The Attack on Belgium and the Defence of “German Freedom”: German Historians and their Involvement in a War of Culture since Aug

The Attack on Belgium and the Defence

 

of “German Freedom”: German Historians

 

and their Involvement in a War of Culture

 

since August 1914

 

Christoph Cornelissen

 

Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, the Heidelberg medievalist Karl Hampe

entered a note in his diary about the German violation of Belgium’s political neutrality.

In the emergency of the German Reich at that moment –according to Hampe’s comment

on the 5th of August– only military utility should count, whereas moral considerations

should come second as they were “only of minor importance”1. To be sure, the historian

Hampe should not be ranked equal to the many German hotheads who began, at an

early stage of the war, to adumbrate far-reaching visions for the future of a Belgian state

under German hegemony. He did not belong either to the coterie of German academics,

scientists or experts who regarded the outbreak of war as a welcome opportunity for plundering cultural assets in Belgium. This even included plans, as the historian Christoph

Roolf demonstrated it in 2004, for the transportation of dinosaur skeletons from the small

town of Bernissart to German natural history museum2.

However, all of this must be seen as part of far wider reaching plans for the war pillage

of documents, objects of art and other material gains by the German occupants since

August 1914. In comparison to these sweeping activities Hampe’s comments seem to

be much more restrained, though he did not either really ponder much about the fate

of the occupied country as various entries in his diary testify. Furthermore, it seems that

 

1. Hampe 2007, p. 101.

2. Roolf 2005.

 

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his research on Belgian and Dutch history was soon met with a very positive echo by

leading representatives of the military General-Government (Generalgouvernement) in

Brussels. Therefore, he was officially invited to continue his studies in Belgian archives

in the autumn of 1915. That led him to a memorandum on “Belgium and Holland”

and a more or less similar book version on Belgiens Vergangenheit und Gegenwart later the

same year3. While he was working on these texts, Hampe was also conceded some free

time which he used for excursions to Anvers, Dinant, Namur and Louvain. Although the

material destruction caused by the German conquest did not elude his attention, he tried

to justify it indirectly by saying that considerable improvements had taken place since then.

To prove this point to himself, he referred to the reconstruction of houses which had been

organised by the German military government. He also stated quite frankly that many

habitations had surprisingly survived the destruction of war. When he commented on the

developments in Louvain, he briskly observed that the loss of the library building was not

a real loss “due to reasons of taste” (aus geschmacklichen Gründen), leaving out not only

the fact that German soldiers had set ablaze the priceless cultural heritage of this library,

but also committed massive war crimes in the city as well as in other parts of Belgium4.

The fact that the historian Karl Hampe glossed over these problems in his diary must be

seen against a general denial of many German intellectuals, academics and politicians who

rapidly formed a united front when faced with foreign reproaches accusing the German

military of a serious violation of both international and martial law. The most famous

or rather notorious instance of such an intervention became known as early as on the 4th October of 1914, when ninety-three prominent German scholars and artists published

an appeal “To the world of culture” (An die Kulturwelt!)5. In six repetitively constructed

passages, each of which begins by saying “It is not true…” (Es ist nicht wahr…), the

counter-signing academics and artists denied all foreign reproaches according to which

Germany should be blamed both for triggering the war and having committed war crimes in

Belgium. In addition they went on to say that: “It is not true that our troops acted brutally

against Löwen. And it is not true that our warfare ignored the rules of international law”6.

Apparently, the foreign attacks against the German “cultural barbarians” (Kulturbarbaren)

weighed heavily on many people’s minds. The appeal was followed up by a plethora of

official, semi-official and academic publications, all of which tried to demonstrate the

same arguments.

Now, it could be easy to argue that all of this was the sorry consequence of war

propaganda, possibly also of an overdose of nationalistic postures in times of war or,

 

3. Hampe 1915a.

4. Hampe 2007, p. 30.

5. Ungern-Sternberg von 1996.

6. Ibid., p. 144.

 

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perhaps, of the attempt by academics and intellectuals who tried to underline their own

importance for the national war effort. Although there may be some truth in this, I will

argue that these reasons cannot be regarded as a sufficient explanation for what happened in

the wider “war of culture” which evolved after August 1914 and which should be regarded

as an integral part of the “people’s war” –the Volkskrieg as it was termed in Germany. One

of the major challenges in this “war of the minds” (Krieg der Geister) –the term actually

dates back to a book title from Hermann Kellermann in 19157– was constituted by the fact

that basically nobody could really define what Germany was fighting for, except for its own

preservation and the maintenance of its position as a leading power in Europe. In contrast

to this situation, England and France could mobilize the universal ideas of equality and

freedom right from the beginning of the war, that is to say the ideas of 1789. And they

could claim to fight for democracy, although they had to remain rather silent regarding the

allied Tsar of Russia. The Germans, however, could not simply distance themselves from

these universal values. But as their constitution and political culture was certainly neither

democratic nor parliamentarian in a western sense, many academics and intellectuals tried

to point a way out of this impasse by putting a high emphasis on Germany’s singularity

and its specific understanding of political freedom. Contemporaries in Germany often also

spoke of the ideas of 1914, which they positioned against the ideas of 17898.

