In Imperial Germany the public realm was constituted principally in the form of voluntary associations. Tens of thousands of these Vereine were founded after 1890 to serve every conceivable purpose and to bring together the devotees of every conceivable pastime, from group singing or the cultivation of carrier pigeons to religious charity or the training of police dogs. Every German community boasted a plethora of them. The town of Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, with a population of 12,500 in 1905, hosted more than a hundred different Vereine.1 The small town of Freienwalde, which lay to the northeast of Berlin, had more than fifty such associations for its 7,000 inhabitants in 1894, while Cronberg im Taunus, a town of 3,200 souls, was infested with forty-two in 1912.2 In 1898 the city of Naumburg had six religious associations, five women’s groups, nine veterans’ organizations, five gymnastic societies, and dozens of others of various descriptions to serve the 20,000 people who lived there.3 It is reasonably certain that few healthy adult male Germans escaped membership in one or more of these organizations at some time in their lives; and some Germans belonged to a staggering number of them. Although he was doubtless not a typical example, Hasse once complained of the burdens he faced as a member of fifty-three different Vereine.4
The proliferation of voluntary associations was one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of the Wilhelmine epoch. It inspired scholarly investigation, satirical poetry, jokes, and even its own label in the word Vereinsmeierei, whose meaning is best captured in the saying, then current, that ‘whenever three Germans get together they form a Verein’.5 The phenomenon was also a facet of social change in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the new associations were urban, formed to meet the affiliative needs of the dramatically growing numbers of Germans residing in cities.6 More specifically, the proliferation of voluntary associations was due in no small part to the polarization of class relationships in urbanized Germany. The rift between the socialist labor movement and the rest of German society at the end of the century was institutionalized in the establishment of all manner of voluntary associations that catered to a working-class constituency.7
In other respects, too, although not as radically as in the case of the socialist working class, voluntary associations reproduced and reinforced the segmentation of Imperial German society. Indeed, each of the major segments of this society was delineated in large part by voluntary associations – the cooperatives and political action groups (such as the Agrarian League) which defended both the social existence and the cultural traditions of rural Protestant Germany, the trade unions and parish auxiliaries which kept alive a corporate consciousness among German Catholics, and the social clubs of the Protestant middle class.8 Voluntary associations tended, in addition, to underpin the vertical stratification of the various segments of German society. Either by design or custom, most of these associations became preserves of specific social strata. These strata were in fact partially defined by their social contacts and the manner in which they managed their leisure time in the organizations to which they belonged. Selecting the proper Verein was accordingly a serious undertaking for anyone with social pretensions, who had to take care to associate with organizations that enjoyed ‘a certain prestige and respect’ and were frequented by ‘the better sectors of the public’.9
Voluntary associations of all descriptions also had tremendous political significance. This truth has lain buried for decades beneath the famous thesis of the ‘unpolitical German’ – a thesis that has rested to a large extent on the purportedly non-political character of German associational life.10 To be fair to its proponents, the thesis reflects (in addition to the self-image of some German intellectuals and literary figures) a peculiarly American view of what politics means; but if one defines politics as the process by which questions of public power and policy are debated and resolved, voluntary associations were the most important political medium in Imperial Germany. For most Germans they provided, in the first place, the principal access to the public realm in which political questions were at issue.11 Moreover, by virtue of the multiple affiliations of their members, voluntary associations were interwoven in intricate webs; these linked the more overtly political organizations, such as the Agrarian League, with groups like the choral societies or gesellige Vereine which on the surface had no political significance at all.12 These links made voluntary associations of practically every description available for politicization and turned them into the basic cells of political mobilization in Imperial Germany.13 The best testimony to the truth of this proposition comes from the two masters of political mobilization in modern German history. Bismarck regarded voluntary associations with suspicion regardless of their goals. ‘All Vereine’, he wrote in 1887 to Prince William, ‘in which entry and activity depend upon the individual members themselves, their good will and personal intentions, can be used very effectively as tools of attack and destruction, but not for construction and preservation.’14 Hitler agreed. His government moved swiftly in the first months of the Machtergreifung to remove all points around which organized opposition might crystalize by destroying the autonomy of voluntary associations whether they were immediately political or not.15
The principles of political mobilization had not changed much from the days of Bismarck to those of Hitler. But the style of politics in Germany had. The ground-rules of the political process in Imperial Germany corresponded to the character of the voluntary associations that participated in it. It was, with remarkably few aberrations, an ordered process, conditioned by the demands of the police who supervised it, as well as by a sense of propriety which, though middle-class in inspiration, prevailed in the politics of the other sectors of German society too. Formal bylaws and procedures, lectures, resolutions, petitions, and an occasional big rally were the hallmarks of the process. Violence and terror were foreign to it. These limitations of style extended to those features of the Imperial German political landscape that seem most clearly to have prefigured the National Socialists. Many of the propaganda techniques employed by the Imperial Naval Office and other agencies of the German government might well have anticipated the plebiscitary style of the Nazis, but Tirpitz and other officials geared their propaganda to the associational conditions they found: building the battle fleet was debated not on the streets, but around the Stammtisch.16 The Pan-German League anticipated the Nazis in much of its program and rhetoric, but never in its political style. Significantly, the League was uncomfortable with Georg von Schönerer and the Austrian Pan-Germans, precisely because the political tactics of these men did include violence.17
In the galaxy of voluntary associations in Imperial Germany, the Pan-German League represented but one small star. It resembled most Vereine in drawing its members from a distinctive segment and stratum of German society, in making its members at least potentially available for political mobilization, and in observing the prevailing proprieties of style. The Pan-German League also resembled a number of voluntary associations in many additional respects.
To extend the astronomical metaphor, the Pan-German League belonged to a large constellation, which comprised dozens of voluntary associations that served what were called ‘national goals’. These associations included six major patriotic societies, which were nominally open to all Germans without respect to confession or class; in addition to the Pan-German League, these were the School Association, the Colonial Society, the Language Association, the Eastern Marches Society, and the Navy League. The label ‘national organization’ comprehended as well countless other associations whose membership, appeal, and goals were more restricted. These groups included the women’s auxiliaries of the big patriotic societies, religious organizations, veterans’ associations, student groups, patriotic youth and workers’ organizations, genealogical societies, antisemitic groups, and sectarian organizations like the Deutscher Bund für Regeneration, which were devoted to causes still exotic and populated by men still considered cranks.18
The six major patriotic societies were the core of what contemporaries called the ‘national’ or ‘German-national movement’. They were all remarkably similar. The extent of their similarity can perhaps be best appreciated in a few more or less random samples from the reports in which chapters of each of these societies described their activities.
