The Failure of Illiberalism

...Thus German liberals tried to make the best of a semifeudal constitutional state—much as many French liberals had tried to come to terms with the Bonapartist dictatorship...

...The almost ritualized outcries, often sanctimonious and uninformed, that came from American scholars against Germans being unwilling to face up to their past, probably raised more questions about historians on this side of the f lantic than about those on the other...

...The Germans, at least for the period between 1870 and 1945, supposedly lacked individuality, were the products of authoritarian households, and believed implicitly in their national superiority...

...For what it did was to turn Fischer (among both the German academic Left and its American rooters) into the beleaguered spokesman for his country's lost conscience...

...Faced with the absence of a parliamentary tradition like England's...

...Stern only weakens his case when he draws a limited parallel between the Kaiser's adventures into world politics and our own "loss of moral confidence and credibility" as a result of Vietnam, or when he urges students not "to confound a moment of repression [in America] with the dark night of totalitarianism [in Nazi Germany...

...Stern connects both these watersheds to a certain moral corrosion which supposedly pervaded German society, at least since theformation of the Empire: "illiberalism," a convenient rubric to cover all of the alleged flaws of German national character noted by Teutonophobes since the turn of the century and by many German emigr4s since 1933...

...I believe that one can illustrate the effect of these pitfalls by analyzing The Failure of Illiberalism, the work of a leading apologist for the type of thought described...

...In 1964 critiques of Fischer's thesis began to appear in semiofficial government newspapers—one such piece bearing the provocative title, "Germany Does Not Accept War Guilt Twice...

...Recent investigations of the annexationist designs of the other belligerents during the First World War also shed unfavorable light on Fischer's method of studying the German case outside a broader context...

...Disputing the self-serving attempts of the various belligerents to assign sole responsibility for the War to their enemies, the revisionists pointed to the massive failure of international diplomacy as the crucial cause...

...Many respectable historians—for example, Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfels, and Golo Mann —denounced their inaccuracy and sensationalism...

...Perhaps this role has by now been made to appear too terrible, in the sense that any interpretation of the past that, puts the Germans in a particularly bad light can expect an enthusiastic hearing among large segments of the American academic community...

...Among the most successful states of the twentieth century have been those that have displayed the least regard for liberty...

...Elsewhere he offers some interesting, though hardly startling, comments on present-day Germany, East and West, and a fine study of the defects of the Weimar Republic...

...Here sympathy for a scholar battling against some political opposition to his work came to be viewed as the struggle of an honest and wise radical against the cumulative force of his country's whole evil history embodied in its then-present Christian Democratic regime...

...World War I and its aftermath and the Nazi seizure of power...

...However divided they were on some issues, these personalities brought to their work a distinctive set of prejudices...

...Still, the incessant concern of her leaders with national security was partly justified by the disruptive effect of their country's rise to power...

...Such evocations of the antiwar Left's rhetorical style make the reader resistant to a historical explanation that lacks any subtlety...

...He cites as proof the growing consensus within German scholarship that imperial Germany played a critical role in causing the disasters of 1914...

...The break of German historiography with self-defensive accounts of the First World War was already underway in the 1950s, as relevant historical documents became available, and as German conservatives as well as radicals felt the need for a critical confrontation with their own national past...

...They sought to explain the rise and success of Hitler in terms of a culture that was peculiarly German...

...From this perspective, the study of German history has but two overriding purposes: to be an object lesson to foreigners and to serve as a means of contrition for Germans...

...In view of this research, it seems strange that Stern maintains (as does Holborn in his introduction to the English edition of Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht) that "German historians have gradually assimilated Fischer's views...

...His essay on the relationship of Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian nobleman who unified Germany, and Gerson Bleic:hroder, the Jewish banker who helped subsidize the enterprise, is one case in point...

...In some cases German tactics were designed for the purpose of defeating one enemy with the resources of a second one that had already surrendered, e.g., the German plan to fight England from the Belgian and French coasts...

...And in Europe their efforts culminated in the agreement reached by French and-German historians in 1951, which affirmed the joint responsibility of their peoples for the First World War...

...His introduction, which fails in its attempt at imposing thematic unity on the volume, tries to explain the two central catastrophes in modern German history...

...This has certainly been true of the responses to the Fischer debate...