Thus the talk of a “deutsche Freiheit” (German freedom) turned into something like a topos

during the war. It even moulded into some kind of propaganda formulae which supposedly

helped to legitimate the attack on Belgium, on France and on their co-belligerents9. The idea of a specific “German freedom” was partly grounded on philosophical or more general

ethical considerations, many of which represented a combination of Fichte’s moralism and

the pronounced anti-western attitudes of the late xixth and early xxth centuries in German

political culture. But it was also based to a great extent on historical interpretations. All of

these ranked the semi-autocratic political culture of Imperial Germany as a case of its own,

which could claim the support from all strata of the German society. Thus, for example,

the conservative-liberal-minded historian Friedrich Meinecke from Freiburg argued in

August 1914 that the Germans as a chosen “people of culture” (Kulturvolk) had gone to

war in order to defend their specific understanding of political freedom10. Many more

were to join him along the same line of argument. This included, for example, one of

the few German historians in favour of the Social Democratic Party, Gustav Mayer, who

argued that defending Germany’s course meant to pursue higher cultural ideals. In his eyes,

the war was led by Germany to ascertain the highest values of humankind –so he put in

 

7. Kellermann 1915.

8. Ungern-Sternberg von 2014.

9. Mommsen 1992. For more recent discussions on this topic, see Flasch 2000; Bruendel 2014. 10. Meinecke 1958.

 

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October 1914. He even regarded the war as a tribute to the “eternal will of history”11. The

Berlin historian Friedrich Thimme was to second him in a similar way several years later,

in May 1917. His letter to Meinecke merits quotation as it explicitly defined the aim of

defending German liberty and also because it neatly described the role Thimme assigned

to the profession of historians during the war12:

I would like it very much if we German historians could come together to

stage a powerful appeal in favour of defending the “German liberty”. Basically,

all of us, perhaps with the exception of the hapless Dietrich Schäfer, are of the

same opinion as to the aims of the war and peace, but also on home affairs.

[…] We historians in particular, who administer the heritage of Bismarck and

Treitschke, should be at the front line of both domestic and foreign politics.

 

It is interesting to note the fact that so many leading German historians voluntarily took

part in explaining their country’s war effort against “a world of enemies”13. And it is also

interesting to realise that this attempt united historians over the whole political spectrum

and from all confessions. All of them readily sided with their government when it came

to explain the German attack on Belgium and also when denying the Belgian atrocities

committed by the German army. What we witness in this connection can be understood

as the result of a general moralisation of warfare which, as the German theologian Ernst

Troeltsch argued in 1915, had become part and parcel of a modern people’s war. In times

of mass politics, so Troeltsch argued further, political leaders had to couch the national war

effort in terms of a “war of defence”. Therefore, both politicians and academics represented

the war as a just cause to defend Germany’s political existence and also to defend the

specific moral fibre of its political culture14.

In my view, this argument carries some weight because it underlines the importance of

moral standpoints and thus a phenomenon which has remained to this day a corollary of

modern warfare. If democracies attempt to win a war, they do not only have to win battles

but they also need to gain the higher moral ground over their adversaries. The argument

in itself was, to be sure, not new, neither in 1914 nor at the end of the First World War.

But after August 1914, this challenge propelled many of the German historians into

becoming fervent supporters of their country’s cause. This proved quite a challenging task as Germany could not pretend to lead a war in the defence of universally acclaimed ideals.

Against this background, the German government engineered several broad publicity

campaigns to legitimise the attack on Belgium and at the same time to defend what is

 

11. Niedhart 2009.

12. Thimme 1994, p. 157.

13. Wilhelm, Walter 1914.

14. Quoted by Lübbe 1963, p. 228.

 

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understood under the concept of “German freedom”. These publicity campaigns were

meant to convince both the public at home and the inhabitants of the neutral states of

the just cause on the German side. However, this mobilization went, as I will argue, hand

in hand with a broad self-mobilization of German intellectuals and academics, many of

whom were renowned or less well-known historians.

