East Elbian landed elites and Germany's turn to fascism: The Sonderweg controversy revisited

European History Quarterly

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 209-240

  Baranowski, Shelley ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AKRON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 3242781642     PISSN: 02656914     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/026569149602600203     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. For an analysis and survey of the 'Bielefeld' historians which accounts for their differences as well as their similarities, see Roger Fletcher, 'Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and its Critics', German Studies Review, 7 (1984), 451-80. Although the term, 'Junker' is often applied to all large landowners (those who owned a minimum of 100 hectares), I will use it solely in relation to noble families who traced their origins to the German colonization during the Middle Ages. Otherwise I will opt for the more inclusive term, 'nobility', when discussing the Junkers together with those ennobled later, or the still more inclusive terms, 'agrarian elites' and 'estate owners' when bourgeois owners are included. Before the First World War, "East Elbia' referred to Brandenburg, Pomerania, East Prussia, West Prussia, Posen, Silesia and Prussian Saxony. The loss of most of Posen and West Prussia to Poland afterwards resulted in the creation of the Border Province, while Silesia was divided into Upper and Lower
2. The most concise example of the Bielefeld interpretation is that of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserrreich. 1871-1918 (Göttingen 1973). Its pre-war ancestry runs deep. See Heinz Reif, 'Der Adel in der modemen Sozialgeschichte', in Wolfgang Schieder, ed., Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland. Entwicklungen und Perspektiven in internationalen Zusammenhang, Vol. 4 (Göttingen 1987), 44-5
3. See especially David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century' Germany (Oxford and New York 1984), and the Special Issue, 'German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice, Techniques', Central European History, 22, 3/4 (1989)
4. Consult Thomas Childers, 'The Social Language of Politics in Germany: The Sociology of Political Discourse in the Weimar Republic', American Historical Review, 95, 2 (1990), 331-58, and Detlev J.K. Peukert's benchmark work, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main 1987)
5. See Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd edn (London and New York 1993), 180-96, as well as Jane Caplan, 'Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians', and Peter Jelevich, 'Contemporary Literary Theory: From Deconstruction Back to History', both in Central European History, 22, 3/4 (1989), 260-78 and 360-80. Jürgen Kocka, 'German Identity and Historical Comparison: After the Historikerstreit', in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past. Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston 1990), 279-93, raises the same question as to why Fascism, but focuses his attention on the German bureaucratic tradition
6. See Shelley Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism and Nazism in the Weimar Republic (New York and Oxford 1995)
7. As Wehler points out in Europäischer Adel 1750-1950, ed. H.-U. Wehler (Göttingen 1990), 9-18, the German nobilities have been especially underresearched. Hans Rosenberg's seminal article, 'Die Pseudodemokratisierung der Rittergutsbesitzerklasse', in Machteliten und Wirtschaftskonjunkturen: Studien zur neueren deutschen Sozial-und Wirschaftsgeschichte, ed. Hans Rosenberg (Göttingen 1978), 83-101, which spawned so many post-war scholarly assumptions about East Elbian estate owners, was a prelude to a never-completed larger study
8. William W. Hagen, 'Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg: The Thirty Years' War, The Destabilization of Serfdom, and the Rise of Absolutism', American Historical Review, 94, 2 (1989), 334. For a discussion of the composition of middle-class estate owners, see Robert Berdahl, The Politics of the Prussian Nobility. The Development of a Conservative Ideology 1770-1848 (Princeton 1988), 278