Like the Pan-German League, the Colonial Society capitalized on opposition to the Boer War in Germany. Early in 1900 the society’s chapter in Aschaffenburg heard a lecture on political conditions in the Transvaal. The lecture, according to the report, ‘proceeded in an edifying manner [nahm einen erhebenden Verlauf]’. At its conclusion the assembled guests ‘joined enthusiastically in cheering the German fatherland, and the elevated, patriotic mood found warm expression as everyone sang together “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”’.19
Several years later the chapter of the Eastern Marches Society in the Silesian town of Wollstein held a late-summer festival. Although the weather was bad, some 700 people attended, including representatives of the society’s chapters in other towns around the county. The festival opened with music, whereupon the chairman of the host chapter greeted the participants ‘with warm words and pointed out that the purpose of the festival was to strengthen in the society’s members the consciousness that they constitute a large family to which the defense of home and hearth has been entrusted’. After the deputy Landrat had delivered an ‘enthusiastically received toast to the Kaiser’, the principal speaker described, ‘in stirring fashion, the blessed [segensreich] influence of German settlers and the solicitude of the House of Hohenzollern in the Eastern Marches’. In concluding, the report emphasized that the ‘elevated mood of the participants was not influenced by the disfavor shown by the weather’.20
Meetings of chapters of the Language Association emphasized specialized themes, but these meetings had the same effect on their participants as did those of other patriotic societies. In Kassel in 1912, for example, the Language Association’s chapter sponsored a ‘dialect evening’. The meeting opened as the chairman greeted the guests and demanded of them ‘energetic assistance in the fight against foreign words [Fremdwörterwesen] and against everything un-German’. The highlight of the evening was a series of readings in dialects indigenous to various parts of Germany and Austria. According to the report, the audience ‘followed with the most excited interest the presentations, some of which provoked considerable merriment, and thanked the readers with rich applause’.21
Many of the activities sponsored by chapters of the Navy League also had a distinctive flare, for this organization had resources unavailable to the others. The effect, however, was familiar. ‘As in previous years’, read the report which the Navy League’s group in Essen submitted about activities in 1909, the festivals that featured motion pictures ‘were the most actively in demand; on occasion the crowd was so large that hundreds of people had to be turned back at the doors’. Altogether some 40,000 people attended these festivals, but, lest one get the impression that the throngs were there for the technological novelty of motion pictures rather than because of glowing enthusiasm for the navy, the reporter hastened to add that the participants were all ‘elevated in patriotic spirit by speech and song’.22
Finally, although the School Association was primarily interested in raising money for Germans abroad, its chapters appreciated the importance of the proper mood at their meetings. Late in 1909 the newly founded chapter in Bayreuth inaugurated its activities with a public lecture by a German delegate to the Bohemian diet in Prague. The lecture was received with ‘grateful enthusiasm’, whereupon the musicians struck up ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ and everyone rose to sing it. The entertainment that followed was ‘immensely successful’. At the end of the meeting a spokesman for the chapter thanked the guest speaker for his ‘splendid words’ and assured him that the chapter would ‘remain mindful of his admonishments’ about the Slav peril and would ‘translate them into action’. The whole evening, the reporter concluded, ‘proceeded in a harmonious manner and represented an uplifting demonstration for the German nation’.23
Citing additional examples would merely belabor the point that all these reports were describing the same phenomenon. No less than in the Pan-German League, the meetings of the other patriotic societies summoned up a German-national public realm, which transformed every German who entered it as it suspended class distinctions and parochial loyalties, generating spontaneous unanimity of thought and emotion in the defense of national symbols. In fact, to judge from the format of the meetings and from the rhetoric of the speeches, toasts, resolutions, and the reports, it would be difficult to distinguish one patriotic society from another.24 Nor were these similarities superficial; they reflected commonalities of ideology and mentality, social structure, and geographical distribution.
The patriotic societies defended different components of the same network of national symbols. The navy, the colonies, the language, and Germans struggling to preserve their ethnic integrity all ultimately meshed with one another to symbolize the defense of culture, authority, and order at home and abroad. The patriotic societies shared a common fear of threats to these symbols. The ideologies of all these organizations were informed by a common vision of conflict between the forces of order and disorder, whether this conflict be played out in terms of rivalry for naval power and empire, or in the progressive subversion of one language and culture by another.
The same images and metaphors surfaced in the programmatic literature of all these associations, where they bore witness to common anxieties. Cunning and unscrupulous enemies abounded, portrayed frequently -especially in the literature of the Eastern Marches Society and the School Association – in the imagery of the flood. The figure of the pioneer and the preoccupation with the ideas of distance and isolation were prominent in the literature of the other societies too. In the case of the School Association the metaphorical tradition was practically identical with that of the Pan-German League: the pioneers were the lonely champions of German culture in Central and Eastern Europe. In the Eastern Marches Society the metaphors were more geographically specific and applied to the efforts of Germans to beat back the flood of Poles in the Prussian east. The Language Association made free use of the same imagery, as it appointed itself the vanguard in the defense of the language against foreign intrusions from all sides. In the Colonial Society’s literature the pioneers were the intrepid German merchants and settlers who brought culture to the distant wilds of the empire. The Navy League appropriated much of the Colonial Society’s imagery in arguing that a fleet was essential for the spread and protection of German culture overseas.
The ideologies of these patriotic societies appealed in addition to the same kinds of people. Every organization drew its cadres overwhelmingly from the propertied and educated middle class (see Appendix, Tables 5.6, 5.7, 5.8). Although the proportions of the mixture varied among the societies, academically educated public officials and teachers, professionals, and military officers made up an absolute majority of the local leadership in all of them; and these people presumably were representative of the rank and file as well, with the probable exception of the more broadly based Navy League.25
Although conclusive generalizations must await more systematic comparison of these organizations, the ideological and sociological similarities among them suggest that the same cultural and psychological dynamics that underlay radical nationalism in the Pan-German League were at work in the other societies too. All were populated in the first instance by custodians of culture and authority. These men found in a generalized, aggressive antipathy to outgroups a vision which spoke to the confusions and anxieties they were experiencing, as rapid social and cultural change bred challenges to their authority.
The patriotic societies were similar in another respect. Excepting the Eastern Marches Society, which was concentrated in the cities and towns of the east, they exhibited the same patterns of regional distribution; all were strong in the central belt from Hessen to Saxony.26 The same social and confessional conditions that encouraged large and active chapters of the Pan-German League worked to the benefit of the other societies. Their chapters, too, were strong in administrative centers in Protestant parts of the country, where the threat posed by socialists to bastions of power, especially to bastions traditionally occupied by National Liberals, was immediate. And Catholics were nearly as rare in the other societies as they were in the Pan-German League.27
Despite the fundamental similarities among the patriotic societies, their political postures were different, in some cases dramatically. The Pan-German League was unique among these organizations in its consistent and outspoken opposition to the German government. The roots of this divergence among the patriotic societies extended back into the 1880s, into the debates over the definition of the German nation and whether ultimate national authority resided in the monarchy which ruled within the frontiers of 1871 or in the ethnically defined Volk, which transcended these frontiers. While the tension between the political and ethnic definitions of the nation never disappeared entirely, the domestication of most of the patriotic societies in the 1890s seemed to resolve the issue in favor of the monarchy, whose own place in the shrine of national symbols became that of supreme custodian. The monarchy served, that is, not only itself as the symbol of national integrity, order, and authority, but it claimed the exclusive authority to tend all the other national symbols – not only those, like the colonies, which were associated with the monarchy from their creation, but also cultural symbols, such as the language, which operated well beyond the scope of the monarchy’s political authority.
Apart from the Pan-German League, in which opposition to monarchical authority became increasingly explicit, this interpretation of the monarchy’s role found general acceptance among the patriotic societies. Beyond the area known as Kulturpolitik, the School and Language Associations abandoned the realm of politics, but if they did take positions of immediate political consequence, they normally supported the government. The Colonial Society, the Eastern Marches Society, and the Navy League all adopted a ‘governmentalist’ posture most of the time. The Colonial Society in particular consistently followed what might be called an official line, gearing its propaganda and activities to official policy, whatever the vagaries of this policy might prescribe. The Eastern Marches Society was less reluctant to criticize the government, but did so rarely in public. For a short while the Navy League provided the one other exception to this pattern; its support for official policy was punctuated, between 1905 and 1908, by a major crisis (to be considered below), during which its challenge to the government’s authority to determine naval policy rivalled that of the Pan-German League.