In the following I would like to probe deeper into this phenomenon by concentrating

on a selected number of public interventions by German historians during the war. To this

purpose I will, firstly, try to give a rough sketch of the professional group of historians and

its adherence to the idea of a German freedom. Secondly, I will analyse the relationship

between mobilization and self-mobilization which ensured a wide circulation of the

concept of German freedom. Thirdly, I will look a bit closer at some of the long-term

consequences for the German historiography on the First World War. In all these passages,

I will try to highlight the great importance of the German attack on Belgium as this

weighed heavily on all moral and political debates since the outbreak of the war, but I will

not confine myself to it. The historians’ debate over Belgium needs to be integrated into

the wider “war of culture” that took place between 1914 and 1918. It is only then that we

can understand its wider implications.

 

A BRIEF GROUP PROFILE OF GERMAN HISTORIANS DURING

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE IDEA OF A “GERMAN FREEDOM”

 

Although it has been constantly repeated that the age of the mass university had already

begun at the turn of the xixth to the xxth centuries, this was, in quantitative terms, completely

different to what we understand under the expression today. At the outbreak of the First

World War, there were only eighty-six established chairs of history in Imperial Germany,

seventy-six of which formed part of a university department. This situation ensured that a few

opinion leaders usually sufficed to exert a relatively strong influence over their “guildsmen”.

During the war years, this concerns, above all, Hans Delbrück, Friedrich Meinecke and

Hermann Oncken, to mention only some of the most renowned ones. The three of them

represented figureheads of a liberal-conservative wing in German historiography, while

Dietrich Schäfer, Max Lenz and Georg von Below turned into historiographical rabble-

rousers during the war, favouring far-reaching war aims and a punitive peace against

Germany’s enemies. Together with numerous other colleagues, to whom we should add

Karl Hampe as a specialist on Belgian history, they took part in massive publicity campaigns

to legitimate the German war effort and also concrete military actions on the ground15.

 

15. Cornelissen 1996.

 

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But, perhaps, it is helpful to extend the borders of this group to better understand some

of the motives which activated its members. This attempt should include some of the less

well-known exponents of the field, such as the archivist Paul Richter from the state archive

in Wetzlar, who came to occupied Belgium in 1915 in order to carry out a comprehensive

search of German historical documents. What his motives were, he made clear in a letter

to the Deputy-Director of the state archives in Berlin, Paul Bailleu, written in Anvers in

July 1916: “It would be a real pity [as Richter formulated at that time] if one does not

benefit from the present circumstances not only to gain the expected material values, but

also idealistic ones”16. Obviously, Richter was thinking of important archival documents,

of which the Germans should get hold of in order to relocate them into archives under

German rule. This chimed in with one of the main war aims put forward by numerous

directors of German museums, libraries and also archives who, at an early stage of the war,

already called upon their government to ensure the restitution of the pillages during the

Napoleonic Wars. This campaign concerned objects of art, historical manuscripts, books

and archival documents in Belgium, France and Russia17. At times this led to far-reaching

claims, as can be shown with regard to Friedrich-Wilhelm Bissing, the son of the General-

Governor in Brussels, Moritz von Bissing. Friedrich-Wilhelm Bissing was an egyptologist

at the University of Berlin and he may be ranked as quite an ominous figure in this context.

In September 1914, Friedrich-Wilhelm Bissing wrote several revealing letters to Wilhelm

von Bode, the General-Director of the Imperial Museum in Berlin, in which he underlined

the importance of a transfer of significant objects of art from Belgium to Germany: “Yes, the complete Gent Altar needs to go to Berlin, including the missing part of the Dirk

Bouts-Altar from Löwen. Perhaps, at a later stage, parts from Munich can be added to it

in exchange for a Bavarian image or sculpture or even a good Rembrandt”18. Obviously,

the war wet the experts’ appetite for more, which went along with rather dire comments

on the Belgian side. Thus Friedrich-Wilhelm Bissing commented in another letter to Bode

(the 14th of September 1914)19:

 

We must get hold of the Gent Altar at all cost; this is the price for saving the

city hall in Löwen! I also do not believe that the Americans will hinder us to

act this way. On the whole things in Belgium look rather gloomy. We may

even reach the point when we have to destroy Brussels [zusammenschiessen].

But that would not really matter. As far as I have come to know Belgium and

the Belgians, they are a rather awful sort.

