(originally published by H-German on 11 December 1996)
Virtually no discussion of the Bismarckian Kaiserreich can dispense with a now almost ritualistic recounting of the deficiencies contained in the argument most associated with the Bielefeld school of historians that during this period German history moved along a special path or Sonderweg. This contention that Germany's elites deliberately manipulated the course of that nation's development after 1870 to deviate from "Western" norms and ultimately into the disaster of National Socialism has recently received new currency from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners. In short, as Mark Twain once noted in a different context, rumors of the Sonderweg's permanent demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Lying at the heart of the Sonderweg dispute as presented by its Bielefeld advocates is the issue of feudalization. That is, did an increasingly economically vestigial but till politically powerful Prussian nobility maintain its dominant position in Imperial Germany by getting the country's middle classes to adopt the mentality peculiar to its caste? Does the historic record factually validate the observations made by Heinrich Mann in his turn-of-the century novel, Der Untertan? Is the record but a factual rendering of Carl Zuckmayer's comedy, The Captain from Köpenick? The answers given by Geoff Eley, David Blackbourn, Richard Evans and most recently, Dolores Augustine have of course been a resounding No!
One point nonetheless joined both sides of this argument: most of the evidence for or against the Sonderweg notion came out of the West German Federal Republic's archives and libraries. In short, the discourse on the alleged feudalizers originated from the sites historically most associated with the middle class objects of the effort.
The collapse of the GDR of course opened new archival sources. It is from their holdings on the would-be feudalizers and the careful reading of other European national histories that Professor Baranowski reexamines both the Sonderweg controversy and its attending unanswered question concerning National Socialism's sheer viciousness. Her focus is on Pomerania, a Prussian East Elbian backwater that in the rhetorical style of another controversialist, Ernst Nolte, can be described as the "ursprünglichste Urquelle" (most original, original source) of the downright uncivil in-your-face fear and loathing of democracy that would color nationalist conservative political attitudes towards the Weimar Republic.
It is Professor Baranowski's contribution in this important, well- researched and well-written article, an extension of her fine book The Sanctity of Rural Life (Oxford, 1995), to ask what, specifically, was so special about the Sonderweg? While acknowledging the critiques that have long undermined the Sonderweg, she notes that the question the Sonderweg's partisans from Jürgen Koca to Daniel Goldhagen have sought to answer, "why Fascism emerged in its most vicious form in Germany, remains as vexatious as ever" (p. 210).
Professor Baranowski begins by stating that, as with any national history, there were things in the German record that stand out in comparison to the development of other European states. Most notable among these was the special status accorded the economic and political wishes of the country's East Elbian nobility during the Kaiserreich. Between the Reich's founding in 1870 and the First World War that position would be strengthened through a combination of protective agricultural tariffs, political alliance with the wealthiest elements of the country's growing but highly fragmented middle classes, and the governing regime's refusal to seek political accommodation with an almost exponentially expanding working class. By contrast, urbanization and timely franchise reform that accommodated the phenomenon would leave the British landed aristocracy wealthier but far less politically potent than its early twentieth century East Elbian counterpart. Similarly in pre-World War I France the consistent ability of the country's Right to snatch defeat from the jaws of political victory would leave its Catholic nobility sulking and resentful, but nonetheless politically disempowered in an increasingly stable Third Republic.
To those absences once might add, as Professor Baranowski does not, the utter lack of ambivalence or ambiguity in Pomerania. Unlike neighboring East Prussia, the province never served as refuge for Scottish or French Protestants fleeing religious persecution at home. Nor, like East Prussia, would it develop a Kantian, a Pietist, or even a weak Socialist tradition. Unlike Silesia, Pomerania would contain no opulent latifundists professing a faith (Catholicism) not favored by the authorities running the Kaiserreich. What distinguished pre-1914 Pomerania was the entrenchment of its estate-owning nobility both on the land and within the institutions of local governance, the virtual absence of a middle class, a subservient class of agricultural laborers, and a provincial attitude that there was nothing especially wrong with this state of affairs. As Professor Baranowski adds, this outlook was reinforced by an entrenched and sometimes bigoted Protestantism that united landowners and laborers alike against a perceived Polish Catholic threat" (p. 223).
Although that attitude would be challenged by the advent of the Weimar Republic it would nonetheless remain unchanged. A bitter agricultural laborers' strike during the summer of 1919 was initially settled in the workers' favor. Nonetheless the means by which this was accomplished -- intervention by the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture -- would be ruled unconstitutional by the Reich government in early 1920. The result would be a permanent take-no-prisoners hostility toward the Republic on the part of the province's major landowners and a return to stoic passivity on the part of the agricultural laborers. As Professor Baranowski shows, when combined with the continuation of wartime agricultural price controls until 1922, that first antagonism would have two consequences. It would lead to a rhetoric of landowner vituperation and anti-Republican political organization that the Nazis could subsequently subsume with ease. In the case of the agricultural laborers, their loss of government support would lead to resentments from which the Nazis would also reap an enormous political profit.
In short, Professor Baranowski has presented her readers with a cogent well-documented argument that with the feudalization operand factored out, the Sonderweg is not entirely devoid of applicability to what was once the German East. To this Pomerania would add a lack of diversity that made for a closed society whose prejudices and resentments made for a score-settling spitefulness that required little if any Nazi effort to exploit.
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