The docility of patriotic societies was not a foregone conclusion.28 The ideologies, programs, and styles of all of them implied at least a latent tension with the government, for all were potentially rival custodians of the national symbols. Speaking in the name of the nation, all had been founded on the proposition that patriotic causes, from building the fleet to prohibiting languages other than German at public meetings, could be served by mobilizing popular sentiment in their support. However, in exploiting this support the government ran the risk of creating sorcerer’s apprentices, in so far as the process involved playing on popular anxieties and the manipulation of emotionally laden symbols. Particularly in the event that official policies seemed to work to the detriment of the national symbols which these organizations served, the danger arose that patriotic activism could turn against the government and challenge its custodial authority.
The key to the docility of most of the patriotic societies lay in structural features in each organization that made difficult the venting of patriotic activism in public criticism of official authority. The bylaws of both the Language and School Associations limited the purview of these organizations’ activities to areas in which direct confrontation with official authority was unlikely. The potential for friction was greater in the case of the School Association, whose subsidizing of German schools abroad did on occasion raise problems with the Foreign Office; however, the extreme decentralization of the organization, the fact that its local chapters were for all intents and purposes independent institutions of eleemosynary patriotism, made it difficult for the national organization to mobilize any sustained opposition to the government.
The potential for friction with the government was still greater in the cases of the Colonial Society, Eastern Marches Society, and the Navy League, for they all dealt with controversial issues of immediate political consequence. That this potential did not result in more public criticism was due to the channels which the government had built into each of these organizations and which made possible the stifling of patriotic activism whenever it threatened to turn into public criticism of official policies. The extensive, lucrative system of concessions which linked the government to the national leadership of the Colonial Society gave the top echelons of this organization a powerful incentive to heed the entreaties of high officials and to silence criticism of the government coming up from the chapters. In the Eastern Marches Society and the Navy League the channel of government influence lay in the massive encouragement each organization had enjoyed, during its incubation, from bureaucrats acting in a semi-official capacity. The debt owed by the Navy League to official favors was especially obvious, but the success of the Eastern Marches Society owed only a little less to the systematic encouragement of the Prussian bureaucracy in the eastern provinces. The penetration of both organizations by the bureaucratic apparatus continued to make the expression of criticism difficult.
In many respects, then, the Pan-German League was unique among the patriotic societies in Wilhelmine Germany. Its program was the most broad and systematic; the organization did not, like the School and Language Associations, eschew issues of direct political importance. The League’s program embraced, in fact, the issues of primary concern to all the other societies. Furthermore, the Pan-German League differed fundamentally from the Colonial Society, the Eastern Marches Society, and the Navy League, in that the government had built no regular channels of influence into it through which to mute the expression of criticism. The Pan-German League remained genuinely independent of official control, so that the political expression of emotions and anxieties mobilized at the local level could be more radical than in any other patriotic society. Unattenuated by official pressure, the voice of the Pan-German League was less reluctant to dispute the claim of the monarchy to preside over the national symbols.
All these points of similarity and contrast combined to govern relations between the Pan-German League and the other patriotic societies on both the national and local levels. The contrasts and points of collision figured more prominently at the national level, where ideological differences and the question of ties to official agencies were focused. At the local level, on the other hand, the social, ideological, and cultural similarities among the patriotic societies weighed more heavily.
At the national level, the Pan-German League’s relationship was most cordial with the Language and School Associations, the two organizations whose programs were the most restricted and whose own renunciation of political activity made for complementarity of roles with the Pan-Germans. The League was content to concentrate its own efforts elsewhere while the Language Association took over primary responsibility for hunting down foreign words.29 The League and the School Association quickly accommodated one another’s programs, leaving the subsidization of most schools abroad to the School Association and support for other German organizations, as well as most of the political agitation on behalf of Germans abroad, to the League.30 Encouraged by this comfortable division of labor, the ties between the League and the School Association grew very close. In 1908–9, in fact, the possibility of a merger of the two organizations surfaced briefly; it did not materialize, but the transfer of Alfred Geiser from his position of executive secretary in the League to a similar job with the School Association in 1908 guaranteed that the two societies would continue to act in concert.31
Relations between the League and the other societies were more clouded by direct competition. Although the League and the Eastern Marches Society had reached an implicit understanding by the turn of the century about the areas of the country each was to cover, relations between the two organizations were far from the ‘hearty and undisturbed friendship’ which an official of the Eastern Marches Society claimed them to be.32 In part the trouble stemmed from personal animosity between the autocratic leader of the Eastern Marches Society, Heinrich von Tiedemann, and the League’s principal advisor on Polish affairs, Alfred Hugenberg, whom Tiedemann regarded as a ‘pie-eyed [schwärmerisch] idealist’.33 Hugenberg’s idealism was the moving force behind the League’s adopting positions in the Polish question that were more radical than those that the Eastern Marches Society, an organization more attuned to the dictates of official policy, was willing to endorse. As early as 1899 the League called publicly for the suspension of the constitutionally guaranteed principle of equality before the law in Prussia, in order to prepare the way for restricting the rights of Poles to own property.34 Several years later the Eastern Marches Society adopted this demand too (and it was put into law in 1908), but the fact that the League had been in the vanguard did nothing to diminish the rivalry between the two organizations.35
More threatening to the League than its rivalry with the Eastern Marches Society over the Polish question was its competition with other patriotic societies in exploiting popular excitement over the issues of empire and the navy – the issues to which the League owed its dramatic growth in the late 1890s. With the exception of several brief episodes of collaboration, relations between the Pan-German League and the Colonial Society were consistently bad. The League was originally born in the early 1890s as a rival colonial society, and although the scope of its interests expanded, the League continued to denounce the Colonial Society for its anemic advocacy of colonial expansion and its cozy relations with the government. The greatest source of tension was the extensive concessions that bound the Colonial Society and the government. Nowhere was the populism that animated the Pan-German League more evident than in the organization’s denunciation of the speculative profits this system was bringing, particularly in Southwest Africa, not only to the colonial companies whose directors controlled the Colonial Society, but to the Colonial Society itself as a corporate investor.36 The League’s attack touched a nerve in the Colonial Society, and the attack was motivated in no small part by resentment in the League over the riches and other official favors the Colonial Society reaped from what one of the League’s leaders called its ‘Dekorationspolitik’.37 In its own defense, the Colonial Society only exacerbated the resentment and ill will by publicly treating the League like an unmannered child.38
The relations between the Pan-German League and the Navy League vacillated. For most of the prewar period the Navy League was, like the Colonial Society, a ‘Regierungsbildung mit Serenissimus-Kultus’, in the untranslatable words of one bitter Pan-German – an organization so dependent on the good will of the government for its existence that any radical departures from serene endorsement of official policy were inconceivable.39 As a consequence, relations between the two organizations remained cool, except for the period of crisis during which the Navy League itself attacked the government’s policies and prerogatives.