 

16. This letter was passed on to me by Christoph Roolf. 17. Roolf 2009.

18. This letter was passed on to me by Christoph Roolf. 19. Roolf 2009.

 

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To be sure, Bissing was not an exemption but rather a typical representative of many

other German academics, scientists or experts from various fields who came to Belgium,

Northern France and Paris in order to draw up long lists of claims for the restitution of the

objects mentioned. In their eyes, the hunt for material objects was a good basis for a future

peace treaty or, alternatively, it might be regarded as a security or bartering object in order

to enforce Germany’s will onto Belgium and France. This position however was constantly

vetoed by the German Foreign Ministry, which partly explains why the self-mobilization of

so many scientists and academics, who addressed their political or military superiors with

long memoranda, went unnoticed for a very long time after the war. What is important

in our context is the observation that to many academics (including historians) the war

represented a phase of unprecedented opportunities. They were suddenly confronted with

a very wide scope of action which, obviously, they were prepared to turn to Germany’s

advantage.

In a clear contrast to these very wide reaching aims by numerous experts, many of

whom came to Belgium to carry out covert or even secret groundwork as advisors to the

military, most of the leading historians literally worked in the background. That might

partly explain their more reserved interventions compared to what the front-line experts

said. But the result can also be understood as the consequence of their social background

and professional training. The traditional avenues of school and university education

ensured that German historians regarded themselves as high priests of a school of thought

which strove to demonstrate a sort of positive historical continuity for their own country.

Methodologically speaking, many of them adhered to the historicist school with strong

neo-Rankean leanings and, politically, most of them belonged to the camp of a broad spectrum of governmentalism. A majority of them also regarded themselves as a public

authority whose task was to shape public opinion. To achieve this, they tried to kindle

a fairly uncritical identification of the public with its state and the nation. It seems that

the historians’ claim to public leadership was relatively successful because it formed part

of a wider academic culture or an intellectual field, as Fritz Ringer has termed it20. Thus

there was, both before and after 1914, a network of inter-related and explicit beliefs about

academic practices of teaching, learning and research, but also about the social significance

of these practices which guided historiographical output during the war years.

This means that German historians could expect a positive echo when they highlighted

the uniqueness of their own particular state and its political culture. When it came to

more concrete plans and controversial questions during the war, a majority of them were

rapidly prepared to defend a territorial expansion of the German Reich. Simultaneously,

they continued to praise the specific German constitutional set-up as the expression of

a kind of German liberty which was, in their view, much more beneficial to the people

 

20. Ringer 1988, p. 97.

 

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than western liberalism, derided again and again as corrupt and plutocratic. An epitome

of this view may be found in a booklet by Hans Delbrück, then editor of the Preussische

Jahrbücher and professor at the university of Berlin, which first came out in 1913 under

the title Government and the People’s Will 21. According to Delbrück’s argument, the idea of

the sovereignty of the people merely represented a fictitious model. In contrast to the sham

respect of the people’s will in the countries of the West, as he saw it, the German system

ensured the effective combination of democratic representation with administrative rule.

At the same time, he postulated that the German model was able to ensure a much better

and adequate social security for the inhabitants than in Britain or in France.

These ideas were taken up by many of his colleagues during the war. They became

part and parcel of a constant battery of politico-historiographical arguments which were

directed repeatedly against wartime claims from foreign historians, according to which

German society was suffering from a rift between Prussian militarists and the ideals of a

humanistic culture. In this context it is interesting to note that although the war actually

activated more and more German historians to throw down their gauntlet against the

enemy, the range of their arguments remained comparatively stable. On the whole roughly

forty German historians came out with statements and publications during the war, which

may be regarded as a significant contribution to “the war of words”. But it seems that this

constant increase in public statements often did not really further the debate in intellectual

terms. Delbrück’s 1913 book remained more or less canonical. His colleagues ensured that

his ideas found a very wide circulation in countless publications.

But when more attention is paid to their speeches and published works, much more comes to the fore. We should not expect to meet with the kind of books written, for

example, by the sociologist Werner Sombart on Traders and Heroes which contained extreme

anti-English diatribes22. This was not exactly the style most German historians preferred,

although the majority of them were deeply convinced of the idea that Britain had willingly

unleashed the war to hold down Germany and its people. But in their publications most

German historians remained more restrained in their statements. Perhaps that was much

more effective than the open propaganda of the type of Sombart and his fellows produced.

We may indeed assume that this kind of “intellectual poison” administered by historians

was even more harmful in the final analysis, as it met a wide approval amongst the German

bourgeois reading public.

The Heidelberg historian Karl Hampe, already mentioned, may be a good case in point,

because he began at a very early stage to raise the question of Belgium’s future after the war.

