Early in 1909, shortly before his fall from power, Bernhard von Bülow discussed the Pan-German League at some length during a meeting of the Prussian Cabinet. The League was, he complained, ‘a cross for our foreign policy to bear’. It had accomplished ‘nothing practical’, but had instead ‘managed to provoke all the other nations at the same time’. After speaking of his attempts to work through the men thought to be moderates in the organization – chief among them Liebert – Bülow urged the assembled ministers ‘to do everything in their power to ensure that the Pan-German League not behave too irrationally in the future’.1
Bülow’s lament was understandable in light of the attacks which he had suffered at the hands of the League and which had reached a new crescendo in the aftermath of the Daily Telegraph affair. Yet his futile attempts to bring moderation to the organization betrayed once again his misunderstanding of the dynamics that underlay the League’s opposition to official policies. Bülow’s ministers were not able to bring pressure on the League, nor were their successors. Indeed, as the League recovered from its financial and ideological crises, it became the spearhead of a national opposition far larger, more vocal, and more dangerous than anything Bülow had had to face. Although the challenge this opposition posed to the government’s authority stopped short of open revolt, it was none the less profoundly disturbing to the men who governed the country; and it left its imprint on the policies they pursued in the years immediately prior to the war.
For most of the prewar period the Pan-German League was the principal proponent of a national opposition to the German government. For a brief period, however, this distinction passed to another patriotic society. Of all the patriotic societies, the German Navy League was at first glance the least likely to be at odds with the government, given the official support it enjoyed. Initially, this support had seemed to reward the expectations of the officials who were responsible for encouraging it. The Navy League had evolved into a huge, governmentalist organization par excellence, gearing its demands and activities to the suggestions passed down to it from the Imperial Naval Office.
Both the Navy League’s enormous membership and its accessibility to official influence were critical to Tirpitz’s plans, in which a plebiscitary element figured large from the start.2 The building of warships was to be founded on a broad and stable majority in the Reichstag – a parliamentary constellation, Tirpitz was convinced, which depended for its durability on the participation of the Catholic Center Party. The role of the Navy League was to bring together a massive popular coalition, with Catholics in a central role, in order to reinforce the parliamentary majority and, if necessary, to exert pressure on deputies who wavered in their support of the naval estimates. At the same time, however, considerations of foreign as well as domestic policy demanded that the agitation of this popular coalition remain coordinated with Tirpitz’s guidelines. These dictated the enlargement of the fleet by increments gradual enough both to preserve a parliamentary coalition in their support and to dampen British alarm over a growing German navy.
At first Tirpitz’s calculations appeared vindicated by the fact, at least with respect to domestic politics. Not only did the Reichstag handily pass the two bills he submitted in 1898 and 1900, but the Navy League lived up to the role he had planned for it. Its membership of a quarter million in 1902 was imposing by any standard. While many of these members were doubtless drawn from other patriotic societies, the Navy League succeeded in invading social and confessional regions normally off limits to the others; not only did it attract a larger contingent of lower-middle-class members – subaltern officials, clerks, artisans, and other small businessmen – but it also drew in a large number of Catholics, particularly in Bavaria and the Rhineland.3
Paradoxically, the very success of the Navy League’s recruitment posed problems for the Imperial Naval Office. The League’s huge membership made the organization financially secure and, unlike the Colonial Society, unbeholden to official agencies for its income. The bonds that tied the Navy League to the government soon proved to be less durable than those that operated on the Colonial Society and involved money.4 Because the Navy League was involved in agitation whose political undertones were difficult to ignore, the government officials who had initially fostered the expansion of the organization were reluctant to assume permanent roles of leadership, preferring to hand these over to private citizens. To be sure, Landräte and other officials continued to chair local chapters in many parts of the country, particularly in the rural north and east, where the ‘naval movement’, largely an urban phenomenon, remained weak. In the western and central regions of the country, though, the officials stepped aside or confined themselves to ornamental roles. Into this gap moved a group of independent activists, who had been prominent neither in the founding of the Navy League nor, as a rule, in other patriotic societies. To the Navy League they now devoted their energies and loyalties, as they took on the burdens of administration and agitation. The principal loci of their power were the League’s provincial and state federations, which, after reforms adopted in 1902 and 1903, exerted a decisive influence on the policies and composition of the national leadership.5 In part because they had not been present at the birth of the Navy League, the new activists who began to determine the tenor of agitation had little sympathy for the Naval Office’s ideas about their organization’s proper role. Unable to appreciate the tactical nuances of Tirpitz’s plan, they proposed to use the Navy League to speed up construction of the fleet, disregarding both the sentiments of the British and the hesitations of the Catholic Center, a party which they regarded as an obstacle rather than as a necessary ally in building warships.
The figure who emerged as their leader exemplified both the temperamental and ideological divergences between these new activists and the men in Tirpitz’s office. The career of August Keim was characterized throughout by spirited resistance to attempts to restrain his enormous energies. He was born in 1845, the son of a middle-class officer in the Hessian army.6 He followed his father into a military career, fighting against the Prussians in 1866 before his unit was amalgamated into the Prussian army. His career advanced thereafter rather conventionally, limited perhaps by his social background and non-Prussian origins. After serving in the 1880s with the General Staff, however, he began, unbeknownst to his superiors, to dabble in journalism, publicly criticizing the state of the army’s field artillery. His reputation as a publicist convinced Caprivi to take him on as public-information officer during the struggle with the Reichstag over military appropriations in 1892–3.7 In this capacity Keim orchestrated an effective propaganda campaign during elections to the Reichstag in 1893. Thereafter he remained in Berlin, where he became involved in political intrigues surrounding the War Minister, Walter Bronsart von Schellendorf, and where he continued to write articles critical of the army’s preparedness for war. The fall of Bronsart in 1896 left Keim vulnerable to the many enemies he had made, and they succeeded first in farming him out to Aachen as a regimental commander and then in forcing his retirement in 1898 with the rank of major general.
Shortly after the turn of the century Keim became active in the Navy League, rising by 1903 to a position in the national leadership. Here patterns that had marked his earlier career came again to the fore. Keim not only found in the Navy League an opportunity to put his propagandistic skills to work again, but he soon courted trouble with his superiors. His superiors this time, in fact if not in name, were in the Imperial Naval Office, and their guidelines for naval building and propaganda became a growing source of frustration to Keim and many other activists.
The complicated story of the conflict between the Navy League and the Naval Office has already been recounted at length.8 Here it is appropriate only to emphasize several aspects of the story. At issue initially were specific provisions of Tirpitz’s plan, which did not, Keim and his allies argued, provide adequately for the country’s naval defense nor approach the limits of what was politically possible. Soon, though, the issue broadened. Keim began to draw into question not only the wisdom of the plan’s specific features, but the authority of the Naval Office to prescribe either the parameters of the Navy League’s propaganda or the guidelines of naval construction. Under Keim the Navy League began, in other words, to challenge the government over custodianship of naval policy. Nor was it possible to pretend that anything less was at stake once the emperor himself castigated Keim, in May 1905, for having ‘arrogated the right’ to determine the formation of the fleet – a presumption the Kaiser found ‘impertinent [ungehörig] and a direct invasion of the monarch’s power of command’.9 By 1905, however, Keim’s supporters were entrenched enough in the Navy League that he survived this censure. His position had proved popular. The organization’s membership continued to grow, as Keim’s views provided a sense of momentum and purpose to the activists’ enthusiasm.
For the German government the challenge posed by the Navy League was more disturbing than any of the attacks from the Pan-German League. The Navy League was much larger, and the orchestration of popular support for naval policy remained a critical part of Tirpitz’s plans. Yet for several reasons, officials found it difficult to bridle the organization. In the first place, the scenario envisaged by Tirpitz required preserving the fiction that the expression of popular support for the navy was independent of the government. Tirpitz could expect that any public attempt to muzzle Keim would destroy this fiction. Another obstacle was the fact that both Bülow and the emperor tended to share Keim’s belief that the pace of naval construction was too slow, and these two men sent out just enough signals to enable Keim and his friends to argue that their agitation had the blessing of official authority.10 In the face of this divergence of opinion, Tirpitz struggled to hold Keim and the other so-called radicals in check through the medium of the more moderate state and provincial federations, particularly the Bavarian, in which the presence of large numbers of Catholics made the League’s leaders sympathetic to Tirpitz’s ideas about the gradual construction of the fleet with the support of a broad political alliance.
After 1905 the fronts solidified. As Keim and his supporters established themselves more firmly in the national leadership, they became more outspoken in their challenge to the government’s competence and authority to preside over the naval build-up. Within the organization itself, antagonism between the radicals and moderates grew to the point where it threatened to split the Navy League, as the radicals’ position turned into a direct attack on the Catholic Center Party. Meanwhile, neither the emperor nor the chancellor appreciated the implications of the dispute, and their disagreements with Tirpitz over the prudence of the radicals’ demands for more ships continued to exclude the possibility of determined intervention to bring peace to the organization.
The dispute in the Navy League reverberated throughout the German-national public. The issue of the navy was the main theme at ‘German evenings’ and in meetings of other patriotic societies. Predictably, most chapters of the Colonial Society took the side of Tirpitz, while the Pan-German League aligned with the radicals.11 From the moment the mounting antagonism in the Navy League became public, the Pan-Germans followed it with great interest, for they well realized that the implications of the crisis bore directly on themselves. The similarities between the Pan-German League’s position and that of the radicals in the Navy League extended well beyond specific demands for ships.12 The Pan-Germans and the naval radicals shared a common mentality and approach to politics, as well as a common rhetoric. They were both more comfortable in driving political antagonisms to their conclusion than in trying to compromise them. Their view of world politics was founded on the inevitability of conflict with Great Britain, their view of domestic politics on the inescapability of a reckoning with political Catholicism.13 Both groups were convinced too that reinforcing the structure of domestic authority required the rapid building of the navy, and they were prepared to superimpose their own independent authority over that of the government to ensure that the navy fulfill its role.14
Yet the growth of the radicals’ strength in the Navy League was not an unmixed blessing to the Pan-German League. The two organizations underwent their crises simultaneously; and as the Pan-Germans moved closer to a position of systematic opposition to the government, they found this position already occupied, at least with respect to the most current national issue, by an organization much larger, better financed, and more in the public eye than their own. The dearth of membership lists makes it impossible to be certain, but the likelihood seems great that some of the Pan-German League’s decline in membership at this time was due to the exodus of people who saw in the Navy League a more credible and effective vehicle for expressing criticism of the government’s policies.
Pan-Germans played, in any event, only a minor role in the radicalization of the Navy League, the impetus for which came for the most part from men whose entry into the German-national public had been through the Navy League itself. The growing strength of the radicals behind Keim was the product of forces within the Navy League itself and not the influence of any ‘organized ginger-group’ of Pan-Germans.15 A number of Keim’s chief supporters were, to be sure, also active in the Pan-German League; the most important of them were Liebert, Ernst zu Reventlow, and Friedrich Hopf, the man who led the chapters of both organizations in Dresden.16 On the whole, though, the Pan-Germans’ influence did not exceed the confines of moral support and increased cooperation with chapters of the Navy League in areas where the strength of the naval radicals was concentrated.17
Cooperation between the Pan-German League and the Navy League – in fact, coordinated action among all the patriotic societies – culminated early in 1907, in a remarkable episode during which the German government appeared fully to have adopted the position of the Pan-Germans and the naval radicals.18 Late in 1906 Bülow dissolved the Reichstag, ostensibly because a majority of that body, led by the Catholic Center Party, had refused to approve supplementary funds for a German expeditionary force to Southwest Africa, where natives were in rebellion. Bülow apparently concluded that Keim’s assessment of German politics was more accurate than Tirpitz’s, that a more stable and reliable Reichstag majority was available with the exclusion of the Center, and that national issues – the navy, the empire, and anti-socialism – could be exploited to produce such a majority. This venture would entail ostracizing the Center, along with the socialists, and rallying the other parties, from the Conservatives to the Progressives, around the symbols of patriotism.19
The campaign that began early in 1907 was one of the most bitter in the history of German parliamentarianism. Its novelty lay not in the wholesale intervention of public officials on behalf of parties blessed with the imprimatur of ‘national reliability’, but in the government’s attempt systematically to mobilize the German-national public.20 The government’s electoral manifesto came in the form of a public letter from Bülow to Liebert, in his capacity as head of the Imperial League against Social Democracy.21 In this document Bülow showed that he knew well what the national symbols meant to this audience; he conjured up the spectre of ‘socialist subversion of the concepts of authority [Obrigkeit], property, religion and Fatherland’, and then he called out the forces to do ‘battle for the honor and well-being of the nation against Social Democrats, Poles, Guelphs, and the Catholic Center’.
