Prusia: el chivo expiatorio de Alemania

El historiador Christopher Clark desmonta en su nuevo ensayo la falacia sobre la que se cimentó la erradicación de Prusia del mapa y cómo su identificación con el nazismo se corresponde más con prejuicios que con hechos

ETIQUETAS
Alemania Historia Rusia

Moneda con la efigie de Juan Zápolya sentado en el trono de Hungría
Cultura La crueldad sin límites de Juan Zápolya

24 de octubre de 2016. 04:34h David Solar.

Federico Guillermo Víctor, Augusto Ernesto, último príncipe de Reino Unido de Prusia y Alemania

Voltaire, amigo de Federico el Grande, escribía a mediados del siglo XVIII: «Sería útil explicar cómo Brandemburgo, un país arenoso, ha acumulado tanto poder que contra él se han levantado fuerzas más poderosas que las coaligadas contra Luis XIV». A la sazón, Federico II de Prusia combatía contra la coalición de Rusia, Francia, Austria y Suecia en la Guerra de los Siete años (1756-63). Se comprende el asombro de Voltaire: viajeros posteriores se referían a Prusia como «zona arenosa, llana, cenagosa, baldía» o «vasta región de arena desnuda y abrasadora; aldeas, pocas y alejadas entre sí y bosques de abetos raquíticos...». Partiendo de bases tan pobres, los Hohenzollern crearon allí un poderoso reino que se enfrentó a grandes alianzas impotentes para cortar las alas al águila prusiana.

La clave, según sus defensores, fue el trabajo, la administración austera, honesta y eficaz, la educación nacional avanzada (el país más alfabetizado del mundo en el siglo XIX), un código civil moderno y progresista, los políticos desinteresados, la tolerancia religiosa e ideológica, un ejército nacional disciplinado y bien adiestrado, una moderna escuela de guerra... Con esos mimbres Federico II y sus sucesores convirtieron Prusia en el reino germano más poderoso, cosecharon victorias militares asombrosas y unificaron Alemania.

Sus detractores sólo ven autoritarismo, servilismo, militarismo, «pestilencia recurrente» (Chur-chill), caldo de cultivo para la muerte de la democracia y el triunfo del nazismo. Tal opinión, dominante entre los vencedores de la II Guerra Mundial, provocó la Ley nº 46 del Consejo de Control Aliado (25/2/ 1947) por la que «El estado prusiano, junto con su Gobierno central y todos sus organismos, queda abolido». En adelante, Prusia sólo perviviría en la Historia, como Cartago o Esparta.

Prusia: el chivo expiatorio de Alemania

Convirtieron a Prusia en un chivo expiatorio apropiado para explicar la I y II Guerras Mundiales. En 1947 era cómodo decir: «Prusia fue la perdición de la Alemania Moderna y de la Historia Europea» porque buena parte de su territorio ya formaba parte de Polonia; su núcleo original –Brandemburgo– y territorios limítrofes constituían la Alemania del Este, bajo ocupación soviética, y en los territorios del Oeste, administrados por EE UU, Gran Bretaña y Francia, nadie se erigiría en defensor del cadáver e, incluso, a la mayoría de los alemanes les interesaba, sacudiéndose así las responsabilidades nazis que pudieran corresponderles.

Barrer de un plumazo

Siete décadas después, Chris Topher Clark, un historiador australiano profesor en Cambridge, ha publicado «El reino de hierro. Auge y caída de Prusia. 1600-1747» (La Esfera de los libros, Madrid, 2016), un libro tan bien documentado como valiente, que desmonta la falacia sobre la que se basó la erradicación de Prusia del mapa de las naciones. Uno de los caballos de batalla de Clark en esta obra es que «Prusia era un estado europeo mucho antes de que se convirtiera en un estado alemán. Alemania no fue una realización de Prusia, sino su ruina».

En el ocaso medieval, Brandemburgo era una región inhóspita, cuyas tierras apenas producían una cosecha cada cinco años, carecía de fronteras naturales, de materias primas explotables, de acceso al mar..., pero contaba con algo que la hacía codiciable: su señor era uno de los siete electores del emperador del Sacro Imperio romano germánico. En 1417, el Emperador Segismundo se lo vendió a Federico Hohenzollern, señor de Núremberg, agradeciéndole los servicios prestados en sus guerras contra los turcos y en su consagración imperial.