...Inasmuch as most of the group—e.g., Hans Kohn, Hajo Holborn, Franz Neumann, Georg Mosse, George Lichtheim et al.—were themselves victims of Nazi oppression, it was only natural they should consider the Hitlerian epoch a focal point for their historical research...

...Although the list of abuses contains no surprises, it does make one nostalgic for the simplicities of wartime movies...

...It should be conceded that Stern presents some defensible and occasionally stimulating opinions...

...Having made these acknowledgements, we may proceed to examine the weaknesses of his presentation...

...Although such indiscretion is partly understandable, it must be regretted in this instance...

...For example, those German history surveys assigned to my generation in college—with their interminable references to national failures, lost turning points, and squandered revolutions —resembled prosy religious allegories which describe the sinner's descent into a self-incurred perdition...

...Basic to most revisionism was the belief that the belligerent governments, including the German, contained moderate as well as fierce annexationist elements,but that due to the increasing devastation of the War, the conciliatory voices once heard in Europe were muted by those that called for a vindictive peace, and both sides eventually gave themselves over to the dream of dismembering their enemy's lands...

...The positions Stern takes, however, make sense in the framework of the refugee historical tradition...

...Meanwhile, scholars like Hans Herzfeld and Egmont Zechlin questioned the attempt to view German war aims as the cause of the War, seeing them instead as the product of a bloody and protracted strugglo...

...Much of Germany's history between 1871 and 1914 was dictated by her past acquisitions and by the dynamics of her economic development...

...continental liberals often had to console themselves with whatever approximations of parliamentarianism existed in their own lands...

...It took form during the Wilhelmian era and drew strength from that expansionist impulse which fueled the First World War...

...Moreover, the population and industrial growth that took place in imperial Germany threatened an older European order, based on the military predominance of France and the economic supremacy of England...

...He considered Germany's expansionist policy the most decisive factor in causing the conflict and treated her war aims (to which he devoted his chief work) as inseparable from her aggressive and pervasive nationalism...

...Nor does he seem to have read the imperialistic rhetoric of English parliamentary leaders, or of Sir John Fisher, Lord Admiral of the Royal Navy, who publicly advocated a preventive war to destroy the Teutonic menace as early as 1905...

...By Stern's admission, not all Germans between 1870 and 1914 shared these illiberal qualities he catalogues...

...In all probability, a weak Germany would have provided France with an irresistible invitation to retrieve the territories she had lost after the Franco-Prussian War...

...It caused them to create hobgoblins out of past figures and movements, which they ultimately placed in some ascending order of culpability for the presence of the Nazi regime...

...Fischer broke with the revisionists, by focusing almost exclusively on those political forces operative within Germany before and during the War...

...His treatment of the September program and of Bethmann-Hollweg proved particularly vulnerable,' as historians like Ritter and H.D...

...Of course this particular admission came from German scholars long before the Fischer controversy, and it continues to be made by some of his most ardent opponents down tothe present...

...Unfortunately, he tries to buttress his defense with mere generalities about German illiberalism and with such assertions as the following: "The idea of war as salvation and as liberation from social and cultural abuses had currency among various writers of other countries as well, but hardly among the leaders of other nations at the time...

...Granting such reasoning, an atheist might be impelled to concede the premise that the flesh was fashioned by the Devil rather than by God...

...Insofar as they can manage this, they shall follow in the footsteps of those post-World War II European historians, who in writing on the Great War, decided to bury old axes, and no longer merely to grind them...

...All of them were passionately critical of German social traditions, revealing not only the depth of their despair over Nazism but also an iconoclastic spirit often related to their feelings about pre-Hitlerian Germany...

...After all, it is possible to admit anything, when given a choice between two unreal choices...

...They showed that it is high time that Americans trained in German history, move beyond the pious hysteria of their teachers, and examine their field outside the realm of bad theology...

...A recent study of German activities in the disintegrating Russian Empire of 1917 and1918, by the Ukrainian historian Olek Fedyshyn, indicates the absence of any prior war plans in the East, too...

...Stern shows considerable psychological insight in discussing the growth of an implausible...

...Such preaching has apparently influenced Stern, who expresses approval of Ludwig Dehio's demand for"unconditional recognition" by the Germans of their "terrible role" in twentieth century history...

...This controversy centers around the findings of Fritz Fischer, a scholar who, by means of copious documentation, has sought to demonstrate a continuity of political purpose between imperial and Nazi Germany, and to challenge the long-entrenched revisionist views on the origin of the Great War...

