GERMANS: THE QUINTESSENTIAL REPRESENTATIVES OF MODERNITY?

____________________

David Blackbourn. THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY: A History of Germany, 1780-1914.

New York: Oxford U. Press, 1998. Ursinus College Library: 943.07/B562L.

____________________

 

 

I was studying postmodernism. That made me back up and look at modernism. I might best do that, I decided, by contrasting the way a modern subject or "self" saw itself to the way a postmodern subject saw itself. I backtracked into a defining moment of modernism, World War I, to find what made a modern subject's perspective what it was. World War I seemed best entered through the eyes of those it affected most, the Germans. The writings of Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque met the need.

Two questions, each unrelated to the other, then sent me to David Blackbourn's new history.

First: What was it about the experience of Germans that made them so central to an understanding of modernism?

Second: Coincidentally, friends hooked on genealogy persuaded me that I should think a little about my own roots in Berlin and Baden-Baden. I lacked the g-bug and had little to go on anyway. However, while pursuing the first question I supposed I might profit from a small exercise in "generic genealogy." What was it about nineteenth century Germany that would have brought my grandfather to America? I take A Stab at "Generic Genealogy" in a footnote to this essay review.

Blackbourn's history, crisp and readable, combines politics, economy, society (with special allegiance to class categories), and culture in what must qualify as "new history" with an old intent--to give a generalist's account of a period in central Europe. He selects the period (1780-1914) out of the larger current of time because it appears to have a meaningful beginning and ending. (I think of it as the period when the Enlightenment ideas--liberty, equality, fraternity--drove Europe into modernity and then when their promise collapsed in World War I. Blackbourn's formulation of course is more complex.)

Blackbourn prepares for his story with a sketch of Germany in the late Eighteenth Century. Still part of the Holy Roman Empire, its "small worlds" were awaiting the upheavals of the French Revolution.

The Napoleonic vehicle for Enlightenment ideas swept through German states with varying but lasting consequences. Blackbourn brings interesting reports on the development of political life in a post-Napoleonic Germany--prelude to the Revolutions of 1848-49.

He tracks the spring-to-autumn burst of revolutionary fervor in '48 and the success of the counter-revolution, again varying according to conditions in the many principalities.

He labels 1849-1880 "the age of progress," when the economy and the society transformed. It was also the age when the emigration from Germany to America peaked. Some 4.5 million Germans left home from 1847 to WWI; 4 million of them came to America.

The "age of modernity" (1880-1914) emerged from the industrial progress and national consolidation under Bismarck. Blackbourn is particularly informative when he collects the numerous cultural threads in Wilhelmine Germany into a social-cultural fabric: "avant-garde, official culture, the national literary canon, middlebrow kitsch, commercialized mass entertainment," (391) plus the political and religious subcultures around Catholicism and the labor movement. Also, he usefully weighs the tension between Germany's enthusiastic embrace of modern technology and its pull toward an "organic" anti-bourgeois tradition, which attached to a reactionary politics. (397)

His section on "Nationalism, Imperialism, Racism" (424-440) sets the political stage for entry into WWI. It also lays out some of the themes for his final pages, where, with the war over, he briefly assesses what nineteenth-century Germany contributed to the coming of Nazis to power.

Blackbourn first insists that immediate circumstances had much to do with Nazi success in 1933. He then identifies a couple of powerful impulses that continued from the long century into the Nazi program. One was their successful reconciliation of the powerful but contradictory impulses toward modern technology and toward an anti-modernist culture. The Nazis also took from Wilhelmine Germany the sense of order and discipline and national-racial sentiment. However, Blackbourn would have us remember that Nazis denounced the rule of law, multiple political parties, and a free press--all of which Wilhelmine Germany valued.

Theodore Adorno argued that the Enlightenment contained its own internal dynamic toward totalitarianism. Perhaps so; but Blackbourn's story leads me to think that the German example is not the best evidence to support the thesis, although the example culminates in Nazism. Germany may not have failed because it ingested the Enlightenment dialectic; it may have failed because it was too complex to implement Enlightenment ideas sufficiently.

The nineteenth-century Germany that Blackbourn depicts, in the end, is one of "unforegone conclusions." His final thought is that "the complex tendencies at work in it pointed towards different potential futures: toward reform as well as authoritarianism, social emancipation as well as repression, cultural diversity as well as culture driven into exile." (497)

Perhaps the complexity of the German experience, and the impossibility of reconciling its conflicting impulses in the twentieth century, combine to exemplify a different thesis. The Germans could not resolve their national narrative into a whole that made sense. That may make them, in a perverse way, the quintessential representatives of modernity.

end

Footnote

A STAB AT "GENERIC GENEALOGY"

The facts I know are as follows. My grandfather, Adolph Richter, was a native of Berlin. He renounced all allegiance to the Emperor of Germany and became a US citizen on 3 October 1877. He had been in the US for at least three years before reaching age 21. He had lived in the US for a total of at least eight years. All this is certified by the Court of Common Pleas, No. 4, for the County of Philadelphia, Prothonotary William B. Musser. The yellowing certificate hangs in a frame on my study wall.

