figured in the background of another former officer of much higher social station, Ernst Graf zu Reventlow, who before becoming active in the League had been forced out of the navy when he married a dance-hall singer.32 The suspicion is also as difficult to suppress as it is to document that many of the attorneys, prominent among them Heinrich Class, had been unable to find careers in the more prestigious ranks of the civil service.33
Whether or not it was complicated by any of these circumstances, the role of custodian was, by definition, culturally insecure in a period of rapid change such as that which beset Germany after 1890.34 To the extent that these men represented authority and dominant cultural values, they were, in an objective sense, on the first line of defense when these values and the structure of authority came under attack. It is unnecessary to describe this change in any detail here, for it is the basic theme of German history in the Wilhelmine era, and it was played out in many different realms. Several facets of it particularly emphasized the vulnerability of the custodians. The challenge posed by the political mobilization of the urban working classes was especially troubling, for it was the most fundamental, directed against the entire social order and structure of political authority. The mass mobilization of peasants and Catholics represented another attack on bastions of political authority traditionally controlled by Honoratioren around the country.35 The demands of ethnic minorities for autonomy or independence challenged German authority along the periphery of the Reich. The growing weight of industry in German society, which had occasioned much of the social and political ferment, had more diffuse cultural implications as well, principally in drawing into question the very relevance of Bildung as traditionally conceived and hence the entitlement to precedence and authority that it gave to those who had it.36
These trends are not only abundantly recounted in the history books; they were dramatically in evidence in the Pan-German League’s literature, where they were collectively symbolized as the flood and were subjected to a process of interpretation and distortion which leaves little doubt that these men were psychologically as well as culturally vulnerable. The challenges they encountered to the cultural roles they played and to the values they represented were at the same time psychological threats to the internalized roles and ideal-objects on which their self-images and esteem rested. The cultural challenges produced, in other words, psychological tension in the form of conflicts between ego-ideals and the reality these men experienced.37
This psychological tension specifically involved threats to national symbols internalized as ideal-objects and to expectations created by role models internalized as ego-ideals. Threats perceived to national symbols from whatever source – from ethnic or international rivals, domestic enemies, or even an anemic German foreign policy – had direct emotional repercussions. So too did the strains that inhered in the role of custodian. The role demanded that its occupants enjoy deference, that their claims to authority and precedence be recognized. The perception that their authority was instead being challenged – by socialists, ethnic minorities, and many other groups – was emotionally traumatic, especially for the men who were new arrivals, and hence insecure, in the custodial roles.
The most telling clues to the nature of the psychological strains that Pan-Germans experienced are the repeated allusions in their writings and lectures to the related themes of abandonment and shame. Shame connotes a particular kind of stress. It is distinct from guilt, which arises when moral injunctions (or, in the idiom of psychoanalysis, the demands of the super-ego) are unmet. Shame, by contrast, arises when, to quote a leading authority, the ‘goals and images of the ego-ideal are not reached’, or when self-concept, which is molded from these ideal goals and images, is discrepant with cultural reality. If guilt instills the fear of punishment, shame gives rise to the fear of being exposed, isolated, and abandoned.38
One index of the centrality of such fears was the frequency with which Pan-Germans admitted their feelings of shame as they evaluated their nation’s standing in the world. Exposure, isolation, and abandonment were, in addition, hallmarks of the symbolism in the League’s ideology. Surrounded by the flood, the island outposts faced the dreaded risk of being fully cut off and abandoned to hostile forces. The essential characteristics of the pioneer were, in the last analysis, his separation, isolation, precarious exposure, and his loneliness. ‘No horror today is like the loneliness of those who are not heard’, Class confessed in 1912, ‘the moral, spiritual, political loneliness of all of those’ – and here he meant his fellow pioneers in the League – ‘who are aware of the real condition of our fatherland and its people and who have the courage no longer to delude themselves.’39
The vision that Class, Hasse, and other leaders of the League articulated in an effort to come to terms with their feelings of shame and loneliness was an emotionally charged ‘restitutional measure’, a representation of reality, a central feature of which was a conspiracy among the enemies of authority and culture throughout the world. The nature of the deeper psychological needs served by the vision – many features of which psychologists would no doubt describe as neurotic – must remain obscure. In its basic contours, though, this vision resembled belief-systems observed among highly prejudiced people in other cultures.40 The social and cultural position of these prejudiced people also appears to have corresponded to that of the Pan-Germans, at least to the extent that they too were often members of marginal groups disoriented during periods of rapid social change. Like the Pan-Germans, they seized upon belief-systems characterized by a rigid schematization of reality, aggressive attitudes against out-groups, a high level of anxiety, and a low tolerance for ambiguity – all of which resulted in militance and perceptual distortion.41 The Pan-Germans, like these other prejudiced people, found in their ideological vision an element of intellectual control, which made possible the maintenance of self-esteem as it reconciled ego-ideal and experienced reality.42 The pioneer was an admirable figure precisely because of all the hostility he faced.
In 1899 Julius Lenzmann, a deputy of the Progressive Party, attempted to analyze the roots of radical nationalism for his colleagues in the Reichstag. The phenomenon represented, he observed, ‘the self-seeking employment of a purported patriotism to satisfy egotistical needs’.43 Stripped of its polemical intent, his analysis had an element of truth, at least with respect to leaders of the Pan-German League. A substantial proportion of these men belonged to what might, with little exaggeration, be described as a ‘crisis stratum’.44 Their role was to defend culture and authority in Imperial Germany at a time when prodigious social change made this role difficult, both culturally and pscyhologically. The fact that most of these men were new arrivals in the role intensified their insecurities and increased their receptivity to the radical nationalism of the Pan-German vision.
The resort to psychology provides a plausible explanation for the appeal of the Pan-Germans’ anxiety-laden vision of the world, and it underscores the emotional dimension of their reactions to political events. None the less, the limitations of this analysis must be emphasized. Beyond the fact that its evidentiary foundations are weak, an obvious problem remains. The logic of the analysis implies that the psychological tensions to which the Pan-Germans’ ideology and behavior were a response inhered in the role of custodian. However, the great majority of the men who performed these roles in Imperial Germany were not in the Pan-German League. Psychological needs that arose out of cultural strain might well have motivated some notables to become active in the organization, but more tangible factors affected the extent to which such psychological needs generally resulted in a decision to join the Pan-German League.