Durante los dos siglos siguientes, los margraves (marqueses) de Brandemburgo acrecentaron sus posesiones con matrimonios y alianzas, gobernándolas desde Berlín, una pequeña ciudad con apenas diez mil habitantes, pronto sustituida por Königsberg, histórica ciudad báltica que fue capital entre 1525 y 1701.

Enfermeras ayudando a soldados germanos en Allenstein

Personaje determinante entre los Hohenzollern fue Federico Guillermo (1620-1688), al que su bisnieto, Federico El Grande, atribuía las «sólidas bases del reinado»: sometió a los estados, que se consideraban súbditos del elector pero sin vínculos entre ellos, generalizó los impuestos, pacificó a los bandos religiosos y fundó de un ejército permanente, eliminando las milicias. En su lecho de muerte decía: «Todos conocen el desorden del país cuando comencé mi reinado. Lo he mejorado con la ayuda de Dios. Hoy soy respetado por mis amigos y temido por mis enemigos».

Su hijo Federico III (1657-1688) aprovechó la situación internacional y su madurez administrativa y para pasar de margrave (1688-1701) a rey de Prusia (1701-1713), con el nombre de Federico I, reconociéndole el emperador del Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico y de Austria a cambio de su apoyo militar en la guerra de Sucesión de España, en favor de las pretensiones del archiduque Carlos y en contra de los intereses de Felipe V. La Historia le recuerda por la conversión del margravato en reino por el nombre de Prusia, originario de una nación báltica, vecina a Lituania y ya desaparecida; por el establecimiento de Berlín como capital y por el boato de su corte, lo que contribuyó a su prestigio internacional.

«El rey sargento»

Su heredero, Federico Guillermo I (1688-1740), fue todo lo contrario: en vez de afable, brusco y desabrido; en vez de generoso, avaro; en vez de derrochador, administrador estricto; en vez de disfrutar con artes y letras, sólo era feliz con el ejército, al que llevó de 40.000 a 80.000 hombres, procedentes de reclutamiento obligatorio. Le llamaron «El rey sargento», y le ha sobrevivido su fama de violento y melancólico, pero fue, también, el artífice de la reforma agraria y del saneamiento de 65.000 hectáreas de marismas, de la supresión de los privilegios fiscales nobiliarios, de una administración eficaz y honesta. Se le recuerda por su ejército, tan desproporcionado como bien adiestrado y mandado, pero se olvida que durante su reinado Prusia no acometió aventuras exteriores y que se dedicó a crear las estructuras sobre las que se desarrollaría el país.

Uno de los «culebrones» en la joven Prusia fueron las relaciones entre el rey y su heredero, el príncipe Federico (1712-1786). Al rey Sargento le enfurecía que su hijo se cayera continuamente del caballo o temblara ante el fuego de la mosquetería y que sólo le interesara la poesía, la literatura francesa y la música; que en vez de cultivar la esgrima dedicara horas a tocar la flauta o que le atrajeran más los guapos oficiales de la guardia que las muchachas de palacio. Combatió tales inclinaciones a bofetadas y, ante un intento de abandonar clandestinamente Prusia, le metió en la cárcel y le obligó a contemplar la decapitación de su cómplice.

Soldados tomando café en Lotzen (al este de Prusia)

No podía imaginar que aquella calamidad de hijo fuera a convertirse en el Marte del siglo XVIII, vencedor en las dos guerras de Silesia y artífice de un milagroso acuerdo en la Guerra de los Siete Años; sus victorias admiraron al propio Napoleón, aunque a él le complaciera más el sobrenombre de rey Filósofo y la lisonja que le dedicó el gran filósofo Immanuel Kant, su compatriota y contemporáneo: «La era de la ilustración» es sinónimo de «la era de Federico». Pero la Historia le recuerda como el caudillo del gran ejército de la época con el que duplicó la extensión de Prusia convirtiéndola en el primero de los estados alemanes. Y sería su victoria en Silesia el gran argumento para calificar Prusia de estado agresor, olvidando interesadamente que ése era el signo de los tiempos: como Austria en los Balcanes, Inglaterra en Gibraltar, Francia en Bélgica, las potencias coloniales en la destrucción de reinos africanos y asiáticos para apoderarse de sus territorios y recursos, Rusia en Polonia, Estados Unidos en México y en los territorios de los pieles rojas. Tras las guerras napoleónicas se encerró a Bonaparte en Santa Helena, pero no se produjo el disparate de abolir Francia, como se hizo con Prusia en 1947.
El taconeo de los oficiales dandies