With special organizations at work in all the major sub-fields that its own program comprehended, the Pan-German League had constantly to emphasize its own unique ideological profile. Running feuds with other patriotic societies contributed substantially to the character of this profile. Years of criticizing other groups for their want of resolve and independence from the government cast a new light on the image of the pioneer in the Pan-German League. The image implied service in the vanguard of the national cause, independent and out ahead of both the government and the more docile patriotic societies. The League was the pioneer among pioneers.40 This role entitled the organization, its spokesmen claimed, to prior authority on all national issues. The League accordingly comprised the unadulterated core of patriotic Germans, next to whom the other societies represented but groups in a diaspora; its comprehensive program made the League in addition the ‘natural center’ or point of crystallization for patriotism properly conceived and hence the logical foundation for a broad coalition of patriotic organizations.41
Maintaining the profile of the true pioneer weighed heavily on the League’s leadership. On many occasions the decision about the position the League was to adopt hinged on the need to demonstrate the organization’s independence and its role in the vanguard. The role required that the League pose demands that were more radical than those of the other patriotic societies – more ships than the Navy League advocated, more colonial annexations than the Colonial Society wanted, and more radical measures against the Poles than the Eastern Marches Society thought advisable.42
The League’s profile did tend to broaden the ideological distance between it and the other patriotic societies, but the result was not invariably beneficial. While the League’s leaders thought in terms of pioneering service to the nation, the salient features of organization’s public image were its radicalism, the extremism of its program, its hostility to the government, and its irresponsibility. Especially once the German government began systematically to promote this image, the League’s calculated advocacy of extreme positions ran the risk of casting the organization as a group of eccentric chauvinists.43
While programmatic and ideological disputes set the tone for relations among the patriotic societies at the national level, a different set of circumstances operated at the local level. Here a single truth governed the situation: all the patriotic societies had to appeal to the same group of people, and as patriotic societies shot up ‘like mushrooms out of the ground’, as one patriot in Bamberg described the problem, they found themselves competing for a limited pool of potential activists and members.44 The problem was not so much economic, for most people from these social strata could afford to pay dues to several patriotic societies; it was a question of the time, energy, and the interest that people could devote to more than one organization, particularly when patriotic societies had to contend with all manner of other associations for their members’ attention and when, despite the concerted efforts of the national leaderships, the ideological distinctions among patriotic organizations were not always clear and many Germans believed that membership in just (any) one was sufficient.45
German cities and towns thus became arenas in which the logic of Verbandsimperialismus was played out in a running struggle among the patriotic societies – a struggle that seemed hardly to befit the ideal of national solidarity they all claimed to serve. An organization’s appeal to the distinctive merits of its own program or ideology often counted for less in this competition than the skill with which it exploited other more mundane features of German associational life. The patriotic societies vied with one another to make their meetings the most interesting and attractive. The group that succeeded in bringing in the most prominent speaker, or in tapping the best tavern as a meeting hall, or in appearing to be the best organized, or in displaying the most colorful literature could achieve a decisive advantage.46 One of the reasons why the Navy League was such a formidable competitor was that the assets at its disposal allowed it to charge the lowest dues of all the patriotic societies and to outfit its travelling lecturers with motion pictures for showing at meetings.47 Occasionally, tactics in the competition included the exchange of public recrimination, subversion of one group by another, and the outright rustling of members.48
The eventual outcome of the competition depended upon the local context in which it took place. The organizers of all the patriotic societies encountered the same experiences as the Pan-German League’s. In most communities the number of members they initially attracted was less important than the kinds of people these were. The object was to win the allegiance of men who, as one organizer for the Navy League counseled, ‘enjoy a certain influence among their fellow citizens’, men whose standing in the pool of local notables would attract others, like satellites, into the organization and keep them there.49 In Worms the Pan-German League occupied a dominant position among the patriotic societies, in large part because it succeeded in enlisting into its ranks Cornelius Heyl zu Herrnsheim, who was the single most important political figure in Hessen.50 The fortunes of patriotic societies in Cologne fluctuated as they competed for the allegiance of Wilhelm von Recklinghausen, a wealthy merchant who was active first in the Colonial Society in 1890, then became chairman of the School Association, joined the board of directors of the Pan-German League in 1899, and took on a leading role in the local chapter of the Eastern Marches Society several years later.51
When organizers of patriotic societies arrived in a community, they often discovered that these influential notables were already organized, either in a chapter of another patriotic society or in some other voluntary association that placed rival claims on the loyalty of its members. When Geiser appeared in Lauf, in northern Bavaria, in 1904, he discovered that the town’s ‘national element’ was already in the camp of the Navy League.52 In Stuttgart the main obstacle to the activity of all the patriotic societies was the Württembergischer Verein für Handelsgeographie; originally founded in the 1880s, it was well established as the club of the best groups of people in Stuttgart when, in the 1890s, other patriotic societies attempted to challenge its dominant position.53 In Greifswald the situation was similar; here the local Geographical Society served as the patriotic society in the community.54 In other communities, such as Paderborn and Konstadt, the Bürgerverein, nominally only a social club, was the dominant middle-class association, and it resisted the incursions of the patriotic societies.55
Breaking the monopoly of groups already established was a difficult undertaking, and in the dynamics of local competition prior presence could be decisive. Once a society became established in a community, the group loyalties it created were hard to break, if only because of inertia. One of the reasons why the Eastern Marches Society failed to recruit more successfully in the west was that other societies had beaten it into community after community.56 That the Navy League was able to do so well, in spite of its late start, was due to its massive resources and the official endorsement it enjoyed.
The proliferation of patriotic societies and their competition in localities around the country meant that the notables for whose loyalty these organizations vied were under a great deal of pressure to support all manner of patriotic causes. The fragmentary evidence that survives indicates that a man like Recklinghausen in Cologne, who was an officer in four different patriotic societies, was unusual. Most of these people chose to become active in only one. Of the slightly more than 2,000 men whom I have identified as local leaders in patriotic societies in twenty-five communities, less than 6 percent were officers in more than one group, although this figure would no doubt be higher if more complete information were available on the cadres of the School Association.57 It is more difficult to determine whether many notables chose to be officers in one group and only members in another, or simply members in more than one patriotic society. Of the 753 members in the Hamburg chapter of the Pan-German League in 1901, only eight were officers of other patriotic societies in Hamburg at one time or another, while the corresponding figures for Stuttgart were seven of 117.
Only for Hamburg do multiple membership lists survive for the patriotic societies. Comparing them suggests that most people chose to belong to only one, although the lists reveal some interesting patterns of cross-affiliation (see Appendix, Table 9.1). The membership lists of the Hamburg chapters of the Pan-German League, Colonial Society, School Association, Language Association, and Navy League had a combined total of 5,767 names (more than half of them in the Navy League). In just under 1,500 instances the same name appeared on two or more lists; and in just over 300 cases it appeared on three or more. Accordingly, about one patriot in eleven or twelve was a member of more than one society in Hamburg.58 The School Association had the greatest percent of members with multiple memberships, the Navy League the least. The Pan-German League had the largest number of activists who were members of three or more societies, and it shared these activists most frequently with the massive Navy League, least frequently with its bitter rival, the Colonial Society.