Bülow established headquarters for the campaign in his own chancellery, and he and the chancellery’s chief, Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell, personally supervised the mobilization of opinion. To finance the campaign they persuaded leading businessmen to contribute to a special fund.22 The expenditure of a large share of this money they then entrusted directly to the patriotic societies – the Colonial Society, the Imperial League against Social Democracy, and especially the Navy League.23 Keim became the principal advisor to Bülow on campaign strategy, drawing on his experience from the election of 1893. The two men consulted on the themes to be emphasized in pamphlets, the people who were to be sent out as lecturers, and the electoral districts in which agitation was to be concentrated.24 Altogether the Navy League produced close to 20 million brochures and leaflets, while the Imperial League sent out more than 10 million of its own.25
Bülow hoped that the socialists would be the principal object of attack and that the patriotic agitation would treat the Center Party more gently, distinguishing between Catholicism and its political organ. The Colonial Society had enough Catholics among its members that the tenor of its propaganda remained moderate, in keeping with Bülow’s preferences. So naturally did the agitation of the Bavarian chapters of the Navy League.26 The dominant tone of the campaign, however, was much more strident. Keim set it. His antipathy for the Center Party knew no bounds, and he made no effort to conceal it. Although he was merely pursuing the logic of Bülow’s own strategy, Keim’s explicit attacks on the patriotism of the Center became a source of embarrassment, particularly after it came to light that he had been hounding Catholics out of the Navy League and even proposing electoral alliances with Social Democrats to defeat candidates of the Center Party in run-offs.27
The militance that Keim injected into the campaign was well suited to the Pan-Germans, whose fortunes underwent a brief resurgence during the elections. Although they were still smarting from the criticism that both the emperor and Bülow had directed at them late in 1906, they resolved, as Hasse telegrammed to the chancellor (with a direct allusion to Bülow’s recent attack), that ‘no resentment should or will prevent us Pan-Germans from decisively supporting, with a warm heart and a clear head, the national policy of the federal government, which you have proclaimed against the Center and Social Democrats’.28 Chapters of the Pan-German League thereupon joined with chapters of the other patriotic societies, veterans’ associations, and patriotic workers’ groups in a frantic campaign to mobilize sentiment in the German-national public behind the ‘national parties’.29
These efforts revealed the extent to which reliance on the symbols and rhetoric of patriotism could, in the proper circumstances, obscure factional disputes among the political parties. The most important of these circumstances was the patent alliance between the government and the radical nationalists. Although the full extent of the government’s connivance with Keim was not public knowledge during the campaign, it was clear that the demands of the radicals in the Navy League enjoyed the support of official authority.
Both Bülow and the radical forces whose aid he had enlisted had reason to be pleased with the results of the alliance. Although their popular vote rose, the Social Democrats found the size of their Reichstag deputation cut almost in half, while the parties that now made up the so-called Bülow block -Conservatives, Free Conservatives, Antisemites, National Liberals, and Progressives – emerged with a sizable majority. This they owed in no small way to the patriotic societies, which had not only produced an increase in the non-socialist vote, but had smoothed the way for electoral coalitions among the non-socialist parties.
Well might the Pan-Germans have congratulated themselves in the aftermath, for the elections appeared to vindicate their policy of opposition. The dissolution and the elections had brought, in Samassa’s view, ‘the justification for the efforts and program of the Pan-German League’: persistent criticism of official policy had ‘contributed a good part to the awakening of political insight which the German people displayed in the elections’.30 Liebert, who had been elected with Keim’s help, as a Free Conservative, was even more optimistic: ‘all Pan-German demands in questions of the army, navy, colonies, and world-policy made up, so to speak, the electoral slogans. In view of the government’s position, the League can now stand cheerfully behind the chancellor, supporting him and pushing him forward.’31
The optimism was premature. Bülow did, to be sure, appease the patriotic sentiment to which he owed his majority by pushing through the Reichstag bills which raised the pace of naval construction to four capital ships a year and banned the use of foreign languages in public meetings; in the Prussian diet he also sponsored a bill that provided for the expropriation of Polish property in the eastern provinces. Other developments soon suggested, however, that the chancellor was retreating from the position he had assumed during the elections and that he was willing to abandon the radical nationalists rather than break completely with the Center Party.
The elections of 1907 only exacerbated the tension within the German Navy League. Keim’s assault on the Center pushed the more moderate forces, particularly those in the Bavarian federation, to the point of resigning. Tirpitz, who, in spite of the recent elections, had not abandoned his vision of a coalition that included the Center, now feared, with good reason, for the very survival of the Navy League. His strategy was to encourage the moderates to remain in the organization while lobbying quietly for the resignation of Keim. The strategy remained frustrated, however, as long as Bülow and the emperor continued to indicate their confidence in Keim, who seemed to have been the engineer of the new parliamentary coalition.32
On the surface, the dispute in the Navy League revolved now about the issue of the Organization’s political character. The moderates argued that Keim’s behavior during the elections had pulled the League into the realm of party politics – a charge that Keim’s supporters denied in contending that national issues like the navy stood ipso facto above this realm. The belabored argument over the scope of the realm of politics was the mask for the real issue, which remained, now exacerbated, the question of custodianship over one of the principal national symbols. The position of Keim and his supporters was that the Navy League had entitlement to determine independently the guidelines of naval building and, if necessary, to compel the government to accept them. The moderates continued to advocate Tirpitz’s view that ultimate custodial authority resided in the Naval Office, whose guidelines were to define the limits of the Navy League’s agitation.
The Pan-German League was centrally involved, in spirit if not in fact, in the growing crisis. In the eyes of Tirpitz and his supporters, the League became itself the symbol of the evil forces that were animating the naval radicals.33 The people who charged that the Pan-Germans were behind Keim would have been hard pressed to substantiate their claims with specific names, but in a broader sense they were right. In contesting the government’s authority in national issues, the radicals in the Navy League had brought to a head an issue that had long been basic to the Pan-Germans’ own program.
Because the chancellor shared Keim’s assessment of Tirpitz’s building program and because Keim’s approach to politics had borne such fruit during the elections, Bülow’s appreciation of the issues at stake remained clouded. But by the end of 1907 even he was persuaded that a large-scale secession and possibly the collapse of the Navy League were too high a price to pay for keeping Keim. Late in the year the protector of the Bavarian federation, Prince Rupprecht, resigned in protest over Keim’s leadership. Bülow and the emperor now at last tried to force Keim to quit. To their consternation, Keim, who still enjoyed the confidence of most of the Navy League, refused.34 Bülow and the emperor were then compelled to use a drastic weapon. In January 1908 they announced that Prince Heinrich, the national protector of the Navy League, would resign if Keim were to stay.35 Even Keim’s most avid supporters could harbor no illusions about the impact of such a spectacular display of official disfavor: every other protector, as well as most of the public officials active in the organization, would have little choice but to resign, to be joined no doubt by a major portion of the membership.
Although it did not yet fully resolve the crisis in the Navy League, Keim’s departure under pressure meant that the organization had ceded custodial authority over the navy back to the government. The Navy League’s activity would not again clash significantly with the program of the Naval Office. When the new leader of the organization, Admiral Hans von Koester, announced his determination to preserve its independence of official control, he did so as a rhetorical flourish for the benefit of Keim’s former supporters; but he was unwilling to push independence to the point of another crisis, and in practice he was careful to remain in consultation with the Naval Office.36
The real question was not the docility of the Navy League after Keim’s resignation, but rather how many people would remain in it. If the removal of Keim had made the League more attractive to the moderates, it also raised the possibility of the mass withdrawal of Keim’s supporters, who were calculated to number as many as 150,000.37 In the event, some 15,000 of them did leave, principally in the radical centers of Hessen and Saxony, but Koester’s loud defense of the League’s independence kept the secession within manageable bounds.38
Koester’s success signalled the failure of a project on which Keim had embarked immediately after his resignation. He had hoped to mobilize his followers in an independent Flottenbund, which would be a massive new center of opposition to official navy policy.39 When most of his supporters chose not to leave the Navy League, Keim was left with another obvious option. Within weeks of leaving the Navy League he joined the Pan-German League, where, as he explained to Class, he ‘now knew he belonged’.40 The failure of his Flottenbund raised the possibility that many of his former followers might also find their way into the Pan-German League. In fact, several of Keim’s friends took seats on the Pan-German League’s board of national directors. Hermann Gerhard, who had been one of Keim’s closest associates in the Navy League, where he coordinated what one official in the Naval Office described as the ‘vilest Keim-agitation’, became executive secretary of the Pan-German League in October 1908.41 Gerhard and the others attempted to exploit their contacts in the Navy League on behalf of the Pan-German League, but their hopes for a large-scale migration were disappointed. It is impossible to determine just how many people left the Navy League for the Pan-German League, for the modest increase in the latter organization’s membership at the end of 1909 was due at least in part to the reverberations of the Daily Telegraph affair.42 Only a few local chapters of the Navy League, such as those in Mülheim and Rudolstadt, came over to the Pan-German League en bloc, and the total number of defectors probably did not exceed a thousand.43
Despite this disappointment, the outcome of the Navy League’s crisis had far-reaching repercussions within the German-national public realm. To the Pan-German League it brought a propagandist of great energy, experience, and skill. The crisis left, in addition, a legacy of bitterness among Keim’s supporters, many of whom – even those who had not chosen to join the Pan-German League – could be mobilized in the future into a more broadly based national opposition to official policies. Finally, the fate of the radicals around Keim in the Navy League was peripherally related to a development that set the stage for the mobilization of such a national opposition. This development was the collapse of the parliamentary coalition which the government’s exploitation of patriotism had produced in 1907.
Translating the patriotic enthusiasm of the elections into legislation carried an expensive price tag. In particular, raising the pace of naval construction pushed the federal treasury, already strained by the costs of the Tirpitz plan, beyond its limits and made necessary the tapping of new sources of revenue. The government hoped once again, by enlisting the services of the patriotic societies, to drape its program of financial reform in the mantle of patriotic necessity.44 Officials foresaw, however, neither the dispiritedness that had set into the German-national public in the aftermath of the Navy League’s crisis, nor the limitations of patriotic slogans in overcoming sectional interests. Patriotic societies did devote meetings to the theme of financial reform, and they supported the government’s proposal; but their enthusiasm did not begin to match the determination with which the Conservative Party resisted the government’s attempt to enact an inheritance tax, which the party calculated would weigh disproportionally on its own constituency.45
The recriminations that followed the demise of the inheritance tax in the Reichstag revealed the inherent limitations of relying on patriotic slogans alone to generate a broad anti-socialist Sammlung.46 The effort was doomed by the want of a consensus among the agrarian, commercial, and industrial sectors over the distribution of the financial burdens of the specific policies that patriotic slogans seemed to demand. Failing this consensus, and given the fact that the Center Party had exploited Bulow’s parliamentary fiasco to move out of the opposition into which it had been ostracized, the government would find it difficult in the future to orchestrate another patriotic campaign like that of 1907.47 The circumstances of the Bülow block’s collapse thus increased the chances not only that the mobilization of patriotic sentiment might take place independently of the government, but that this mobilization would accommodate the demands of the Conservative agrarians. And within a short time developments elsewhere, at the level of foreign policy and within the Pan-German League, combined to catalyze just such a mobilization.
