Too many historians have sought to “normalise” Wilhelmine Germany, ignoring the ideological and cultural pathologies an earlier generation were prepared to confront. Today -- July 28, the 100th anniversary of the Great War's eruption -- that combination of pious duty and conscienceless brutality should be kept very much in mind
Mesmerised by their teacher’s nationalistic eloquence, the high school students rose as one and marched off to enlist in the army as Germany declared war in August 1914. It was a pivotal scene in Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and was brilliantly realised in Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film version. Faces flushed with idealism, their eyes aglow with patriotic fervour, the entire class embraced the war and the trials and triumphs that it promised.
Such students were inspired by the “Germanic Ideology”, promoted through the universities, schools and numerous youth groups, and pervasive across German society, as Hans Kohn showed in The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (1960).
Regrettably, more recent discussions of the Great War have tended to ignore the central role played by this ideology and the earlier scholarship that explored it. They overlook the powerful grip it had on the German people and the continuity that existed between it and Nazi ideology, and they avoid facing the dreadful implications for the world if a Germany possessed by that ideology had prevailed in the war. Instead, such histories have tended towards anachronism, projecting backwards into the past an image of the Second Reich not illuminated by the barbarism of the Third Reich, but one informed by the apparent stability and moderation of contemporary Germany. They tend to view the war on the Western Front as a conflict between comparable regimes, and not an epoch-defining struggle between political systems and underlying cultures that were fundamentally divergent and incompatible. Ironically, this was the view of the conflict that was eagerly embraced by proponents of the Germanic Ideology themselves, who extolled the fundamentally different path down which a victorious Germany would take the world.
Long before Hitler, long before Versailles, there appeared in Germany deep national frustrations, galling cultural discontents, which inspired nationalist fantasies and utopias which found ready assent among this German elite.
Central to the Germanic Ideology was a fierce belief in the uniqueness of the German people (the Völk), their pre-eminent role in the world, and their imperial destiny; combined with adoration of the state, contempt for liberalism, and deeply ingrained militarism. This was coupled with hatred and fear of the Slavic peoples, against whom, as Taylor points out in The Course of German History, “their weapons have varied [but] their method has always been the same—extermination”. This was accompanied by an anti-Semitism that conceived of the Jews as evil Untermenschen who were both the negation and nemesis of the Völk and destined to be eradicated.
Propelled by this ideology and a nationalist idealism that merged into sacrificial self-adulation, German students threw themselves into the war from its very beginning, many inspired by the declaration issued on the eve of the war by 3100 German professors that drew a direct connection between militarism, nationalism and scholarship:
the army educates [students] to sacrificial faithfulness … our belief is that salvation for the very culture of Europe depends on the victory that German militarism will gain: manly virtue, faithfulness, the will to sacrifice found in the united, free German people.
more
Beyond Good and Evil: Germany, 1914 — Quadrant Online
Mesmerised by their teacher’s nationalistic eloquence, the high school students rose as one and marched off to enlist in the army as Germany declared war in August 1914. It was a pivotal scene in Erich Maria Remarque’s war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and was brilliantly realised in Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film version. Faces flushed with idealism, their eyes aglow with patriotic fervour, the entire class embraced the war and the trials and triumphs that it promised.
Such students were inspired by the “Germanic Ideology”, promoted through the universities, schools and numerous youth groups, and pervasive across German society, as Hans Kohn showed in The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (1960).
Regrettably, more recent discussions of the Great War have tended to ignore the central role played by this ideology and the earlier scholarship that explored it. They overlook the powerful grip it had on the German people and the continuity that existed between it and Nazi ideology, and they avoid facing the dreadful implications for the world if a Germany possessed by that ideology had prevailed in the war. Instead, such histories have tended towards anachronism, projecting backwards into the past an image of the Second Reich not illuminated by the barbarism of the Third Reich, but one informed by the apparent stability and moderation of contemporary Germany. They tend to view the war on the Western Front as a conflict between comparable regimes, and not an epoch-defining struggle between political systems and underlying cultures that were fundamentally divergent and incompatible. Ironically, this was the view of the conflict that was eagerly embraced by proponents of the Germanic Ideology themselves, who extolled the fundamentally different path down which a victorious Germany would take the world.
Long before Hitler, long before Versailles, there appeared in Germany deep national frustrations, galling cultural discontents, which inspired nationalist fantasies and utopias which found ready assent among this German elite.
Central to the Germanic Ideology was a fierce belief in the uniqueness of the German people (the Völk), their pre-eminent role in the world, and their imperial destiny; combined with adoration of the state, contempt for liberalism, and deeply ingrained militarism. This was coupled with hatred and fear of the Slavic peoples, against whom, as Taylor points out in The Course of German History, “their weapons have varied [but] their method has always been the same—extermination”. This was accompanied by an anti-Semitism that conceived of the Jews as evil Untermenschen who were both the negation and nemesis of the Völk and destined to be eradicated.
Propelled by this ideology and a nationalist idealism that merged into sacrificial self-adulation, German students threw themselves into the war from its very beginning, many inspired by the declaration issued on the eve of the war by 3100 German professors that drew a direct connection between militarism, nationalism and scholarship:
the army educates [students] to sacrificial faithfulness … our belief is that salvation for the very culture of Europe depends on the victory that German militarism will gain: manly virtue, faithfulness, the will to sacrifice found in the united, free German people.
more
Beyond Good and Evil: Germany, 1914 — Quadrant Online