Because the pool of potential members was limited, and because the number of activists willing to contribute their time and energy to more than one patriotic society was even more limited, the virtues of cooperation among the patriotic societies at the local level were compelling, although the fact that each organization jealously guarded its own corporate identity placed limits on their cooperation and made outright consolidation impossible. The principal stimulus to cooperation was economic. Staging patriotic meetings could be expensive: a meeting hall had to be rented, flyers and other forms of advertising had to be printed and disseminated, and the speaker, if he were coming from outside, had to be paid.59 By pooling their resources, patriotic societies could not only share the expenses and administrative burdens, but could avert the psychological as well as the financial catastrophe of a half-empty meeting hall.60 The advantages of cooperation were particularly impressed upon the small group of activists, like Recklinghausen, or Paul Winter in Hamburg, or professors Clauss and Barthelmess in Ulm, or Winterstein in Kassel, or Friedrich Hopf in Dresden, who were the moving spirits in the local chapters of several patriotic societies and whose lives were made less complicated by arranging meetings that served their several constituencies at the same time. Similarities of program and ideology made selecting themes for these joint meetings easy. The navy motif attracted Pan-Germans and members of the Colonial Society, as well as friends of the Navy League. The same was true of colonies, while the theme of oppressed German minorities abroad appealed to everyone in one way or another. One final consideration weighed heavily in encouraging cooperation, particularly at the turn of the century when the intrusion of the Navy League posed a threat to all the others. By arranging some kind of truce, patriotic societies diminished the risk of their members deserting to competitors.61
The liabilities of continued competition were already apparent when, at the turn of the century, a number of issues prompted cooperation by making even more salient the symbols that these societies shared. Building the navy was one issue; even more compelling, because it combined the symbols of imperial power and ethnic unity, was the Boer War.62 But the greatest impetus to join forces came with the death of Bismarck in 1898 and the commemorative activities that soon followed. Bismarck was symbol supreme to every patriotic organization in Germany, the putative champion of the goals each promoted. As the campaign took hold to build monuments in his honor in the form of towers on hillsides throughout the country, the patriotic societies were in the vanguard. Coming together in the committees set up to raise the money, they quickly saw the merits of working together on a more lasting basis.63 Thereafter the annual Bismarckfeier in April was the occasion for joint celebrations among the patriotic societies, as were other patriotic holidays, such as the anniversary of the founding of the Reich on 18 January and the Sedantag on 2 September.64 In many communities cooperation among the patriotic societies was encouraged by public officials, who worked through these organizations in arranging local public festivals.65
Cooperation among the patriotic societies of a community took several forms. In many localities the societies simply agreed from time to time to hold joint meetings, which they promoted together. In other places they agreed on a mutually profitable division of labor and cemented it by becoming corporate members of one another or by delegating representatives to sit on one another’s board of officers.66 In Ratibor, for example, the survival of the Pan-German League was due in no small degree to its cooperation with the local chapter of the Eastern Marches Society; the Pan-Germans left the Polish problem to the Eastern Marches Society, while the two groups alternately sponsored big festivals.67 In other communities patriotic societies offered one another reduced rates of admission to their meetings.68 In Hamburg and Pritzwalk, and doubtless in many other places as well, members of several patriotic societies sat at the same Stammtisch.69
In a number of communities cooperation reached the point of being institutionalized. In Potsdam, Lübeck, Posen, Dresden, Barmen, Kassel, Berlin, Erfurt, Göttingen, and several other cities, the patriotic societies put on regular joint meetings called ‘German Evenings’ (Deutsche Abende).70 To coordinate the arrangements, they established cover-organizations, usually called ‘leagues of patriotic associations’ (Verbände vaterländischer Vereine) and composed of representatives of the participating groups.71 The situation in Barmen was typical. Five patriotic societies agreed to sponsor a series of five lectures, with each of the groups responsible for selecting the speaker and theme for one; members of each participating society purchased a series ticket at a reduced price.72 Elsewhere patriotic societies arranged bazaars and summer outings together or set up common reading rooms. The institution of the ‘German Evening’ reached its height in Potsdam, where in 1897–8 the Pan-German League, Colonial Society, Eastern Marches Society, and the School and Language Associations met jointly thirty-four times.73 Cooperation tended everywhere to have salutary effects on all the participating organizations. It made possible the staging of larger and more impressive rallies, which enhanced the public profiles of all the groups and, in most communities, added to all their memberships.74
Considerations of survival recommended the subduing of rivalries among patriotic societies and their forming loose cartels at the local level. At the national level the patriotic societies were unable to establish any analogous arrangement. Here cooperation remained limited to consultation from time to time among national officers, the sending of representatives to one another’s national congresses, and the occasional undertaking of joint charitable activities.75 Projects to institutionalize this cooperation, in the form of a single national congress, a common charitable fund, or a cartel to promote more regular communication, foundered repeatedly on the suspicions among the national leaders of all the societies and on their determination to sacrifice none of their own organization’s identity.76 Antagonisms among these societies were sometimes so intense at the national level that they inhibited cooperation at the local level. Relations between the Pan-German League and the Colonial Society, respectively the most radical and the most staid of the patriotic societies, were so strained at the national level that chapters of the Colonial Society refused, probably on orders from Berlin, on a number of occasions to participate with the League in the ‘German Evenings’.77
It has become commonplace to interpret the Pan-German League’s cooperation with other patriotic societies at the local level as the avenue through which it spread its influence into other, less radical organizations. This view, which both Franz Sontag and Eckart Kehr initially popularized, implies that the League was the most virulent of the patriotic societies – the most radical, active, and effective.78 The League was assuredly the most radical, and in many (though by no means all) communities it was also the most active. But the popular view both overrates the effectiveness of the League’s infiltration and underrates the commonality of views among the patriotic societies. The Pan-Germans did aspire to infiltrate and radicalize chapters of the more moderate groups, particularly in the Navy League and Colonial Society.79 At times they succeeded, but just as often they failed, as the persistence of rivalries at the local level made other groups reluctant to adopt positions associated with the Pan-German League.80
None the less, the significance of these rivalries should not be overplayed either. The patriotic societies in Imperial Germany were involved in a common venture. Their cooperation in communities around the country revealed the extent to which they all invoked and participated in the same German-national public realm – a realm defined by consensus on a broad range of issues and a commitment to defending a common set of national symbols. The social affinities among the patriotic societies – the prominence in all of them of the academically educated – betrayed the extent to which this public realm was a cultural product of a specific social experience. The men who congregated in this realm were custodians of culture and authority. They were convinced that Germany faced a world of enemies, both at home and abroad, that struggle was the basic law of politics, and that upon Germany’s success in this struggle depended not only the country’s survival and security, but ultimately the integrity of its culture and the structure of domestic authority.
The point at which consensus ended in the German-national public realm was the question of monarchical authority. Here the Pan-German League stood, so to speak, with one foot outside the consensus as it argued that the protection of the national symbols could in extremis justify active opposition to the government, that the defense of authority could require challenging official authority. For most of the prewar period the League was isolated in this view. To anticipate, though, the German-national public underwent radicalization on the eve of the war, and the consensus broadened to accept the League’s position. The radicalization was due not to the infiltration by the Pan-German League of the other patriotic societies, but rather to the alarming impact of outside events. The League’s contribution was nevertheless crucial: it was to provide the program in which the radicalization of the German-national public could find expression. And the political force exerted in the wake of this radicalization was all the more compelling because the scope of the German-national public realm extended far beyond the patriotic societies.