La identificación de Prusia y nazismo se corresponde más con los prejuicios que con los hechos. El premier británico, Churchill, hablaba del «terrible ataque de la máquina de guerra nazi con sus oficiales prusianos, esos dandies con sus sonidos metálicos y su taconeo»; su segundo, Atlee, opinaba que «el verdadero elemento agresivo de la sociedad alemana eran los junkers prusianos». Pero Prusia tenía el más democrático de los «landtag» (parlamento), pero fue disuelto por los nazis con el apoyo conservador. La cúpula dirigente nazi no era prusiana. Tampoco lo eran los militares. Hitler odiaba a los junkers (nobleza terrateniente prusiana) y a sus generales. Y si se unieron al nazismo esperando la recuperación alemana y la revancha de 1918, también fueron los más comprometidos en el atentado de Von Stauffenberg (1944), eliminado en las represalias consiguientes, lo mismo que los generales Witzleben, Olbricht, Fromm, Fellgiebel y muchos otros prusianos, encabezados por medio centenar de junkers.

Source: La Razon (España)
http://www.larazon.es/cultura/prusia-el-chivo-expiatorio-de-alemania-HN13787264#.Ttt1NDybPZDCSEa

Ernst Nolte’s Revenge

Conflations of Bolshevism and Nazism are the order of the day. Ernst Nolte would be pleased.
by Daniel Lazare

A Jobbik rally in Hungary in 2012. Ivádi László

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Ernst Nolte, the Hitler apologist who gave liberal German historians a collective coronary in the 1980s, died this summer in Berlin aged ninety-three.

For a while, Nolte seemed to be the big loser in the famous Historikerstreit, or historians’ dispute, that set German intellectual life ablaze for a few months beginning in June 1986. Ostracized for his thinly veiled efforts to excuse Nazi war crimes, he retreated into a kind of internal exile, ignored by his colleagues and forgotten by the press.

His chief opponent, the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, meanwhile emerged as the hero of the day, the very model of a public intellectual who defends democracy when not holding forth in the lecture hall. It’s not often that the Left emerges victorious, but this was one occasion when it did.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the victory celebration: it began to fade. Nolte was partially rehabilitated fourteen years later when the Deutschland Foundation, which is close to the right wing of the ruling Christian Democrats, gave him its Konrad Adenauer Prize for literature and Horst Möller, director of the respected Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, seized on the opportunity to praise him for a “life’s work of high rank” and to defend him against “hate-filled and defamatory” efforts to stifle free debate.

Rather than a hero, it seemed that Habermas was now an intellectual bully of sorts. Meanwhile, a watered-down version of Nolte’s thesis has become increasingly dominant thanks to such popular historians as Yale’s Timothy Snyder, author of the bestselling Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a historian of the gulag.

The neo-Nolteans have been careful to avoid the “causal nexus” that got Nolte in such trouble, the idea that Nazism was an understandable response to Bolshevik atrocities, although one that happened to go overboard. Instead, they skirt causation altogether by arguing that Nazism and Communism interacted in some unspecified way so as to drive one another to unexpected heights.

As Snyder put it in Bloodlands, they shared a “belligerent complicity” and therefore “goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have.” This is not exactly what Nolte said. But it’s close enough since his basic goal was to shift the blame for Nazism onto others, a goal that has been fully achieved in the current ideological climate in which no one is supposed to notice the neo-Nazi militias ranging across the Ukraine or the SS veterans’ parades that are an annual occurrence in the Baltics. Nolte’s death is therefore an occasion to revisit the Historikerstreit to examine what it accomplished, where it went wrong, and why Habermas and his co-thinkers allowed victory to slip through their grasp.

Nolte started the ball rolling with an article in the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on the theme of Nazism as a response to a Communist threat:

Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Was the Gulag Archipelago not primary to Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the “racial murder” of National Socialism?

Nazi mass murders were thus a copy of a Soviet original. As the English historian Richard J. Evans points out, rhetoric like this had been on the upswing since the Christian Democrats wrested control from the center-left Social Democrats in 1982. Franz Josef Strauss, the right-wing Bavarian politician, had taken advantage of the conservative shift to urge Germans to “walk tall” and “emerge from the shadow of the Third Reich” while the FAZ was increasingly opening its pages to the radical right. But as bad as a few far-right cranks might be, an article by a respected academic historian like Nolte — his 1963 study, Fascism in Its Epoch, was internationally known — was worse since it was a sign that the historical profession as a whole was shifting into the “revisionist” camp.

