Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (103 page)

At one level, of course, this was a parable about the power of a Prussian uniform. Voigt himself was an unimpressive figure whose appearance bore all the marks of a life spent in poverty and confinement – a police report based on witness accounts described the hoaxer as ‘thin’, ‘pale’, ‘elderly’, ‘stooped’, ‘bent sideways’ and ‘bow-legged’. It was, as one journalist remarked, the uniform rather than its weatherbeaten inhabitant that carried off the crime. Seen in this light, Voigt’s tale evokes a social setting marked by a servile respect for military authority. This message was not lost on contemporaries: French journalists saw in it further evidence of the blind and mechanical obedience for which the Prussians were famed;
The Times
commented smugly that
this was the kind of thing that could happen only in Germany.
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By this reading, the captain’s story was a concentrated exposé of Prussia’s militarism.

But the fascination of the episode surely lies in its ambivalence. Voigt’s exploit began with obedience, but it ended with laughter.
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No sooner had he walked off with the cash, but his crime was a media event. The papers in and around Berlin described it as an ‘unheard-of trickster’s exploit’, ‘a robber’s tale as adventurous and romantic as any novel’ and conceded that it was impossible to reflect on it without smiling; Voigt was described as ‘cheeky’, ‘brazen’, ‘clever’ and ‘ingenious’. The Social Democrat newspaper
Vorwärts!
reported that the ‘hero’s deed’ was the talk of the town; in restaurants, in the streetcars and trains the ‘heroic exploit’ was discussed: ‘It’s not that one expresses indignation over the robbery of the Köpenick municipal treasury – instead the tone is mocking, sarcastic; everywhere a certain gleefulness over the ingenious prank at Köpenick refuses to be suppressed.’
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Quick-witted entrepreneurs published mass-produced ‘sympathy postcards’ with before-and-after depictions of Voigt as cobbler and captain. Purchasers were informed that a portion of the income generated by their sale would go to a local society for the care of prisoners or even to Voigt himself.
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It was precisely the comedic, subversive element of the story that Voigt so skilfully exploited in his memoirs and theatrical performances. As a media event, the captain’s exploit was nothing short of a disaster for the Prussian military. It was, as the socialist journalist and historian Franz Mehring put it, a ‘second Jena’.
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The roots of this laughter are not difficult to discern. The butt of the joke was Prussian ‘militarism’. But what exactly did this term mean? The word first passed into general circulation as a liberal anti-absolutist slogan during the constitutional struggle of the early 1860s and it never lost these liberal connotations. In the south German states, the term ‘militarism’ was widely used in the later 1860s, almost always with an anti-Prussian charge.
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‘Militarism’ meant the Prussian system of universal conscription (as opposed to the arrangement still operating in the south, where wealthy subjects could purchase exemption from service), or the payment of matricular contributions for the upkeep of the national army, or the assertion more generally of Prussian hegemony over the southern states. For left-liberals, militarism could mean high taxes and potentially unchecked state expenditure. For some national
liberals, anti-militarism captured echoes of the militia romanticism that had driven the reforms of the Napoleonic era. For the Marxist analysts of the Social Democratic movement, militarism was an expression of the violence and repression latent in capitalism. Precisely because it channelled and focused multiple preoccupations in changing combinations, ‘militarism’ became one of the foremost ‘semantic rallying-points’ in modern German political culture.
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In whatever sense it was used, it drew attention to the structural connections between the military and the wider social and political system in which it was embedded.