The proliferation of voluntary associations in Germany at the turn of the century and the fact that many Germans were members of dozens of these organizations created a situation in which the potential for political mobilization was high. Every sector of German society bore witness to this potential to one degree or another. The mobilization of the socialist labor movement depended to a large degree on the multiplication and growth of all manner of voluntary associations.81 This process had analogues in the mobilization of peasant associations by the Agrarian League and in the relationship between the Center Party and a network of Catholic voluntary associations, particularly the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland.82 The closest analogue within the urban Protestant middle class was the mobilication that took place in the name of the national cause, a process spearheaded by the patriotic societies.
Like political mobilization in other sectors of German society, the mobilization of patriotism in the Protestant middle class began in the personal networks that linked Germans in the private as well as the public sphere – as relatives, friends, parishioners, colleagues, and members of voluntary associations.83 Chapters of the patriotic societies grew up around the personal networks of influential notables. In Mainz the pivotal figure was Heinrich Class, who as a lawyer had contacts among local judicial officials; his nephew’s brother worked in the office of public construction and had acquaintances among the local architects. With Class’s encouragement a small group of these men formed an antisemitic group, which during the naval agitation became the core of a new chapter of the Pan-German League.84 The League’s chapter in Hoyerswerda grew around a nucleus of men who worked in the local Amtsgericht. The chapter of the Eastern Marches Society in Elberfeld, like many chapters of the Colonial Society, consisted of the friends and colleagues of the man who served as chairman.85 The Colonial Society’s chapter in Wiesbaden orginated around a handful of men who frequented the same tavern.86 Because they well recognized the dynamics of the situation, organizers in all the patriotic societies recommended recruitment among friends and acquaintances as the most effective technique.87
The personal networks of the men who were active in the patriotic societies extended into other voluntary organizations of all descriptions. These other organizations provided channels for broadening mobilization. Personal contacts could be exploited to produce new members for the patriotic societies, or, if interest were great enough, entire organizations could be drawn loosely into the orbit of the patriotic societies by means of participation at patriotic festivals, corporate affiliations, or subscriptions to patriotic newsletters.
Predictably, patriotic societies had the greatest success in mobilizing voluntary associations that catered to the same educated and wealthy stratum of the middle class. The range of these organizations was broad, from cultural societies like the Deutscher Schillerbund in Ulm or the Allgemeiner Plattdeutsch- Verband in Essen, to recreational organizations such as the Deutsch-österreichischer Alpenverband and assorted sport clubs.88 They also included religious organizations, most significantly the Evangelischer Bund, whose anti-Catholicism and anti-socialism were spearheaded by the Protestant clergy in the Catholic west, where chapters of the organization were frequent participants at activities sponsored by patriotic societies.89
Patriotic societies were also successful in exploiting the ties of their members to social clubs, casinos, Bürgervereine, and, in the mercantile sector, to Kaufmännische Vereine. These contacts resulted in the frequent participation of these organizations alongside the patriotic societies in national festivals and their corporate affiliation with many chapters of patriotic societies.90 In some locations winning over these associations was vital to the survival of patriotic societies. In the town of Kybnitz in Silesia, for example, the Kaufmännischer Verein provided the Colonial Society with the bulk of its membership, while the vitality of the Pan-German League in Mülheim was due in no small part to the support of the local Kaufmännischer Verein.91
The social center of gravity of the patriotic societies, and of the personal networks of their members, was located in the upper-middle class. The activities in which these societies participated also attracted a number of large organizations whose social complexion was more heavily lower-middle class. These organizations were not, by strict definition, patriotic societies, for they had specific primary goals and appealed to specific constituencies.92 For a number of reasons, though, which related to their histories or social composition, extreme nationalism was a central characteristic of all of these organizations, and it drew them into the German-national public realm.
Theories that emphasize downward social mobility, or the threat of it, are more convincing in explaining the receptivity of lower-middle-class groups to radical nationalism than they are in accounting for the behavior of the better-established people who gathered in the patriotic societies. Nationalism served different functions for different social groups. Participation in the German-national public realm could, in other words, be motivated by a variety of social experiences. For small businessmen and white-collar employees, the defense of culture and authority was not so important in itself, for these people could not, as a rule, credibly claim to represent culture or authority in Imperial Germany; it was rather a symbol of the social distance that separated these people from the blue-collar labor force. In proportion as the objective measures of this distance (chiefly income and property-holding) diminished, and as the socialist labor movement publicly abandoned the national symbols, these same symbols became increasingly important in defining the social existence and in lending meaning to the social experience of large sectors of the urban Mittelstand.93 The attempt to emphasize social distance from the manual labor force also encouraged these lower-middle-class groups to emulate the cultural practices of the upper-middle class, so that the values and traditions nurtured in the German-national public realm – the careful structuring of authority on the basis of education and wealth, the modes of sociability, and the station of women – were both familiar and agreeable to them.
The group to which these generalizations appear most clearly to apply was the army of clerks and other commercial employees who organized in the Deutschnationaler Handlungs-Gehilfenverband. The members of this organization, who on the eve of the war numbered more than 160,000, embraced radical nationalism in all of its manifestations, from antisemitism to extravagant demands for building the navy. The Commercial Employees’ Union was a regular participant alongside the patriotic societies at ‘German Evenings’ and other national festivals.94 It maintained cordial relations with all the patriotic societies, but it had the closest ties to the most radical of them.95 At the national level, the union was long a corporate member of the Pan-German League, while local chapters of the union joined the League’s chapters in Schandau, Tilsit, Würzburg, Giessen, Plauen, and many other communities.96 Relations cooled only a little at the national level, when in 1910 Hans Bechly became chairman of the union and undertook to emphasize its non-partisanship by withdrawing its corporate membership in all other organizations, including the Pan-German League.97
It is more difficult to generalize about the social complexion and the motivations of the veterans’ associations (Kriegervereine), which made up the most numerous sector of the German-national public.98 The composition and political disposition of the many thousands of local veterans’ associations varied from region to region. In the areas where the patriotic societies were strongest, lower-ranking civil servants, artisans and other small businessmen, and salaried employees constituted most of the membership – along with enough blue-collar workers that the civilian and military officials charged with supervising the Kriegervereine were preoccupied with using these organizations to combat socialism. This undertaking involved the effort to keep socialists out of them and to employ the associations – sometimes against the inclination of their own memberships – as agencies of popular education in patriotism. Large contingents from the Kriegervereine, with flags and often in uniform, joined the patriotic societies at officially sponsored national festivals. Participation in these events was often mandatory, but many local veterans’ groups chose to associate with the patriotic societies on other occasions as well, perhaps because their leaders, in contrast with their rank and file, were usually wealthy and educated men who held reserve commissions and were active in patriotic societies. Because they were purportedly non-political, veterans’ groups eschewed corporate membership in the Pan-German League and most other patriotic societies, in part too because they calculated that their advocacy of national causes like the navy would be more effective if it were independent.99 They cooperated, in any event, with the patriotic societies in many other ways, as sponsors of ‘German Evenings’ and other festivals and as members of local leagues of patriotic associations.100