I remember a few particulars my father told me about Adolph. He was a glassblower. A glass doorstop in the shape of a turtle sits on our living room shelf as tangible evidence. He came from Berlin to Philadelphia and married Matilda Storm, American born. I think I remember my father saying Adolph was Lutheran.

Adolph hunted small game in the open space of southwest Philadelphia near the present-day International Airport. He used a 12-gauge Damascus steel shotgun, numbered 15645, made by Charles Daly. The gun, inscribed with Adolph's name and that of the gunsmith and the number, is in our family room. My father was the last person to fire the gun; he inherited it from Adolph and used it to shoot small game in the fields of Montgomery County when I was a boy.

My father kept a few family facts in a Masonic Bible, now in my possession. In his characteristic draftsman's printing, my father recorded Adolph's date of birth as 5 March 1848 (and his date of death, 26 November 1927). That would have made him age 29 when he took his oath of citizenship in 1877.

(He also listed his mother's vital dates--Matilda Storm Richter, 6 February 1865 to 3 January 1955. He completed his family list with the names of his three siblings and himself: Adolph, Jr., 22 July 1885 to 11 March 1963; Robert, 25 January 1888 [he died in the 1970s after my father died, as I recall]; Mae, 3 September 1892 to 24 August 1921; and my father, Manuel Dewitt, the youngest, 24 April 1893. Some years ago I filled in his date of death, 30 December 1973.)

I'm afraid I know little else. A "generic genealogy" will have to suffice for the rest. I ground it on a couple of assumptions that I cannot completely substantiate. One is that Adolph left Germany and came to Philadelphia at age 18 in 1866. Another is that he came to the US unaccompanied by parents.

I looked through David Blackbourn's pages on German emigration (191-207) for bits of insight into why Adolph would have left his native Berlin for a new life in Philadelphia. The dating of his emigration seems supported by Blackbourn's report that a second great wave of emigration occurred between 1864 and 1873. Those in that second wave differed from those of the first wave (1845-1858). They tended to be single rather than members of families. They were from the east (including Berlin) rather than from the overpopulated rural areas of the southwest (including Baden: that is the home of my mother's line, the Theilackers, a generic genealogical trail to follow some other day). Asylum following the political turbulence of 1848-49 ceased to be a major motive for emigration by the time Adolph would have left.

His young age would support the notion that economic promise was a major reason for Adolph's leaving. In addition, Prussia under Bismarck in 1866 was taking the decisive military steps against Austria that would lead to German unification. A young Prussian subject could probably expect to spend some years under arms in Bismarck's new order. If Adolph had no taste for military service, emigrating from Prussia would have had the added value of removing him from harm's way.

By 1866, he could have obtained transportation on the German rail system, fully developed since its inception in 1835. It would have afforded an emigrant from Berlin the way to reach a port, probably following the Elbe valley north to Hamburg. The shipping companies operating out of such ports were in alliance with the emigration agencies and associations that promoted America as a desirable destination. Adolph, I might suppose, had read the advertising or at least had heard stories in his Berlin neighborhood about the promise of a new life abroad.

In opting to settle in Philadelphia, Adolph followed an urban course that typified the large German influx to America. "The typical German experience in America was urban," Blackbourn declares. (197) Like other American cities, Philadelphia had its newer German section. This was presumably in the southwest section of the city, not to be confused with the original Germantown in the northwestern section. (My father graduated from Southern High School.)

There in the neighborhood, Adolph would have found a familiar Germanic culture. This ethnic stronghold in an alien city would have given the young German a feeling of comfort and support as he made his way. I do not know whether he learned glassblowing as an apprentice before coming to the US or after arriving. Work with glass, in any event, would have fitted well with the burgeoning industrial and commercial scene in Philadelphia.

That's about as much "generic genealogy" as I can glean from my reading of Blackbourn. Like many American families with nineteenth-century immigrant origins, ours did little to preserve links to the past. They did not seem important. The old country was what Adolph renounced. He swore a new allegiance to his new country. Since he did not value Germany enough to stay there, why would his progeny want to value it? My father may have had an ear for the German language, but he never spoke it in my presence. He and my (equally Germanic) mother and their numerous siblings would toss around a handful of German phrases at family gatherings, when conviviality revived old ways for a time. Sometimes, when I was small, they would say something in German that they did not want me to understand. That was all.

In the mid-1950s, I spent a year and a half in the Mannheim-Heidelberg area of Germany as a member of the US Army. Absorbing the German milieu of that post-war moment, I had small sense of myself as a German. (The German civilians who worked with me in our field maintenance office, however, were sensitive to my Germanness, for they queried me about my name; it may have disposed them to treat me with a warmth that at the time puzzled me.) The wartime propaganda mill had taught me as a boy to think of Germans as our enemies. While I was making friends with my German co-workers, I was not inclined to bypass those recent lessons and celebrate my German roots. It would have seemed ridiculous to me then to work up a "generic genealogy" of Richters.

Today, if I were to write the complete story of my life, I suppose it should attach some significance to that return of a Richter to German soil (even though Mannheim is far from Berlin). But the past is gone, Adolph's as well as mine. His decision as a young man determined the fate of a grandson he would never see. That grandson would feel but the faintest personal affinity with Germany. He would be an American.