9. See Ilona Buchsteiner's argument for Pomerania, 'Grossgrundbesitz in Pommern zwischen 1871 und 1914. Soziale und ökonomische Veränderungen als Ausdruck der Integration des Adels in die bürgerliche Gesellschaft', Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 37 (1989), 329-36. On the modernization of estate agriculture see J.A. Perkins, 'The Agricultural Revolution in Germany, 1815-1914', Journal of European Economic History, 10 (1981), 71-118, and Manfred Jatzlauk, 'Agrarstatistische Untersuchungen über die Entwicklung der landwirtschaftlichen Grossbetriebe in Deutschland zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen', Wissenschaftlicher Zeitschrift Wilhelm Pieck Universität Rostock, 38, 7/8 (1989), 36-42
10. This becomes clear in the memoirs of Junker offspring. See Klaus von Bismarck, Aufbruch aus Pommern. Erinnerungen und Perspektiven (Munich and Zurich 1993), 42-3, 75-83
11. Marion, Countess Donhoff, Before the Storm. Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia, trans. Jean Steinberg (New York 1990), 65-70
12. and Christian Graf von Krockow, Die Reise nach Pommern. Bericht aus einem verschweigenen Land (Stuttgart 1985), 30-5, 73-9
13. See Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540-1880 (Oxford and New York 1986), 130-63
14. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society. England since 1880 (London and New York 1989), 62-78
15. Reinhold Brunner, 'Landadliger Alltag und primäre Sozialisation in Ostelbien am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts', Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 39, 10 (1991), 995-1011
16. Dolores L. Augustine, Patricians and Parvenus. Wealth and High Society in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford and Providence 1994)
17. F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society. A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830-1900 (Cambridge, MA 1988), 159-64
18. Klaus Hess, Junker und bürgerliche Grossgrundbesitzer im Kaiserreich. Landwirtschaftlicher Grossbetrieb, Grossgrundbesitz und Familienfideikomisse in Preussen (1866/71-1914) (Stuttgart 1990), 82
19. See Henning von Treskow, 'Adel in Preussen: Anpassung und Kontinuität einer Familie 1800-1918', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 17, 3 (1991), 34-69. My own research agrees with his findings
20. Liselotte Schwiers, Das Parodies liegt in Pommern (Munich 1989), 74
21. See also Brunner, 'Landadliger Alltag' and Werner Mosse, 'Adel und Bürgertum im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine vergleichenden Betrachtung', in Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, Vol. 2 (Munich 1988), 286
22. This is the insight of Hanna Schissler, 'Die Junker. Zur Sozialgeschichtliche und historische Bedeutung der agrarische Elite in Preussen', in H.-J. Puhle and H.-U. Wehler, eds, Preussen in Ruckblick, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Sonderheft 6(Göttingen 1980), 89-122
23. See Shearer Davis Bowman's Masters and Lords. Mid-19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (Oxford and New York 1993)
24. See William Carr, The Origins of the Wars of German Unification (London and New York 1991), 60-1
25. Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, Vol. 1, The Period of Unification, 1815-1871 (Princeton 1991), 53-65
26. Lothar Gall, Bismarck. The White Revolutionary, Vol. 1, trans. J.A. Underwood (London, Boston and Sydney 1986), 47
27. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, 'Voter, Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany', American Historical Review, 98, 5 (1993), 1448-74
28. See also Stanley Suval, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill and London 1985)
29. James N. Retallack's summary of recent trends in Wilhelmine scholarship, 'Wilhelmine Germany', in Gordon Martel, ed., Modern Germany Considered, 1870-1945 (London and New York 1992), 33-53
30. See especially David Blackbourn's contribution to Peculiarities of German History, as well as George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social. The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton 1993), 92-4
31. James N. Retallack, 'The Road to Philippi: The Conservative Party and Bethmann Hollweg's "Politics of the Diagonal" ', in Larry Eugene Jones and James N. Retallack, eds, Between Reform, Reaction and Resistance. Studies in the History of German Conservatism, 1789-1945 (Providence and Oxford 1993), 261-98
32. Volker R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, 2nd edn. (New York 1993), 85-90, 165-8
33. See Dominic L. Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe 1815-1914 (New York 1992), 201-2