Very much in line with many of his colleagues, he regarded the coexistence of the Flemish

and Walloons in a united Belgian state as “unnatural” and therefore pleaded in October

 

21. Delbrück 1914.

22. Sombart 1915.

 

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1914 for a “more healthy reconstruction” (23 October 1915)23. Between December 1914

and May 1915, Hampe worked on a historical survey of Belgium which mainly centred

on modern and contemporary history, while putting a great emphasis on its status as a

neutral power. It really did not take him long to conclude that Belgium had justly lost its

status as a neutral power due to the rapprochement with the Entente Powers. In his eyes,

the secret talks of 1906 and 1912 –the conversations anglo-belges– meant that Belgium

had given itself up politically to the English and culturally to the French. The fate of the

country, which had solely sought to fortify itself to the East, could only be understood as

a kind of “antique tragedy”, as Hampe concluded24.

Many of Hampe’s historical arguments remained rather vague. They did not reach out

as far as the ones produced by many experts over the future fate of Belgium. But it cannot

be overlooked that by and by the historians also began to be carried away by their country’s

desperate military situation. Thus Hermann Oncken, in a speech held in October 1914 in

Heidelberg, went to great lengths to explain the German war aims in Belgium. Although

he pleaded against those who called for a complete annexation of Belgium, he made clear

that it would be useful to hand the occupied territories as a kind of security, which would

then allow to dictate the conditions of a future peace treaty to England25. Erich Marcks,

Willy Andreas or Gustav Mayer argued in a similarly equivocal way in their statements,

because on the one hand they favoured leaving the Belgians free to administer their internal

affairs, while on the other hand they favoured a close control of their foreign policy in

order to avoid a new rapprochement with England or France. Another central question consisted of the status of the Flemish in Belgium26. Many German historians proved to be

adherents to romantic ideas of a considerable ethnical vicinity between the Flemish and

the German “tribes”. Be it the national economist Gerhard von Schulze-Gaevernitz or the

staunch conservative historian Georg von Below, they all identified a powerful Flemish

movement which deserved the political support of Imperial Germany in order to improve

its status in a reconstructed Belgian state27. At the same time, it cannot be overlooked that

these or similar arguments put forward amongst others by Georg von Below, Hermann

Schumacher and also by Eduard Meyer, basically served to legitimate far reaching plans for

turning Belgium into a German protectorate. At times, some of those who knew better,

as, for example, Gustav Mayer, had inklings that the whole situation looked a lot different

and he even spoke of the “curse of horrific deeds”. And others like the renowned historian

 

23. Hampe 2007.

24. Hampe 1915a.

25. Quoted by Hampe 2007, p. 297f.

26. See Wende 1969.

27. Ibid.

 

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of Antiquity Eduard Meyer and Friedrich Meinecke already mentioned were not prepared

to give up completely their belief in a common European heritage during the war.

On the whole, however, the members of the politically moderate camp amongst

German historians also sided with their more hard faced colleagues when they discussed the

important Belgian questions during the war. We could, therefore, enumerate a whole series

of pamphlets and books in which German historians violated central historiographical

virtues such as detachment and impartiality, and there is much to be said in favour of the

argument that the noble dream of the objective, as Peter Novick has aptly called it, was

lost sight of again and again28. The historiographical discourse over Belgium furthered this

trend considerably and must be seen as a pivotal debate for the increasing international

isolation of German historians both during and after the war.

 

THE INTERPLAY OF HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SELFMOBILIZATION

AND OFFICIAL MOBILIZATION

 

When we consider the massive surge of historical publications as from August 1914, it

is obvious that many historians did not find it difficult at all to extoll the virtues of their

respective country. The constant increase in manifestoes and pamphlets can be explained

by the fact that each historical statement by one side inspired a counter-argument by

historians of the respective enemy state on the other side. Thus in September 1914 historians of the University of Bonn set in motion a spiral of denouncing manifestoes

against Britain and English politics which was quickly countered by a series of academic

pamphlets in Britain. “Why We Are at War” was a project by Oxford dons of September

1914. In this series, the authors equated Germany with the glorification of war and they

described England, by contrast, as the epitome of the rule of law and the protection of

small nations29. This was only one of many other historiographical projects that came into

being as the outcome of a spontaneous mobilization of historians without any government

interference or any official cooperation.

But neither the British nor the German surge of war-time publications remained

independent of state influence as it might seem on the surface. Thus it has been shown

that even the famous Appeal to the Civilized World (Aufruf an die Kulturwelt) had been

officially initiated by the propaganda department of the German Naval Office. A similar

and quite important project was initiated in 1915 under the title Germany and the World

War (Deutschland und der Weltkrieg), about which it may be useful to go a bit more into

 

28. Novick 1988.

29. Oxford 1914.

 

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detail30. The project was initiated by Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, a higher civil servant in the

Ministry of Culture and from 1917 Minister of Culture. Schmidt-Ott cooperated with

leading German historians to counteract the allied intellectual propaganda. Their main

aim was to win over the public in the neutral states like the United States of America, Italy,

Holland, Switzerland or in Scandinavia.

