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Russian radio orders were sent uncoded and were intercepted by incredulous German listening posts. Over sixty miles and four days, in a landscape split up by strings of little lakes, the battle raged, until the agile mobility of German forces won out. Ninety-two thousand Russian prisoners were taken. General Samsonov, his army crushed, wandered oV into the woods and shot himself.
On the German side, naming the battle was a task of great symbolic signiWcance. Will the German now allow, as then, that the Lithuanian and especially the Pole take advantage of our helplessness and do violence to us? Will centuries-old German culture be lost? Overnight, Hindenburg became a god to Germans at home.
On November 1, , he was elevated to the position of Supreme Commander in the East, Oberbefehlshaber Ost, with extraordinary powers. In the partnership between the old Weld marshal and his chief of staV, Hindenburg provided the Wgurehead. This was announced by his very appearance: In the Wrst year of the war, their spreading fame stood in sharp contrast to the stalemated failures in the West, all that Chief of General StaV Falkenhayn had to show after he replaced von Moltke. After a battle over great areas of diYcult terrain, the Russians were expelled from East Prussia.
German armies moved on to take parts of the Suwalki area, but they were again lost to the Russians in their late fall campaign. Austrian armies were turned back and pushed almost to Cracow by September. But the Russians, now reaching full mobilization, heroically counterattacked at the end of September, threatening Silesia. Intensively using railway Coming to war land 17 movement to oVset Russian numerical superiority, Hindenburg and LudendorV deXected the attack.
Receiving new reinforcements from the West, they threw Russian armies back towards Warsaw, as winter closed the campaign. With the start of the new year in , German armies went over to the oVensive in the East. They regained their foothold in the Russian empire after the winter Battle of Masuren in February By mid March, German front lines all ran on enemy territory.
Falkenhayn temporarily moved his attention east to relieve the strained Austrian front, where Russian forces threatened the Carpathians and prepared to surge into Hungary. This shift eastwards was a mixed blessing for Hindenburg and LudendorV, whose control there now was less absolute, yet they strained to realize their plans of annihilating battles of encirclement.
In the north, German troops moved into the territories of what had been the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The immediate goal was to protect East Prussia from renewed attack and to distract from attacks to the south during early May. There, the southern armies achieved a breakthrough at Gorlice. In the north, in spite of the terrible condition of roads, progress was made.
Not much was left of it: To the south, the Russians had been expelled from Galicia. In May, the northern armies prepared their attack over the Njemen River, supporting the mid-July oVensive on the Eastern Front, which aimed at the formidable fortress city of Brest-Litovsk. On August 1, , Mitau Jelgava and Bauske were taken. The fortress of Kowno Kaunas , another great strong point of Russian defenses, was besieged on August 6, Fortress Grodno fell on September 3, , the last stronghold on the Njemen River line of defense.
To the south, Warsaw had been taken on August 5, and by later in the month most of Poland was in German hands. LudendorV was allowed to make his move towards Wilna on September 9, , still hoping for a dramatic encirclement. The Njemen Army struck east, in the direction of Dvinsk Daugavpils. Streets had long been crowded with carts of refugees Xeeing east.
Now the government departed, oYcials and agencies cramming the train station to bursting with packages and freight. With them, they took their monuments and statues, symbols of tsarist rule. Parishioners surrounded churches to prevent bells from being taken away. The city shut down, mail and telephone service severed. As the Germans neared, cannon were soon heard from three sides. Zeppelins Xoated over the city to drop bombs on darkened streets. The retreating Russians were determined to leave as little as possible to the advancing Germans.
The government sought to mobilize all local reservists, so that their manpower would not fall to the enemy. Soon planned measures turned to panic. Arson teams set Wre to homesteads, farms, and manors, pillaging, looting, and driving people east by force. On September 9, , the army chief ordered that all men from 18 to 45 were to retreat with the army.
A crazy manhunt began, as natives and deserters hid or Xed to the woods. Those caught by police were sent to collection centers to be moved out. Intensifying Zeppelin bombardments, shattering the train station and dropping explosives at random, announced the end. The last Russian regiments and Cossacks marched out of a city that seemed dead. In the dreamlike interval before the arrival of German soldiers, life slowly began to stir again, as locals organized civic committees, police militia, and newspapers.
For one native, it seemed a scene from the past, as if medieval Teutonic Knights were resurrected: Despite the success, German northern armies lacked suYcient strength to eVect the encirclement of which LudendorV dreamed. The Russians succeeded in withdrawing in time, retreating towards Minsk.
The vision of epic encirclement, replicating Tannenberg on a gigantic scale, was unrealized and Hindenburg and LudendorV blamed Falkenhayn, who had not approved their plans. Consistently, Russian armies in retreat managed to withdraw into the open spaces, establishing new fronts. On this new front line, German armies settled into a monumental work of building up fortiWed positions.
Behind this wall, war and Russian scorched-earth policy ravaged rear areas. As it withdrew, the tsarist administration shipped entire factories east, destroying what it could not move. It evacuated or dragooned away masses of people. Commander in Chief Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich ordered the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from front areas at short notice. Retreating Russian soldiers carried out summary shootings and hangings of Lutheran farmers as spies, burning homes and mills, and driving others away.
Kurland was left depopulated, losing three-Wfths of its population. German armies came into possession of Coming to war land 21 lands in a state of desperate disorder. Refugees crowded the roads, streaming towards the cities where they huddled together in misery, while the prospect of famine and epidemics hung over the ruined territory. It encompassed the areas of Kurland, Lithuania, and Bialystok-Grodno, a space of , square kilometers nearly twice the size of West and East Prussia combined, and at 42, square miles roughly 45 percent of the area of the United Kingdom today with an ethnically diverse native population of close to 3 million.
He personally, or more often through his energetic chief of staV, LudendorV, directed not only military operations on the Eastern Front, but also day-to-day administration of the occupied territories. The supreme commander was the Wrst cause of the Ober Ost state, to which he gave his name. His Wgure was the personiWcation of that state, his will its law. The area over which the supreme commander held sway also expanded over time, as Hindenburg was charged with the command of the front with the Austrians as far south as Brody, east of Lemberg, after threatening Russian successes of the Brusilov oVensive in Galicia in June The experiences of the fronts in East and West took shape in markedly diVerent ways for German armies.
The East remained, at least potentially, a war of movement, after the West bogged down into a war of positions, trenches, and bunkers. OVensives here still held the promise of breakthroughs. The great advance of came at great expense; one division reported daily losses of more than men. Afterwards, western losses predominated, but memories of tremendous initial casualties were another crucial Wrst impression of the East. During the course of the entire war, losses on the Eastern Front due to death, wounds, and disease were one-quarter lower than in the West. In relation to the overall numbers of men, there were two-Wfths less dead, only half as many missing, and one-third fewer wounded than in the West.
However, another deWning feature was the role disease played in losses in the East. During the entire war, in the West there were 2. Arriving in the East, German soldiers often found themselves lost, even though just over the border from Germany. The very proximity of such strangeness heightened the force of new impressions. The army had made no plans in advance for administration of the newly occupied territories.
Moreover, the reality they saw overthrew their earlier vague views of the East. From a distance, it had seemed to them a monolithic, frozen Russian empire, but now it dissolved into a chaotic, ragged patchwork of nationalities and cultures. When the Kaiserreich looked to the East in the decades before World War I, it saw an absolutist monarchical state, apparently uniWed.
For the broader German public, Imperial Russia conjured up images of repression, backwardness, and despotism. Ordinary Germans viewing the East before the war worked on traditional assumptions that it needed to be understood in dynastic terms. Above all, people to the east were understood as subjects of another imperial sovereign, all vaguely Russian in character, whatever else they might be. Fears grew of Russian surprise attack and nightmares of the Slavic advance of peasant giants gained currency in the popular imagination. Adding fuel to this Wre, the s saw the hoisting of the banner of a new politics to win for Germany the international position it believed it merited by its economic muscle.
The cry for Weltpolitik went out across large segments of imperial society, as an outlet for the political energies of the conWned population. Industrial and agricultural interest groups encouraged these demands, seeking new economic possibilities. Some ultranationalist propagandists looked east. Ernst Hasse, the theoretician of Pan-Germanism, called for a return from the colonial scramble to a European policy in his Deutsche Politik Its inXuential membership 24 War Land on the Eastern Front of industrialists, agrarian notables, and academics were a voice to be reckoned with in domestic politics.
Repatriated Baltic Germans, in particular, carved out a special position in forming public opinion on Russia and the East. Articulate Baltic Germans resettling in Germany energetically presented their grievances and often partisan understanding of Russian realities to the public. During the war, they were in the forefront of the most ardent annexationists. Set against the tradition of autocratic sympathies was German revolutionary sentiment. At the start of the nineteenth century, German student radicals planned attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander I and the Polish risings stirred liberal sympathies among the middle class.
Indeed, it was on the left that the most durable antipathy toward the Russia of the Tsars and the conservatism of the Russian peasantry was found. Bebel and Liebknecht again took up the cry in the s. The Russian issue, thus, was to be a decisive component in German socialist enthusiasm for the war eVort. The originator of modern nationalism, Johann Gottfried Herder, praised the naturalness of eastern and northern peoples, while condemning German imperialism.