34. Francis L. Carsten,'Der preussische Adel und seine Stellung in Staat und Gesellschaft bis 1945', in H.-U. Wehler, ed., Europäischer Adel 1750-1950 (Göttingen 1990), 112-25, esp. 123
35. Michael Geyer, "The Past as Future: The German Officer Corps as Profession', in Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds, German Professions 1800-1950 (New York and Oxford 1990), 183-212
36. See Avner Offer, The First World War. An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford 1989), 331-4
37. J.M. Winter, 'Some Paradoxes of the First World War', in The Upheaval of War. Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914-1918 (Cambridge 1988), 27-32, 37-40
38. The supposedly deleterious effects of the tariff can be traced primarily to Alexander Gerschenkron's influential work, first published in 1943, Bread and Democracy in Germany, reprinted with a new foreword by Charles S. Maier (Ithaca and London 1989)
39. The contrast between pre-war and post-war emerges as a powerful leitmotif in Richard Bessel's Germany after the First World War (Oxford 1993). The negative perceptions of Weimar arising from many quarters resulted from the Republic's failure to reproduce the relative prosperity of Wilhelmine Germany
40. See especially Heinrich Becker, Handlunggspielräume der Agrarpolitik in Weimarer Republik zwischen 1923 und 1929 (Stuttgart 1990), 95-131
41. Martin Schumacher, Land und Politik. Eine Untersuchung über politische Parteien und agrarische Interessen 1914-1923 (Düsseldorf 1978), 189-235
42. The sheer diversity of the Nazi electorate is the main conclusion arising from Jürgen Falter's work, Hitlers Wähler (Munich 1991)
43. For the most detailed recent analysis of the Osthilfe program and its scandalous proportions, see Gerhard Schulz, Von Brüning to Hitler. Der Wandel des politischen Systems in Deutschland 1930-1933 (Berlin and New York 1992), 24-42, 209-23, 532-6, 591-9, 800-4
44. See Seymour Becker's, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (Dekalb 1985), esp. 108-29
45. Becker questions the argument of Roberta Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order. Gentry and Government (Princeton 1982), who sees a massive return to the land by the nobility after emancipation
46. Consult in particular David Higgs, Nobles in Nineteenth Century France. The Practice of Inegalitarianism (Baltimore and London 1987)
47. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime. Europe to the Great War (New York 1981)
48. Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism 1789-1914 (London and New York 1989)
49. and William D. Irvine, The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered. Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France (New York and Oxford 1989)
50. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven and London 1990), 18-19
51. W.A. Armstrong, 'The Countryside', in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, Vol. 1, Regions and Communities (Cambridge 1990), 113-15. Agriculture's share of the national income was only 6 percent by the turn of the century
52. Peter Cain, 'Political Economy in Edwardian England: The Tariff Reform Controversy', in Alan O'Day, ed., The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability 1900-1914 (London and Basingstoke 1979), 35-59
53. and Andrew Adonis, Making Aristocracy Work. The Peerage and the Political System in Britain 1884-1914 (Oxford 1993), 118-19
54. For the erosion of the Junkers' patrimonial privileges, see Robert Berdahl, 'Conservative Politics and Aristocratic Landowners in Bismarckian Germany', Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972), 1-20
55. Recent works that stress the restiveness of the German peasantry include Richard J. Evans and W.R. Lee, eds, The German Peasantry. Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (New York 1986)
56. Robert G. Moeller, German Peasants and Agrarian Politics 1914-1924. The Rhineland and Westphalia (Chapel Hill and London 1986)
57. Jonathan Osmond, Rural Protest in the Weimar Republic. The Free Peasantry in the Rhineland and Bavaria (New York 1993)
58. The literature on the strike in Pomerania is substantial. See especially, Flemming, 'Die Bewaffnung des "Landvolks". Ländliche Schutzwehre und agrarischer Konservatismus in der Anfangsphase der Weimarer Republik', Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 2 (1979), 7-29
59. 'Landarbeiter zwischen Gewerkschaften und "Werkgemeinschaft"', Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 14 (1974), 351-418