To achieve this aim, the initiators of the project brought up the idea of a well-researched

book to defend the German case in moderate historiographical terms. The whole thing

was to be a scholarly response to the Allied accusations and largely free of the strident note

of the manifestoes. Once Schmidt-Ott had developed the idea, it was rapidly taken up by

historians like Hermann Oncken, Otto Hintze and Friedrich Meinecke. Additional support

came from the ranks of the national economists, amongst whom Hermann Schumacher

took on a leading role31. Karl Hampe was assigned the task of writing about Belgium.

Hampe, at first, hesitated because he felt that this knowledge was not good enough to take

on such a task. But he finally accepted and produced, with the financial help of the regional

ministry in Stuttgart, the article the editors had asked him to write. Basically, it consisted

of a summary of his publication on the same subject, which means that Hampe firstly

gave a survey of Belgium as a neutral power before he entered into a critical evaluation of

its misuse and also of its precarious ethnical situation due to a strong cleavage between

the Flemish and the Walloons. To put it short, the whole argument was a justification of

Germany’s invasion, which betrayed the strong influence of the idea of a close relationship

between Germans and the Flemish. While in his text Hampe could nowhere identify signs of a “soul of the Belgian people”, he gave almost everywhere the proof of a close flemish-

germanic connection32. This remained the case until the end of the war.

Illusions of this kind explain why the whole project failed miserably. The wide-raging

expectations invested into the project could not possibly have been fulfilled. The idea is

nonetheless noteworthy because it demonstrates clearly the multitude of problems which beset

the participating historians once they got involved in semi-official historiographical missions.

Some of the letters exchanged by the historians involved in the project are quite revealing. Thus

Hermann Oncken gave vent to his frustrations in letters to Friedrich Meinecke in 191633:

We historians cannot live up to the expectations of either side. Due to the

many considerations by the editors, I was forced to make concessions in my

article. Therefore historians regard my work as a kind of official-apologetic

diplomatism; the diplomats, however, do berate me for not knowing and not

saying what was really important.

 

30. Schumacher et al. 1915. See Cornelissen 1996. 31. Ibid.

32. Hampe 1915b.

33. See Cornelissen 1996.

 

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All of this would leave the historians in a very uncomfortable position. Furthermore,

the war brought with it permanently changing constellations which the contributors found

difficult to bring into line with their historical arguments.

We cannot go into more detail at this point. Obviously the rule of objectivity was

extensively violated in this work and, in retrospect, many of the historical arguments

turned out to be much less “sober” than they had originally been claimed by their authors.

In the final analysis, the project did not fulfil the wider political aims which had been

invested into it. The American translation was met only with a scant and predominantly

negative echo. In consequence, both the Ministry of Culture and the German Foreign

Office lost their interest in taking historiographical projects of this type any further.

Despite this failure, Germany and the World War did not remain the only project

which mobilized German historians via official channels. There was a whole series of

other projects which testify to the constant interplay between official planning and self-

mobilization. Friedrich Thimme had a hand in several of these projects, above all when

the German historians began to dwell on the advantages of the “German social kingdom”.

These projects found a powerful prop in the works of national economists like Gustav

Schmoller and the Weber brothers; but Meinecke, Delbrück and Oncken, to whom we

should add Walter Goetz, also played a prominent role in highlighting the advantages of

Germany’s early welfare state in comparison with foreign examples. Thus in 1915 Thimme

initiated together with leading social democrats and trade unionists a book project entitled

The New Germany, which was meant to attract members of the educated working class

in particular34. Again the project failed to achieve its aims, as the historians continued to feel very uneasy in their work with representatives of the organized Labour movement.

Rather it turned out that the radical historians on the political right like Schäfer and von

Below were much more efficient in whipping up public political sentiments. This was due

to their willingness to use modern methods of mass political participation whereas the

politically more moderately minded historians continued to place a high value on their

direct links to government circles. But once Bethmann Hollweg’s government had been

turned over in July 1917, this wing lost much of its political influence. As a consequence

the interplay between the semi-official mobilization and the self-mobilization of German

historians came to a standstill.

When Walter Goetz co-edited another project in 1918, entitled Germany and the Peace

(Deutschland und der Friede), an obvious corollary to the aforementioned Germany and the

World War, he marked the end of a series of historical academic failures during the war35.