His philosophy had revolutionary impact on the consciousness of Slavic and Baltic intellectuals. Sturm und Drang movement members Klinger and Lenz discerned in Russia and its people a spiritual breadth not to be found in their own civilized Europe. Rilke even considered Russia his spiritual homeland. For many, the East was not only an exotic setting for the imagination, but seemed a tabula rasa, where man was still young, a noble savage for all that he was in chains.
While teaching in Slavonic studies was established in at Breslau, it took on new momentum with the founding of the Seminar for Eastern European History and Geography in Berlin, directed by Baltic German historian and publicist Theodor Schiemann. But these popular visions were radically upset when German armies arrived in the East in the summer months of They now saw a reality on the ground quite diVerent from their preconceptions. What seemed in peace a unitary empire now broke down completely before their eyes.
With overarching 26 War Land on the Eastern Front Russian administration gone, the lands were revealed as distinct, various, and more complex in their present and past than Germans had suspected. Non-Russian peoples there had their own languages, traditions, and historical memories forming cultural and nascent national identities.
Most immediately, the landscape and scale of the spaces of the East left newly arrived occupiers shaken. Rippled lines of hills marked the coast of the Baltic waters and yielded to a slowly rising east of hilly lands scoured by river valleys, Wlled with marshes and a multitude of little lakes. Further to the east, the land opened out on to the vastness of Russian plains, a premonition of gigantic steppes beyond.
Thus, from time immemorial this place was a point of meeting and conXict between East and West. Distinct families of peoples pressed in from all sides: Topography read like destiny. Again and again, the occupying soldier felt that he was losing himself in the open, empty spaces of the East.
The further east armies moved in and in the later great advances of , the more this landscape revealed itself in its openness, the plains in their endlessness. All this left the occupier as a tiny Wgure struggling to explain his presence. There lay the East, the Russian endlessness. He stared into this land, which in its distant expanses makes the eyes wide and yet directs the gaze inwards, which leads people into inWnity, and yet leads them back to themselves. His gaze was drawn eastwards, towards this mysterious, powerful expanse. It was apparent even in towns, as one oYcial sensed in Kowno.
The main roads as well are laid out so broadly, that one sees constantly the proverbial Russian sky spanned above. It seems indeed so mystically wide, as if it curved constantly away and only struck the earth somewhere behind the horizon. Imaginations reeled at their sheer scale, their endless areas, and what might be hidden in the wild, brooding darkness.
Forests hid howling wolves, bears, elk, deer. Even bison roamed in the primeval forest of Bialowies, long since vanished elsewhere in Europe. What astonished Germans even more was that the woods here were not cultivated at all, untouched by the organized, planned, scientiWc forestry practiced in Germany.
Trees were not thinned, forest Xoors not cleared, remaining thick, impenetrable tangles of growth: Awe at this spectacle was touched 28 War Land on the Eastern Front by apprehension for soldiers, because the impressions which the ancient forests made refuted a part of their own understanding of themselves as Germans: Rain fell constantly through spring, summer, and autumn.
It could not drain oV into the poor soil and gathered into extensive rivers and lakes, marshes and bogs. Then mists and fog crept in, through the forests and down valleys, a twilight of uncertain shapes and living forms. Finally, rain would begin again. Winters were harsh, as Siberian winds brought inWnities of snow to cover the land.
Winter was slow to loosen its grip on the land, even with the thaw. With spring, the snow-covered land became sodden. This aVected the ground underfoot, leaving it marshy. Advancing troops moved with diYculty through the swamps, along uncertain trails that only locals really knew. Ground was spongy, perennially wet, and footing uncertain. Travel here seemed a nearly superhuman undertaking. Roads were wretched, impossibly rutted and dusty when dry, most often seas of mud and mire, swallowing carts, trucks, and horses. As vehicles drove alongside roads to avoid the growing swamp at the center, the width of some roads expanded to Wfty meters.
The occupiers experienced and remarked on it. It was completely Coming to war land 29 undrained and seemed totally uncultivated. New arrivals saw the territory as a badlands. Many documents from the occupation attest to the strength of these Wrst impressions and attempts to come to terms with them.
Soldiers recounted the scenes in army newspapers, oYcial publications, and in letters, diaries, memoirs, and novels. Albums of sketches and photographs recorded images arresting the attention of the occupiers. Army publications such as The Lithuania Book and Pictures from Lithuania presented landscape scenes and ethnographic sketches, to catalog, order, and Wx the unfamiliar.
German Kultur, meanwhile, was real, rooted, organic, spirit-infused, and given wings by idealistic philosophy. The Eastern Front, however, was diVerent: And yet Kultur emerged as one of the great issues of the Eastern Front, where it took on a diVerent sense, made crassly literal. Here Kultur did not merely mean high art; it meant civilization as such. Kultur was even taken back to its original sense of agricultural cultivation, of working the land, even drainage. With every step into the wilderness, they weighed in their imaginations how this piece of nature would have been tamed, controlled, divided, subdivided, cultivated and shaped, back home.
As far as the eye could see, nothing but a scene of poverty and Unkultur, 30 War Land on the Eastern Front impossible roads, poor villages and neglected huts and a dirty, ragged population with primitive Weld agriculture, a total opposite of the blooming German landscape in neighboring Upper Silesia. Looking out over the landscape, they saw not only what was there, but what it might become.
At Wrst, this land of war seemed nearly emptied of people. Great numbers Xed as the war approached, or were dragooned away by retreating Cossacks. Natives who hid in the forests to wait for the front to pass now slowly struggled back. The distribution of people had been sparse before the war, and was even more so now. With twenty-seven people per square kilometer, it stood at about half that of East Prussia, a quarter of that of Germany as a whole. Generally, roughly a third of the prewar population had Xed or fallen victim to the war. Refugees Xooded Wilna and other cities, in numbers overwhelming the limited resources of native relief committees, and soon disease and famine gripped the urban centers.
For the occupiers, seeing the lands for the Wrst time, these initial impressions were crucial, shaping the way they responded to the territory and its peoples. Facing something new and unknown in the diverse native populations, the Wrst imperative for the occupiers was to understand the categories and varieties making up this confusing mix of peoples. Somehow, the complexity had to be distilled, reduced to essences, but the task of deWning these peoples was no easy matter.
DeWnitions of identity were notoriously Xuid here and even now still in the process of historical development. In their new Ober Ost, Germans faced a bewildering array of unfamiliar peoples with alien customs, histories, and views of the world. They spoke an archaic language, the oldest living Indo- Coming to war land 31 European tongue, a linguistic coelacanth fascinating to scholars. Along with other Baltic tribes, they had inhabited these shores since BC. A year Baltic crusade by the Teutonic Knights failed to baptize them by force though managing to wipe out the related Old Prussians, and taking their name.
Even then, what evolved was a complex synthesis of older beliefs with new religion. The third Baltic tribe, besides the Lithuanians and extinct Prussians, were the Latvians in Kurland to the north, until recently likewise largely a peasant people, though advancing industrialization centered in Riga and larger towns produced strong urbanization, an industrial working class, and middle class.
Lutheran faith came to them through their German lords, while southern areas under the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth retained Catholicism. With Lutheranism, Latvians also gained their own literary language and thus a basis for growing national consciousness. Strengthened by sharp social and class conXict, this evolved into a frightening intensity of mutual hatred and violence between Latvians and German Baltic Barons, erupting during the Revolution.
They were a Slavic tribe concentrated mostly to the south and east. Lacking even the beginnings of an educated class at least in the occupied territories , their passivity and voicelessness shocked the Germans. Was this the wreckage of a 32 War Land on the Eastern Front people, doomed to extinction, or one in the process of being born? Belarusians were further split into diVerent confessions, Roman Catholic and Orthodox.
Because Catholic clergy were Polish, the religious aYliation, as with Lithuanians, conditioned overwhelming cultural and linguistic tendencies to assimilate, further confusing ethnic identity. In the cities and towns, soldiers were often surprised to Wnd a group speaking a German dialect, the Eastern Jews. Alone among local peoples, Ostjuden were able to communicate with Germans, either through their cognate Yiddish or polyglot learning. Jews lived for the most part in towns and cities, making up a larger percentage of their inhabitants, working at small trades and living in diYcult conditions.
Before the war, some traveled the countryside as horse traders and peddlers, valued by peasants for the news they brought. Their cherished historical memories recalled the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, and their language, culture, and romantic, messianic nationalism were Polish. Most Russians in the territory, brought in under tsarist attempts at RussiWcation, were now gone. Only some simple Russian farmers remained. More dangerous were other Russians who went to ground here: Armed and dangerous, they Coming to war land 33 skulked in forests and swamps, forming bandit groups which terrorized the countryside.
The largest ethnic German communities were in the old German Baltic provinces of Kurland, Livland, and Estland the last two conquered later, by February Werce tempers, aristocratic appearance, and curiously Xat accents. Though insisting on their Germanness, Baltic Germans were also deeply embedded in local history. Their identity was above all aristocratic, for they had been loyal servitors of the Romanovs, occupying leading positions in the provinces in spite of their small absolute numbers and Russia.
After emancipation of the serfs, social and economic developments produced growing class and national antagonism with Latvians and Estonians, exploding in the Revolution and ensuing reprisals. Last to be brought under German control were the Estonians, in An aboriginal Finno-Ugric people speaking a language unrelated to Baltic tongues, their history paralleled that of Latvians.