Habermas, a product of the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School, therefore mounted a counterattack not only on Nolte but on other right-wing historians as well. He sailed into the historian Andreas Hillgruber for writing that the German military in 1944–45 was engaged in “desperate and sacrificial efforts . . . to protect the German population in the East from the orgies of revenge by the Red Army.”

He upbraided Michael Stürmer, an academic historian who served as an official adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for calling for a more patriotic version of German history. And he attacked Nolte not only for suggesting that Bolshevism was the prime mover, but for arguing that a letter that Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization, wrote in September 1939 stating that Jews the world over sided with Great Britain “could lay a foundation for the thesis that Hitler would have been justified in treating the German Jews as prisoners of war.”

Nolte didn’t say the letter did lay a foundation, merely that it could. Nonetheless, his statement was an affront because it violated what, since the 1960s and ’70s, had been the first rule of West German politics, which is that the Nazis were entirely responsible for their actions and that Germans should not shift the blame onto others, least of all the Jews.

Yet Nolte was now clearly out to “relativize” the Nazis by arguing that they were not the only ones at fault. The upshot would have been a return to the “good Nazi” rhetoric of the late 1940s and early ’50s when Hollywood turned out admiring biopics of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Adenauer assured the Bundesrat that the percentage of accused Nazi war criminals “who are really guilty is so extraordinarily small that the honor of the former German Wehrmacht is not compromised.”

It would have, that is, if Habermas and his co-thinkers had let Nolte get away with it. But they didn’t. Rather, they were able to fend off the assault by pointing out that after years of soul-searching and political debate, it was impossible to turn back the clock. “After Auschwitz we can create our national self-understanding solely by appropriating the better traditions of our critically examined history,” Habermas wrote in the liberal weekly Die Zeit. “Otherwise we cannot respect ourselves and cannot expect respect from others.”

Germans must confront the past ruthlessly and unsparingly if they were to have any future as a liberal society. The point was so obvious, so compelling, so indisputable that there was never really any doubt that the argument would carry the day.

But if that’s the case, why was it subsequently undone? Why was Nolte able to regain his footing to a degree while Habermas seemed to visibly deflate?

The answer has to do with the remedy Habermas put forth. While Germans must wrestle with the past, the ultimate solution, he said, was for West Germany to tie itself ever more securely to the liberal west. As he put it a few weeks into the great debate:

The unconditional opening of the Federal Republic to the political culture of the West is the greatest intellectual achievement of our postwar period; my generation should be especially proud of this . . . The only patriotism that will not estrange us from the West is a constitutional patriotism. Unfortunately, it took Auschwitz to make possible . . . binding universalist constitutional principles anchored in conviction.

As sensible as this may seem, there was a problem. If the West is synonymous with liberalism, does that mean that the East is the opposite — intrinsically illiberal and threatening? If so, then perhaps Nolte’s argument that an “Asiatic” bacillus was at the root of it all was not off base.

Moreover, Habermas’s belief in Western liberalism was one of those assumptions that first had to be proved. The Historikerstreit, for example, was essentially an aftershock from the Bitburg furor a year earlier when Helmut Kohl prevailed on Ronald Reagan to lay a wreath at a German military cemetery containing the remains of some forty-nine members of the Waffen-SS. As Habermas wrote in the liberal weekly Die Zeit, the visit was intended to accomplish three things:

The aura of the military cemetery was supposed to waken national sentiment and thereby a “historical consciousness”; the juxtaposition of hills of corpses in the concentration camp and the SS graves in the cemetery of honor, the sequence of Bergen-Belsen in the morning and Bitburg in the afternoon implicitly disputed the singularity of the Nazi crimes and shaking hands with the veteran generals in the presence of the US president was, finally, a demonstration that we had really always stood on the right side in the fight against Bolshevism.

Quite correct. But Reagan was hardly an innocent victim of German wiles. After all, he was a hardened Cold Warrior who, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, had worked hand-in-glove with the FBI to purge Hollywood of Communist influence and, decades later, would resist visiting a German concentration camp on the grounds that unpleasant memories should remain undisturbed. “I don’t think we ought to focus on the past,” he reportedly said. “I want to focus on the future. I want to put that history behind me.” His sentiments were captured in remarks a few months earlier about Americans who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in 1936–39 to defend the Spanish republic: “I would say that the individuals that went over there were, in the opinions of most Americans, fighting on the wrong side.”