The army was without a doubt one of the central institutions of Prussian life after 1871. Its presence was felt in everyday life to an extent that would be unimaginable today. The army, whose public standing had been low for much of the nineteenth century, emerged from the wars of unification in a nimbus of glory. Its role in the foundation of the new Germany was commemorated throughout the imperial era in the annual Sedan Day festivals that recalled the victory over France. The military establishment acquired a new kind of public resonance. Its prestige found expression in the imposing buildings that sprang up in garrison towns to accommodate serving troops and regimental administrations. There was an elaborate culture of military display in the form of parades, marching bands and manoeuvres. Military men took pride of place in virtually every official public festivity.
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And the proliferation of military imagery and symbols infiltrated the sphere of private life: the photograph in uniform was a prized possession, especially for recruits from poor rural families where photographs were still a costly rarity; the uniform was worn with pride, even on holiday; military insignia and medals were treasured as mementos of deceased male relatives. The Prussian Reserve officer commissions – there were some 120,000 by 1914 – were a hotly sought-after status symbol in bourgeois society (hence the efforts of former Jewish volunteers to secure access to the corps). School children in garrison towns sang martial songs and marched in their playgrounds. Huge numbers of former servicemen joined the rapidly growing veterans’ associations and military clubs; by 1913, the Kyffhäuser League, the central organization of veterans’ clubs in Germany, counted some 2.9 million members.
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In other words, the military wove itself more deeply into the fabric of everyday life after 1871. Assessing the precise significance of this fact is far from straightforward. According to one influential view, the militarization
of Prussian-imperial society widened the gap between Germany and the western European states, stifling the critical and liberal energies of civil society, perpetuating a hierarchical approach to social relations and inculcating millions of Germans with political views that were reactionary, chauvinistic and ultra-nationalist.
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But was the Prussian experience really so unusual? Prussia was not alone in seeing an expansion of military cultures during the last four decades before the First World War. In France, too, veterans and servicemen flocked to join military clubs and associations – in numbers comparable with Prussia-Germany. A comparison of the militarization of national commemorations in France and Prussia-Germany after 1871 reveals close parallels.
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Even in Britain, a predominantly naval power that prided itself on the emphatically civilian quality of its political culture, the National Service League attracted some 100,000 members, including 177 members of the House of Commons. The league’s propaganda combined a paranoid perspective on questions of national security with racist presumptions about the superiority of the British race.
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In Britain, as in Germany, the late Victorian era saw a massive unfolding of imperial ceremonial. The ‘civility’ and anti-militarism of British society were perhaps more a matter of self-perception than a faithful representation of reality.
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It is also worth noting that the German peace movement developed on a scale unparalleled elsewhere. On Sunday 20 August 1911, 100,000 people gathered at a peace rally in Berlin to protest against the brinkmanship of the great powers over the Moroccan Crisis. There was a wave of similar protests in Halle, Elberfeld, Barmen, Jena, Essen and other German towns throughout the late summer, culminating in a mammoth peace rally in Berlin on 3 September, when 250,000 people thronged to the Treptow Park. The movement subsided somewhat in 1912–13, but at the end of July 1914, when war was clearly imminent, there were once again large peace rallies in Düsseldorf and Berlin. The response of the German public to the news of war was not, as used to be claimed, one of universal enthusiasm. On the contrary: the mood in the early days of August 1914 was muted, ambivalent and in some places fearful.
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‘Militarism’ was, moreover, a diffuse and internally fissured phenomenon. A distinction has to be drawn between the essentially aristocratic and conservative ethos of the Prussian officer corps and the very different identities and attachments involved in the ‘militarism of the little people’.
The legendary corporate arrogance of the Prussian officer caste and its disdain for civilian values and norms were essentially a distillation of the old spirit of East-Elbian noble corporate exclusiveness admixed with the defensiveness and paranoia of a social group determined not to relinquish its traditional pre-eminence. By contrast, the ethos of many veterans’ clubs was plebeian and egalitarian. A study of soldiers from the annexed Prussian provinces of Hessen-Nassau who joined military clubs over the period 1871–1914 has shown that many of these were landless rural labourers, craftsmen and poor smallholders. They did not join out of enthusiasm for military service, but because membership provided a way of asserting their value, status and entitlements
vis-à-vis
the self-sufficient large-holding peasants who dominated their communities. Membership of the veterans’ club was thus a ‘vehicle of participation’. Viewed ‘from below’, what mattered about the military was not the imposition of deference
between
ranks, but the equality among men who served together.
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It was, in any case, the German navy, rather than the Prussian army, that captured popular enthusiasm for German national aggrandizement. Through his promotion of a massive naval construction programme from the late 1890s, Kaiser William II made his bid to establish himself as a genuinely national and German imperial ruler. The German naval programme soon attracted huge public support. By 1914, the German Fleet Association (
Deutscher Flottenverein
) counted over 1 million members, the great majority of them middle and lower-middle class. The navy was perceived as a genuinely national service, free of particularist territorial ties, with a relatively meritocratic approach to recruitment and promotions. The wave of technological innovations that transformed fleet-building around the turn of the century also attracted interest; ships were exciting because they were at the cutting-edge of what German science and industry could achieve. The fleet also carried the promise of a more expansive German global policy under the banner of
Weltpolitik
.