There were also small Tatar and Muslim communities. Tatars were brought here in the Wfteenth century as prisoners, then bodyguards for the Grand Dukes. Compounding confusions of identity, some Tatars belonged to the Karaite sect, professing non-Talmudic Judaism. This entire scene was unsettling for Germans. Terms of ethnic identity here were confusing and explosive. Rather, ethnicity seemed very much determined by choice. Families splintered along many planes of fracture, diVerent branches ending with diVerent permutations of names and allegiances.
Often members of one family count themselves to diVerent nationalities. The low level of education of the population worsens the chaos even further and opens the door to national agitation of every kind. But German observers noted that We discover, with a sense of distress, that all three have distanced themselves far from their national identity. Schmidt, who on top of everything else carries the [German] given name Heinrich, professes himself an incarnate nationalist Pole, Mr.
Kowalski as a thorough Russian and the apparently Muscovite Mr. Kusnjetzow as a genuine German. And the situation is no better with the confessional identity of the three: Kusnjetzow, in spite of his Russian name, belongs to the Evangelical community. Germans found themselves buVeted by competing ethnic claims from all sides. This confusion bothered soldiers because their own national identity was a recent construct, and often in question. The German Reich, cobbled together only forty years before, was fragmented, despite loud and unconWdent assertions of chauvinists to the contrary.
German regionalism and tribalism were persistent realities. Eastern Germany had unassimilated Poles and Slavic minorities. Alsace-Lorraine presented complications in the West, with its German-speaking French patriots. Bavaria and other principalities resisted Prussian predominance and asserted separate regional characters.
Kaiser Wilhelm II declared all divisions transcended: From now on, soldiers with Slavic names occupied an awkward position. They are observed even more keenly than the others, with the exception of the Alsatians. The sheer variety of peoples could seem astonishing and objectionable to new arrivals used to diVerent certainties. It was disconcerting for them to see how much ethnicity depended on historical circumstance and to them this seemed most obscene on personal choice and commitment. Whatever feelings came to them at the sight of this variety, one thing was clear to Germans.
A complicated and war-wrought history had made this place, giving the region its unique character as a land of syntheses, anachronistic survivals, and local adaptations. German soldiers sensed a living history in the peoples and their ways, from which they were excluded, standing apart. It seemed that once a 36 War Land on the Eastern Front thing happened, it stayed on forever, absorbed and retained, present in visible traces and echoed memories. Once reaching across northern Russia to Moscow, their territories contracted with the press of other peoples to this last stand, hemmed in on all sides.
Yet, in one of the paradoxical historical movements which seemed to play themselves out so often, the Baltic Crusades beginning in the thirteenth century backWred, actually forging anarchic Lithuanian tribes into a state. German settlers were introduced and native Prussians slowly extinguished. But this pressure from both sides led to the consolidation of independent Lithuanian tribes under Grand Duke Mindaugas in and resurgent paganism in a warlike state, holding oV the Teutonic Knights to the west and raiding Russian lands to its east, expanding at a terriWc rate.
In , allied Polish and Lithuanian armies defeated the order at Tannenberg, a blow from which it never recovered. Yet the Grand Duchy eventually waned before the growing power of Muscovy and Sweden. Out of necessity and dynastic politics, Lithuania drew closer to the Kingdom of Poland, culminating in constitutional fusion and the creation of a joint commonwealth.
Decline and then partitions by surrounding powers followed. Instead, this precipitated another paradoxical reversal, as common people, who had little interest in such matters before, became radicalized. Henceforth, national identity was inextricably bound up with the idea of education, a hallmark of the Lithuanian movement. The history which unfolded before the newcomers recorded a string of failed outside attempts to rule and reshape the place.
Neither landscape nor people oVered German soldiers anything to which they could attach their own past. Moreover, the past was here everywhere present, visible and felt, an overlay of legend, tradition, and memory. History seemed not strictly chronological, but present and the land itself adrift in time, so retentive that once a thing happened, it was no longer to be dislodged, but endured in an inWnity of echoes. Past traces coexisted out of all context, in archaic, original survivals, uncultivated, absolutely primitive.
The sense of history pressing in on the new arrivals came also from the ground underfoot. Among its many disconcerting qualities was how much history it seemed to hold. Dynamiting outside Mitau in to loosen sand could produce a shower of human bones, iron and bronze artifacts. A thin recent layer instantly gave way to dense past. Clamorous prehistory was visible above ground as well: Roadside crosses and chapel poles were everywhere, an insistent pre-Christian tradition, sometimes massed on holy hills.
A key feature was disconcerting simultaneity. Scholars marveled that an ancient hoard dug up near the front contained coins centuries apart, a numismatic museum unto itself. In the countryside, newcomers saw natives farming with nearly prehistoric tools. Buildings of improbable age and condition were not pulled down, but still used. Yet the whole jumble seemed to cohere. In the same way, the territory held diVerent peoples, in what Germans took to be diVerent stages of historical development, existing side by side. Facing this unfamiliar mess of history, soldiers stationed in Ober Ost looked for their own historical models.
Somehow, they had to Wt themselves into this eclectic yet cohering foreign jumble, to give meaning to their presence here. To the present mind, this need may seem strange. Yet in a time when historical memory was denser than in our own age, this was a crucial fundament of identity. Always a man with an eye to his own repute, public opinion, and posterity, here he felt history call on him to justify his presence. In army newspapers, oYcial publications, and personal documents, Germans recorded their avid search for hints of their own Wt in this area, looking back to parts of their own imagined pasts.
The most ancient was that of the great movements of peoples in the Dark Ages, a tribal model hovering before readers of the Song of the Nibelungs. The newcomers tried squinting at the hill fortresses looming before them. On a diVerent tack, army newspapers took up medievalizing poses, trying to link the region to Germany in a common culture of the Coming to war land 39 Middle Ages.
Invaders compared themselves to Teutonic Knights moving eastward and building a state in Prussia, carrying the Drang nach Osten, a sensed continuity asserted in the naming of the Battle of Tannenberg. Their identity was born at the borders, where the word Deutsch Wrst took on its ethnic meaning. It was not even bound to the area, and thus could not be a perfect match.
This model gave expression and some meaning to their rootlessness and brutalization.
From to , Germany became the stage for an apocalyptic European war. Rough historical estimates Wnd that a quarter of the population was lost, while areas stalked by plague saw more than half swept away. The countryside 40 War Land on the Eastern Front lay abandoned, unpeopled. Helpless, the individual endured, accepted his fate, or went under, in an unending ordeal of suVering and loss.
And the war moved on and on. Moreover, the war seemed even less historical as no one could point to signiWcant outcomes, since the war, lasting a lifetime, ended not with successes, but with the exhaustion of contending powers, called oV without decisive resolutions.
Most signiWcantly, the panorama of desolate landscapes made the war a place in popular historical memory. In this war landscape, one German Wgure looms up, one Wgure alone, embodying possibilities of freedom of will and action, less a character than a towering, unyielding shell of black armor, the carapace of an austere moral attitude. This Wgure is a being named Wallenstein. This popular vision of Wallenstein is actually not unlike the historical Albrecht von Wallenstein, a larger-than-life Bohemian noble, who placed a private army at the disposition of the Kaiser. Encased in such titles, radiating extraordinary powers and dangerous freedom of action, it is easy to see why Wallenstein became a mythological Wgure, sole embodiment of moral possibilities against a background of general helplessness.
Most at home there was the freebooting mercenary Landsknecht, compounded of severe discipline and rapacious freedom. As the war moved, so moved their homeland: Over time, religion no longer united armies, but only common loyalty to war. They created their own language, a mix of international military jargon and Yiddish, Polish, Gypsy, and romance Coming to war land 41 languages. The armies were a nation of war on the move.
Such an invocation of precedent was not unconscious, cultivated by artists and propagandists. These literary tropes took on political signiWcance, as Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was turned into that towering hero, in place of Wallenstein. A cult of personality was constructed around the Weld marshal. In Berlin, Hindenburg was literally set up as a titanic Wgure. By this common eVort, the huge Wgure became metal-clad, armored, a visible projection of collective will.
For soldiers, the land was a collection of unfamiliar scenes and traces of the past, in which the new arrival could not Wnd any reXection of himself. There was an added special diYculty for German Jews in the administration. Arnold Zweig, a writer in the cultural administration, came away with a commitment to Zionism. German attempts to Wnd historical models for their presence could not overcome this strangeness. Unexpectedly, German identity was thrown into this crucible of war in the East. The sum of powerful Wrst impressions was that the new conquerors were in control, yet in many other respects disoriented.
This fact conditioned policies and the ambitions which grew out of them in Ober Ost, against a backdrop of the constant struggle of German soldiers to Wnd a place for themselves, without losing themselves in the process. The East appeared diseased, lice-ridden, uncannily empty and depopulated. As one recalled, It was a horrifying sight, these villages, deserted, half burned out and haunted by hungry crows, in which only on occasion, out of a stark, barricaded house with blind, covered windows, from a disgusting door crack would lean out a sad Wgure, wasted down to bones, which in terrible greeting would vomit on the doorstep and then immediately crawl back into the darkness of these unhealthy, forbidden houses.
Boundaries of all kinds were obscure and the variety was overwhelming. It came to seem that they were not so much people to whom terrible things had happened as the sort of people to whom disasters always happened, somehow due to their own nature. According to a popular native source, this was conWrmed at the outset of the occupation in a disastrous way, when frightened villagers of a population now made up mostly of women and the old tried to kiss the hands Coming to war land 43 of surprised German oYcers, begging for leniency.