The collapse of the Bülow block and the dismissal of the chancellor in the summer of 1909 occurred as the Pan-German League was beginning to emerge from the crisis which its assault on the government’s authority had brought on. The Pan-Germans hoped that the new chancellor would prove more receptive to their advice and services than his predecessor had been. They had some cause to believe that despite all the antagonism, the German government still viewed their activities in a favorable light. Even during the hottest stages of the conflict in 1908, contacts between the League and high officials in the chancellery, the Foreign Office, and other agencies had not lapsed entirely.48 In spite of Bülow’s unpleasant experiences with both the Pan-Germans and the Navy League, his assumption was still widely shared that mobilizing public opinion in support of patriotic causes was a sound strategy, one worth the price of public criticism from the Pan-Germans, whose energy made them useful and who could, in any event, be isolated as whipping boys. As one official in the Foreign Office’s press bureau explained it, the Pan-Germans were like a ‘pike in a fish pond, and if a Pan-German movement did not exist, we would have to invent one’.49
The Pan-German League’s honeymoon with Bethmann Hollweg was none the less brief. In his salutations to the new chancellor, Class expressed the hope that the League could henceforth ‘work in quiet collusion with the government’ and serve as ‘independent auxiliaries’, whose role would be ‘to prepare the way for the difficult work the government faces, so far as this can be done from below’.50 Bethmann’s response was cautious but encouraging, for he agreed to meet with Class and Klingemann, who was then deputy chairman. The chancellor assured Class that he followed the League’s activities with ‘active interest’ and that he would be glad if the ‘mobilization of the forces in the League were to prepare the way for those who are responsible for governing the state’.51
A careful reading of the chancellor’s words would have disclosed that the Pan-Germans had misplaced their hopes and that Bethmann was no more inclined than Bülow to cooperate with the Pan-Germans on their own terms and to pursue the policies they prescribed. In the event, the meeting between Bethmann and the Pan-German leaders never took place. Within months a series of minor incidents, including a public condemnation by the German ambassador to the United States of the ‘Pan-Germans’ bold flights of fantasy’, culminated in an open break.52 Early in 1910 a group of leading Pan-Germans announced to Bethmann that it had ‘lost all confidence in the Foreign Office’.53 Bethmann’s response, which was published in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, was that of annoyed parent, but it stung no less than Bülow’s derision. ‘It is irresponsible’, he chided, ‘… for an organization like the Pan-German League, which professes in its statutes to be patriotic, to hurl such unworthy and groundless charges at the authorities.’54 When this episode was followed by the government’s announcement of a draft constitution for Alsace-Lorraine (which the League branded a capitulation to the French element), the Pan-Germans closed the book on the new chancellor and prepared to resume their opposition.55
The sequence of events that now transpired can be explained only as testimony to the resilience of the Pan-Germans’ hopes that the government would need to make use of their services, as well as to the persistence in official circles of misconceptions about the dynamism of radical nationalism. For all their temperamental differences, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter shared with Bernhard von Bülow a belief in the salutary domestic impact of foreign-policy splashes and in what he called ‘letting all the dogs bark’, the tactic of manipulating public opinion to create the impression that his foreign policies were but moderate responses to pressure from a militant populace.56 Within weeks of his becoming Foreign Minister in the summer of 1910, Kiderlen established contacts with Class and a number of other leading Pan-Germans.57 He also began to pass money from the Foreign Office directly to the League’s Wehrschatz; and in view of the plans Kiderlen was then devising to use the League, these funds bore all the marks of bribery.58
In a series of discussions with Class early in 1911, the Foreign Minister proposed a strategy that could only gratify the League. Kiderlen suggested a ‘division of labor between the Foreign Office and the patriotic societies’; these groups were to ‘present demands in the press and in their organizations’, so that Kiderlen could then say to other governments: ‘I am certainly conciliatory, but I have to take public opinion into account.’ Accordingly, he told Class, the Pan-Germans should ‘Scold and mock me all you want! It is necessary, and I have a thick skin!’59 That Kiderlen was not being altogether candid, that he was prepared to abandon this arrangement when it no longer suited his purposes, was lost on Class, whose gullibility matched his desire to be called upon to play a constructive role with the government.60
The occasion for activating this ‘alliance’ was to be the resolution of the Moroccan issue.61 Here the League and the Foreign Office shared an interest, albeit for different reasons. The League had never dropped its demand that the western half of Morocco be seized as a settlement colony, and the organization’s interest in Morocco grew after 1908. Against a backdrop of diplomatic tension stimulated by continuing disputes over the Algeciras treaty, the League began to champion the claims of the Mannesmann brothers (who were friends of several members of the League’s executive committee) to mineral rights in the southern and western parts of the country.62 Kiderlen, on the other hand, evidently wanted to use an apparent French violation of the treaty to resolve the whole issue in a fashion that would reflect well on the government during impending elections for a new Reichstag.
During his conversations with Class the Foreign Minister dwelt at length on the subject of Morocco. Whatever Kiderlen might have said about his plans, he left Class with the impression that he was about to undertake a dramatic initiative, the purpose of which was to be the seizure of at least a portion of Moroccan territory as a German colony.63 Class, who was beginning to feel that the moment had arrived for his ‘personal intervention in history’, agreed to place the newspapers over which he had some influence into the service of Kiderlen’s plans and to prepare a pamphlet justifying the German claims to Morocco.64
The fruits of this agreement appeared immediately in the curious new accents in the Pan-German press – a group of publications that included not only the Alldeutsche Blätter, Die Post, and Reismann-Grone’s Rheinisch Westfälische Zeitung, but Lange’s Deutsche Zeitung and Liman’s Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten.65 These papers, which had long excoriated German diplomats, now began to publish unusually optimistic assessments of the state of German foreign policy, adding that the moment was ripe for a great deed in Morocco.66 By June 1911 editorials in these papers were expressing impatience with the Foreign Office, and it is not clear whether this new attitude was part of Kiderlen’s strategy or if it reflected genuine apprehensions among the Pan-Germans.67 In any event, the Pan-Germans did not have long to wait. On 1 July 1911 the German gunboat Panther arrived at the Moroccan port of Agadir. In the Pan-German League the mood was jubilant, and the machinery set in motion to mobilize the chapters in support of the government’s action.68
The Panthersprung, which was to have marked the culmination of cooperation between the League and the German government, brought instead a parting of ways that had more far-reaching political consequences than any previous episode. The Foreign Office discovered anew that it had conjured up forces beyond its control, that, as Kiderlen complained, public opinion had become, with the Pan-Germans’ encouragement, so ‘increasingly excited’ that he ‘could no longer restrain it.’69 At the very moment the gunboat arrived in Agadir, Class was in the Foreign Office, where Arthur Zimmermann, the undersecretary, hinted that the German government would not insist on retaining Moroccan territory, but would be content with compensations, perhaps in the Congo.70 Shortly thereafter, the Foreign Office urged leaders of the League to curb their agitation, lest they jeopardize a peaceful compromise settlement with the French.71
A compromise was the last thing the Pan-Germans wanted. They had geared their propaganda to the demand (which they believed the Foreign Office would make) that Germany receive at least the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the adjacent hinterland. This demand they refused to drop, and they were happy to run the risk of war with France.72 Kiderlen was not; so the Pan-Germans instead declared war on him. As the Moroccan crisis escalated alarmingly in the summer with the intervention of the British on the French side, and as the German Foreign Office made clear its desire for compromise, the mobilization of opinion within the Pan-German League turned with increasing ferocity against both Britain and the German government.73
Morocco provided the Pan-German League with the galvanizing issue for which it had been groping ever since the end of the Boer War. Class later recalled that the summer of 1911 was a ‘splendid, active time of struggle’, in which the mood the Pan-Germans found everywhere was ‘magnificent’; another leader reported that the ‘joy in struggle of old was there’.74 Chapters everywhere, including many that had long been dormant, swung into action, hosting meetings as large as in the days of the Boer protests. The national office dispatched lecturers to orchestrate the campaign.75 The themes for the meetings were drawn largely from Class’s pamphlet, which appeared in the middle of July and soon sold more than 50,000 copies.76 The Foreign Office, which had been privy to its contents, had urged Class not to publish it, but succeeded only in persuading him to eliminate some of the more extravagant passages, notably the one in which he called for German annexation of most of eastern France in the event of war.77 The rest of the pamphlet was sufficiently blunt in demanding the Atlantic coast of Morocco that it became the basis of the indictment against the government’s policy of seeking compensations in apparent response to the British intervention.
This indictment, rehearsed relentlessly in the chapter meetings, was couched in terms that suggested the emotions that the Moroccan crisis had brought into play. The British intervention the League’s spokesmen characterized as a ‘presumption’, to which the appropriate response in Germany was hatred.78 The German government’s conciliatory policy was thus shameful, an insult to German pride and intelligence.79 The treaty which eventually specified the extent of the compensations the Pan-Germans called ‘an intolerable humiliation of our Fatherland’, a ‘shameful debasement of the international political prestige [Geltung] of the German Empire’, a ‘Jena without war’, and a reminder of the Heligoland treaty of 1890.80
The rhetoric was not new, nor was the challenge to the government which it carried; but the League’s message resonated now in a way it had not in 1905,1908, or 1910. The reasons lay not only in the war scare that followed British intervention in the crisis, but in the continuing disarray of the political right in Germany, a condition which promised to benefit the Social Democrats in up-coming elections to the Reichstag. The government’s policy was thus a source of great frustration for the many people who hoped that the Moroccan venture would provide the cement for a new anti-socialist electoral coalition.
This frustration was evident throughout the German-national public, and the Pan-German League was both its beneficiary and the principal vehicle of its expression. The reason why the League’s protest rallies were so large was that the other patriotic societies participated in them, in many localities as co-sponsors.81 Even the Navy League and Colonial Society abandoned their reserve. The Navy League mobilized its chapters in hopes that the excitement would create sufficient pressure to pass additional naval appropriations. Its agitation was aggressive in tone and resurrected the proposition, dormant since Keim’s departure, that ‘if the government does riot for tactical reasons consider it appropriate to propose a new naval bill, the nation must demand one’.82 In the Colonial Society observers found ‘more unrest [Erregung] than ever before’.83 Chapters of the society joined those of the Pan-German League in condemning the idea of compensations, and even the Colonial Society’s national leadership came out for a time in favor of annexing Moroccan territory, until the influence of the Foreign Office prevailed; the leadership thereupon backed down and, to the disgust of many chapters, mildly announced only its regret over the final settlement.84
The opposition took on new dimensions in November 1911, in an atmosphere of general hostility within the right-wing and National Liberal parties to the idea of compensations. The Colonial Secretary, Friedrich von Lindequist, resigned in protest over the settlement. Then, when Kiderlen and Bethmann attempted to defend the settlement and their own policies in the Reichstag, they met with a stormy reception, highlighted by a bitter speech from the Conservative leader, Ernst von Heydebrand und der Lasa, which in its belligerence and hostility to England rivalled what the Pan-German League was generating at its rallies.85
Bethmann and Kiderlen could do little to tame their critics. The traditional tactic of discrediting opposition to the government’s foreign policies by ridiculing the Pan-Germans no longer worked. Bethmann’s characterization of the Pan-Germans’ demand for Moroccan annexations as utopian and ‘fantastic playing around’ did nothing to quiet the general criticism.86 Nor did Kiderlen’s attempt to make a laughing-stock out of Class by revealing to the Reichstag’s budget commission the contents of the suppressed passages of Class’s pamphlet on Morocco.87 These public statements only provoked the League still further into accusations that the men who guided German policy – including the emperor – were unfit and were leading the country toward the abyss.88
The credibility of this charge was only enhanced in the light of what took place in January 1912. The socialists’ success in the Reichstag elections was not unanticipated, but its magnitude was alarming in the extreme.89 The continued disagreements among the parties of the right and center over financial reform, as well as the general impression that the Moroccan crisis had resulted in German humiliation, made unthinkable the resurrection of an electoral coalition held together by patriotic slogans and directed against the socialists. As a result, the parties of the right sustained losses nearly as dramatic as the Social Democratic gains.
In the Pan-German League and the wider German-national public – a prime constituency for these parties – the mood was lugubrious. ‘A demonstration of the most calamitous significance’ was the League’s verdict on the elections.90 A few months later Class delivered a more extended analysis of what he referred to as the ‘Jewish elections’. The results symptomized the ‘end of confidence’ in the German government, the ‘loss of authority by the highest ranks of the bureaucracy,’ and the spread of the ‘ferment of decomposition’. Embittered and dispirited by still another humiliation visited upon them by the government’s foreign policy, the ‘reliable national circles’ of education and property had, according to Class, demonstrated their unhappiness by withdrawing from public life, enabling the socialists and their allies to claim the field.91
Whatever the accuracy of Class’s analysis, the elections of 1912 and the lingering effects of the Moroccan crisis created a situation in which the mobilization of the ‘reliable national circles’ became possible on a broader basis and under different terms than ever before. The Pan-German League was about to become a major force in German politics, the driving spirit behind two massive coalitions which turned the national opposition into a formidable phenomenon on the eve of the war.