The right side was that of Franco. If Hitler had concentrated his fire on the Soviets instead of attacking Britain and France, the right side would presumably have been that of the Nazis. The United States thus stood for the sort of willful forgetfulness and accommodation with fascism that Habermas found so dangerous, yet he embraced it regardless. The result was to tie him hand and foot to the new “hyperpower” as it headed off in an increasingly militaristic direction with the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989–91.

Thus, Habermas supported Operation Desert Storm in 1991 even though, as Perry Anderson noted in the New Left Review, the war was essentially a defense of Saudi oil interests. He endorsed the 1999 NATO air campaign in the Balkans even though the United States was plainly seeking to back Serbia into a corner by presenting it with an ultimatum — the notorious Rambouillet Accords — that it knew it couldn’t accept. He backed the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and only balked at supporting the 2003 Iraq War when Bush and Blair failed to get UN Security Council approval. He championed the European Union and a single currency and was thus flummoxed when an over-extended EU began coming apart at the seams in response to the 2008 financial meltdown, Syriza, Brexit, and the refugee crisis.

The effect has been to paint himself into a corner. Habermas is still everyone’s favorite public intellectual, the recipient of innumerable awards and the subject of gushing profiles in publications like the Nation. But the impression otherwise is of a man adrift. This is especially the case with the European Union, increasingly the object of Habermas’s most fervent hopes.

As he freely confesses, the idea of a Germany that is both powerful and united fills German center-leftists like himself with dread. It means a return to pre-1914 days when Germany was “too weak to dominate the continent, but too strong to bring itself into line,” to quote the historian Ludwig Dehios. Just as liberal redemption lies in the West, the solution to a Germany that is both too big and too small lies in a greater Europe that is increasingly integrated.

“By embedding itself in Europe, Germany was able to develop a liberal self-understanding for the first time,” Habermas wrote recently, the same thing he said thirty years earlier about integration into the US-led international order.

Indeed, he went even farther. Rather than a sovereign Germany, his hope was for Germany to cede aspects of sovereignty to the European Union without the union taking them on itself. The state would fade away at both the national and EU level, not under socialism but amid the greatest wave of speculative mania in capitalist history. This was no less utopian than the notion of finding liberal redemption in the arms of an increasingly illiberal west, which is why it was inevitable that his hopes would eventually crash and burn.

Which brings us to yet another reason why the Historikerstreit would eventually fall short. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has observed, Habermas has an issue with capitalism: he doesn’t want to hear about it. Just as he sees the European Union as a device that technocrats can manage provided they have the proper “democratic roots,” he sees Nazism as a largely national problem that Germans can manage provided they dissolve themselves into some larger liberal entity. As admirable as the call for Germany to take responsibility may be, the effect is to play down certain ideological and economic aspects.

One of the curious things about the Historikerstreit, for instance, is why Habermas and his allies failed to challenge the Cold War caricature of Soviet history that was the centerpiece of Nolte’s argument. Both sides took it as a given that the Soviet experience was one big bloodbath from beginning to end — the only question is whether it planted the idea of mass extermination in Hitler’s head or whether he thought it up on his own.

After six months of controversy, it was left to an outsider, an ex-Marxist named Richard Löwenthal, to note in a letter to the FAZ that while the revolution and civil war of 1917–1921 were certainly bloody, there were no “acts of annihilation” until Stalin’s disastrous collectivization campaign in 1929–1933 and the purges in 1936–38. Since this was long after Nazi ideology had taken shape, the idea of a causal connection was spurious on its face.

So why didn’t Habermas point out the obvious? No doubt because he was unwilling to part ways with a US consensus that the Soviet Union was all bad all of the time except for a brief period of dispensation during World War II.

Similarly, his depiction of Nazism as essentially a German problem had the unintended consequence of letting other nations off the hook. So what if aging veterans parading about in their Waffen-SS uniforms were a regular occurrence in the Baltic republics? Since the Balts are not Germans, they can’t be Nazis — can they? What did it matter if statues of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera were proliferating across the Ukraine or if Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán was attempting to rehabilitate Miklos Horthy, the Axis supporter who oversaw the deportation and annihilation of some four hundred thousand Jews? Since only Germans were responsible for Nazi atrocities, the others got a free pass.