After their Wrst surprise, a popular native account claimed, oYcers eventually held out their hands as a matter of course. Wilna was founded by Grand Duke Gediminas, legend said, at the urging of a prophetic dream of a howling iron wolf. It was used as a cult center for the burning of bodies of the pagan Grand Dukes. A good part of its strangeness lay in its eclectic character. Scores of diVerent cultures from all cardinal directions ran together.
Some Germans found this mixture exotic, others distasteful, as one commented: Over half a thousand years the most diVerent inXuences from Occident and Orient had brought forth a queer cultural mixture which matched the presently still existing mess of nationalities. The guidebooks were less comprehensive guides to the place than guides to correct bearing and etiquette for soldiers. They warned of spies, usually forward women. Soldiers were instructed that their behavior was watched everywhere: The population of the occupied territory judges the entire German people by your behavior.
To pay attention to appearance, salutes, and a worthy bearing is the duty of a German warrior. Afterwards, it directed him to those spots that would seem familiar: At the conXuence of the two rivers rose the castle hill, from whose tower Xuttered the austere and familiar colors, black—white—red, of the Prussian Xag.
But once he stepped down it, it became clear what a diVerent world he had entered. This was the Judengasse, the Jewish quarter. Soldiers were instructed on how to react to sights and sounds of life redolent of foreignness, Oriental mystery. Towns heightened the impression soldiers had of being ungrounded. Footing was uncertain, on streets overlaid with perilous, rickety boardwalks of narrow, slick planks.
Underfoot, multilayered history again announced itself. In another case, cleaning exposed a human skeleton — it was unclear how or when it had ended up there. One stood on a swaying, uncertain base of mud, stamped earth, or rickety boardwalks. The physical reality and the spiritual combined to produce metaphors for the unfamiliarity of the place.
When occupiers considered how they themselves were regarded by subject populations of the rear areas, they worried over their own standing in native eyes. By projecting a resolute image, the occupiers could compensate for their small numbers. Prestige demanded that they keep their distance from native populations.
Army publications instructed soldiers in proper bearing: Yet this trouble simultaneously held promise, as a special, urgent case of a larger project, as thinkers at home looked to war as a transformative experience, Wnally oVering a redemptive chance to transcend the Xawed realities of fractured imperial German society, achieving some new, triumphant ideal.
Thus, the army would change the place, giving German form to foreign, alien content. In German Work, Riehl proposed that German craftsmanship oVered a model of unalienated, spiritually meaningful labor. The title alone was of greatest consequence, burrowing into popular imagination. It truly came into its own in the war, as a way of expressing hopes that this conXict was not merely destructive, but a chance for Germans to build a new world. Germans of the Kaiserreich deWned themselves not without pathos, given the imperfect result as a state-building people. The German, then, was someone who administered and gave order.
Through German Work, Germans would Wnd for themselves an identity, justifying their own presence in the East. Success must justify its actions. German Work was neither a bloodless ideological construct nor mere motivational slogan, but rather implied a new way of looking at the eastern territories. SpeciWc claims about the land followed from it. OYcials asserted that, in spite of all outward appearances, the new land around them was in fact not unlike Germany, merely unworked.
Only that here the scale is larger, lines drawn out further, and borders between nature and the work of man seem erased. But that is probably due more to lack of exploitation of the land than to its unique character [Eigenart] and does not apply to the areas where human activity could develop itself more briskly. Any land received its face and features from those who worked it, making it over. German Work thus dictated a speciWc prescription for the work to be accomplished, and Ober Ost derived its program and mission from this conception. German identity in Ober Ost was deWned as a speciWc way of doing things, a working and Coming to war land 47 organizing spirit.
Means were deWned as ends. Not content, but method and form were important. It was the ideal chance for the army, which had presented over centuries the image of an unpolitical tool of the state. Now it would reveal itself as a creative power. Only later would it become clear that turning Kultur into a mere means emptied of content, and deWning German identity as rule over others, would be a disastrous development for both occupiers and occupied.
Seizing on the ideology of German Work, the army prepared to build a military utopia which would change the place. The most durable product of the venture, however, would be the transformation which took place within individual soldiers, creating a speciWc way of viewing and treating the lands and peoples of the East. Meier, , and Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis Berlin: Benning Herald, ; rpt.
Marine Corps Association, , On the Second World War: Herausgegeben im Auftrage des Oberbefehlshabers Ost. Bearbeitet von der Presseabteilung Ober Ost Stuttgart: Hirzel, ; Stone, Eastern Front; W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon: Stein and Day, ; D. Genius of World War I Boston: Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich Munich: William Morrow, , — Lituanistikos Instituto Leidykla, , Israel Cohen, Vilna Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, , Antanas Gintneris, Lietuva caro ir kaizerio naguose.
ViVi Printing, , — Wheeler-Bennett, Wooden Titan, Bernhard von der Marwitz, Stirb und Werde. Korn Verlag, , IX Part 2 Leipzig: Barth, , — Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: Bilder, Briefe, Dokumente, — Frankfurt-on-Main: Verlag Heinrich ScheZer, , Schlichting, Bilder aus Litauen. Kownoer Zeitung, , 9— Pounds, Eastern Europe Chicago: Aldine Publishing, , 11— Victor Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae. Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, , Richard Dehmel, Zwischen Volk und Menschheit. Fischer Verlag, , Knopf, , 23—; Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Victor Gollancz, , — Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, , 42— Marwitz, Stirb, 17, V, 54; Marwitz, Stirb, Eine Auslese aus der Zeitung der Druck und Verlag Zeitung der Armee, ; Schlichting, Bilder.
Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: The Outsider as Insider New York: The Intellectuals and Lawrence: Deutscher Taschen- 50 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 War Land on the Eastern Front buch Verlag, Schlichting, Bilder, 11; Das Land, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, , A Short History Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: Oktober bis Droste Verlag, , Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, 2nd edn Stanford: Northern Illinois University Press, Istorijos ir Kulturos bruozai Vilnius: Baltos lankos, , — Years of Dependence, —, rev.
University of California Press, , 7. Beilage zur Zeitung der Armee July 18, Armee 89 June 14, All subsequent citations of Zeitung der Bartov, Eastern Front, 93, — Oxford University Press, , Rohwohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, V, ; Klemperer, Curriculum, Verlag Armeezeitung AOK 10, , 9, Cambridge University Press, , 9. The National Debate, — Princeton: Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press, , 40— These ambitions were fused into a utopian vision, which was the moving spirit behind the building of the Ober Ost state and yet also produced within it fatal contradictions.
While the future of these territories was unclear, the army sought to create a durable order before peace came, setting the terms for later disposition of the lands. First there was the obvious necessity of securing areas behind the front, establishing lines of communication and supply, order and quiet among the subject peoples. Next, oYcials would move to a total mobilization and comprehensive economic exploitation of land and people.
Successes of rational management by the army were to convince Germans at home and natives here that the regime should be permanent. Finally, in a utopian climax, came the progressive remaking of the lands and peoples, through intensiWcation of control and administration. LudendorV himself was the war god who called this military utopia into being. From his oYce, scanning maps of the area, he envisioned the state as an extension of his own personality and was awed by his own creation: In fall , LudendorV began to organize the administration in a way that would keep the lands under military control.
When the areas had Wrst been conquered, they were administered directly by the armies ranged across them. Behind a twenty-mile strip of operation area at the front lay the rear area Etappe commands of each of the armies. The administration was frequently reorganized, especially in the southern areas, producing constant confusion. LudendorV set about centralizing control, yet he faced the problem of doing this while retaining exclusively military control in the area. The size of the staV grew and grew, by a process that seemed unstoppable. For simple matters of administration, he believed in taking on energetic people without speciWc training: A high oYcial noted that his section attracted young oYcials wanting independence of action and upward mobility in their careers.
To secure the best, LudendorV extracted information about those applying for duty in Germany: One oYcial reported that at its high point the central administration numbered upper-level positions, including military details and economic oYcers. Of that number, oYcials worked in forestry and agriculture, in medicine and veterinary duties, and the remaining at internal administration and justice.
One of these, Lithuania, had 2, men in September At this time, Ober Ost had Wve such areas, so an estimate would suggest more than The military utopia 57 16 10, men involved in the administration as a whole. The chief of Military Administration Lithuania noted that in early he had over 9, subordinates. Throughout the occupation, then, the administration as a whole probably numbered between 10, and 18, men. Besides men in the administration itself, millions of German soldiers served on the Eastern Front and in the rear areas and many came to know Ober Ost. The administration drew in a broad range of men from diVerent walks of life in civilian existence.
In principle, these oYcials were either no longer usable at the front or specialists with important skills, or both. Among higher oYcials, the largest group was involved in government at home. All parts of Germany were represented in the administration, one oYcial reported, though the Prussian element at the top was marked. Another postwar German report cited oYcers and higher military oYcials in Ober Ost, not including those in the economic sector. Of these upper oYcials, The report noted their religious confession: Thus, especially Protestants, and to a lesser extent Jews, were overrepresented.
Education was also emphasized among these upper oYcials: Most of the oYcials were middle-aged. Agricultural oYcials were mostly from Pomerania, East Prussia, and Silesia and were thus able to adapt their skills to similar climatic conditions. In Kurland, Baltic Germans were also included in the administration. A handful of men had served in the colonies, perhaps carrying over some of their administrative experience to this new territory. Not only experts crowded in to the administration, since oYcials provided places for friends and relatives, and important individuals pressed their wards on the state in the East.