In the network of national symbols in whose name patriotic activism was channeled, the German army occupied an inconspicuous position during most of the prewar period. The salience of the navy and the campaign by the government to mobilize patriotic sentiments around this symbol were responsible for the relative neglect of the army as a national issue, as was the reluctance of the country’s leading soldiers to make the army an issue. After 1893, when the Reichstag had passed major new military appropriations, the policies of a succession of War Ministers were guided by a deep-seated social conservativism, the fear that additional increases in the size of the army would result in the further dilution of the officer corps with candidates from non-noble backgrounds, as well as in greater reliance on conscripts from urban areas, whose political views were feared tainted with socialism.92 Despite the fact that Tirpitz’s political strategy had produced a strong rival for limited financial resources, the persistence of these fears made the army’s leaders reluctant to resort to similar plebiscitary techniques.93
The Moroccan crisis of 1911 rendered the conservative policies of the War Ministry untenable, as it produced a broad reorientation in strategic thinking in Germany.94 Two lessons seemed irrefutable. The first was that the crisis had made the likelihood of war much more imminent; the second was that the German navy was not yet prepared for combat, nor would it be in the near future, failing a building program so vast that it stood no chance of parliamentary approval.95 With the navy of dubious value, the army reemerged not only as the principal object of strategic concern, but as the primary symbol of national power, integrity, and security. When the emperor told the army’s commanding officers in January 1912 that ‘the navy is going to relinquish the main part of available public funds to the army’, he signalled a change in priorities that corresponded to a widespread shift in public attitudes.96
The Pan-German League anticipated this shift. For several years its publicists had drawn attention to the army’s reluctance to draft all the men who were eligible.97 The League’s interest in the army was a reflection of the increasing influence wielded in the League’s leadership by a new group of men whose backgrounds were military. The central figure in this group was Keim, whose career, for all its eccentricities, epitomized an important phenomenon in the military and political history of Wilhelmine Germany.98 Keim was but one of a number of high-ranking officers, many of whom were not noble, to have made careers in the expanding army after 1870 only to encounter trouble. Their ambition and dedication blinded them to the limits which social conservatism placed on the army’s capacity for reform; and in their advocacy of reform they clashed repeatedly with their superiors. After retiring, resigning, or being forced from active service, they turned to journalism as a vent for their frustration. Some of them, like Keim, found homes in the Pan-German League or other patriotic societies.
Eduard von Liebert joined the Pan-German League before Keim did, but his career displayed many of the same features.99 Like Keim, he served on the General Staff before becoming involved in political disputes which led to his leaving the army. Long an advocate of colonial empire, he was military governor of German East Africa from 1897 to 1901, before charges of brutality and incompetence prompted the Foreign Office to press for his recall. Shortly thereafter he was eased out of the army, a bitter man, and he fell in with a number of the patriotic societies.100 Liebert’s friend, Johannes von Wrochem, followed much the same route. Serving as deputy military governor in East Africa under Liebert’s predecessor, he too had difficulties with the Foreign Office and was forced to return home. He retired in 1908 and soon afterwards joined the Pan-German League.101
For these and several other high-ranking retired officers, the Pan-German League provided a more cordial fotum than the army for expressing the view that the inevitability of international conflict made necessary the exploitation of all Germany’s reserves of manpower and the modernization of all arms of the service. For Keim, though, the League offered more. He never accepted his defeat at the hands of the Naval Office in 1908 and regarded the Pan-German League as the core around which to build a genuinely independent mass organization to promote German military power. And once his efforts to create a rival navy league collapsed, his eye turned naturally to the army, both as the object of his criticism and the beneficiary of his labors.102
Keim pursued this goal with a drive that made Class and other leaders of the Pan-German League fear an attempt to transform the organization into a tool of his own ambitions.103 Keim’s criticism of the army found little echo, however, before the Moroccan crisis changed entirely the context in which military questions were discussed in Germany and created a new opportunity for the Pan-German League.104 When the League congregated in Düsseldorf in September 1911 for its annual convention, the Moroccan crisis and its implications were the main items of business. Expansion and reform of the army were, by common agreement in the executive committee, now indispensable; and the alarm over the Moroccan crisis promised to make conditions ideal for the mobilization of the German-national public in the service of the army. The League’s own profile was still so controversial, however, that the leadership decided to establish a new, nominally independent patriotic society to orchestrate the campaign to generate popular pressure on both the government and the Reichstag. Establishing a new organization had the additional advantage of providing an outlet for the enormous energies of Keim, who was the obvious man to lead. it.105
Keim needed no persuasion of the importance of founding an ‘army league on the model of the old Navy League’.106 Together with Liebert and Wrochem, he laid the foundations for the new organization during the fall of 1911. An impressive list of notables agreed to endorse the manifesto Keim prepared, and on 19 December 1911 Keim announced his intentions in the press. The events of the previous summer, he explained, had demonstrated glaring weaknesses in the German army, which had in recent years fallen victim to mismanagement, partisan politics, and governmental penuriousness. It was essential, Keim concluded, to ‘create an organization which will have an impact on military policy, one which will enlighten the German people about the urgent necessity of accelerating the expansion of our army in various ways, in order to increase its inner strength and to bring its fighting capabilities [Kriegsbrauchbarkeit] up to the highest possible level’.107 Keim then baptized the organization the German Defense League (Deutscher Wehrverein).108
The establishment of the Defense League took place just as the elections to the Reichstag were delivering another blow to the German-national public. At the end of January 1912 Keim officially founded his organization at a giant rally in Berlin, which was attended by more than a thousand business leaders, parliamentarians, professors, and soldiers.109 It was a measure of the consternation in the German-national public that the Defense League grew rapidly during the next several weeks, as Keim, Wrochem, and Liebert toured the country to establish local chapters from among the large audiences they attracted. By the end of February membership in the new organization stood at 7,000; by June it had reached 33,000 individual and 100,000 corporate members in 250 chapters, and in January 1913, on the anniversary of its founding, the Defense League comprised 55,000 individual and 150,000 corporate members.110 Keim’s new group thus grew quickly to the point where it ranked second in size only to the Navy League.
The Defense League invited other comparisons with the Navy League as well. Keim’s initial manifesto implied clearly that the Defense League aspired to play the same role with respect to the army and to military policy that the Navy League had claimed over the navy when Keim himself had controlled that organization. In the speeches they delivered across the country while founding chapters, Keim and the other leaders of the Defense League made explicit their claim to act as custodians of military policy, as they subjected the composition, organization, and technical quality of the army to outspoken and wide-ranging criticism. The conclusion that all the criticism invited was that the men and agencies responsible for Germany’s security and military policy – and in the first instance Keim meant the chancellor and the War Ministry – had proved themselves negligent or incompetent. ‘The pressure of public opinion’ had accordingly ‘in the final analysis to compel even the parties and the government to do their duty’.111 Unlike the Navy League, however, the Defense League remained independent of the government, so officials discovered that they could do little to tone down the criticism to which the Defense League subjected them.
Much of the Defense League’s criticism of the army was technical in character, touching upon the failure to draft the number of men who were eligible each year, the inferiority of the German system for training reserves, weaknesses in the organization of the cavalry and artillery, and inadequate utilization of machine guns and airplanes.112 Many of these criticisms reflected long-standing professional concerns of Keim and the men around him, and, given the demands of the grandiose operational plans the German army intended to follow, many of them were apt.113 They were all rooted, however, in a vision of politics which differed from that of the Pan-German League mainly in the technical idiom in which it was expressed. The premise of this vision was that Germany faced a world of enemies, the foremost manifestations of which were the Russian and especially the French armies -institutions which, in Keim’s perspective at least, were superbly organized and equipped for combat, supported by nations themselves morally disciplined for war.114 The concern for the stability of order and authority, which was so central to the ideology of the Pan-German League, was conspicuous too in the literature of the Defense League, but again in a characteristic accent. The perils the country faced, in the view of the Defense League’s publicists, included familiar forces, such as the peace movement, feminism, socialism, and foreign mores; but their danger lay in the manner they subverted the values of discipline, vigilance, and hierarchical authority, which the army embodied and whose continued vitality in the civilian populace was essential to the survival of the country.115
The ideology of the German Defense League was thus similar in fundamental ways to that of the Pan-German League. It was modified by admixtures which betrayed the background of the men who articulated it and which made it more consistent with what sociologists are calling a ‘professional military ethic’.116 The premonitions in this vision of impending conflict were, however, not only a reflection of this ethic, but symptomatic of the alarm the Moroccan crisis had raised. The imperatives in the vision called for the immediate expansion and reform of the German army, according to guidelines which the Defense League itself claimed, as the custodian of this national symbol, the authority to determine.
The programmatic and ideological similarities between the Defense League and the Pan-German League, as well as the prominence of August Keim in both organizations, left little doubt about the source of the Defense League’s inspiration. Yet the dramatic expansion of the new organization meant that it would be far more than the Pan-German League in a new guise. In fact, the Defense League was a vast coalition which comprised the patriotic societies and other ‘national organizations’, as well as some important new elements. The significance of this coalition was that it revealed the extent to which other sectors of the German-national public were now willing to consolidate behind a program that so clearly reflected the position of the Pan-German League on the question of national opposition.
The rallies convoked during the spring of 1912 to establish local chapters of the Defense League were attended in the main by people who had already distinguished themselves in the German-national public, as members of the Pan-German League and other patriotic societies. The chapters put together at the rallies typically consisted of a core of these patriots, who then brought their own societies in as corporate members. The situation in Hamburg, for which the most evidence survives, was probably typical. Of the 200 men who signed the public document announcing the founding of the chapter, ninety-seven were members of the Pan-German League, the School Association, Language Association, Colonial Society, or the Navy League.117 In most localities, though, the men who were leaders in other patriotic societies, particularly those who had been conspicuous in the Pan-German League, chose to hand over the positions of leadership in the Defense League to other men, in order to emphasize the appearance that broad new forces were being mobilized. In Berlin, for example, of the forty-five men who were listed in the board of local officers, only two were familiar from the Pan-German League, while two others were prominent in the Colonial Society, and still another was from the Navy League. In Halle, although the board of officers included two men who had been active in the Pan-German League, the majority were new men.