The presence at patriotic festivals of veterans’ associations in full regalia was one of the main attractions of these events. Another was the gymnastic exhibitions that were regularly featured to symbolize the physical vitality of the nation. The prominence of these displays in the ritual of the festivals was but one of the reasons for the close ties between local gymnastic societies and other patriotic organizations. Like the veterans’ associations, gymnastic societies drew the bulk of their membership from the lower-middle class (except in academic centers, where they also comprised large numbers of students), but they were led by local Honoratioren with ties to the patriotic societies. The receptivity of these organizations to ethnic nationalism owed much to the grossdeutsch tradition in which the German gymnastic movement had grown up in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the Imperial period, ethnic nationalism merged easily with anti-socialism, which became a prominent feature of the program of the gymnastic federation after the defection of working-class gymnasts to their own societies once the anti-socialist laws lapsed in 1890. Like the veterans’ associations too, local gymnastic societies did not confine their cooperation with other patriotic organizations to officially sponsored festivals. In many communities they joined with patriotic societies in leagues of patriotic associations.101
The nether social reaches of the German-national public were inhabited by workers’ associations of several descriptions. All had been founded with the encouragement of employers or the state and in opposition to the socialist unions; the symbols of patriotism, particularly the ideal of domestic unity (read: concord between capital and labor) accordingly served as alternatives to the socialist vision of class struggle.102 Many of these workers belonged to company unions, whose participation in national festivals was due less to the patriotism of their members than to the fact that the men who employed and organized these workers belonged to patriotic societies.103 In 1904, when the chapter of the Eastern Marches Society in the Silesian town of Radoschau held a festival to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its founding, the reporter pointed out, because it was unusual, that a large number of miners were among the participants. Their presence could ‘be attributed to the fact that the higher mining officials also came’, he remarked in all seriousness, ‘for experience has shown that not even the best festive offerings exert as much attractive power on the people of our town as does the good example of the “higher circles”’.104 No one offered a better example than Wilhelm Kollmann, the director of the Bismarckhütte near Kattowitz in Silesia, who led his workers into a local chapter of the Pan-German League just as he led them to the polls.105
Pressures similar in character, if not quite so direct, figured in the ties between patriotic societies and the Evangelical trade unions. The political and social philosophy of these organizations was largely that of the Conservative Party, and their leadership was usually in the hands of local notables who belonged to the patriotic societies. Particularly in parts of the country that were predominantly Catholic, Evangelical unions were prominent fixtures in the German-national public, as participants in festivals and meetings, and as corporate members of chapters of patriotic societies.106
One other category of workers’ association was also linked to the German-national public realm. The so-called national or patriotic workers’ associations resembled the Evangelical and company unions both in their docility and in the fact that their leadership was in the hands of notables, many of whom belonged to the patriotic societies. A large number of these national unions owed their founding to the work of the Imperial League against Social Democracy (Reichsverband gegen die Sozialdemokratie), an organization created in the aftermath of the federal elections of 1903, which saw alarming socialist gains.107 The Imperial League was an interesting addition to the team of ‘national organizations’ in Imperial Germany. It resembled the patriotic societies in many respects. Its leadership was in the hands of the same kinds of people. In fact, its national chairman, Eduard von Liebert, was a prominent figure in both the Colonial Society and the Pan-German League, while its executive secretary was Albert Bovenschen, who before joining Liebert in the Imperial League had been executive secretary in the Eastern Marches Society. Like the patriotic societies, the Imperial League stood guard over one component of the system of national symbols, in this case the ideal of industrial peace or, more negatively, anti-socialism. However, after a desultory attempt, soon abandoned, to emulate the others in setting up an infrastructure of local chapters, the Imperial League turned its attention to two other spheres of activity, in which it concentrated until the war.108 The first of these was a campaign, encouraged and financially supported by both industrial employers and the German government, to publish and distribute anti-socialist literature among workers.109 The other sphere was establishing patriotic unions and coaxing them in to the German-national public, as participants in national festivals and corporate members of patriotic societies.110
Despite the encouragement of the state, employers, and the Imperial League against Social Democracy, workers did not make up a significant component of the German-national public. Veterans’ associations and other organizations of a lower-middle-class complexion provided most of the members, but the tenor in this public realm was set by men of the wealthier and better-educated middle class who led the patriotic societies and controlled many of the other organizations. These men also dominated the organs through which the voice of the German-national public was transmitted directly into the arena of party politics.
The multiplication of voluntary associations of all descriptions after 1890 was but one facet of the mobilization of new groups in Imperial German society; this mobilization produced as well a restructuring of the political parties. These began to shed their character as alliance of local committees of ‘occasional politicians’ – notables who were linked together more in loose personal networks than in formal political organizations and who joined forces only during electoral campaigns, when they worked to secure office for one of their own.111 After 1890 the parties began to develop more ramified and permanent infrastructures geared to the demands of keeping mass constituencies loyal. Local, regional, and national offices, staffed by full-time political professionals, became the marks of party organization. So too did alliances between the parties and popular interest groups. Although nominally independent, these groups served as auxiliaries to the parties, for the issues around which they mobilized their own constituencies corresponded to positions articulated in the programs of the political parties. In establishing an extensive party bureaucracy and in using the free trade unions to mobilize working-class support, the Social Democrats provided the impetus for the transformation of party politics in other sectors of German society. In fear of losing their own constituencies to the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center and Conservative parties quickly responded, the one by working through the Volksverein, the other through the Agrarian League.
While none of the non-socialist parties entirely shed the character of Honoratiorenpartei before the war, the two liberal parties were the slowest in adjusting to the new forms of politics and in abandoning the traditional loose-knit structure of local committees of notables.112 One reason was the liberals’ deep-seated distaste for the kind of bureaucratic regimentation the new mass politics appeared to require. The National Liberals, however, had other compelling reasons to prefer the traditional system of associations of notables: the system continued to work, because it was particularly endemic to the constituency to which this party appealed. Political mobilization of this constituency was principally a question of forging alliances among local associations of notables. And in this process, the National Liberals found their own auxiliaries in the patriotic societies and other organizations that made up the German-national public.113
The patriotic societies professed to be non-partisan organizations, willing to support any of the ‘reliably national parties’.114 Their understanding of this description was restrictive, however, and in practice it excluded the Social Democrats, Progressives, and Catholics. The major exception to this pattern was the Navy League, which did make a concerted attempt to court Catholics, but this attempt was the result of official pressure, and the resistance it encountered among the activists nearly tore the organization apart. The other patriotic societies spared themselves the ordeal and maintained ties only to the parties that Bismarck had blessed with the designation of ‘parties of order’ – National Liberals, Free Conservatives, Conservatives, and Antisemites.
In those parts of the country in which more than one of these parties was strong, patriotic societies drew their leaders and members from all of them and encouraged the cooperation of these parties in a kind of local anti-socialist, anti-Catholic Sammlung. The role of mediator fell chiefly to the Eastern Marches Society, most of whose chapters lay in the east, where they attempted to mediate between local organizations of the National Liberal and Conservative parties.115 Nowhere, however, did the patriotic societies play a more prominent political role than in Dresden. Here the league of patriotic associations simply changed its name during elections to the ‘National Electoral Committee’.116 Its component groups included, in addition to all the major patriotic societies, the local committees of the National Liberal, Conservative, and antisemitic Reform parties. Anti-socialism, reaffirmed annually at gigantic rallies to celebrate the founding of the Empire, was the cement that held this coalition together, and while the block failed to keep Dresden’s three Reichstag seats out of the hands of the Social Democrats, it did retain control of the municipal government.