60. Eric D. Kohler, 'Revolutionary Pomerania, 1919-20. A Study in Majority Socialist Agricultural Policy and Civil-Military Relations', Central European History, 9 (1976), 250-93
61. The importance of state-backed repression for landed elites has been stressed recently by Ralph Gibson and Martin Blinkhorn, eds, Landownership and Power in Modern Europe (London 1991), 4-8
62. For more on the strike in Pomerania, especially the Rural League's tactics in breaking it, see Jens Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie. Ländliche Gesellschaft, Agrarverbände und Staat 1890-1925 (Bonn 1978), 217 ff, 277-97
63. Bogdan Dopierala, Ekonomiczne i Demograficzne Problemy Pomorza zachodniego w świetle Niemieckich materialów źrodlowych z lat 1926-1932 (Poznań 1959), 30-1
64. For some helpful comparative observations that stress particularly strongly the Prussian nobility's ties to the land, see Marc Raeff, "The Russian Nobility in the Eighteenth and Ninteenth Centuries: Trends and Comparisons', in Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch, eds, The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe (New Haven 1983), 99-121
65. For the development of German anti-Polish policy to the First World War, see William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles and Jews. The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago 1980)
66. and G.R. Searle, 'Critics of Edwardian Society - The Case of the Radical Right', in The Edwardian Age, 79-96
67. M.L. Bush, The English Aristocracy. A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester 1984), 157-8
68. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House. A Social and Architectural History (New Haven and London 1980), esp. 267
69. to conclusion. F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London and Toronto 1963), 184-211, points out that falling landed incomes weakened mechanisms that preserved deference
70. See especially Dan S. White, The Splintered Party. National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich, 1867-1918 (Cambridge, MA 1976)
71. Robert G. Moeller, 'The Kaiserreich Recast? Continuity and Change in Modern German History', Journal of Social History, 17 (1984), 655-83
72. For the effect of agrarian interest politics on the German Conservative Party, see James N. Retallack, Notables of the Right. The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876-1918 (Boston, London and Sydney 1988)
73. For Hugenberg and the disintegration of the DNVP, see Heidrun Holzbach, Das 'System Hugenberg.' Die Organisation bürgerlicher Sammlungspolitik vor dem Aufstieg der NSDAP (Stuttgart 1981)
74. Attila Chanady, 'The Disintegration of the German National People's Party 1914-1929', Journal of Modern History, 39, 1 (1967), 65-91
75. and Andreas Grenzer, 'Der russische Adel. Interessenvertretung und politische artikulation in den "Zemstva" des späten Zarenreiches', Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 42, 5 (1994), 399-414
76. Anthony L. Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and Italian Fascism. The Province of Bologna 1901-1926 (Princeton 1982) and 'The Long Good-Bye. The Landed Aristocracy in North-Western Italy, 1880-1930', European History Quarterly, 23, 3(1993), 323-58
77. For more on this, see Baranowski, Sanctity of Rural Life, Chap. 6
78. This is the main argument of Larry Eugene Jones, '"The Greatest Stupidity of My Life": Alfred Hugenberg and the Formation of the Hitler Cabinet, January 1933', Journal of Contemporary History, 27 (1992), 63-87
79. Evidence of pressure on estate employees is available in files 82 and 83, Rep. 65c, Regierung Stralsund, Vorpommerscher Landesarchiv, Greifswald. Moderate conservatism, as expressed in such splinter parties as the CNBLP, made little headway in the Prussian east. See Dieter Gessner, '"Grüne Front" oder "Harzburg Front". Der Reichslandbund in der letzten Phase der Weimarer Republik - Zwischen Wirtschaftlicher Interessenpolitik und Nationalistischen Revisionsanspruch', Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 29 (1981), 110-23
80. Larry Eugene Jones, 'Crisis and Realignment: Agrarian Splinter Parties in the Late Weimar Republic', in Robert G. Moeller, ed., Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany. Recent Studies in Agricultural History (Boston, London and Sydney 1986), 198-232
81. See Cardoza, Agrarian Elites and the Rise of Italian Fascism, 245-386