Despite this appearance, the Defense League comprised an alliance in most localities among existing patriotic societies, which came together because the sudden prominence of a cherished national symbol provided them with a unifying issue. Because the alliance was held together by little more than the issue of the army, however, its durability was uncertain. Keim made every effort to give the new organization as broad an appeal as possible. The subject of racist antisemitism was banned, and dues were held low – so low, in fact (at only 1 Mark), that Keim was compelled to seek subsidies from the Pan-German League.118 The Defense League accordingly lacked either a program that looked beyond a specific issue or the resources to maintain a permanent infrastructure of local groups. As a result, the chapters of the Defense League survived in most localities less as autonomous groups than as appurtenances to other organizations in the local leagues of patriotic organizations.119
The Defense League was the most dramatic symptom of the radicalization of the German-national public in the aftermath of the Moroccan crisis and the federal elections of 1912. The success of this new organization was also an index of the growing cordiality between the Pan-German League and the other patriotic societies, as these other organizations came to accept the proposition, long advocated by the Pan-Germans, that the German government was not competent to determine or defend the national interest. The new cordiality on both the local and national levels between the Pan-Germans and the Eastern Marches Society antedated the Moroccan crisis; it was the result of the two organizations’ common opposition to policies announced by the Prussian government late in 1910, the effect of which would be to suspend the expropriation of Polish property in the eastern provinces.120
The Moroccan crisis produced a more remarkable rapprochement between the Pan-German League and the two organizations with which its relations had been the most troubled. In the Colonial Society outrage over the Moroccan settlement persisted in many chapters despite the attempt by the organization’s leadership to stifle it. It surfaced in the enthusiasm of the society’s chapters for the Defense League and in the frequency with which they invited Liebert and other leading Pan-Germans to speak to them.121 Racism also served as a bridge between these two organizations, as they joined forces in protesting against the government’s policy of permitting marriages between German settlers and black Africans in the colonies.122
The mood in many quarters of the Navy League was no less restive after the Moroccan crisis, but the reordering of fiscal priorities to the benefit of the army made it difficult for the Imperial Naval Office to mollify the discontent with a dramatic new navy law.123 At the same time, the reemergence of Keim, even as champion of the army, awakened memories in the Navy League, suggesting that the radicalism he had embodied was not dead.124 Despairing of vigorous leadership in their own organization or in the Naval Office, many chapters joined forces with the Pan-German League in demanding more warships or joined the Defense League out of sympathy for Keim.125
If the Defense League consisted at its core of an alliance among the Pan-German League and other newly radicalized patriotic societies, the new organization also attracted fresh elements. The breakdown of the Defense League’s cadres reveals a social profile that is in most respects familiar (see Appendix, Tables 11.1, 11.2, 11.3). The men who led the Defense League tended, like the leaders of other patriotic societies, to be academically educated officials, teachers, and professionals. In several important respects, however, the Defense League’s profile was different. In the first place, the proportion of military officers was higher (12 percent) than in any other patriotic society save the staid Colonial Society, although this statistic is inflated because it hides a large number of men who were not professional soldiers in any strict sense, but who were middle-class professionals whose social pretensions demanded they secure reserve commissions as company-grade officers (see Appendix, Table 11.4). The mean social status and mean public administrative position in the Defense League were lower than in the other patriotic societies. These statistics reflect a relatively large number of subaltern officials in the postal and customs services and in the railroads (see Appendix, Table 11.5). Although the evidence is lacking in specific cases, it is certain that many of these officials were former non-commissioned officers who had been placed in the civilian bureaucracies as Militäranwärter.126
With the establishment of the German Defense League, the German-national public saw the more conspicuous participation of men whose cultural role was to serve as custodians of national security. Soldiers in uniform, as well as retired officiers in Zivil, were the most prominent and numerous group in many chapters of the Defense League. In some places – such as Braunsberg in East Prussia, Cottbus, Landsberg an der Warthe, or Hameln in Hanover – the Defense League’s chapters consisted largely of the troops of the local garrison or depot, or the staff of the local Bezirkskommando. Officers began to appear in uniform at meetings of the Pan-German League as well.127
The participation of the soldiers helped turn the German-national public into a powerful political force, which mobilized in the name of military reforms to be forced, if necessary, upon the government. I have investigated elsewhere and in more detail the role of the Defense League in the passage of the army laws of 1912 and 1913.128 Here I propose only to highlight the aspects of the story that pertain to the theme of national opposition. As on numerous earlier occasions, only now with much higher stakes, government officials hoped to exploit the popular forces that the patriotic societies had mobilized, only to discover that these forces were too powerful to control.
As on previous occasions too, interagency struggles encouraged the intervention of these popular forces. At the center again was Tirpitz, who hoped to exploit the crisis atmosphere in the fall of 1911 to raise the building tempo from two capital ships per year (to which it had fallen) back to three. Arrayed against him were the Treasury Secretary, Adolf Wermuth, who insisted that new funds first be raised, and the chancellor, whose efforts to repair the country’s relations with Great Britian would not have survived the kind of naval increases Tirpitz proposed. In order to block the Naval Office, Bethmann Hollweg summoned a new force into the dispute late in 1911. He invited the War Minister, Josias von Heeringen, to propose rival claims for the expansion of the army. Heeringen’s reaction to the invitation was ambivalent, for he himself was sensitive to the ministry’s traditional apprehensions about the social and political consequences of a large-scale expansion of the army. In the General Staff, on the other hand, an agency in which considerations of fighting quality were paramount, Bethmann’s invitation was eagerly seized. Prodded by the soldiers in the General Staff, as well as by the chancellor, the War Minister submitted a plan for the most significant expansion in the army’s effective strength since 1893. The plan called, among other things, for the creation of two new corps and the induction of 24,000 additional recruits annually. Armed with this plan, Bethmann succeeded in reducing by half the number of new capital ships Tirpitz would be allowed to build, although Wermuth resigned rather than accept the chancellor’s view that the proposed expansion of both the army and navy would require no major new sources of revenue.
The complicated negotiations that produced this compromise proceeded just as the German Defense League was taking shape. By his own testimony, Keim had no knowledge of them, although it was perfectly clear which of the competing agencies stood most to gain from the Defense League’s activity.129 The precise nature of Keim’s contacts with the General Staff during the controversies over military estimates during the next eighteen months is difficult to determine. The presence of high-ranking officers in the Defense League, as well as Keim’s own contacts in the officer corps, speaks for the likelihood that the Defense League was at least privy to the broad outlines of the General Staffs proposals.130 In any event, the role of the Defense League throughout was to add weight to the arguments of the General Staff and to increase enormously the pressure on the War Ministry, the chancellor, and the Reichstag.
Bethmann soon learned that he had miscalculated and that international tensions could not cool in the atmosphere of alarm in which discussion of the army and navy bills took place in the spring of 1912. He appeared to have recognized his miscalculation when he confessed in May to the Bavarian minister in Berlin that Keim’s presence would mean ‘tactless and ruthless agitation’.131 In fact, the announcement, presentation, and eventual passage of the bills were played out against a backdrop of just such agitation. The Defense League subjected the army to ‘devastating’ criticism, charging grave inadequacies in all its branches and calling, in view of an ‘undoubtedly imminent war’, for improvements far more comprehensive than those proposed by the government.132 These charges made the rounds in the German-national public, in articles by Keim and others in the press, in pamphlets, in petitions and appeals to the Reichstag, and in chapters of patriotic societies throughout the country, particularly those of the Defense League, which sprouted like mushrooms in the German political landscape during the first six months of 1912.
Bethmann and Heeringen were naturally uncomfortable with the criticism, which the War Minister characterized as ‘way out of proportion’.133 Yet they faced a dilemma. For all the damage it appeared to do to the government’s own authority, the agitation effectively promoted the passage of the military bills in the Reichstag. The logic of Keim’s charges was that however inadequate the government’s proposals, to reject them was unthinkable. Bethmann found it difficult, in any event, to muzzle the Defense League. Public humiliation was out of the question, for Keim’s position had the support of the soldiers, and the government had conceded the need for major arms increases. Another possibility for exerting leverage surfaced early in 1912, as officials debated whether to designate the Defense League a political organization under the provisions of the federal law of associations of 1908. The effect of this move would be to bar active officers from membership, and while it would not be fatal to Keim’s organization, the departure of the officers would deprive the Defense League of one of its most prestigious and authoritative components.134 In the end, Bethmann and Heeringen decided not to press this issue, chiefly because the logic of their action would compel them to move against the Navy League and other patriotic societies as well, and thus to risk antagonizing the entire German-national public just as the army and navy bills were coming before the Reichstag.
The Reichstag passed the bills with large majorities in May 1912, after debates that found the parties of the right and the National Liberals making free use of the charges which the Defense League had popularized. These debates were, however, merely the prelude to a second round of controversy over the state of the army, for the Defense League’s criticism of the government’s proposals had struck a chord in both the army and the German-national public. Within days of the Reichstag’s final passage of the bills, the Defense League called for massive additional increases, to include the genuine introduction of the principle of universal military service (which Keim claimed would increase by 25 percent the size of the annual classes of conscripts) and extensive organizational reforms. These demands then became the theme of the Defense League’s continuing agitation, which drew attention to the areas of the army’s inadequacy, the growing likelihood of war, and, in what one French observer described as ‘violent attacks,’ to the malfeasance of the government in responding so fecklessly to the challenges the country faced.135
In the fall of 1912 this agitation converged once again with the plans of the General Staff. Pressure for renewed expansion of the army gathered momentum in this agency in the wake of the defeat of the German-trained Turkish armies in the Balkan War and after a personnel shift put an energetic and ruthless champion of army reform in the position of principal advisor to Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff. No evidence is available of direct contacts between Keim and Erich Ludendorff, but the two men certainly shared a common appreciation of the army’s weaknesses, the need for comprehensive modernization, and the imminence of war. Ludendorff’s arrival on the scene set off another interagency battle, this time among the General Staff, the War Ministry, and the chancellor, over the need for still further increases in troop strength. With Ludendorff’s encouragement, Moltke became the advocate of ‘really decisive’ increases, while Heeringen and Bethmann Hollweg fought to limit their scope – the War Minister because of continuing fears about the social ramifications of the General Staff’s demands, the chancellor for fear of their financial and diplomatic consequences.136 On 21 December 1912 Moltke laid before them a startling memorandum, which called for increases on a scale likely to appease even Keim. The principle of universal military service was henceforth to be rigidly enforced, as an additional 150,000 conscripts were to be called up each year.
The real issue in the interagency battle now became the extent to which Bethmann and Heeringen would be able to pare down these staggering demands. It was an unequal battle. Despite the attempts of the War Ministry and chancellery to urge moderation on the Defense League, the champions of the massive increases enjoyed the support of a fully mobilized German-national public.137 The interagency negotiations took place in the context of a public debate, inspired and orchestrated in the main by the Defense League, over just how deficient the German army really was – a debate in which the antagonists appeared to many observers to be the War Ministry and the General Staff.138 Long before news of the impending new army bill leaked into the press in March 1913, the German-national public was geared for it. The year 1913 was rich in occasions for patriotic celebration in Germany – it was not only the centennial of the Wars of Liberation but the twenty-fifth anniversary of the emperor’s reign. Patriotic observances ran almost continuously early in the year, and a principal theme in them was army reform. The Defense League entered a new phase of expansion, as between February and July 1913 200 new chapters were set up.
This was August Keim’s finest hour. Although he pronounced the bill which the government announced in the spring as the ‘minimum of what must be demanded’, he did not object when the new increases became known as the ‘lex Keim’.139 He had found revenge for his expulsion from the Navy League, for no government agency could restrain his new organization. Indeed, the fact that the War Ministry had no agency analogous to Tirpitz’s Nachrichtenbüro left the Defense League as the primary source of public information on military affairs, and the information that Keim and his colleagues dispensed added great weight to the arguments being advanced at the highest levels of government by the soldiers.140 In the end, the resistance of Heeringen and Bethmann crumbled under the combined pressure of the General Staff and an aroused public. ‘I shall pass on the bill exactly as the soldiers are demanding, with no cuts’, wrote the exhausted chancellor in March 1913, ‘otherwise the fellows will be back next year, and Keim and his friends will scream for more.’141
As in the previous year, a large majority, in which the Catholic Center Party joined the parties that had once made up the Bülow block, passed the huge arms bill in the Reichstag in June 1913. This event brought to an end the period in which the Defense League exerted a dominant influence in German politics. Keim and other leaders of the organization announced immediately after the Reichstag’s action that the army was still dangerously understrength and that yet another bill was needed. Military reforms undertaken late in 1913 in France and Russia, particularly the lengthening of the term of service in the French army, did nothing to change their minds, but despite some sympathy in the army for another bill, army reform had ceased, at least temporarily, to be an issue compelling enough to sustain the mobilization of the German-national public.
None the less, the success of the German Defense League marked a high point in the mobilization of popular patriotism in Wilhelmine Germany, and the country’s leaders had good reason to be uncomfortable with the spectacle. While the War Minister was concerned about the ‘unholy confusion’ the Defense League was sowing in the army, the chancellor found his hands tied, as the army bill took shape in early 1913, by the popular preoccupation with ‘war, screaming for war, and with eternal armaments’.142 Moreover, both the substance and the tenor of the agitation over the arms bills drew into question the competence and hence the authority of the government in the sensitive area of military policy. The charges of negligence and malfeasance echoed far beyond the meeting halls in which Keim raised them; they appeared widely in the press and informed the arguments of politicians during the Reichstag debates.