Besides being exclusively military, it was also to be exclusively German. Natives could only be drawn in to work as helpers, and then received no pay for their services, could not refuse service or resign from assigned responsibilities. The men heading the administration were, to a great extent, Prussians. Their Prussian character and experience colored their perceptions, assumptions, and methods in the East. London, Tavistock Publications, Empfindsamkeiten Passau, Rothe, Weischedel Frankfurt aM, Suhrkamp, Geschlechterdifferenz und Affekt in der Sprachpoetik des Studien zu Psychogenese und Literatur im Studien zu einer Geschichte der literarischen Empfindung, Hg.
Die Dialektik der Empfindung. Hg Der ganze Mensch. Anthropologie und Literatur im Jahrhundert Stuttgart, Metzler, , — Fiktion und Wirklichkeit Heidelberg, Winter, , — Jahrhunderts Stuttgart, Metzler, Der Strukturwandel in der Lyrik Goethes: This paper focuses on the part played by the ethnic group still called Gypsies and Zigeuner — the Romany nation — in the tradition of German counterculture, and finds several of the above modalities exemplified in the history of their literary representation. The first part of the paper examines the cultural anthropology and literary image of the Romanies in the epoch around as emblematic of the role of art and of the Gypsies in early modern German culture.
The thesis is that the representation of the Romanies around consistently followed the agenda of an aesthetic counter1 We define modernity with Silvio Vietta as a cultural macroepoch lasting from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, and characterised by the inner continuity of a small number of basic features across several, superficially distinct stylistic microepochs. The basic features are exhibited in elemental form in Early Romantic culture: Only in the twentieth century was this ultimately colonialist stance overcome. Romanies in modern and postmodern German literature are still the locus of counter-cultural utopian emancipatory energies.
However, the twentieth-century utopia rests for the first time on a hybrid or dialogical notion of authentically intercultural communication: As already indicated, we see the key term counter-culture as implying the notion of utopia. There is a vast amount of internal variation in the literary utopian genre per se. Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 45 Romantics however modify this representative strategy in two typically modernist ways.
Thus Hardenberg presents the theocratic Middle Ages in the context of post-Revolutionary chaos as a lost and future ideal of political constitution. Second, however, these utopian designs are ironically reflected and relativised in the texts themselves, revealed modernistically as merely provisional, experimental and provocative in function something non-specialists perennially overlook when they try to define Romantic politics see Malsch and Kurzke.
Thus despite the attempt to overcome distance, and to embed the utopia in everyday reality, the Romantics in fact also preserve one fundamental characteristic of the utopian tradition in literature, namely the insight that the realisability of a utopia is not in itself an indicator of its value, which lies elsewhere only Karl Mannheim would disagree. Mannheim argues that only an historically realised utopia qualifies as authentic, the rest qualifying merely as ideologies.
Norm, says Pikulik 13—14 , means two negative things for the Romantics: To take Hardenberg again, there are explicit signs of this only towards the end of his career. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen we find the first proper Romantic encounter with utopian Oriental alterity, when the figure of the imperialist Crusader is contrasted with his Muslim prisoner, the Saracen poetess Zulima — with decidedly negative consequences for Germano-Christian selfesteem.
For the Gypsies figure here as the ultimate ideal of human perfection, as ultimate cultural mediators, in short, as the ultimate Bohemian counter-culture of early nineteenth-century philistine Biedermeier. At one level the tale concerns how this inauthentic artist meets his aesthetic Nemesis. The treatment of the border theme is where the interculturality comes in. It is important to note that the company in the tavern is a representative selection of pretty much all the member nations of the Habsburg empire and its neighbours: Austrians, Tiroleans, Savoyards, Italians, Croats, Germans, plus a representative of the former enemy, the Frenchman Devillier not to mention Turks and others in the inset tales.
But the greatest contrast is with two others, in fact the chief characters of the tale. They achieve this by a variety of means, usually aesthetic in nature and involving the creation of order or the discrimination of truth from falsehood. For example Michaly, whom the narrator likens to a second Orpheus Brentano, , quells an outbreak of multicultural chaos in the tavern by playing his violin at a strategic moment and imposing Orphic order.
She also makes peace between the aesthetic entrepreneurs, and even rediscovers her own lost beloved, the sceptical Frenchman Devillier. They create intercultural harmony between the bewildering mix of nations and cultures that is the Habsburg state and there is plenty of evidence that Brentano seriously intended this as a political utopia.
They rescue love from oblivion and re-unite divided partners. In short, Michaly and Mitidika transcend any kind of boundary — political, cultural, aesthetic, sexual — in order wherever they act to restore wholeness and harmony, and Brentano does not shrink from promoting messianic associations around their person. And, to focus more narrowly, the two Gypsies, representatives of Oriental otherness in war-torn and philistine Europe, are the ultimate symbol of late Romantic selfunderstanding, vehicles of one of the last versions of the Romantic poetic utopia, symbol of healing for all the ills of Biedermeier Germany or Austria.
But it is precisely the Romantic selection of the Gypsy — among all possible Oriental ethnic groups — which is most remarkable about this tale. For of course the Romantic Gypsy utopia entirely fails to correspond to the reality of Gypsy life around Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 49 degree than even the Jewish nation Jews were at least tolerated absolutely the most despised ethnic group.
Naturally this had to do with their vagrant status and irredeemably low public esteem. In every German state save Austria they were obliged by law on pain of death as vogelfrei to cross the border of wherever they happened to be. With no national territory, they were therefore obliged to make their home everywhere and nowhere, de facto outside of society, in fields and forests — in nature, and to make their scarce living by disreputable trades or theft.
The negativity and marginalisation of the Gypsies rather like that of woman in patriarchal discourse paradoxically only increased their suitability as a poetic symbol of sheer Otherness, and precisely this is what Brentano exploits. Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt 50 lithe physicality as a Naturvolk which Brentano gleefully translates into his particular brand of aestheticised eroticism and their historical trajectory the myth of the return to Egypt, which Brentano translates into Romantic Heilsgeschichte.
But the key point is this: But this criticism is hardly the point. For none of this prevented the Gypsies around from serving as the perfect symbol of everything a Romantic utopian looked for. This is also the case for much of the nineteenth century in Germany, through texts which cannot be explored here,8 at least up to Thomas Mann, whose Gypsies symbolise everything Gustav Aschenbach is not.
The Romantic paradigm of the Gypsy, then, which effectively silences the Gypsy voice even as it preaches emancipation and transcendence, exerts a dominating influence over the literary representation of the Gypsy in the nineteenth century. It thus inaugurated and controlled the discourse on the Gypsy for this period. We shall now consider to what extent this received discourse of the Gypsy retained its power in the twentieth. Counter-Cultures and the Twentieth Century In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the presentation of the Romany universe in normal German culture tended to be restricted to the Orientalist mode.
It was an oppositional life-style, a bohemian liberated and liberating space, an escapist aesthetic utopia, which was available to cultivated Germans either in literature or in life. In the 8 For example: After Adorno signalled the perils of attempting to produce poetry after Auschwitz, and it is equally hard to see how after the extermination of half a million European Romanies the cultural history of the German-speaking world could continue unabashed to present the world of the Gypsies as a utopia.
It was not until the s that Romany voices were raised and the dystopian spaces around the Gypsy experience acknowledged. Ethnicity and the Search for Utopia in the Early Twentieth Century Among the Expressionist writers and artists at the start of the twentieth century there was an enthusiasm for other cultures, for other peoples, whether they lived in Europe or beyond. Otto Mueller — — who reputedly had Gypsy blood and spent several extended periods with Eastern European Gypsies — created images of their proud independent culture.
In an exhibition in Bonn in some images of Gypsies bore witness to the ethnicity and individuality of the Romanies, rather than showing them as outsiders. Yet this artistic utopian landscape peopled by bronzed bodies, by angular and often distorted facial features, and scruffy clothing, defiantly staring out at the viewer, this glorification of what appeared more like a primitive tribe, was pronounced unacceptable, likely to inspire only disgust.
Although these works portrayed the reconciliation of man and nature, and opposed urbanised civilisation, they were considered decadent, not in line with Nazi classicist ideals of beauty. The images of Gypsies flowing from the brushes and charcoal of Mueller and Pankok were thus among the many banned by Hitler as degenerate in the infamous Exhibition of Entartete Kunst in Munich in Their works were proscribed, removed from public view, consigned to the storerooms of the galleries.
After this cultural cleansing, Pankok comments in on how only one of the many Gypsies he had painted had actually survived the Holocaust. The others fell, victims of ethnic cleansing. In his speech on Post Acknowledgement of Dystopia After the Romanies were no longer officially persecuted. But does this mean that they ceased to be part of a counter-cultural group? The fact that some forty years after the end of the war many Gypsies had still not received compensation from the German and Austrian governments was proof enough of the continuity of anti-Gypsyism. In cultural terms Romanies still do not form part of the dominant discourse and are marginalised.
At a time when the heyday of socially critical literature in Germany was over, the Austrian writer Erich Hackl began to emerge as the champion of the underdog, the exposer of the iniquities suffered by various minority groups, be they in Europe or South America. Interwoven with the story of the life of the young Gypsy girl Sidonie Adlersburg, who is adopted by an Austrian family, and later deported to a concentration camp, is the reflective discourse around later governmental and public responses to these events. The key issue is Gadzo non-Romany complicity in the crimes.
Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 55 issue of the play, but the bomb explodes before the play begins. For Jelinek it is the cultural representation of the deaths, and the media indifference and insensitivity, the oscillation between images of misery and banality, the failure to see beyond the surface, which intrigues. The play is not only about the deaths but their memorialisation, the place which they take in history.
Yet in both works they emerge as an important part of the literary counter-culture, and illustrate the cultural diversity of the contemporary German-speaking world. How do the minority group themselves react, respond, generate a new genuine counter-culture? Written down some fifty years after the end of the war, these autobiographies highlight the counter-culture, the culture of the Romanies, which was targeted for extermination 12 Cultural history does not only relate to works of literature.
Cultural memorials to the past can also be seen as an attempt to acknowledge dystopia. Since the s a substantial number of monuments and plaques have been erected in cities, towns and other sites which mark the events of the Nazi regime in which Gypsies were deprived of their liberty, tortured and murdered. In the debate over the memorial to the Sinti and Roma in Berlin the old concerns about whether the dystopian images should be brought into the foreground are raised again.
Driven by the wish to record the traumas which they had experienced, and perhaps themselves exorcise some of the pain, the Romanies use writing as a form of therapy. Whilst recording the depths of depravation and inhumanity of the Nazi period, they attempt with remarkable lack of bitterness to create a culture of tolerance and understanding, to recapture those idyllic days in which they led a life free of threats of violence and abuse. The heterogeneity of the autobiographies is striking.
Here the Romany counter-culture forms part of a further subculture — a regional counter-culture. Oliver, born in Swabia to Spanish parents, who mixes the Alemannic with the Andalusian. When Alfred Lessing writes of having to play in front of Nazi officials in Buchenwald he is describing the paradoxical attitude to countercultures — the Nazi at once proscribed Romanies and yet were perfectly willing to enjoy their musical talents be it wittingly, or as in the case of Alfred Lessing who played for the SS in Buchenwald concentration camp, unwittingly, since they did not know that he was in fact a Romany.
Oliver also interweaves writing and singing and has made a number of CDs in which he reads or sings his work. Gypsies, Utopias and Counter-Cultures in Modern German Cultural History 57 In the writing of all these Romanies and in the art of Karl and Ceija Stojka, both now internationally acclaimed as artists who depict the horrors of the Holocaust, the dystopian world of the concentration camp is described in all its inhumanity and excesses of barbarism.
Although relatively few of their works relate unambiguously to the experience of Romanies — some refer to those of Jews and other persecuted groups — the aim is to create an aesthetic space in which the relatively utopian contours of a nomadic lifestyle prior to the introduction of strict laws preventing movement from one town to another are juxtaposed with the horrors which succeeded it. Conclusion In the cultural history of the German-speaking world the art and writing about and by the Romanies illustrate the weakness of talking of a major and a minor culture.
Although the works of both Mueller and Pankok were condemned as degenerate, they diverge from the officially accepted art culture in different ways. The Romany may appear as a form of noble savage, a primitive in an utopian landscape, as in the works of Mueller, but for Pankok social inequality is signalled in his inner emigration to a cultural space beyond the Nazi propaganda machinery. After it is impossible to represent the Romanies without the Holocaust casting its shadow. The idea of utopian images of Gypsies seems a contradiction in terms. The continuity of anti-Gypsyism is perpetuated by the journalists, but Jelinek interrogates the melodramatically dystopian media images of the Oberwart bombing and sets against them her own counter-interpretation.
Rather than being seen as forming a minority alternative group within society, the work of the Romanies is no longer to be comprehended exclusively in terms of a counter-culture, in opposition to something which is not, but as a valid culture in its 58 Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt own right. This recognition of dystopia and the reaching to reclaim utopia should not be dismissed summarily as a counter-culture, but should be appreciated as an integral part of the multicultural world of Germany and Austria today.
Works Cited Agnew, V. Materialien zu einem Buch und seiner Geschichte Zurich, Diogenes, Schaub Hg , Clemens Brentano. Ein Zigeunerleben Freiburg, Basle, Herder, Selected Essays London, Fontana 3— Abschied von Sidonie Zurich, Diogenes, Schulz, 6 vols Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, — , I, pp. Mein Leben im Versteck: Poetische Rede des Novalis. Schulte-Bumke, First edition, The Story of Karl Stojka: Hg , Otto Pankok: Kunst im Widerstand Bonn, Bundeskanzleramt, Das Brennglas Frankfurt aM, Eichborn, Western Conceptions of the Orient Harmondsworth, Penguin, Stojka, Ceija, Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-Zigeunerin Vienna, Picus, Stojka, Karl, Auf der ganzen Welt zu Hause: Stojka, Mongo, Papierene Kinder: Politics and Propaganda London, Routledge, The Burschenschaften and the German Counter-Cultural Tradition Throughout their history the Burschenschaften have been associated with strong nationalist tendencies.
Their public image has always gone hand in glove with the political intentions and positioning of German nationalism, which from the later nineteenth century onwards locates them in the right-wing regions of the political spectrum. From at the latest, modern German nationalism, reduced from its original complexity to the simple priority of establishing national unity, was a conservative force that aimed at consolidating an externally powerful and internally obedient nation which could challenge its neighbours for international supremacy.
The left-wing end of the political spectrum had meanwhile been claimed by the new movements of communism and socialism. However, prior to the appearance of these ideas to restructure a fully industrialised society, modern nationalism was the most left-wing element on the political scene because of its links with ideas promoted by the French Revolution, such as constitutional representative government. The levelling tendencies of nationalism, creating equal citizens of one nation, set it in direct opposition to absolutist dynastic systems.
It is in this politically progressive and socially revolutionary context of nationalism that the Burschenschaften originate. On the one hand, 62 Maike Oergel this investigation is a contribution to establishing the origins of modern German nationalism as politically progressive, as a radical opposition aiming at far-reaching social, political, and national reform. In other words, the essay asks whether there is a German tradition of opposition that is intrinsically flawed.
This approach redefines the perennial debate about the political nature of the early Burschenschaften and, in a more general sense, of German nationalism, which still revolves around the assumption that the German political tradition is profoundly antidemocratic and set against the values of Western rationalism and liberalism,2 by asking how and why solidly democratising tendencies promoting civil rights and social justice occur in close proximity to non-democratic activities which tend towards totalitarian dogmatism.
Although as a unique individual act it can only have signal function, the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Burschenschaftler Carl Sand represents these very different tendencies and persuasions: On the other hand, it cannot be overlooked that the readiness to execute such a deed results from a totalitarian dogmatism which decrees that it is legitimate and necessary to eliminate those who hold opposing 1 2 Due to the particular political and social circumstances in the German territories nationalism was an unusually new, politically effective and destabilising force: The grandeur of France, for example, had already sparkled in the fountains at Versailles, before it was claimed by the revolutionary Republic.
The recent study of the Burschenschaften by Dietrich Heither et al. A similar view of the political tendencies of the Burschenschaften was put forward by Walter Grab see Grab, Ein Volk, — Researching German Jacobinism, Grab of course is keen to point out democratic tendencies in other German contexts. It is evident that such violent opposition has proved counter-productive. Militant and radical fringes, committing acts of illegal violence to destabilise a system they find oppressive and exploitative, have repeatedly brought entire opposition movements into disrepute, thus paralysing all progressive powers.
The question arises to what extent there may be a direct line from Carl Ludwig Sand, whose actions precipitated the persecution not only of the Burschenschaften, but also of the entire liberal opposition, to the activities of the RAF and its descendant groups, who caused considerable problems to the self-understanding and efficacy of the Neue Linke. A close analysis of the political and national ideas that informed the early Burschenschaft movement will shed light on the nature of any German peculiarity regarding political tradition and especially political radicalism, and also suggest a number of parallels to radical opposition movements in West Germany in the late s and early s.
Let me begin with a brief look at the political and intellectual background to the nationalism of the Befreiungskriege. Between and the basis for the modern German identity was laid. Political and cultural self- definitions of a modern German nation were in competition, until they eventually combined around the crisis-point of , when after the Prussian military collapse Napoleon controlled much of central Europe.
The Sturm und Drang-movement demanded reform in both the cultural and social fields, but had a mainly cultural impact. The events of gave fresh impetus to political ideas of representative and constitutional government — the enthusiasm of the German intelligensia for the early phases of the French Revolution is quite legendary — but the German situation laid the double obstacle of feudal absolutism combined with territorial division in the path of such ideas.
These circumstances necessarily reinforced a link between political reform or revolution and national unity. But political enthusiasm declined in the wake of the Jacobin Terror and the unprogressive handling of the occupation of conquered German territories by the French. It was replaced with the notion of the Kulturnation, which claimed that culture needed to precede politics and suggested that German culture, unsullied by political involvement and unfettered by an ossified classicism, could prepare the culmination of human culture for the benefit of humanity.
Although Napoleon brought no small degree of constitutionalism to the states of the Rheinbund, he came to be seen by nationalists as a foreign oppressor whose sole aim was territorial conquest.
A new political-ideological German nationalism mobilised resistance. So for once the princes and the intellectuals stood on the same side to mobilise the people. This is a unique constellation in the revolutionary phase — And it is responsible for the peculiar mix of revolution- and tradition-based approaches to reform, which has been taken as evidence of the immature backwardness of German political thought.