The army, by contrast, bore the burden of its association with the particularist power structure of Prussia. The most radical popular militarist organization of the pre-war years, the Defence Club (
Wehrverein
), whose membership numbered around 100,000 by the summer of 1914, was actually highly critical of the ‘conservative’ militarism of the Prussian elite, which they saw as reactionary, lethargic, narrow-minded and crippled by otiose class distinctions. They had a point: until 1913, parts
of the Prussian military command opposed army expansion on the grounds that this would dilute the aristocratic
esprit de corps
of the officer caste by flooding the upper ranks with middle-class aspirants.
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The failure to integrate authority over civilian and military affairs had been one of the defining flaws of the Prussian constitution of 1848–50. The 1848 revolutions, as we have seen, constitutionalized Prussian politics without demilitarizing the Prussian monarchy. This was a flaw that the new German Empire inherited from the old Prussian state. The question of control over military spending remained unresolved. The constitution of 1871 stipulated on one hand (art. 63) that ‘the Emperor determines the effective strength, the division and the arrangement of the contingents of the Reich army’, and on the other (art. 60) that ‘the effective strength of the army in peace will be determined by legislation of the Reichstag.’
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The indeterminacy of these arrangements gave rise to periodic conflicts between the executive and the legislature. Of the four Reichstag dissolutions decreed during the life of the Empire (1878, 1887, 1893, 1907), three occurred for reasons related to the control of military expenditure.
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The Prussian army remained a praetorian guard under the personal command of the king, largely shielded from parliamentary scrutiny. The executive organs of the German military in turn remained embedded in the sovereign institutions of the old Prussian state. There was, for example, no imperial minister of war, just a Prussian one with responsibility for imperial military affairs. The Prussian minister of war was appointed by the Emperor (in his capacity as King of Prussia) and swore an oath of loyalty to the Prussian, but not the imperial, constitution. He was responsible to the Kaiser in most matters, but answerable in budgetary questions to the Reichstag. Yet he appeared before this body not as Prussian minister of war (for this post was formally quite unconnected to the imperial legislature) but in his complementary role as a Prussian plenipotentiary to the Federal Council.

As for the organs that administered the army in peacetime and at war, these were completely independent from the structures of civil authority. The military cabinet, the body responsible for personnel decisions
(appointments and promotions), formally separated itself from the Prussian ministry of war in 1883, as did the Great General Staff, which was entrusted in the event of war with overall control of the operations of the field army.
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Both henceforth reported directly to the monarch himself. Rather than establishing authoritative organs of central military governance, William II further fragmented the command structure by creating, just a few weeks after his accession, a new military establishment known by the grandiloquent title ‘Headquarters of His Majesty the Kaiser and King’.
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He also stepped up the number of military and naval command posts that reported directly to the Emperor.
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This was all part of a conscious strategy to create an environment that would permit the untrammelled exercise of the monarchical command function.
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The Prussian-German military system thus remained a foreign body within the German constitution, institutionally sealed off from the organs of civil governance and ultimately responsible only to the Emperor himself, who came to be known from around 1900 in general parlance as the ‘supreme warlord’.
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The result was a perennial uncertainty about the demarcation between civil and military authority. This was Prussia’s most fateful legacy to the new Germany.