The Pan-German League was pleased for the very reasons the government was uncomfortable. The success of the Defense League seemed to confirm the wisdom of its new strategy of quietly inspiring other, more broadly based organizations; and Keim’s organization did more to lend legitimacy to the concept of national opposition than the Pan-German League itself had been able to accomplish alone. If there were any blemish in the situation, it was the fact that not even the powerful issues of national security and army reform could overcome factional differences among the so-called national parties. The problems that had brought the collapse of the Bülow block resurfaced in 1913, as the staggering costs of the army increases at last made the tapping of major new revenues inescapable.143 The ensuing controversy produced a curious coalition, as the Pan-German League and Defense League found themselves allied with the Social Democrats against the Conservatives in advocating a federal tax on capital gains. This situation was as intolerable for the Pan-German League as it was for the isolated Conservatives; and it led on the eve of the war to one last attempt to find a durable bond among the parties of the right and their extra-parliamentary allies.
The growing strength of Social Democracy was not merely a spectre that haunted the Pan-Germans; it was the dominant and in many respects the motive force in the history of politics in Wilhelmine Germany. The seemingly inexorable increase in the parliamentary strength of the Social Democrats after 1890 called forth a series of attempts to consolidate heterogeneous and frequently antagonistic parties and interest groups into an anti-socialist electoral coalition and parliamentary block.144 Constructing an anti-socialist Sammlung was an arduous process. It never succeeded more than temporarily before 1914, for the issues that divided agrarians, the mercantile sector, and industry light and heavy (to say nothing of Catholics) were fundamental: they had to do with the relative weight, priority, and even the survival of these sectors in the evolution of German society. These issues were also omnipresent and surfaced in recurrent debates over tariff policy, taxation, social policy, and electoral reform.145
The rhetoric and symbolism of patriotism figured vitally in the attempts to forge an anti-socialist block, both because the socialists themselves had ideologically repudiated the national symbols and because these symbols provided the primary common ground among the factions of the non-socialist camp. However, even patriotism had its limits as a cohesive force. To reduce the problem to schematic form, the symbols and slogans of patriotism – from the navy and colonial empire to ridding the country of ethnic minorities and the ‘protection of national labor’ – all implied specific positions in the debates among these factions. Indeed, they exacerbated the debates in so far as they raised difficult questions about the distribution of the social costs of pursuing ‘national policies’. By the turn of the century, the principal danger was that the agrarians would be permanently alienated, for the battle fleet and overseas empire implied the future primacy of the industrial and mercantile sectors.
The history of the Bülow block revealed the limitations of patriotism as a bond among the non-socialist factions. The Conservatives’ refusal to accept a larger share of financial burdens created largely by the navy not only caused the collapse of the block but left the agrarians isolated and made their relationship to the national symbols problematic. The events of 1911–12, however, reintroduced the possibility of Sammlung around national issues as an avenue for the Conservative agrarians to break out of their isolation. As Heydebrand’s famous speech to the Reichstag in November 1911 made clear, the Conservatives were willing to join the chorus of those who held the resolution of the Moroccan crisis to be a humiliation for the country and a sign of the government’s incompetence to defend the national interest.146 The elections to the Reichstag soon afterwards dealt another blow to this party’s fortunes, as they emphasized the socialist danger more dramatically than ever before. In these circumstances a new formula for the consolidation of the right began to take shape. In this formula the symbols of patriotism implied not only a renewed campaign against the Social Democrats, but an onslaught against the institution of the Reichstag itself and the government of Bethmann Hollweg. Consolidation of the right began, in other words, to crystallize around a program of national opposition. And in the complicated negotiations to achieve this consolidation, the Pan-German League played a critical part.
For the Pan-Germans a durable consensus among the ‘national parties’ was not only an ideal; it was essential to the internal harmony of the organization itself. Although the dominant political orientation in the League was National Liberal, supporters of the Conservative and Antisemitic parties were numerous enough in the rank and file that their sentiments could not be disregarded. The collapse of the Bülow block produced tensions in a number of local chapters, as did the formation of the anti-agrarian front, the Hansabund, in 1909.147 The situation in the strong chapter in Cologne was the most serious. Resentments among the National Liberals in the chapter were so bitter over the Conservative Party’s opposition to financial reform that the chairman, who was also the leading figure in the local Conservative Verein, nearly resigned.148 The efforts of the League’s national leaders to minimize the antagonism among the parties resulted only in angry charges that the leadership had fallen under the control of the Conservatives.149 These problems, which arrived in the wake of the League’s own financial crisis, moved Class to complain in 1910 of how ‘endlessly difficult’ his job was to bring his flock of Antisemites, National Liberals, and even a few Progressives ‘under a single Pan-German hat’.150
The response of Class and the rest of the leadership to the tensions that grew out of the fragmentation of the non-socialist block in 1909 was to try to steer the Pan-German League to the right, gently enough not to drive out the National Liberals in the membership, but visibly enough to accommodate the Conservatives who belonged to the League and to suggest avenues for the entry of the Conservative Party into a new anti-socialist block. Several circumstances recommended this response. The most important was the effect of the industrial subsidy on the perceptions of the League’s leaders. The men who after 1909 underwrote the Pan-German League occupied positions on the extreme right of the National Liberal Party and were among the main proponents of a condominium with the Conservatives based upon tariff protection for the products of both agriculture and heavy industry. Although they joined it as a tactical maneuver, the Hansabund was hardly less distasteful to them than to the Conservatives, for it was dominated by leaders of the exporting industries, who appeared intent upon revising downward the whole structure of tariffs when existing legislation expired in 1917. In 1911, their isolation in the Hansabund obvious, Kirdorf, Krupp, and other heavy industrialists abandoned the organization amidst recriminations about the general leftward drift of the National Liberal Party under the leadership of Ernst Bassermann.
In the Pan-German League these men found a vehicle to translate their specific concerns into a broader ideological vision of social and political degeneration, the contours of which the League’s racism furnished. In this light, the perils besetting German society appeared as a generalized drift toward democracy and the breakdown of authority – perils which the government was unable to counteract and which the National Liberal Party abetted through its sympathy for tariff reform, redrawing federal electoral districts to the benefit of urban areas, reforming the Prussian suffrage, and its opposition to strike-breaking legislation.151 Responding to the influence of their beneficiaries, as well as to their own inclinations, leaders of the Pan-German League began after 1910 to invoke the symbolism of patriotism to sanction resistance both to the government’s foreign policy and to that set of specific domestic reforms – from tariff liberalization to suffrage reform – which were associated with the parties of the left, including the left wing of the National Liberals.152 Class and the other leaders calculated that this posture would suggest a consensus of sufficient strength to bind together, under the ideological tutelage of the League itself, a national block of right-wing or ‘Old’ National Liberals, Antisemites, Free Conservatives, and Conservatives.
The debacles of Morocco and the federal elections of 1912 set the stage for testing this calculation. Class’s ties to the right-wing National Liberals -particularly to the Hessian leaders of this group, Cornelius Heyl zu Herrnsheim and Jacob Becker – had long been good and now grew stronger.153 So too did the League’s connections to the Free Conservative Party, the party of Sammlung par excellence, two of whose leading figures, Liebert and Stössel, were in Class’s inner circle. In 1912 Die Post, of which leaders of the League were principal owners and whose editor was Class’s confidant, Heinrich Pohl, became the party’s organ.154 The effect of these ties was evident in programmatic statements issued in the fall of 1912 by the party’s leader, Octavio von Zedlitz-Neukirch, who announced that Germany’s problems demanded, as a matter of first priority, ‘the strengthening and broadening of national consciousness’ and that in this process the role of the ‘national agitational societies, the navy leagues, defense leagues [and] Pan-Germans’ was ‘indispensable’.155 Statements like this prompted Hans Delbrück to warn that the Free Conservative Party could ‘turn into an appendage of the Pan-German League’.156
The key, however, to the fulfillment of the Pan-German League’s calculations remained the Conservative Party. Here the difficulties were serious, owing to a long-standing aversion to the Pan-Germans on the part of the national leadership of both the Conservative Party and the party’s main ally, the Agrarian League. The roots of the aversion lay partially in the Pan-German League’s National Liberal complexion, partially in the fact that the Conservatives had tended to support the government in questions of foreign policy.157 The chief problem, however, remained the Pan-German League’s views on the question of landholding in the Prussian east and the relationship of landholding to ethnic conflict. The struggle between Poles and Germans in the eastern provinces was, in the League’s analysis, rooted in patterns of landholding in which German owners of otherwise unrentable large estates cultivated their lands by importing cheap Polish labor. The key to resolving the ethnic conflict which this practice encouraged was to resettle the east with a German yeoman peasantry, whose vitality represented the ‘last anchor of salvation’ for Germans in the east, a ‘solid dike’ against the Polish ‘flood tide’.158 To foster resettlement, the Pan-Germans called for wholesale public limitation of property rights. Most controversially, they advocated expropriation of large estates (whether in Polish or German hands), the parcellization of these estates into rentable family plots, and making them available on favorable terms for colonization by German peasants.159 The men who dominated the Conservative Party and the Agrarian League spoke for precisely the large landholders whom the Pan-German League proposed to dispossess; they not only found these proposals anathema, but were uncomfortable, in spite of the antisemitism which they themselves exploited, with a view of politics and society that so emphasized the primacy of ethnic conflict. For this reason, the relationship between the Agrarian League and the Eastern Marches Society was also consistently uneasy.160
Despite the presence of Conservatives in the Pan-German League (including several in the national leadership), relations between the Pan-Germans and the agrarian leaders remained hostile as late as 1911.161 Early in that year Class and Stössel had interviews with Heydebrand, which did not go well. Heydebrand recommended to the Pan-German leaders that if they wished closer ties to his party they should concentrate on establishing local Conservative Vereine in western and central Germany.162
Events soon compelled the agrarian leaders to reconsider their relationship to the Pan-German League. The full extent of the Conservatives’ isolation was documented not only in the party’s losses in the federal elections of 1912, but in elections to the Prussian diet the next year and in the fact that Conservative opposition no longer sufficed in 1913, as it had in 1909, to prevent the passage in the Reichstag of a tax bill which the party’s leaders found repugnant. As the Conservatives’ concern and bitterness over their isolation deepened, the Pan-Germans’ program appeared increasingly attractive. The attraction grew as resentment over the government’s handling of both the Moroccan crisis and the tax bill of 1913 made opposition more palatable to the Conservatives and as the accents in the League’s agitation shifted away from the navy and overseas imperialism to the army and continental expansion to the east – subjects traditionally more consistent with the agrarians’ own concerns.163 Indications of the conclusions the Conservative leaders were drawing appeared as early as the fall of 1912, when Georg von Bülow announced in the party’s journal that ‘Pan-German movement is what we need – the inspiration [Erfüllung] of all political parties with a national disposition [Gesinnung] and energetic will for the tangible deed’.164 The leaders of the Agrarian League were thinking along similar lines. Early in 1913 they raised the possibility of tapping into the German-national public by founding a network of local associations ‘to cultivate patriotic and monarchist sentiment’.165
Paradoxically, an accommodation between the agrarians and the Pan-German League only became possible once the Conservatives lost on the tax bill in June 1913 – a bill that had the full support of the League. Angry as it left them with the chancellor, the Conservatives’ defeat removed, at least temporarily, the financial issue which had stood in the way of using patriotism as the cement in a Sammlung of the right. Almost immediately after the tax issue had been resolved in the Reichstag, leaders of the Agrarian League, who also occupied top positions in the Conservative Party, entered into negotiations with leaders of the Pan-German League.
That the agrarians should look to the Pan-Germans as a remedy for their isolation was impressive testimony to the standing the Pan-Germans had by now won as custodians of the national symbols. The participation of the agrarians in a national consolidation of the right required the adjustment of patriotic symbolism to accommodate the agrarian leaders’ vital interests; and the agrarians acknowledged that the Pan-Germans were the people who could best arrange the accommodation. The arrangement was eased by the fact that Pan-Germans and agrarians shared ideological assumptions of racist antisemitism and an obsession with the threat that socialism posed to proper patterns of social precedence. The principal issue was whether the League would provide the sanction of patriotism for the continued domination of the east by the large landowners.166
In June 1913 Class met for the first time with Cornelius von Wangenheim, the leader of the Agrarian League, to discuss establishing ‘contacts [Anschluss] to achieve practical results’. Class made a ‘very good impression’ and appeared to Wangenheim to be ‘averse to all national extravagances’ (Wangenheim’s impressions revealed a lot about his own perspective on foreign affairs).167 This meeting was the prelude to a series of conferences during the summer of 1913 between the leaders of the two organizations. They agreed about the desirability of cooperation ( ein gegenseitiges Sich-in-die-Händearbeiten ). The Pan-German League was henceforth to serve ‘more or less as specialist’ for the Agrarian League in questions of foreign policy and other national issues. Conversely, the Agrarian League was to ‘advise’ the League on questions of economic policy and other domestic affairs.168 The two sides agreed then to consult on the lines to be followed in their respective press organs and to exchange speakers.