82. Gliederung der NSDAP in Pommern in Bereiche der Regierungsbezirke Stettin und Stralsund, autumn 1930, Vorpommerscher Landesarchiv, Rep. 65c, no. 978
83. The classic formulation of this position is T.W. Mason's 'The Primacy of Politics - Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany', in Henry A. Turner, Jr., ed., Nazism and the Third Reich (New York 1972), 175-200
84. Gustavo Corni, 'Die Agrarpolitik des Faschismus. Ein Vergleich zwischen Deutschland und Italien', Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 17 (1988), 391-423
85. and Wolfgang Schieder, 'Das Deutschland Hitlers und des Italien Mussolinis. Zum Problem faschistischer Regimebildung', in Gerhard Schulz, ed., Die Grosse Krise der Dreissiger Jahre. Vom Niedergang der Weltwirtschaft zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Göttingen 1985)
86. Corni, Hitler and the Peasants, 132-5, and Hermann Schmidt and Georg Blohm, Die Landwirtschaft von Ostpreussen und Pommern 1914/18-1939 (Marburg 1978), 86
87. Otto Busch, Militärsystem und Sozialleben im alien Preussen 1713-1807. Die Anfänge der sozialen Militarisierung der preussisch-deutschen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main 1962), and Alf Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815-1850, trans. Pete Burgess (Cambridge and New York 1989), are particularly suggestive in this regard. For a thoughtful and provocative essay that deals with the modern, technocratic horror of the Nazi state (and one that disagrees with some of the assumptions in the above two works), see Michael Geyer, 'The Stigma of Violence, Nationalism, and War in Twentieth-Century Germany', German Studies Review, (Winter 1992), 75-100. Even proponents of the embourgeoisement of Germany after unification acknowledge the importance of the army. See Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner: Das DueII in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Munich 1991)
88. Corni, Hitler and the Peasants, 184-219, 245-64
89. For the tensions between radical nationalism and the traditional right, see Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right. Radical Nationalism after Bismarck (New Haven and London 1980), and Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German. A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886-1914 (Boston, London and Sydney 1984)
90. For the relationship between agrarian elites and Nazi expansionism, see Hans-Erich Volkmann, 'Deutsche Agrarelite auf Revisions-und Expansionskurs', in Martin Broszat and Klaus Schwabe, eds, Die deutsche Eliten und der Weg in der Zweiten Weltkrieg, (Munich 1989), 334-88, and Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York and Oxford, 1986), 231-58
91. See Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York 1992), and Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), esp. 57, 489. The debate as to the timing of the Final Solution has heated up significantly since the publication of Arno J. Mayer's Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution' in History (New York 1988). See in particular Christopher Browning's angry response, 'The Holocaust as By-product? A Critique of Arno Mayer', in Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide. Essays on the Launching of the Final Solution (Cambridge and New York 1992), 77-85
92. Tim Mason's epilogue to Jane Caplan, ed., and John Broadwin, trans, Social Policy in the Third Reich. The Working Class and the 'National Community', (Providence and Oxford 1993), 275-369, concedes the failure of class analysis in explaining Nazi violence. The uniqueness of Nazism is also the conclusion of Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State. Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge and New York 1991), 304-7
93. In fact, Simon Schama's Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York 1989) suggests that the revolution in France inhibited modernity instead of fostering it. On the Sonderweg and national differences, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge 1988). For an essay that discards the Sonderweg paradigm while arguing the peculiar fragility of national identity in Central Europe, see Michael Geyer, 'Historical Fictions of Autonomy and the Europeanization of National History', Central European History, 22, 34 (1989), 316-42
94. See David Clay Large's remarks about Britain during the 'Red Ellen' Wilkinson episode in Between Two Fires. Europe's Path in the 1930s (New York 1990), 180-222