Armin Owzar. "Reden ist Silber, Schweigen ist Gold": Konfliktmanagement im Alltag des wilhelminischen Obrigkeitsstaates. Constance: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2006. 482 pp. EUR 39.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89669-718-9.
Reviewed by Roland Spickermann (Department of History, University of Texas-Permian Basin)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Separate Lives
This imaginative book tackles issues of political and social development from an unconventional perspective. As have others, Armin Owzar notes that the structural transformations in the Kaiserreich placed unprecedented numbers of people into new communities and into contact with new friends and adversaries. But, rather than examining the creation of these new communities through lenses of class conflict or power structures, his goal is to examine how social groups in Wilhelmine Hamburg learned to interact, or at least coexist locally, and in so doing, improvised rules for interaction. He provides us a different and useful perspective on Wilhelmine social and political processes, one that provides us insight into the reasons for the relative stability of the Kaiserreich and for the later instability of the Weimar Republic.
Owzar draws inspiration from an unusual source: Norbert Elias's durable concepts of "civilizing processes," the dispersion of cultural habits and mores across a population. These occur interpersonally and gradually, rather than institutionally. Elias noted how matters of etiquette passed from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie in early modern Europe, and to other parts of the population, without any formal intent. Owzar uses the idea a bit differently: rather than adaptations and imitations occurring in ever-widening, ever less-elite social circles, he speaks of many groups simultaneously adjusting to one another in the same environment. In contrast to the emphasis on class struggle in many studies of Wilhelmine society, he asks other, quite productive questions: how much, in fact, did various social groups actually come in contact with each other; what patterns these contacts had; and whether these patterns had byproducts for Germany's political culture. To answer these questions, he applies a taxonomy of interpersonal and intergroup communication to his analysis, ranging from no communication to active agreement, coexistent silence (as a means of avoiding argument, and not the same as the lack of communication), and finally, active, confrontational disagreement. This categorization provides a template for analyzing whether and/or how social groups interacted with each other, and whether the nature of those interrelationships changed over time.
As evidence, Owzar uses, among other things, police surveillance records from Hamburg's archives. Local police regularly conducted such surveillance in local taverns and meeting places, as well as at official meetings of political groups. Many of these sources have been used before, for example, to note the development of working-class culture, popular attitudes, or to document the degree of governmental surveillance activity. Richard J. Evans has written extensively about Hamburg using the same sources. The novelty of Owzar's work appears in his use of them to put together a portrait of these groups' interactions, as each developed and adapted. Other related and interesting excursuses appear in the work, including an engaging look at the homosexual community and Hamburg's Chinese community, and Owzar discusses how they gradually networked while learning to avoid confrontation with the outside world.
As Owzar notes, many social and political groups scarcely encountered each other at all, with their electorates living in different neighborhoods or even regions. In the case of ethnic or religious minorities, Owzar notes how simultaneous necessity of and reluctance to interact intertwined to produce modes of engagement between, for example, Christians and Jews, or between Protestants and Catholics. They found their own unique communication style--high levels of interaction commercially, for example, but minimal levels socially--to create as frictionless an environment as possible. Coexistence, not harmony, was the goal. Even within neighborhoods, different social groups and constituencies often learned to avoid confrontation, learning to frequent different pubs or lecture halls, for example, or meeting at different times at the same pub, so that their paths rarely crossed. This behavior did not result from any formal agreement between groups, but as a gradual adjustment until intergroup contact declined to safe levels. Even within families, members of different political or religious persuasions came to agreements to disagree. Interestingly, this sort of adjustment also served as an element of self-disciplining of members of the groups, especially for the SPD, as its members worked for party cohesion and to avoid incidents that might provoke police intervention or political sanction. While these groups did not cooperate with one another actively, they also rarely engaged in active, confrontational disagreement. In fact, as Owzar notes, the level of politically motivated violence actually declined as the Kaiserreich developed, despite ever-increasing levels of political rivalry, volume, and mobilization. As Owzar's title suggests, talking was silver, but discreet silence was often golden.
Through this approach, Owzar comes to some interesting conclusions. Scholars from Ralf Dahrendorf to Hans-Ulrich Wehler have tended to see the state itself as a disciplinary agent during the Kaiserreich, creating or reinforcing patterns of deference that they saw as conducive to authoritarian political habits. In this vein, Owzar cites Thomas Mann's caricature of German authority, "General Doktor von Staat," the ultimate combination of Bildung, military hierarchy, aristocracy, and state authority. Owzar is inclined to disagree with this picture, however. He points out that the state had few points of contact with society where it could inculcate such patterns--primarily schools and the military--and these would not suffice to create a deferential culture, in the manner of Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan (1918). Rather, he suggests the archival documents reveal patterns of self-discipline and adjustment rather than subservience. The operative principle, he argues, was a tendency to coexistent silence and mutual avoidance of conflict, rather than obedience.
Owzar's study ends with 1918, in part because his rich documentation ends there. The Weimar Republic did not conduct as much surveillance of political gatherings and tavern conversations as the Kaiserreich, so documentation of overheard conversations also ceased. This state of affairs, however, does not stop Ozmar from using his data and conclusions to generate potential insights about Weimar, too. Of special interest is his extrapolated argument that communication avoidance, which becalmed the local politics of the Kaiserreich, actually worked to Weimar's disadvantage. Avoidance as a strategy prevented any accumulation of experience in negotiation and compromise, the necessary schools for conflict resolution rather than conflict avoidance. Consequently, he infers, Weimar politics inclined instead toward active confrontation rather than resolution.
This is a richly textured study of how patterns of everyday life can resonate politically, at the local level and then much higher. It cedes to other scholars the well-worked terrain of explaining why workers or Catholics, for example, came to the views and interests that they espoused. On the other hand, one still asks why Germans in Hamburg tended toward conflict avoidance, rather than toward working toward reconciliation between groups. This question may not be fair (should one expect habits of reconciliation, after all?). But perhaps other, deeper social habits or (as seems likely to me) ideology played a role here, too. For doctrinal reasons, residents of Hamburg may have considered reconciliation between religious groups impossible, for example--but this problem could be explored more fully in further research.
Other potentially interesting, even essential, aspects remain for others to explore. In a males-only political environment, Owzar's emphasis on political groups and political meetings inherently privileges male interactions, for example. However, if one examines the "civilizing process," it would be just as useful to examine the interactions of women as of men, say, at the market, at church, or in their own social circles. Such questions are addressed in Nancy Reagin's A German Women's Movement (1995), which discusses women's society in Hanover during the same period. Overall, however, Owzar's work indicates well how useful the idea of "civilizing processes" remains, and how many insights microhistory can generate about the workings of larger, more general trends.
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Citation:
Roland Spickermann. Review of Owzar, Armin, "Reden ist Silber, Schweigen ist Gold": Konfliktmanagement im Alltag des wilhelminischen Obrigkeitsstaates.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24454
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