The implications of the agreement were obvious. The Agrarian League would join with the forces in the Pan-German League which were denouncing the German government for its weakness in foreign and defense policy. In return, the Pan-German League’s commentary on domestic affairs would now display ‘greater understanding for the work and goals of the Agrarian League’, a greater sensitivity for the dangerous ‘struggle of democracy against agriculture’.169 In practice these formulas meant that the Pan-German League would drop its criticism of the large estates and possibly (although this issue had yet to be confronted) later support the Agrarian League’s demands for an upward revision of agricultural tariffs.
The agreement brought substantial advantages to both sides. For the Agrarian League it pointed the way out of isolation, as it promised to blunt a loud and influential critic of the agrarians’ tenacious defense of their own sectional interests. To the Pan-German League the arrangement brought an opportunity to purvey its views to an enormously expanded audience, for it provided access to the public realm of rural Protestant Germany, from which the League had hitherto been excluded. The fruits of the accommodation soon blossomed. Demands that had long been associated with the Agrarian League – to limit the stock exchange and prohibit department stores, for example – appeared in the literature of the Pan-German League.170 When, early in 1914, the Pan-German League’s board of national directors convened in Stuttgart, the featured guest was Wangenheim, who addressed the meeting on the subject of colonizing the east. It was necessary, he explained to the Pan-Germans, to preserve the ‘natural stratification of the people’ from the threat of too much industrialization. This task demanded the colonization of the eastern countryside, but in such a way as to preserve a natural balance and variety of landholding, from the tiny plots of farmworkers to the great noble estates. Above all, Wangenheim insisted, colonization must not jeopardize the position of the true custodians of German agriculture, the great landowners, the ‘leaders and teachers of the other agricultural classes [Stände]’.171
As the Pan-German League gave increasing exposure in its ranks to the views of the Agrarian League, it received its own rewards. The organization began to enjoy better treatment in the Conservative press. The organ of the Agrarian League, the Deutsche Tageszeitung, whose editor was now Ernst zu Reventlow, covered the Pan-Germans’ activities more fully and cordially.172 The Kreuzzeitung’s view of the Pan-Germans, which had previously been largely negative, also became benevolent, though more slowly, under the encouragement of Wangenheim and Franz Sontag, a Pan-German who in the summer of 1913 became editor of the paper after working for Die Post.173 Perhaps of more significance was the entry into the German-national public of a social group that had been practically absent before, as a significant number of peasants and estate owners became leaders of chapters of the Defense League after June 1913.174
One final advantage the Pan-German League hoped to exploit was the ties of the Agrarian League to important interest groups in other sectors of German society. At the same time they were negotiating with the Pan-Germans, leaders of the Agrarian League were conferring with representatives of the Centralverband deutscher Industrieller, who were no less alarmed than the agrarians about the capital-gains tax the Reichstag had recently passed, and with leaders of the Reichsdeutscher Mittelstandsverband, a large cover-organization founded in 1911 (with the encouragement of the Agrarian League itself and the financial backing of heavy industry) to shore up the artisanal guilds, chiefly by fighting the socialist unions.175 In August 1913 the three groups coalesced publicly to form the ‘Cartel of Productive Estates’ (Kartell der schaffenden Stände), whose purpose was to combine the forces of agriculture, industry, and the handicrafts in ‘combatting Social Democracy and the socialists’ false doctrines’.176
The significance of the Cartel was not immediately apparent, nor after heated debate is it entirely clear today.177 On paper it was a formidable alliance of groups whose memberships numbered several million people. That the Pan-German League would somehow be tied to it was clear in the eyes of both Wangenheim and Class.178 The program of the Cartel was to be bathed in the light of patriotism. Now, however, the scope of the specific proposals so legitimized had become far more ambitious, for not only did the Cartel envisage an aggressive foreign policy and the salutary effects of war as weapons in the fight against socialism, but it made no secret of its desire – in the name of patriotism – both to unseat the government of Bethmann Hollweg and to change the constitution in order to downgrade or eliminate the Reichstag.179 To the Pan-Germans the idea of changing the constitution was no surprise, for on the eve of the war they were working on their own version of the same scheme.
‘One could earlier take comfort in the belief that the Pan-Germans were a small, almost comical sect with no significance. One can no longer say that.’180 Hans Delbrück was one of the most perceptive observers of German politics, and the warning he issued about the Pan-Germans in December 1913 was in no sense exaggerated. By the time he was writing, the cumulative impact of diplomatic tension (which the war in the Balkans kept alive), alarm over the country’s military security, and anxiety over the growth of Social Democracy had created a situation in which the Pan-German League was a potent force in German politics. Its leaders were among the most skilled and influential opinion-leaders in the country – men to be respected, despised, or feared, but certainly no longer to be ridiculed.181
The indices of the League’s new importance and influence extended far beyond the increases in the number of its chapters and members.182 To an unprecedented extent, the organization now enjoyed a ‘good press’. The circle of newspapers that could be called Pan-German, by virtue of their views and the connections of their editors, publishers, or managers was an impressive phenomenon. In addition to the core of Reismann-Grone’s, Pohl’s, and Liman’s papers, it comprised Heinrich Rippler’s Tägliche Rundschau and the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, one of whose leading share-holders was Stössel and which in 1913 incorporated Lange’s Deutsche Zeitung.183 The League found its activities well covered too in Conservative, Free Conservative, and National Liberal papers all over the country.184 In 1913 even the Vossische Zeitung published a lead article expressing appreciation of the League’s recent accomplishments.185
Nor did these accomplishments, particularly the mobilization of opinion during the debates on the army bills, fail to impress officials in a number of government agencies, who in 1913 started cultivating the Pan-German League.186 After a lapse of two years, contacts between the League and the Foreign Office resumed in August 1913. Zimmermann and Kiderlen’s successor, Gottlieb von Jagow, conferred with the League’s leaders and began again to pass money to the Wehrschatz.187 The purposes they hoped thereby to serve were no doubt of the same order as those of Wilhelm Solf, the Colonial Secretary, who in the spring of 1914 tried (in vain) to persuade Class to support a treaty regulating the disposition of Portugese colonies in Africa, which the government had negotiated with Britain and was preparing to announce.188
Most remarkable were the ties which now developed between the Pan-German League and the Imperial Naval Office. The years just prior to the war were not happy ones for Tirpitz, whose plans for the fleet suffered from the competition of the army and the opposition of the chancellor. Tirpitz appeared as well to have become disenchanted with the Navy League just as one of his former top officials in the Naval Office was entering the inner circle of the Pan-German League.189 Alfred Breusing had been Chief of the Admiralty Staff and head of the shipyards section of the Naval Office before his retirement in 1910. Thereafter he joined the Pan-German League, quickly became its expert in naval affairs, and in the summer of 1913 succeeded Klingemann as vice-chairman. He remained in regular contact with the Naval Office, assuring his former colleagues of his willingness ‘to march at all times with the Naval Office in questions of naval policy’.190 These contacts, which undoubtedly had Class’s approval, were the product of the realization in both the Naval Office and the Pan-German League that naval construction was not, for the time being, a matter of top priority. In Breusing the League acquired a leader who was respected in Berlin, a man to whom doors were open not only in the Naval Office, but in the Foreign Office and chancellery as well. For the Naval Office, conniving with the Pan-Germans assured that the need for naval building would be kept aggressively in the public eye. In the event, the League’s position under Breusing’s guidance was to push, in tones gently critical of the Naval Office’s apparent docility, for resuming the pace of building three capital ships per year.191
The most telling indications of the Pan-Germans’ new importance were their role in the evolving configuration of domestic politics on the eve of the war and the extent to which their views on the question of national opposition had become current in the German-national public. The block on the right might well have emerged anyway, but the Pan-German League encouraged it significantly, by articulating, defining, and popularizing the militant slogans of national opposition which provided common ground for at least a temporary Sammlung of the major interest groups and political parties that represented agriculture, heavy industry, and the handicrafts. A formidable constellation of economic and political power thus joined a broad associational network in appropriating the League’s programmatic canons – that the defense of authority at home justified driving from office any government unable or unwilling to risk the pursuit of aggressive policies toward the country’s enemies, both foreign and domestic. Class, in sum, was not boasting idly when he wrote early in 1914 that ‘we have set up an abundance of ties to leading men in all sectors – in a word, the consolidation of forces, which is the precondition for a powerful intervention, is proceeding, and I hope that we shall soon be able to demonstrate that we are more than our opponents claim’.192
Despite the Pan-Germans’ successes of 1913, they had reason to temper their optimism. Before it could be put to the test, the Cartel’s durability was questionable, and early indications were that patriotic slogans could not long conceal fundamental conflicts of interest among the constituent groups.193 One painful indication of the problem was the continuation in the Pan-German League of hostility to the Agrarian League. The Pan-German League’s executive committee did not disclose the agreement between the two organizations to the rank and file. To do so would have invited a major rift in the Pan-German League, for as the storm of protest over Wangenheim’s speech in Stuttgart made clear, many members were still unwilling to support a program of internal colonization that preserved the power of the large landholders.194
Even had the nationalist block on the right proved cohesive, the question of its potential impact remained open. Parliamentary mathematics were not favorable. The skepticism of Catholics and a large block of National Liberals made it unlikely that men with ties to the Cartel groups could find a majority in the Reichstag for the policies they advocated. The most the parliamentary route offered was probably a stalemate, in which the parties on the right could obstruct the passage of measures for electoral reform, broadened social legislation, liberalized trade aggreements, and other programs that the Cartel opposed.195
No one was more alive to the limitations of the parliamentary system than Heinrich Class, who in the last years of peace concluded that the cause of patriotism required the overthrow of this system and who became the main figure in a conspiracy to do it. Class made no secret of his goals. In 1912, in the shock of the federal elections, he composed his most systematic political treatise since his speech to the Plauen congress in 1903. This one was even more provocative. Bearing the title If I Were Emperor, it revealed the extent of his desperation, his commitment to racist antisemitism, and his willingness to countenance the most extravagant schemes.196 The focus of Class’s attention was now the domestic situation. The results of the recent elections to the Reichstag were, he claimed, a final warning of impending catastrophe. The socialists’ victory was symptomatic of a deeper crisis, the erosion of a ‘sense of order’, of the ‘respect for the power of the state’.197 The real agents of subversion were the Jews, who had exploited discontents over Germany’s continuing diplomatic failures to infiltrate and forge an alliance among the manifold enemies of the state – socialists, Progressives, left-wing National Liberals, Poles, the Catholic Center, Danes, French people in the Reichsland, Hanoverian autonomists, and even the patriots who followed Friedrich Naumann.