It was clear that, if Napoleon could be defeated, the situation would be conducive to lasting political, social and national reform. Feudal absolutism had been weakened by the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, and a nationally inspired resistance would pave the way towards national unity on a constitutional basis, in conjunction with the constitutional converts among the princes. The Prussian government in particular saw no reason to dampen the zeal of the nationalists and worked hand in hand with progressive nationalist intellectuals, hoping the situation would lead to a united Germany under Prussian hegemony.
Many of these young volunteers became the next generation of politically active students see Steiger, 42—3. The previously defined cultural superiority is now harnessed to invest the need to fight French occupation with a world-historical dimension. Again, culture, in the shape of education, must precede political action, but political action is now paramount. In Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Karl Friedrich Friesen put together an Ordnung und Einrichtung des deutschen Burschenwesens, a proposal to organise and mobilise students nationally into a political and military opposition in line with their own political and ideological aims of bourgeois emancipation and national unity.
The Ordnung propagated an active life in the service of Vaterland and the people, based on middle-class efficiency and the Protestant work ethic. They intended to politicise the students in order to facilitate their becoming socially responsible and politically active citizens. Jena, situated in the territory of liberal Grand Duke Carl August of Sachsen-Weimar, became one of the hotbeds of liberation, i.
It was no surprise that the Urburschenschaft was founded here. But it was also a class exceedingly dependent on the good will of the aristocratic rulers and their bureaucracies, because in the end they would seek jobs not in the independent areas of trade and commerce, but in those feudal 66 Maike Oergel administrations to secure their material existence. The great majority of Jena students were preparing for some sort of office in the gift of the state.
Since the s Jena University had attracted many young up-and-coming academics, among them Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, Schelling, and Schlegel, all of whom launched their academic careers here. Oken and Fries both lost their posts after and endured lengthy professional bans. In a ceremonial act the Landsmannschaften dissolved themselves and united as one, symbolising the overcoming of the territorial division of the nation. Notwithstanding this, the new charter endeavours to emphasise democratic structures: The Landsmannschaften also used some democratic structures, but were run along more oligarchic lines, priding themselves on their hierarchical set-up.
They had a large underclass of trainees who had no rights. Interestingly much in the Jena Burschenschaft charter is taken verbatim from the constitution of the Vandalia Landsmannschaft. This has been explained as due to time pressure and to the need to achieve a widely acceptable consensus between old and new practices. It is also clear that members of the Vandalia were the driving force behind the national reformation of student organisations. The Jena foundation ceremony in June occurred at an historically interesting point in time, less than two weeks after the foundation of the Deutscher Bund at the Congress of Vienna and three days before the battle of Waterloo.
Both events mark the political crossroads that had been reached: Waterloo establishes the window of opportunity for change, Vienna symbolises the powerful resistance to it. Although Article 13 of the Bundesakte, signed in Vienna, which promised constitutional rule, might have given the Burschenschaftler some hope, the Deutscher Bund was dedicated to safeguard the 68 Maike Oergel absolutist forms of dynastic and monarchic government, and hardly any constitutions came to be agreed. One unsurprising exception was Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, which received a liberal constitution in June , even guaranteeing the freedom of the press.
However, due to increasing pressure from Austria and Prussia, this freedom was curtailed in and withdrawn in The politically progressive ideas were closely linked with a desire for national unity. The obvious lack of the latter and the widespread view that French models had become increasingly inviable resulted in a search for a distinctive German national tradition of reform. The reformers were looking for a German tradition that supported change, were looking in fact for a precedent for a German revolution.
The new historicist outlook, so prevalent among German intellectuals at the time, suggested that social, political and cultural innovations, in order to succeed, needed to be in keeping with tradition and history. The supporters of representative constitutions were a decided minority, and the notion of the separation of powers was rejected. Traditional solutions based on representations of the estates were just about acceptable.
The ideologues of this student movement, such as Arndt and Jahn, were Protestant, too. Hegel echoed this evaluation fairly precisely in his lectures on the philosophy of history. The link between the Christian and the Germanic, which had established itself as a standard topos in the German self-definition from the Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists? The liberation of the individual consciousness was merely the moral basis for the political and national liberation to come, a notion that fits in well with the German idea that culture needs to precede politics.
So the politically responsible and active Burschenschaftler felt called upon to complete the Reformation. This search for a tradition led to an over- emphasis on what was considered original Germanness, which included Francophobia and anti-semitism. Revolutionary ideas were so closely linked with this Teutomania, that the one indicated the other. Steiger observes that conservative authorities viewed these clothes as a German variant of the French Sansculottes Steiger, The link between Jacobinism, nationalism and Teutomania, and their shared revolutionary nature, was taken to be an established fact for several decades, as the assessment of the conservative historian K.
Menzel of shows. He too establishes parallels between Jacobinism and revolutionary nationalism: The Jena Burschenschaft set about planning the two-day event of the Wartburgfest, a sort of national student congress. Jahn and Luden were closely involved in the preparations, Fries and Oken attended. It inaugurated the next phase in the development of the Burschenschaften. It seems that this frustration led to the inofficial act for which the Wartburgfest is really in famous, and which signals the beginning radicalisation of some parts of the Burschenschaft movement: All the books burnt were recent publications.
It has been pointed out that attendance by universities from the south of Germany was sparse, because of their more predominantly Catholic student intake and the abiding suspicion of southern students that the German unity advocated in Burschenschaft circles was really a unity under Prussian hegemony. He was a moderate, who despite his commitment to German national unity, held the ideals of the French Revolution and of French legalism in high regard. Its burning has been interpreted as an indication of the political immaturity of the students, who, blinded by their Teutomania, could not see the constitutional foundations embedded in these laws.
They also threw into the fire what they regarded as symbols of physical and ideological oppression by superpower militarism and authoritarianism, i. These insubordinate acts of anarchic destruction gave the conservative rulers throughout the Confederation the occasion to act tough. There can be no doubt that many were worried. Although they demonstrated progressive criticism of the princes, their authors at the same time hoped for acceptance by and assistance from the feudal regents Steiger, —7.
Typical, and correct, was the following assessment by one of their own: At this point, the split between a moderate majority, whose political opinions and commitment were vague, and a radical politicised wing became apparent. Internally, the spectrum of the politicised members also stretched from moderate to radical.
Alle Deutschen sind einander an Rechten vollkommen gleich. Unlike Riemann, Karl Follen reckoned that this sovereignty of the people was unlikely to be achieved through an alliance with the princes, or even by peaceful means.
It would require politicising the masses, which would in turn lead to uprisings and the eventual breakdown of the current system. The Lied conceives of political revolution as a religious crusade that politically completes the spiritual process initiated by the Reformation. In a grand historical panorama it associates the desired national liberation with an ancient Teutonic drive for independence from the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, its political and social aims were clear: When unrest broke out among the peasants in the Odenwald region in the autumn of , the Schwarzen hoped that this might be the beginning of the revolution.
Level one is more moderate and focuses on ancient German traditions. The Reformation has a crucial status in this countercultural identity. Historicist thinking decreed that only if the revolution were anchored in a German tradition would its realisation be plausible and successful.
This connection, however, works on more than one level: The French Revolution and the German Reformation are the constant reference points in the discussion about political change in Germany at this time. The French Revolution, particularly its violent and regicidal phase, was by many national ist reformers considered to be a failure rather than a model.
Riemann wished to make clear that the German Burschenschaftler were no French revolutionaries. And yet the Revolution and Reformation were seen as related. The Reformation was the more promising German version of the French Revolution. Nor did the religious language or the appeal to an ancient German past suggest to the reactionary-conservative authorities that these people were political traditionalists.
This equation between spiritual and political freedom was turned into a historical relation — one precedes the other — by constitutionally minded theological thinkers in the early decades of the nineteenth century and became a commonplace in liberal thinking. It is important to note in this context that this equation is a topos congenial to rationalist interpretations as well as to more Romantic or Pietistic approaches that prioritise a living inner spirit of freedom and justice, as evinced by the post-rationalist generation of Protestant theologians such as Schleiermacher and de Wette.
All these interpretations share a focus on the need to complete the Reformation in the name of spiritual and political progress see Lange, — Do such metaphysical and spiritual concerns invalidate any political democratic principles, as has been argued by those who take modern German political traditions to be intrinsically non-Western? Does the spiritual always render the political irrational? Does this endeavour to base reform or revolution not only on political, but also on spiritual and historical principles necessarily lead to dogmatic self-aggrandisement?
The national ist element, trimmed with spiritual and cultural traditions, is dubious in both interpretations. Its presence has led to a devaluation of the democratic and constitutional trends in German thought in Western assessments, in GDR treatments it has been brushed aside as a lamentable error of immaturity. Yet it was integral at the time. In a pre-industrial economic situation only the revolutionary national Volk can occupy 15 See Heither et al. Their democratic principles and structures were realised — reasonably successfully compared to early twentieth-century attempts — on German soil in the later twentieth century, while their exclusion of foreigners and Jews, common in Burschenschaft thinking, foreshadows German fascism.
Their theory of resistance also foreshadows arguments put forward by late twentieth-century German terrorists. One of the first publications of the RAF in runs: Apart from leading the masses into revolt, Karl Follen considered the single violent act against an unrepresentative and repressive system not only a legitimate, but also a successful weapon. Follen made plans to set up a revolutionary organisation that would have revolutionary cells nationwide.
After , Follen could not stay in Germany. To escape arrest, he first fled to Switzerland , but in made for the greater safety of the United States. He planned to found a democratic German state as part of the American federation. Once there, he returned to an academic career, introducing the teaching of German language and literature at Harvard.
