Ute Frevert. A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004. 322 pp. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-85973-881-8; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-85973-886-3.

Reviewed by Kevin Cramer (Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis)
Published on H-German (September, 2005)

Every Soldier a Citizen, Every Citizen a Soldier?

After the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in 1815, the "German Question" was whether or not there could (or should) be a nation-state called Germany. After this question was decided with unification in 1871, the "German Question" soon evolved into the "German Problem," which was widely viewed by contemporaries and posterity as the root cause of two world wars. For many historians and other observers of German political and cultural life, the essential characteristic of Germany's historical development, which explained this nation's de-stabilizing pursuit of continental hegemony, was the prominent role "militarism" played in German society. Another name for this trait was "Prussianism," a convenient label that summoned up images of Hohenzollern authoritarianism and saber-rattling, goose-stepping soldiers, and monocled Junker generals in spiked helmets. After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, "Prussia" was deliberately erased from the map of a partitioned Germany, as if a virus of war somehow lay dormant in the soil itself.

Ute Frevert's book is an original and insightful re-examination of the role the military has played in shaping the German civil, political, and cultural landscape. She sees this aspect of German life evolving out of the French revolutionary concept of "the nation in arms," that is, conscription, which established a new kind of link between the state and civil society. Frevert believes that conscription, as a European and "modern" phenomenon, created the possibility of what she calls the "peacetime military socialization" of the citizen (p. 3). Conscription also broke down the assumption that the "civil" was the antithesis of the "military" and in so doing gave the state a powerful means of building the nation around new definitions of citizenship, patriotic values, and social order. In other words,conscription allowed the state to infiltrate civil society effectively by creating what Hermann Broch, in his novel The Sleepwalkers, called "the cult of the uniform ... the man who wears the uniform is content to feel he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life."[1]

There have been two basic lines of inquiry into how modern Germany became a so-called militarized state. The first, originally pursued by historiography that was itself partially a product of this state, theorized that the Hohenzollern monarchy, beginning with the reforms of the Great Elector after the Thirty Years' War, built up a military machine as the only realistic guarantor of the survival of a state surrounded by enemies and lacking defensible natural frontiers. Essentially, this same environment of insecurity was cited as the driving force behind the "defensive modernization" of the Prussian state led by Stein, Scharnhorst, and Hardenberg after Napoleon's victories at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806. Prussia did indeed survive (thus, this school of thought believed, guaranteeing the unification of Germany). Nonetheless, according to this theory, the re-emergence of the army as the "savior" of Germany in 1813, when Napoleon was driven out of central Europe, had malignant consequences in that it strengthened the foundation of autocratic and authoritarian rule in Germany. In the two decades after 1945, historians concluded that "militarism" in nineteenth-century Germany had become a legitimating principle of authority that defended absolutist prerogatives against the claims of constitutional rule. In short, the army became a key player in politics, foreign policy, culture, and society in the new nation--a development that had, ultimately, disastrous consequences.[2] As an explanation for Germany's role in two world wars, this conclusion was challenged by historians who (even as they appropriated some of its main claims) questioned whether the "German Problem" could be reduced to the anachronistic existence of an absolutist elite bent on preserving monarchical and autocratic authority at any cost. Rather, they identified "militarization" (whose social and cultural analogue was "militarism") as a more general European economic and political process within industrialized states. It became problematic in Germany only because the authoritarian state lacked any means of preserving its legitimacy (and internal stability) other than through the pursuit of an expansionist foreign policy.[3] Partially a reflection of the Sonderweg thesis, this view of German national development was challenged in the 1970s and 1980s by historians who argued against the assumption that German political and civil life remained stuck in an absolutist backwater while the rest of western Europe liberalized and modernized. This new interpretation did not, however, deny the existence of German "militarism." Rather, it pointed out that far from being solely a "top down" phenomenon, it was also generated within the broader popular ferment of radical and expansionist conservatism, nationalism, and imperialism. This bellicosity was in turn encouraged by successive regimes between 1890 and 1914 seeking to harness a nationally integrative force while continuing to resist demands for a functioning democracy and liberalized social and economic order.[4]

Frevert's book is a significant contribution to this latter line of inquiry, especially it its examination of the debate over the civic function of the military in pre-unification Germany. By examining the impact of conscription on how German civil society viewed itself, Frevert broadens our understanding of a complex sociological phenomenon in which "thinking about war" dominates peacetime civil discourse.[5] "Militarization," in Frevert's view, was essentially a mechanism of nineteenth-century state-building that, in "making Germans," established for the citizen a defined set of obligations to the state. In consequence, however, "militarism" insinuated itself within all levels of civil society, gradually eroding traditional liberal suspicions regarding the warrior caste. Her explanation of how and why these processes happened begins conventionally enough with a discussion of the defensive reforms of Stein in the wake of Prussia's defeat by Napoleon's "nation in arms." Stein believed that universal conscription, if instituted without exceptions, would inculcate an ethos of service to the state that cut across social and provincial divisions while instilling the entire nation with a "martial spirit" (p. 19). As Germans rose against Napoleon in 1813, patriots such as E.M. Arndt and liberals such as Friedrich von Raumer saw the traditional bonds between the army and the Prussian state reinvigorated, with Arndt extolling military service as duty in which "traditional manliness" could be rekindled in the Germanic Volk and Raumer envisioning a new kind of army integrated into civil life and overseeing the development of a "national consciousness" (pp. 25-27).

