From The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes, 2017) pp117-20
Darkness Visible
Bismarck’s change of course in 1879 was so drastic that historians talk about the second foundation of the Empire. It left one particular group in Germany floundering: people who self-defined as Protestant Germans. They were mostly in the north and east, but had local power-bases elsewhere, in lands whose rulers had backed Luther, or in towns developed later as Prussian administrative bastions. The state-sponsored Kulturkampf against the Catholics had radicalised them but in 1879 they found themselves dumped by Bismarck in favour of deals with Catholics and conservatives. These embittered acolytes of Progress now made Being Protestant German into a new etsatz religion of alien-free German-ness (Deutschtum). Anti-Catholicism was second nature to them, but the fatal spine of the movement was a brand new kind of anti-semitism.
The great proclaimer of this was the official Prussian State Historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, guru of the National Liberals, whose prestige was vast and whose drum-like shriek, as one Mexican observer called it, frequently enthralled the Reichstag. Treitschke’s 1879 article Our Prospects (Unsere Aussichten). better known as its shorter 1880 form A Word about Our Jews, is the founding document of modem political anti~semitism. From now on, hating the Jews wasn’t just about hating the Jews; it was a fully-fledged ideology, unlike any other form of racism.
To Treitschke, the Jews were our misfortune. They had a deep, mysterious relationship with the Englanders (about whom he had long raged). Like the English, they were personally degenerate and cowardly, with the mentality of shopkeepers rather than heroes, yet somehow – in contradiction of all true Progress! – they ran the world. Ruthless, globalising, culture-less, finance-driven Modernity was the Anglo-Jewish master-plan. More healthy but simpler nations, like the Germans, were putty in their hands. Every anti-semite since Treitschke has signed up to this conspiracy theory: Kaiser Wilhelm II talked of Judaengland just as modern anti-semites do of Jew York.
Treitchske added an extra Prussian spin for his readers. From the inexhaustible womb of Poland, he claimed, came an annual swarm of young Jewish trouser-peddlers whose children and grandchildren will rule the press and stock-exchanges of Germany. He thus neatly managed to link fear of allegedly Jewish/Anglo-Saxon modernity with the ancient Prussian colonial fear and loathing of Poland. The Jews were painted as internationalist, money-bagged internal Englanders and penniless, fast-breeding Polish immigrants, rolled into one.
To radical Protestants, the Jews henceforth joined in dark union with the Catholic Church as foreign bodies within Prussian-German-ness. The cry went up: Without the Jews, without Rome, we shall build the cathedral of Germania: (Ohne Juda, ohne Rom, bauen wir Gemanius Dom). Nor would there be anywhere for the old Junker aristocracy in this new, Germanic cathedral. The rabid young librarian Dr Otto Béckel won his Reichstag seat from the Junkers’ own Conservative Party in 1887 with the catchy slogan Jews, Junkers and Priests all belong in the same pot (Jude, Junker und Pfaffen gehoren in einen Topf). His allies compiled a notorious handbook called the Semi-Gotha, which listed all the nobility allegedly tainted by Jewish blood.
For this new anti-semitism was a socially radical movement. It claimed that what true German-ness needed was a new aristocracy of race, not of family. Leaders of the
Anti-semitic People’s Party, the German Social Anti-semitic Party, the Pan-German League, the German Reform Party and suchlike often gave themselves forged titles and by 1908, one false aristocrat, Lanz “von” Liebenfels, was already flying the swastika flag at his castle. National Protestantism (as historians often call it) sometimes slid into pure Germanic paganism.
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‘The National-Protestant Vision, 1902′
The belief of the Germanic tribes is the Christianity of the Reformation. Protestant Christianity is a belief which does not crush German nature, that nature so full of
power and resistance, but rather unfolds it… Protestantism is the rock on which the culture of the German tribes, of the Germanic race, is built. Protestantism is the fundament of its political power, of its moral virtues, of its dauntless, victorious science.
C. Werkshagen, Der Protestantismus am Ende des XIX
Jahrhundert in Wort und Bild, Berlin 1902.
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In 1893, candidates who made anti-semitism their main platform (half of them actually called themselves Anti-semites on the ballot-slips) won sixteen Reichstag seats, all of them in rural, Protestant Prussia, Saxony and Hesse. What followed is a lesson to any country with a noisy, radical minority.
Those sixteen seats on their own meant little. But the Conservative Party, the political wing of Prussian Junkerdom, panicked at any inroad into its power-base. In 1892 the Tivoli Programme made it official Conservative policy to oppose the often obtrusive and corrosive Jewish influence on our national life. Open anti-semitism was now socially respectable at the highest levels.
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