Habermas’s blind spot with regard to capitalism led to him to deemphasize Nazism as a response to the international economic crisis of 1929–1933 and hence left his followers unprepared for the impact that another great capitalist crisis would have in 2008. Where Nazism began in Germany before radiating outwards, ultra-nationalism the second time around began seemingly everywhere except Germany before invading in the form of Alternative for Germany, a self-confessed “völkisch” party that is now a rising force at the polls. Instead of spreading outwards, it began in outlying countries before flowing back in. But the effect is the same: a right-wing radicalization of German bourgeois society that Habermas thought he had headed off at the pass some three decades earlier.

Ultimately, the Historikerstreit was a very center-left affair — decorous, academic, conducted within the narrowest ideological confines. It resembles the Dreyfus affair in the sense of public intellectuals rallying to defend the republic against authoritarians trying to hijack it for the Right. But otherwise it was very weak tea.

Instead of J’Accuse-style broadsides, it featured the tepid prose of the graduate seminar. Instead of riots and threats of coup d’état, it generated a flurry of excited newspaper articles and letters to the editor. While it beat back the Right for a moment, in the end all it succeeded in creating was a Maginot Line that the far right has found all too easy to march around.

Somewhere Ernst Nolte is no doubt enjoying a good chuckle.

10.18.16
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy.

Source: Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/ernst-nolte-stalin-hitler-fascism-historikerstreit/

German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945

Germany and the "Laissez-Faire" Imperialism of the United States

Linked to the rise in domestic industrial capacity and the ascent of an educated, commercially minded liberal political class desirous of expanded economic opportunities, Germany’s global penetration during the long nineteenth century was predicated on the conviction that overseas expansion would deliver both mercantile benefits and domestic political change. Over the past decade, this period of domestic change and international activity has been a fruitful field for researchers studying the historical development of Germany. Historians have variously framed this penetration through the superordinate concept of “globalization”; or alternatively, imperialism, which is one of globalization’s primary historical forms.

Whether viewed as imperial or globalizing endeavors, German attempts at overseas penetration during the nineteenth century did not take place in a historical vacuum, with numerous, preexisting European empires all but crowding Germany out of the ranks of the global empires. While the antiquated Iberian empires offered a counterexample to German liberals, the blue water empires of the British, the French, and the Dutch were perceived by German liberals as exemplars of successful European liberal imperialist ventures. With great verve and clarity, Jens-Uwe Guettel makes the case that missing from this picture is the key role of the United States, which he argues was central to German understandings of liberal empire and in some respects offered a template for German approaches to expansionism. Guettel traces Germany’s liberal imperialism, or as he terms it, “imperial liberalism,” from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, showing the numerous points of transatlantic overlap. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, and Christoph Meiners’ respective meditations on slavery, which derived their content from Anglo-American models, he illustrates how the tension between the negative experience of the condition of slavery for the slave and the utility of slavery as an institution enabling further European economic development was resolved in favor of the latter. From here, Guettel’s account moves on to a refutation of the notion of any special German affinity or empathy for the plight of Native Americans. He does this by demonstrating the favorable reception in Germany of American narratives of the “vanishing” Amerindians, which presented the extraordinary excess death rates associated with imperial expansion as either inexplicable “natural” occurrences or, quite often, a process in line with world-historical developments which dictated that “higher” forms of life must displace “lower” ones. Astutely, Guettel points out that this racializing discourse was multidirectional, with Friedrich Ratzel not merely transmitting current U.S. thought on indigenous policy, but also contributing to the renewal of liberal imperialist thought in the United States, influencing figures such as Frederick Jackson Turner. At this point it might have been interesting to see Guettel go even further and try to assess the impact and agency of ordinary German settlers in the United States on this transcontinental exchange. An admittedly difficult task, it might nonetheless have been possible by utilizing the material uncovered by Stefan von Senger und Etterlin in his 1991 work Neu-Deutschland in Nordamerika: Massenauswanderung, nationale Gruppenansiedlungen und liberale Kolonialbewegung, 1815 – 1860.