As the patriotic euphoria of 1813 gradually faded in the first decade of the Restoration, resistance to the 1814 conscription law emerged from familiar camps. The old elites feared the citizen army as a tool of social leveling and school for revolutionaries. For their part, liberals feared conscription as another weapon of coercive absolutism. According to Frevert, the middle classes' view of the army began to change in the 1820s, as the Prussian state began to institute "a number of measures that upgraded military service into a basic requirement for access to a range of civil rights on the level of both community and state" (p. 70). Sons of the middle class began to view military service as an essential rite of passage into adulthood and as preparation for political and civic duties. Among the younger generation, military service was not associated with the brutal discipline and coarse camp life of the Frederician army but with a social status that advertised courage, duty, honor, manliness, and love of fatherland. In the other states of the German Confederation, optimism persisted that conscription could also serve the goals of liberalism. Carl von Rotteck posed the question, "Do we want to make the nation itself into an army, or turn soldiers into citizens?" (pp. 113-114). Carl Welcker declared in 1839 that the defense of constitutional liberty required a "martial spirit" (p. 115). Frevert does a masterful job of showing how the upheavals of 1848-1849 revealed key differences in German civil society over the role of the military. Moderate liberals believed a standing army was essential to preserving the state from external threat (with a reserve force, the Landwehr to maintain internal order and security), while more radical democrats argued for the establishment of a "citizens' militia force" (Volkswehr) sworn to defend the constitution, thus allowing the people to defend their civil liberties (p.121). But in the aftermath of Prussia's suppression of the revolution in 1848 and 1849, Germans outside of Prussia were understandably still inclined to view standing armies on the "Prussian model" as the blunt instruments of absolutist rule. It comes as no surprise that the overwhelming success of Bismarck's wars of unification did much to change this view.

The heart of Frevert's book is chapter 4, running to almost 90 pages, which deals with the military infiltration of civil society in Wihelmine Germany. Based on the most extensive and available range of source material, particularly memoirs, it examines the social and cultural significance of the military in imperial Germany. However, compared with the revealing analyses of the previous chapters, its claim that military honor assumed primacy over civic honor in the Second Reich seems rather conventional (p. 158). Frevert notes that "the wars of the 1860s represented a tectonic shift in domestic and military policy. They effectively quelled criticism of the army … set a firmer course towards a civic Realpolitik, and acted as a brake on the quest for alternative policy models--that leitmotif of early nineteenth-century German military history" (p. 149). Mining the considerable number of memoirs published in this period, Frevert relates how young (and not so young) middle-class men aspired to, in Friedrich Meinecke's phrase, the "demi-god" status of the reserve officer (p. 158). Not much is new here. Her argument becomes more compelling when she turns to the question of how civilian-military relations, cemented in the glorious year of 1870-1871, began to fray over four decades of peace. Essentially, liberals and social democrats pushed to introduce civil society practices into the army, while the army, advertising its role as "the school of the nation," sought to promote the militarization of civil society as a means of preserving its autonomy (p. 201). In this aim the army seemed at least partially successful, as the burgeoning number of reserve officer associations, veterans' organizations, and youth groups made civic militarism (parades, ceremonials, uniforms) a very public component of associational life in imperial Germany. Pursuing this theme in chapter 5, which examines the twentieth century, Frevert points out that "the roots of Weimar's militarisation process did not feed on front-line experience in the First World War, but in the conflicts over domestic politics and law and order issues that surfaced during the war years, and continued and intensified in the initial post-war period" (p. 247). This conclusion is a salutary corrective to the conventional view that it was the disillusioned and embittered veterans who became the foot soldiers of National Socialism.

Nevertheless, this book is to be primarily recommended for its original and enlightening study of the debate over conscription and the place of the military in German life between 1815 and 1871. By focusing on the attempt to establish military universal service in Prussia and the other German states, Frevert has uncovered a moment in the social and cultural history of modern Germany that substantially enlarges our understanding of "the German Problem."

Notes

[1]. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (1947; repr. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), p. 20.

[2]. See Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955); F.L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and German Politics, 1918-1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); and Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk; das Problem des "Militarismus" in Deutschland, 4 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1954-1968).

[3]. See Eckart Kehr, Schlachtflottenbau und Partei-politik, 1894-1901 (Berlin: E. Ebering, 1930); Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914-1918 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961); Helmut Böhme, Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1966); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Berlin: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969); and the essays in Wilhelm Deist, Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft. Studien zur preussisch-deutschen Militaergeschichte (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1991).

[4]. See Volker Berghahn, Militarismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1975); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); Stig Förster, Der doppelte Militarismus. Die deutsche Heeresrüstungspolitik zwischen Status-Quo-Sicherung und Aggression, 1890-1913 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985); Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus der "kleinen Leute": die Kriegsvereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871-1914 (Munich, R. Oldenbourg, 1990).

[5]. See the essays in Jost Dülffer and Karl Holl, eds., Bereit zum Krieg. Kriegsmentalität in wilhelminischen Deutschland, 1890-1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986); and Jost Dülffer, Im Zeichen der Gewalt. Frieden und Krieg im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Martin Kröger, Ulrich S. Soénius, and Stefan Wunsch (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2003).

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Citation: Kevin Cramer. Review of Frevert, Ute, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11145

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