However, he was removed from his Harvard post after he became active in the cause of liberating another group of oppressed people, the black slaves. He became an American citizen in After a failed suicide attempt Sand was arrested and tried, and finally, on 20 May , executed. This month span is a phenomenally long gap to intervene between arrest and verdict, especially in a case where there is such a self-evident perpetrator to a crime, who never denied his deed. The drawn-out nature of the case is an indicator of the impact of the deed on the legal and political landscape of the Confederation.
The assassination caused a stir all over Germany. A few months later 1 July , there was an attempt on the life of the Nassau prime minister Karl Ibell. There were even suggestions that a black list of targets existed Haaser, It was widely believed that Sand belonged to an extensive underground conspiracy aimed at the absolutist system. Sand took great care not to implicate his comrades. He denied acting on behalf of an organisation, probably to protect his friends. He was not believed, but no directly incriminating evidence could be unearthed to connect Follen to the attack probably because Follen had had the foresight Revolutionaries, Traditionalists, Terrorists?
Part of a group or not, Sand had, in true PietisticProtestant tradition, executed the demands of his conscience.
Not surprisingly, he saw his action in the context of completing the Reformation. Uwe Backes has recently pointed out to what extent terrorism relies on the media to amplify the impact of terrorist activities and to what extent media and terrorists are in an almost symbiotic relationship: The resonance of the Kotzebue assassination in the press was phenomenal.
His political views were conservative, and his provision of information to the Tsar, which had become public the year before, made him a hate-figure in the eyes of the bourgeois opposition. Large numbers of sympathisers lined the streets to the scaffold, some in mourning garb, most of them silent, a few expressing their admiration for Sand.
The Wartburgfest and the Kotzebue assassination did not start a revolution, they instead radicalised the forces of Reaction. The Karlsbad Decrees, orchestrated by Metternich, were a direct consequence of the assassination. They banned the Burschenschaften as criminal and treasonous, re-enforced strict censorship of the press, introduced strict and unaccountable policing of the universities, and made it possible to prosecute as demagogues the leading figures of the national-democratic movement.
A Central Commission — the first confederation-wide institution of any kind — was set up in Mainz to implement and co-ordinate the investigations and prosecutions, and Metternich mobilised his network of secret agents to keep anything suspect under surveillance. The measures of the Karlsbad Decrees were hardline, their creation partly illegal. The Decrees were discussed and prepared at the Karlsbad conference in August , to which Metternich had only invited the ten most powerful members of the Deutscher Bund, whom he considered most reliable.
This contravened article 3 of the Bundesakte, which guarantees the same rights to all member states. This was noticed as early as To even prepare the preparations, Metternich had held a secret summit with Prussia a few days before Karlsbad, meeting with Friedrich Wilhelm and Hardenberg at Teplitz. They also agreed co-ordinated action at the forthcoming conference. To ensure a unanimous vote in favour, which was necessary for additions to the Bundesakte, member states which had not been present in Karlsbad were left in no doubt by the superpowers about how to instruct their representatives.
The usual debating period of fourteen days was shortened to four and the reservations that were voiced in Frankfurt were only recorded in a secret protocol. The official protocol of the meeting only recorded the unanimous vote. On 26 Nov , the Jena Burschenschaft officially disbanded, and the bourgeois opposition was silenced for ten, if not twenty years. There is a generation conflict. They suspect that, despite promises to the contrary, reactionary forces are setting up the same old nasty system again.
In the case of the Burschenschaften the period of turmoil originates in French Revolution and its political and military consequences, in the case of the s revolutionaries it is the extended period of instability beginning with the outcome of World War I and leading up to their present. The historical situation has effected a moment of unusual liberality, a window of freedom that allows ideas of complete political change to flourish. Students and universities, i. But the fact that some radical professors are older than their students does not deny the fact that they too may stand against a system that is supported and condoned by a generation whose values are drawn from an earlier period of monarchical absolutism in this case.
They are convinced they are in the right because their consciences are clear, applying the dogmatic method of self-analysis and self-justification that originates in the Protestant and Pietistic background, which many of the radical activists share; Sand for example shares such a background with Meinhof and Ensslin. Neither movement manages to get mainstream opinion, bourgeois or proletarian, on whose behalf they thought they were fighting, actively on their side. In both cases the activists question, and threaten, the basic self-understanding of the state, which reacts with relatively severe measures.
The same report also noted that prostitutes, whose healing cost the circuit much, were sent to female worker columns. War in the East began with a surprise, as assumptions of German war plans were reversed. The work was so important that it was made independent of other administrations, creating more bureaucratic conXict. Stojka, Mongo, Papierene Kinder: He is shown acting in response to radically egoistic emotion in the form of sexual desire, so making the whole sentimental group a victim of the social world he dominates by seducing the middle-class virgin. Often members of one family count themselves to diVerent nationalities.
Leonard Krieger argued in his study The German Idea of Freedom, with specific reference to the political aims of the radical elements of the Burschenschaften, that social rootlessness and critical dissatisfaction produced a critical negativity regarding political systems: The critical motif remained dominant even in the constructive process of working out a positive democratic system. The persistence of a strongly negative approach denoted the exclusive sponsorship of political radicalism by socially uprooted intellectuals, whose characteristic political expression consisted precisely in universal criticism rather than concrete engagement.
The general criticism of society involved […] the specific revulsion against the state as such. Krieger, Such an anti-state attitude of critical negativity applies to the RAF too. The German political tradition is the lack of a continuous political tradition. This includes the absence of a clearly defined tradition of opposition.
Instead there is a plurality of different 28 The difference is that most of the political-constitutional demands made by the student activists around seem to have been validated by the historical process. They have become reality. On the other hand, many of the political ideas of the radical left-wingers of the late s, anti-capitalism and antiimperialism anti-Americanism in particular, seem to have become, after —90, invalidated by the historical process.
But perhaps it is still too early to judge this. It is no coincidence that both the concepts of fascism and communism received clear definition in Germany. Neither is it coincidental that rival enterprises of capitalism and communism could be set up within German borders, and last for 40 years. Equally, there is a democratic-progressive tradition, which runs from the constitutional hopes of the Befreiungskriege via the Frankfurt Parliament of —9, and the well-intentioned and ill-fated Weimar Republic, to its fulfilment either in the Arbeiter und Bauernstaat, as GDR historiography argued, or in the West German Grundgesetz, as the other side would have it.
On the other hand, there is the tradition of the Obrigkeitsstaat, running from Catholic and feudal dependence, through enlightened absolutism and Prussian militarism, to the authoritarian state of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Between and , none of these approaches had been able to establish a lasting presence.
This leaves openness as well as insecurity, which allows radical oppositional fringes not just to exist, but to impact to a far greater extent than in a society that has an established political tradition. In a situation of shifting or uncertain political structures, anarchic disturbances carry much greater weight.
By the same token, the radical fringe feels more justification to suspect existing political structures whole-scale. Political unease expresses itself in radicalism and violence, which, although only practised by a tiny minority, provokes a severe reaction on the part of the state. This in turn helps to foster the notion, or the myth, of political incompetence and unreliability.
In this context it is useful to remember that political violence in the name of national -democratic change was no isolated German phenomenon around Of course, the political unrest of the s had a decided international dimension, too. But nowhere, with perhaps the exception of Italy, was the radical fringe as violent and as committed as in Germany.
So the Burschenschaften, at least in their origin, emerge not so much as an example of the undemocratic nature of the German mainstream political tradition, but as an example of a political constellation where some believe that violent radicalism needs to spearhead democratic progress, a belief that gradually solidifying forms of democratic government and opposition would in time make unnecessary. In Germany, however, this process of solidification was interrupted too often to succeed. Works Cited Backes, U. Baader-Meinhof und danach Erlangen, Staube, This assassination occurred against the background of the conspiratorial activities of the Charbonnerie, a secret society of ex-army personnel, students and republicans that aimed at overthrowing the Bourbon dynasty.
In Britain the severity of the Karlsbad Decrees is mirrored in the fearful and hardline decision of the authorities in Manchester to violently disperse a large crowd of demonstrators by sending in mounted troops, a decision which resulted in killing or injuring scores of people, and which became known as the Peterloo Massacre. These drastic measures were followed by strict censorship of publications and a prohibition of public gatherings. In response the radical wing of an extra-institutional opposition, led by Arthur Thistlewood, planned a republican coup for the spring of , which was betrayed.
Noch ist Deutschland nicht verloren. Jahrestages des Wartburgfestes Berlin, Akademie Verlag, , 80— The German Idea of Freedom. Deutscher Patriotismus — Wiesbaden, Steiner, Jahrestages des Wartburgfestes Berlin, Akademie Verlag, , 70— Nevertheless, throughout his career he kept upsetting his public, antagonised his critics, and was the focus of interventions by the censor and the police. The actor Nestroy was the darling of mid-nineteenth century Vienna — and beyond, as his numerous guest appearances in Budapest, Prague and other cities of the Habsburg Empire as well as in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and other German urban centres, clearly demonstrate.
The number of roles Nestroy performed is simply astonishing — from to his death, in , he played leading roles, 70 of them in his own plays. To that end he used any source that showed promise of box-office potential, while refashioning the source thoroughly to create his own inimitable kind of play. In all the texts he wrote and performed he asserted his opinions about the world as he experienced it, opinions that were changing with the times, of course. There is hardly a play that did not reflect the wretched aspects of Austrian society.
Nonetheless, he retained his immense popularity.