Class’s indictments differed from those of other racists only in being unusually candid and specific. More original were the remedies for which he called. The object, according to Class, was to reconcile the Volk and the state by transforming the state ‘to correspond to the essence of the Volk’.198 The critical change was to be the reform of the federal suffrage into a plural system, in order to guarantee the election of a ‘parliament in which education and property have the influence they deserve’.199 Out of such a parliament of ‘virtuous men of character’, a select few would distinguish themselves as fit for the highest offices, the advisors to the emperor and the whole nation.200 The first official acts of these men would be to stamp out domestic subversion in all its forms. Jews were to lose their civil rights; newspapers were to be censored (without, however, encroaching upon the ‘national’ press, which, Class noted, had ‘manfully and bravely managed to preserve its independence’). A socialist law would be passed with no holes; all Social Democratic deputies, party officials, editors, publishers, journalists, and union leaders were to be expelled from the country.201 To fill the void in workers’ lives created by the destruction of Social Democracy, Class envisaged a ‘large-scale system of national rallies’, ‘patriotic festivals for the people’, in which the ‘best of all classes and occupations would cooperate’ in the great effort of reconciliation.202
The plans Class announced were not idle fantasies, but rather the candid deductions of a man who had spent most of his adult life agonizing over the problem of authority in Germany and concluded that supreme authority belonged in the hands of men just like himself. Class’s reforms would have transformed Germany into the Pan-German League writ large. The ‘parliament of the best’, which he described as the product of his suffrage reform, bore an unmistakable resemblance to the League’s board of national directors, while his model for the elite of imperial advisors was just as unmistakably the League’s executive committee.203 The task of government was to create in Germany a single German-national public realm, again modeled after the League itself, in which political life would be elevated, by means of national rallies and festivals, into a powerful national consensus which transcended parochial interests of all kinds.204
Fearing that his candor might present legal difficulties and compromise the Pan-German League, Class published his treatise pseudonymously, revealing his identity as the author only to a select circle of friends.205 It would be no exaggeration, though, to regard the book as a manifesto of the League. Money from the Wehrschatz subsidized its publication; despite some misgivings about Class’s attack on the National Liberals, the League’s chapters served as the book’s distributors.206 Thanks to their efforts, the book was in its fifth edition and had sold more than 20,000 copies by the outbreak of the war.207
Gratifying as was the reception of Class’s book in the German-national public, the treatise itself was a final confession of the failure of a conception which had long guided the League – that the symbols of patriotism were so inherently compelling that they would themselves, aided only by a dynamic foreign policy, produce a broad consensus among Germans of all classes and confessions. Class’s proposals betrayed his conclusion that this consensus would have to be abetted by force. In his eyes the significance of the rightist Cartel was to provide a solid block of support for the ‘vast reform’ of the state, which, he believed, could come only from above, in a Staatsstreiche.208 And in the last year of peace, Class and a small group of his friends found a critically placed ally who shared their belief.
The mercurial Crown Prince William first attracted the attention of the Pan-Germans in 1910, when he made his highly publicized remarks about the contrast between ‘our German-national Volkstum’ and ‘attempts at internationalization, which threaten to efface our healthy ethnic distinctiveness’,209 His presence the next year in the Reichstag gallery during the debate over the Moroccan settlement and his conspicuous gestures of sympathy for the speakers who condemned the settlement confirmed the impression that the Pan-Germans had a friend very near the throne; so did the crown prince’s penchant for sending telegrams of greeting, which were much more effusive than protocol demanded, to congresses of the League and other patriotic societies.210 When in September 1913 he wrote, on his own initiative, to Liebert, whom he knew, and spoke of his approval of the Pan-German League’s work, Class resolved to act.211
Class was strengthened in his resolve by another man with important connections who had wandered into his inner circle in 1913. Konstantin von Gebsattel had been inspector of cavalry in the Bavarian army before he retired to his Franconian estate in 1910. Reading Class’s Si j’étais roi galvanized the murky ideas he had formed about politics, and he immediately offered his services to the League. By the fall of 1913 he and Class had become close, and with Class’s encouragement, Gebsattel composed a memorandum on the reform of German politics for circulation among his own friends – a document which read like an abstract of Class’s own treatise.212
Late in October Class sent a copy of Gebsattel’s memorandum to the crown prince, who was captivated.213 The crown prince then forwarded the document to his father and Bethmann Hollweg, both of whom were alarmed enough about Gebsattel’s proposals for a Staatsstreich, plural suffrage, and exclusionary legislation against the Jews that they scolded the crown prince at length. For all his own impatience with parliamentary institutions, the emperor had the sense to see that Gebsattel was a ‘fanatical odd-ball’ (seltsamer Schwärmer) and that the Pan-Germans who made such proposals were ‘dangerous people’, ‘more dangerous to the monarchy and its stability than the wildest Social Democrat’. Gebsattel’s proposals for driving the Jews from public life the emperor declared ‘down-right childish: they would cause Germany’s departure from the ranks of the civilized nations [Kulturnationen]’.214 The chancellor’s commentary on the memorandum was more deferential to the crown prince, but no more favorable. The document as a whole was ‘fantastic’, Bethmann wrote; Gebsattel’s ideas about the Jews were ‘impossible to take seriously’. The memorandum, Bethmann warned, ‘treats the Staatsstreich like a bagatelle and conjures up castles in the air for the future’.215
Bethmann had reason to be concerned about a Staatsstreich, for the Pan-Germans plainly hoped to use the crown prince to this end, and Bethmann’s chancellorship would undoubtedly be the first casualty. Late in November the crown prince did in fact urge his father to dismiss Bethmann.216 For his efforts, though, the crown prince was transferred in January 1914 from Danzig to a military post in Berlin, where his contacts could be more closely watched.217 He continued none the less, to the concern of the chancellor and the annoyance of the emperor, to communicate his enthusiasms to the Pan-Germans.218
Despite the opposition of the emperor to their scheme, Class and Gebsattel persisted in conspiratorial plans which became more bizarre as war approached. They provided the crown prince with more literature, including Class’s Kaiserbuch, which the crown prince read and gave to his father.219 They also cultivated contacts in the emperor’s entourage, one of whom, the former adjutant Ferdinand von Grumme-Douglas, wrote to Class in April 1914 that his own ideas ‘fully conform to your views about our domestic politics’.220 Meanwhile, Class and Gebsattel speculated about a new government to oversee the reforms they planned; as possible chancellors they spoke of Tirpitz – and themselves.221 Finally, in order to promote their project, they decided early in 1914 to form a secret society, to be called the ‘League of the Last’ (Bund der Letzten), which would comprise only racially pure ‘pioneers of an aristocratic world-view’, ‘men of achievement and character’, whose efforts to combat democratization were to be financed by heavy industry.222
Class later claimed that he never put much stock in this secret society – a fantastic undertaking which certainly reflected the conspiratorial extremes of Gebsattel’s thinking but which at the time had Class’s enthusiastic support.223 In all events, the conspiratorial route to recasting the German political system through the crown prince presented at least as many obstacles as the parliamentary route, and Class’s receptivity to Gebsattel’s schemes might well have reflected his own frustration.
Class had one other hope. The subject of war had always loomed large in the Pan-Germans’ discussion of politics. In a world-view as fraught as theirs was with enemies, a violent settling of accounts seemed not only inevitable but attractive, a great endeavor that would unite and regenerate the nation.224 From 1911 on, the Moroccan crisis and then the Balkan Wars made the discussion of war more prominent in the League, while the subject was a central feature in the propaganda of the Defense League and in the attempt to define unifying themes for an anti-socialist Sammlung. The Pan-German League’s publicists and speakers commented openly about the imminence and desirability of war, and about the specific territorial gains -in France, European Russia, Asia Minor, and Central Africa – that should fall to Germany after its victorious conclusion.225 And in Class’s eyes, the subject of war as a regenerative force took on a new dimension in 1912, as he concluded that the patriotic enthusiasm that would accompany a successful war would lead to the election of a Reichstag willing to pass the sweeping domestic reforms he proposed.226
That the Pan-German League contemplated enthusiastically a war of expansion in 1914 is beyond question. It is another matter to charge, as some historians have, that the chancellor secretly sympathized with the Pan-Germans and that his policies in July 1914 were calculated to realize their goals.227 All the evidence that has so far come to light suggests that prior to the war Bethmann Hollweg was not only temperamentally far removed from the Pan-German League, but that he held no sympathy for the racism, alarmism, and arrogance which were integral parts of the organization’s outlook, nor for the extravagance of its aspirations. Unlike his predecessor and many other high officials, he well recognized the danger of stirring up popular emotions around patriotic issues.228 These remarks are neither to dispute Bethmann Hollweg’s share of the responsibility for the outbreak of war, nor to deny that the Pan-German League probably played at least an indirect role in the outcome of the July crisis.
Although they have to be pieced together from disparate sources, indications are that Bethmann Hollweg suffered a great deal at the hands of the Pan-Germans in the years just before the war and that he came to fear them. When he complained early in 1914 of ‘shameless, chronic persecution from all sides’, which was ruining his nerves, the source of the problem was not difficult to trace.229 The German Defense League had portrayed him as incompetent to judge the requirements of national security. The rightist block accepted this verdict and joined the Pan-Germans in demanding his removal. Pan-German leaders had themselves come, via the crown prince, uncomfortably close to the mark in their attempts to undermine his position in the eyes of the emperor.
Bethmann’s response to this assault was curious. While he openly expressed his fears of a Staatsstreich, he seemed to agree with the Pan-Germans in warning of the dangers of democratization.230 But Bethmann meant by democratization something quite different than they. Early in 1912, when he presented the government’s military bill to the Reichstag, he observed, clearly with respect to the Defense League:
Whatever the confounded intricacies of the chancellor’s logic in insisting that the expansion of the army was necessary because fanatical agitation – in favor of expanding the army – was making greater the threat of war, his apprehension over the power of public opinion aroused in the name of patriotism was manifest. A year later he returned to the same theme in remarks before the Bundesrat about yet another army bill. War was not inevitable, he emphasized, but one could ‘not assume that the progressive democratization of states means the preservation of peace. On the contrary, the influence of those who agitate for war is becoming ever greater.’232 The same theme appeared finally in the essay which Bethmann’s confidant Kurt Riezler published shortly before the war about the principles of world politics. In a passage that surely reflected the thinking of the chancellor, Riezler wrote that ‘In our time the threat of war lies in the domestic politics of those countries in which a weak government confronts a strong nationalist movement’.233
If Bethmann Hollweg hoped that his own beleaguered government’s confrontation with a strong nationalist movement would ease after the passage of the massive arms bill of 1913, he was disappointed. In the wake of the consolidation of the rightist opposition to his government, the Zabern affair raised new trouble. The Pan-German League resumed its attack in print and from the podium, contending that the events in Zabern demonstrated anew the government’s folly in trying to appease the provinces with a constitution in 1911.234 Wrote one of the League’s commentators: ‘Political responsibility rests with the weak and lifeless souls who are today permitted to make policy in the provinces and in the country at large. How much longer?’235
Bethmann’s behavior during the July crisis must be seen against the backdrop of a long-standing, well-orchestrated attack on his competence, integrity, courage, and patriotism. The effect of the attack lay not so much in any of the specific fateful decisions Bethmann or other officials made during the crisis, as in the ambience it created. These men operated, as the Chief of the Naval Cabinet recalled, ‘under the pressure of a large part of the German people, which had been whipped into a frenzy of chauvinism by Navy Leaguers and Pan-Germans’.236 In weighing the consequences of policies they thought available to them, they could not, in sum, ignore the sentiment in the German-national public; and this calculation could only make more attractive the bold moves on which they ultimately decided.
Paradoxically, the Pan-German League itself was subdued during most of the July crisis, for the organization was embroiled in a crisis of its own. The prospect of fighting alongside Austria-Hungary drove to the breaking point a dispute that had long been brewing in the League. A faction, which had strongholds in the chapters in Cologne, Dortmund, and Essen, never abandoned the position defended by the Austrian Pan-Germans and, until 1903, by the League itself, that the salvation of Germans in Austria demanded the downfall of the Habsburg monarchy.237 When, during the last week of July, the executive committee resolved after heated debate to support a war waged in alliance with the monarchy, this faction resigned from the League. The secession produced a final irony in the prewar history of the Pan-German League. The leaders of the secession included Reismann-Grone and Pohl, the proprietors of two of the most bellicose newspapers in the country, which were to be found during the last days before the war in the same camp with the socialist press in urging a peaceful settlement of the crisis.238
Most of the antagonism within the League dissolved, however, upon the outbreak of war. The Pan-Germans entered the conflict surpassed by no one in their elation, proclaiming before the guns had begun to fire the grandiose war aims that were to make a compromise peace impossible.239 But perhaps the greatest sentiment in the organization was relief – in the venting of the frustration which had been building up for years among the custodians of culture and authority, the defenders of the national symbols. ‘As we prepare ourselves’, Class wrote on 3 August 1914,
Never before or afterwards would Class be in a better position to speak for the whole nation, but the perceptions of injustice, envy, and hate of which he wrote were those of the custodians themselves, the men who had at last, for a moment at least, helped turn most of the country into a German-national public realm in the name of the ‘ideas of 1914’. Class later recalled the exhilaration of early August, ‘how people who did not know one another at all were profoundly moved as they shook hands, as if making a silent vow to stand together until the end’.241 It was a heady experience, and it left a fateful legacy.