One of the main elements of U.S. imperialism that Guettel sees as translating well to the German context was the emphasis on what he terms the American-style laissez-faire approach to empire, which he argues particularly informed the views of not only Ratzel but also the left-liberal colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg. Central to this American model were political liberty, economic self-reliance, a decentralized approach to settlement patterns, and a localized, “rational” approach to issues of colonial racial hierarchy. While the first three were certainly laissez-faire, the decentralized aspects of U.S. racial policy that Germany adopted were, at least in the late imperial period, not always apparent, as Guettel admits. A tension between localizing and centralizing impulses was apparent, pronouncedly so under the left-liberal colonial secretary Wilhelm Solf, who in 1912 moved from a reliance on colony-specific ordinances forbidding miscegenation and mixed marriages towards a demand that such measures be enacted from Berlin and enshrined in national legislation. With Solf’s call for a law against mixed marriages defeated by the combined forces of the Catholic Centre Party and the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Guettel explains how Solf once again turned to the example of the United States; this time to study how the segregationist Jim Crow laws of some states coexisted with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which seemed to contradict them at the federal level.

Guettel quite correctly reveals just how much changed for Germany after World War One. Germany lost a significant portion of its territory, including all of its overseas colonies, while also enduring a period of partial occupation, including occupation by African troops brought in under French auspices. This inversion of the hitherto-prevailing colonial socio-racial order was decried in the German press. In addition, as a result of the American entry into the war, Germany’s relationship with the United States suffered greatly, to the extent that favorable allusions to U.S. racial conditions in post-1918 German debates fell off markedly. Even more obvious, Guettel reveals, was the Nazi Party’s disdain for the state of racial law in the United States. Rejecting the prewar enthusiasm for a decentralized approach to racial law, the Nazis instead argued that the United States was in fact a racially degenerating counterexample which should follow the new, highly centralized German approach. “Unlike in 1912,” Guettel argues, “in 1935 America was not allowed to be exemplary” (p. 200). The previously admired liberal mode of U.S. imperialism was necessarily criticized on the same grounds--it lacked centralization and was too heavily bound up in notions such as individualism and political liberty which, the Nazis claimed, they had superseded. In this way, Guettel convincingly disrupts accounts of Nazi imperialism that stress its continuity with prewar forms of liberal imperialism, suggesting instead that “the pre-1914 imperialism and post-1918 visions of living space in the East existed as perceived opposites within a framework of dialectical tension” (p. 223).

A natural field of further inquiry for both the author and other future researchers is the liberal depictions of Central Europe in nineteenth-century Germany. Raised briefly in the first chapter, it is one area that might profit from further analysis. Perhaps in deference to Woodruff Smith’s seminal Lebensraum/Weltpolitik distinction, Guettel seems to stress the distinction between overseas empire and contiguous European empire in liberal circles.[1] While he correctly points out the marked differences between liberal imperialism and Nazi imperialism in terms of political modality, racial policy, and manner of execution, it is worth remembering that German liberals such as Friedrich List, Friedrich Naumann, and Max Weber also had their own sense of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) that complemented liberal demands for an overseas empire, as Guettel acknowledges (p. 63). The partial overlap in the imperial topography of liberal Germans and Nazi Germans does not mean that there were uniquely German structural or political continuities that determined the shift from liberal to Nazi imperialism. Given too that U.S. liberal imperialism largely (but not exclusively) took the shape of contiguous territorial expansion, Guettel might profitably assess how Central Europe looked to not just the Nazis but also nineteenth-century liberal Germans familiar with U.S. expansionism. This could potentially strengthen his already detailed and convincing refutation of overarching and idiosyncratic lines of political and imperial continuity in German history.

Guettel’s book is admirable for a number of reasons. It expertly dissects the twin myths that U.S. expansionism was uniquely devoid of violent, imperialist characteristics, and that the history of German imperialism is somehow reducible to proto-Nazi violence. Citing the myriad statements of violent intent against indigenous people made by U.S. liberals and noting the transferal of these statements to German public discourse, Guettel lays out precisely how strategies for imperial consolidation were not contained to individual nation-states but were translocated. The book also successfully contextualizes prewar German imperialism within a liberal milieu which shared a set of assumptions with its American counterpart regarding the correct forms of imperial penetration and the requisite means for dealing with recalcitrant indigenous populations unwilling or unable to submit to the rigors of European politico-military dominance and work discipline. As Guettel shows, imperialism and the forms of socio-racial knowledge it engendered were an integral part of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Note

[1]. Woodruff D. Smith The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Jens-Uwe Guettel. German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 292 S. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-02469-4.

Reviewed by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (Flinders University)
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2013)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Source: H-Net
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38209