The book only served, after its publication in the middle of 1918, to vilify the German

peace attempts as many contributors were still arguing for moderate German war aims

 

34. Thimme, Legien 1915.

35. Goetz 1918.

 

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in a situation when the German army had lost its final major campaign. Now, it would

definitely go too far to say that Germany lost the war because of the academic failures

described above. But in retrospect they did not really help the German effort either. In

addition, as Germany lost the war, many historians had in the end to realize that by letting

themselves be drawn into semi-official propaganda work they had seriously violated the

criterion of academic objectivity. This constituted one of the reasons for their surprising

silence on the concrete events of the war after 1918, although many of them posed first-

hand experience of the events, either as writers in the shadow of the military front or as

soldiers with first-hand experiences of many battles.

 

SOME OF THE LONGTERM CONSEQUENCES FOR THE HISTORIOGRAPHY

AND THE LONG NEGLIGENCE OF THE BELGIAN ATROCITIES

 

The end of the war did not mean at all that the “war of the minds” also drew to an end.

On the contrary, the latter went on and to a considerable extent it focused on the question

of German atrocities in Belgium. That is shown by a large number of books, articles and

pamphlets published on this subject from the 1920s and the 1930s36. Many of them were

written by specialists on international law or publicists, but the historians were part of

the revisionist movement right from the very beginning. Once again, one of the first texts

resulted from a public appeal engineered amongst others by the historian of Antiquity Eduard Meyer who came out in 1919 and who demanded “Honour, Truth and Justice”

for Germany37. This was followed up by a treatise by Walter Goetz from the University of

Leipzig on the atrocities, published in 192238. Later, it was to be accompanied by numerous

further historiographical and juridical papers against the “unfounded reproaches” of

German barbaric deeds in Belgium. All of them more or less came to the conclusion,

already formulated by Walter Goetz, that the myth of German atrocities had no substance

at all and would, therefore, explode just as much as the idea of Germany’s responsibility

for the war.

It is interesting to note that the majority of German historians both before and after

1945 held on to these views, which meant they continued to rely on the official view of

the military and the German Foreign Office. Gerhard Ritter belonged to this group, as

he still argued in the 1960s that the intellectual interventions by his predecessors during

the First World War and its aftermath should be ranked as “politically harmless attempts

 

36. Horne, Kramer 2001.

37. Meyer 1919.

38. Goetz 1922.

 

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of a modern nation of culture” to come to terms with the fate of a total war39. Even in

the 1980s, in his much acclaimed history of Imperial Germany40, Thomas Nipperdey

described the invasion of Belgium in a way that still showed traces of the German white

book on the Belgian atrocities. According to Nipperdey, Belgian francs-tireurs had caused a

strong “nervousness” in the ranks of the German soldiers and “small instances [...] and the

destruction of cultural monuments” had been used by the allied propaganda, so he argued,

“to accuse German soldiers of ‘horrific barbarism against women and children’ or even

to speak of ‘German atrocities’ ”41. The same view found entry into one of the best known

German encyclopaedias, the Brockhaus, which in 1996 explained that “Franktireurs” stood

for armed civilians who fought against German soldiers in Belgium in the hinterland of

the military front42.

Now, Nipperdey was certainly not a specialist on Belgian history, but that does not

explain why he ignored the book by Leo Wieland on Belgien 1914 which had come out

in 198443. This raises, of course, important questions about the long-lasting effects of

the propaganda from the First World War on German historiography. But instead of

going into the details here, I would like to conclude by indicating at least why so many

important aspects of the “war of the minds” continued to dominate the minds of many

German historians.

 

Firstly, many Germans possessed first-hand experience of the war but preferred not to

speak of them after 1918, even though these had been cardinal events in their lives44. Secondly, the impact of the war experience was nonetheless there and that should not be

overlooked. Thus, we can witness on the one hand the emergence of a so-called “people’s

history” (Volksgeschichte) since the 1920s which began to widen the social and cultural

scope of former historicist approaches. On the other hand, the continuity of the war can

be observed in the historians’ rhetoric, in their political positioning and, last but not least,

in their incapability (which I mentioned before), their failure to come to terms with their

personal experience of war.

In this regard, the category of intellectual generations may be helpful to make

some further differentiations45. In a very general sense, we should distinguish between

representatives of an older generation like Walter Goetz, who had volunteered at the

age of forty-seven in 1914. He was, however, rather the exception than the rule, because

 

39. Ritter 1964, p. 39. See Cornelissen 2001. 40. Nipperdey 1993.

41. Ibid., p. 760.

42. Brockhaus 1996.

43. Wieland 1984.

44. See Cornelissen 2002.

45. Ibid.

 

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most of the historians of his age group acted on the home front. The age groups drafted

as soldiers, that is those who had been born between 1879 and 1899, were quantitatively

much more important. Of the latter, I have been able to identify approximately fifty