...The Fischer thesis was not a cause but an expression of this process of reappraisal, but its exponents used the new mood to justify the torturing of documents and even a savage bias against their own country...

...Such considerations may be useful in assessing Stern's observations on the First World War, which plunge him into the most impassioned controversy to have involved German historians for more than twenty years...

...Have mass extermination and total repression caused the administrations of Russia and China to come apart at the seams...

...German society, in Fischer's eyes, was so infected by racist and social Darwinist doctrines that no major political movement, including the socialists, could preserve its ethical integrity, Thus, although the military and civil leadership planned the war by themselves, all parties and classes marched behind them in lockstep...

...Nonetheless, in my opinion, the pursuit of such tasks led these prophets of wrath into error...

...Stern maintains that the misfortunes of Germany can be instructive for America, inasmuch as they prove that the absence of the liberal spirit is destructive for a powerful nation...

...And yet, their determination to work within the imperial structure need not be viewed as an act of moral treason...

...Rising later than most other European powers to a position of political eminence, they suffered from a collective insecurity (Stern prefers the term Angst), which caused them to be stridently aggressive in dealing with other peoples...

...How useful is the qualifier "hardly" in keeping the remark from appearing utterly absurd...

...Fischer's views generated considerable controversy in German academic and political circles in the early sixties...

...While Stern dismisses much of Fischer's documentary evidence, he praises him for having found a "continuity of mood and hope," if not of war aims, between imperial and Hitlerian Germany...

...The war aims which gave evidence of the entire nation's will to power, made an appearance as soon as the struggle began, and indeed, the Chancellor, Theobald von BethmannHollweg, although misrepresented as a moral critic of the War, spelled out these imperialist aspirations as early as September 1914...

...The argument is sheer sophistry...

...but intimate friendship between two figures separated by a veritable social abyss...

...In fact, this collection of essays by Fritz Stern testifies to the durability of their attitudes...

...As another defense Stern suggests that "Perhaps Fischer has strained the continuity thesis, but the counterthesis which posits all the miscalculations and derailments of German policy in the twentieth century were but accidents is still less satisfying...

...Stern concludes that the effect of such criticism has been to cast doubt on Fischer's view of continuing war aims at least in Western Europe...

...This, moreover, came at a time when his interpretations were already falling under sharp and effective attack...

...Their dedication to humanistic education, a religion of ethics, scientific progress, and some form of parliamentary government were all hallmarks of a liberal creed which received as much praise in Germany (even after 1870) as anywhere else on the continent...

...This is a highly questionable assertion...

...It also tempted them to link the rise of fascism with the failure of then personal values to win broad acceptance among the German nation...

...For obvious ideological motives he excludes the Social Democrats from his condemnation...

...No doubt Stern has never studied the influence of Pan-Slavism at the Russian court...

...On the basis of these assumptions, Fischer argued that the foreign policy of the Nazi period acquired its peculiar features long before Hitler's rule...

...He might similarly have absolved that segment of the German middle class which clung persistently to the liberal ideals of the nineteenth century (not anachronistically, as Stern might wish, to those of a later age...

...Or if the Germans had decided around 1900 to run their homes and schools in a thoroughly egalitarian way, and (unlike other European nations of their time) to renounce any imperialist ambition, would such conduct have protected them from blundering diplomats in a critical international situation...

...The scholars I refer to are the German refugee historians, who hive dominated this field, first directly, and then, more recently, through their students...

...It is assumed that they dropped their philosophical scruples owing to the practical economic advantages posed by national unification...

...They attempted to make the past serviceable, as a warning to the world of how their own people had strayed and later as a means for impressing on the Germans the terrible burden of their heritage...

...Erdmann used their research to prove the Chancellor's moral earnestness and the utterly transitory character of his war aims...

...Plainly, historical knowledge is not to be gained by means of a choice made between two glaring hyperboles, on the basis of which half-truth wears better...

...In America, despite the disagreement of such figures as Bernadotte Schmitt and Hajo Holborn, the revisionists found energetic spokesmen among the students of Sidney Fay and William Langer...

...German liberals have often been criticized for having made their peace with the Bismarckian constitution and with the military monarchy it sustained...

...The Wilhelmian Empire would have appeared menacing to her Western neighbors by virtue of her mere existence, although, as Gerhard Ritter has demonstrated, her position was made even worse by her increasing rejection of traditional statecraft in favor of military solutions...