Because the patriotic societies were concentrated most heavily in central and western Germany, the party to which they were most closely tied was the National Liberal. In fact, the National Liberals, more than any other party, represented the political arm of the German-national public. The reasons for this state of affairs were several. The campaign to defend national symbols was the principal bond with which the party tried to hold together its increasingly diversified and fragmented constituency. Although the rhetoric of the campaign was intended to appeal to all sectors of German society, it consisted of politically charged code-words, which, when deciphered, implied specific positions on the salient issues of German party politics. And these positions corresponded in most instances to the program of the National Liberal Party.117 National security, building a navy, colonial expansion, combating socialism, and protecting Germans abroad all raised touchy issues of constitutional jurisdiction, finance and taxation, the distribution of property, diplomacy, and civil rights. The priority National Liberals assigned to the defense of national symbols translated into specific political demands, which reflected a belief in the sanctity of property and order, in commercial and industrial enterprise as the principal source of the nation’s strength and well-being, and in the obligation of a strong central government actively to encourage the nation’s well-being.
The affinities between the patriotic societies and the National Liberal Party were more than programmatic. The local committees that were the backbone of the party drew their memberships from the same sectors of the populace as did the patriotic societies, and the party’s activities observed the same cultural traditions.118 In many instances the National Liberal committees were made up precisely of the same people who led chapters of the patriotic societies. In the twenty-five communities I selected for survey, the board of local officers of the National Liberal committee included one or more leaders of the patriotic societies in seventeen.119 Extant membership lists for patriotic societies indicate that the overlap was even more extensive. In Stuttgart, three of the four men who sat on the board of officers of the National Liberal Ortsverein in 1907 were members of the Pan-German League. In Hamburg, the directing committee of the National Liberal Reichstagswahlverein von 1884 included forty-seven men, of whom twenty-one belonged to the Pan-German League, Colonial Society, School Association, the Language Association, or the Navy League.
A large number of top party leaders and parliamentarians were members of patriotic societies too, but the cross-affiliations at the local level were a more telling index of the ties between the National Liberal Party and the patriotic societies.120 National Liberal clubs and local associations of Jungliberalen were regular participants at national rallies of all kinds, and they frequently joined the chapters of one or more patriotic societies in sponsoring them.121 The symbiotic relationship between the patriotic societies and the National Liberal Party was particularly evident at times of elections, when the same men, in their capacity as leaders of the National Liberal clubs, first selected candidates and then, in their capacity as leaders of patriotic societies, mobilized support for them.122 In some communities the National Liberal electoral committees were virtually identical with one or more chapters of the patriotic societies. The conspicuous association of the National Liberals with patriotic activities added a further political dimension to these activities, just as it provided the party with its principal channel for mobilizing a large constituency. The National Liberal clubs were thus pivotal agencies in transferring the defense of middle-class values and traditions from the Stammtisch to the field of party politics.
The local committees of the National Liberal Party represented the most immediate political dimension of one of the central cultural phenomena in Imperial Germany. The German-national public realm was rooted in a formidable network of associations. At the center of this network stood the Pan-German League and the other patriotic societies. Linked to them by common members, corporate affiliations, and cooperation in local leagues of patriotic associations were the National Liberal committees, student organizations, upper-middle-class cultural and professional clubs, and a host of other organizations that were larger and had broader social appeal -chapters of the Commercial Employees’ Union, veterans’ associations, gymnastic societies, and a few workers’ organizations. The boundaries of this network of associations were set by class, confession, and region, and they worked to exclude Catholics, peasants, and workers with socialist leanings.
It is difficult to estimate the numerical extent of this public realm, principally because of multiple memberships. Over a hundred organizations, with a total membership in excess of 130,000, were corporately affiliated with the Pan-German League in 1905, although the Commercial Employees’ Union accounted for most of these members.123 The Navy League, far and away the largest of the patriotic societies, had a membership of well over 300,000 in 1913, and the organizations that were corporately affiliated with it numbered just under 800,000.124 On the eve of the war there were more than 32,000 separate veterans’ associations, with close to 3 million members.125
These figures must be interpreted with care. Aside from the problem of multiple memberships, it is difficult to judge what significance to assign to the corporate membership of one association in another, beyond some general sympathy in one for the goals of the other. The most that can be said is that the programs of the patriotic societies found resonance in a broad, interconnected network of associations and that the people potentially available for mobilization in the name of these programs probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands.126
The significance of this conclusion is more apparent at the local level. In communities throughout the land, although particularly in the central and western regions, a large block of people, known variously as the ‘German-national movement’, ‘the national middle class’, or the ‘German movement’ – the phenomenon designated in this study as the German-national public – was organized in a network of associations, which invoked the primacy of national symbols in politics.127 In Magdeburg, according to contemporary estimates, seventeen such associations had a total membership of about 4,100 people; in Würzburg, eighty-eight such associations were active, many of them student groups.128 In Essen these associations could mobilize some 2,000 people, while in Dresden the patriotic societies and their friends counted about 25,000.129 The importance of the phenomenon, however, lay in more than the numbers. The block of associations that made up the German-national public realm included the most respected and influential members of countless German communities – leading public officials, professionals, and businessmen, men who controlled the press, academically trained teachers who shaped coming generations of the country’s elites, and the academic students who were being so shaped.
Several other features of this phenomenon deserve emphasis. In cities and towns throughout Germany these associations constituted a milieu in which large numbers of Germans pursued their social and cultural needs in a manner that emphasized the primacy of national symbols in politics. While the patriotic societies exploited the sociability of the upper-middle class, the Kriegervereine politicized the Stammtisch of the lower-middle class. Organizations near the periphery of this associational network politicized the use of leisure in other ways – in gymnastic societies, in swimming, bicycle, boating, and assorted other kinds of sport clubs, and in youth groups.130
The values and attitudes cultivated in this public realm were, for the most part, those of the dominant culture in Imperial Germany. Many of the associations that populated the German-national public – particularly the Kriegervereine, the Navy League, and the Eastern Marches Society – were subjected to the systematic influence of official agencies, which sought consciously to use these organizations as institutions for the political socialization of their members (and their members’ children).131 It is essential, however, to recognize, as did the men who led the patriotic organizations, that their milieu was a fairly discrete phenomenon, that the German-national public realm had limits.132 This realm was in the last analysis devoted to appropriating the national symbols in defense of Protestant, urban, middle-class traditions and values; it did so in part by denying other sectors of German society, notably Catholics and socialist workers, access to these symbols in defense of their own traditions and values. It bears emphasis that in Imperial Germany several cultural traditions survived, that they were not well integrated, and that the German-national public supported but one of them.
It also bears emphasis that the radical nationalism that emerged out of this milieu was in potential conflict with dominant values officially encouraged. The play of activism in many of the organizations that made up the German-national public derived from the mobilization of anxieties not easily controlled, even with all the channels available to the government, should the government itself, for one reason or another, antagonize the patriotic sentiment in this realm.
Many political events thus intruded with a special force into the German-national public, a realm that was highly sensitive to the symbolic implications of political issues. Whether they concerned foreign or domestic themes, events or issues that appeared in any way to threaten the national symbols had far-flung cultural and psychological ramifications; they threatened ultimately a system of values, a way of life, and the self-esteem of the people who participated in this realm. The forces at work in the German-national public were emotionally volatile; they were also politically potent, for the organizational network that made up this realm offered the means for mobilizing a broad coalition in defense of threatened symbols.
Against this backdrop, the narrative history of the Pan-German League can now resume. By the turn of the century the League had already become the leading proponent of the view that defending the national symbols could demand challenging the government’s authority to tend these symbols. Once political events and issues lent currency to the League’s view, the organization emerged in the vanguard of a successful campaign to mobilize the German-national public in opposition to the government. But first, the Pan-German League nearly collapsed.