German university historians in the 1920s and 1930s who had undergone some kind of

war experience, many of them quite harsh ones. In my biography of the Freiburg historian

Gerhard Ritter, I mention one example of this group of German historians who took part

in many well-known battles of the First World War, who suffered serious physical injuries

and who, something we should certainly not forget, underwent traumatic experiences

with long-term-consequences46. Ritter had already finished his first round of academic

socialization before the outbreak of war and, therefore, he found it easier to integrate his

personal war experience into his academic career. But the same cannot be said for the

younger members of the front generation. These tended to react in a much more radical

way and thus it is certainly no coincidence that numerous members of their ranks opted

for a much clearer distancing from bygone historiographical concepts after the war than

was the case with the elder fellow-soldiers.

To those who had been mobilized as soldiers, the experience of the war and the German

revolution in 1918 engraved itself much deeper than in the minds of their academic teachers.

Whereas Meinecke and Oncken, for example, proved capable to analyze the events in quite

a detached mode, even while there were going on, the younger ones reacted much more

passionately and much less restrained. The wartime letters and the after-war correspondence

of Gerhard Ritter, Hermann Aubin, Richard Salomon, Lüdwig Dehio, Hans Rothfels

and many others testify to this result: during the war, their mental map had remained relatively blank as to what they had observed and experienced. But when it finally

dawned on them that their country, that they themselves had lost the war, they reacted

by introducing important historiographical modifications. Aubin, for example, entered

upon the way of regional and folk studies. Ritter became a proponent of a new kind of

neo-Rankean universal history which tried to retain its national roots. And as from the

middle of the 1920s Rothfels embarked on a historical-political mobilization of young

university scholars, the results of which have been discussed in a very controversial way

over the past years. To put it short, the younger, the more radicalized the rhetoric of our

war historians became; the younger they were, the more they favoured a methodological

break with the past, though this does not represent a hard rule. After the war, however,

it took most of them almost two decades before the majority felt able to turn back their

minds actively on their own war experience. Interestingly enough, Hitler’s foreign and

military policy after 1933-1935 paved the way for a fresh reflection on the history of the

World War.

 

46. Cornelissen 2001.

 

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I have already considerably trespassed on the chronology of my topic, but in my view

this is the direction which we should take if we really want to advance the present state

of research. I will end by offering a second closing remark. The mobilization and self-

mobilization of German historians produced an intellectual disaster because common

standards of our profession were massively violated. Historical virtues such as objectivity,

detachment and impartiality were easily shed to assist the national war effort. In retrospect,

this development represented the first major step in the dehumanization of historiographical

values which was to find a much more pronounced expression during the Second World

War47. The historical interpretation of the Belgian atrocities can be regarded as an early

instance of this development which was to have very serious consequences.

 

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1996.

 

Bruendel 2014 = Bruendel Steffen, Zeitenwende 1914: Künstler, Dichter und Denker im Ersten

Weltkrieg, Munich, Herbig, 2014.

 

Cornelissen 1996 = Cornelissen Christoph, “Politische Historiker und deutsche Kultur. Die

Schriften und Reden von Georg v. Below, Hermann Oncken und Gerhard Ritter im Ersten

Weltkrieg”, in Mommsen Wolfgang J. (ed.), Kultur und Krieg: Die Rolle der Intellektuellen,

Künstler und Schriftsteller im Ersten Weltkrieg, Munich, Oldenbourg, 1996, p. 119-142.

 

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20. Jahrhundert, Düsseldorf, Droste, 2001.

 

Cornelissen 2002 = Cornelissen Christoph, “Die Frontgeneration deutscher Historiker und der

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Kriegskultur nach 1918, Essen, Klartext, 2002, p. 311-337.

 

Delbrück 1914 = Delbrück Hans, Regierung und Volkswille, Berlin, Stilke, 1914.

 

Flasch 2000 = Flasch Kurt, Die geistige Mobilmachung: die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste

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1922.

 

47. Schulze, Oexle 1999.

 

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Hampe 1915a = Hampe Karl, Belgiens Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Leipzig/Berlin, Teubner, 1915.

 

Hampe 1915b = Hampe Karl, “Belgien und die grossen Mächte”, in Schumacher Hermann et al.

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schullehrer zur Auslieferungsfrage, Berlin, Curtius, 1919.

 

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schaft und das Modell des monarchischen Konstitutionalismus im Kaiserreich”, Staatswissen-

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Schulze, Oexle 1999 = Schulze Winfried, Oexle Otto Gerhard (eds), Deutsche Historiker im

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Schumacher et al. 1915 = Schumacher Hermann et al. (eds), Deutschland und der Weltkrieg,

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