The German Peasantry (Routledge Revivals)

Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

Richard J. Evans, W. R. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317551577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

This book, first published in 1986, surveys the history of rural society in Germany from the eighteenth century to the present day. The contributions include studies of Junker estates and small farming communities, serfs and landless labourers, maidservants and worker-peasants. They demonstrate the variety and complexity of the social division that structures the rural economy. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on the conflicts that divided rural society, and the ways and means in which these were expressed, whether in serf strikes in eighteenth-century Brandenburg, village gossip in early twentieth-century Hesse, or factional struggles over planning permission in present-day Swabia. The rural world emerges not as traditional, passive and undifferentiated, but as actively participating in its own making; not only responding to the changes going on around it, but exploiting them for its own purposes and influencing them in its own way. This book is ideal for students of history, particularly German history.

1
‘Tradition’ and the Peasantry

On the Modern Historiography of Rural Germany

Ian Farr

I

Over the last generation, intellectual and scholarly study of the peasantry has become a sizeable and flourishing industry. In the 20 or so years since the ‘paradoxical rediscovery’ of the peasantry by the social sciences,¹ countless economists, sociologists, anthropologists and development theorists have become engaged in the business. Moreover, their appreciation of the role played by rural populations in shaping the contemporary world has come to be shared increasingly by historians of modern Europe. With the aid of more sophisticated methodologies and more intensive research, particularly into specific regions and localities, historians of both Western and Eastern Europe have helped to foster a much wider appreciation of the complexities and subtleties within peasant society, as well as of the sympathy and rigour required to study them. It is certainly true that social history remains generally more preoccupied with urban life and the condition of the industrial working class. None the less, recent advances in the social-historical study of the European peasantry lend some weight to Tony Judt’s conclusion that ‘it is pleasingly rare these days to find rural society consigned to the historical wastebin, with the peasantry wrapped up in their potato-sack, ready for distribution to the real world of the city.’²

One country where such welcome trends are regrettably less apparent is the Federal Republic of Germany.³ The writing of modern German history often continues to incorporate a set of deeply-entrenched and wide-ranging assumptions about the lifestyle, economy, behaviour, culture and political disposition of the German peasantry, which, though superficially plausible, urgently require closer empirical and theoretical scrutiny. These presumptions are reinforced, on the one hand, by the apparent reluctance of specialist agrarian historians to consider wider theoretical issues and, on the other, by the relative indifference of social historians. to the problematics of rural society in the age of industrialisation. Probably the most powerful and persistent of these assumptions is that the peasant-producer in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries represented one of the most significant of those ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-industrial’ sections of society, whose continued and increasingly anachronistic survival in a rapidly industrialising nation acted as a bulwark against progress, retarded socio-economic change and inhibited Germany’s transition to a modern pluralist democracy.

The pervasiveness of such notions can be illustrated at this stage by one example. In some prefatory remarks to his detailed study of the lobbying activities of the Deutscher Bauernverband (German Peasant Federation) in West Germany, Paul Ackermann confidently proclaims that the peasantry and their representatives had great difficulty in adapting to the process of industrialisation and rejected its implications. The peasant was to a great extent ‘rooted’ in the past in a tradition of self-perpetuating conservatism, resignation and mistrust. Industrial society was fundamentally alien to a peasant existence moulded by backward and ‘corporate’ (ständisch) values. The industrial laws of rationalisation, concentration and co-operation were supposedly in diametrical opposition to the intrinsic attitudes of the peasantry.⁴ Such comments are by no means untypical of the way in which preconceptions about the peasantry can be presented as self-evident truths, deserving of no further critical analysis or genuinely historical explanation.

The first part of this essay attempts to show how this situation has arisen. This requires, first, a brief assessment of the work produced by those branches of scholarship, notably agrarian or agricultural history (Agrargeschichte) and folklore/ethnology (Volkskunde), which traditionally have been most involved in the study of the German peasantry. One result of their activity has been to make historical investigation of rural society a largely peripheral exercise, held in narrow confines by inherited academic traditions, and frequently isolated from many of the mainstream historiographical changes of the last generation.

Secondly, it necessitates some appreciation of the way in which the recent flowering of social history in the Federal Republic has, if anything, served only to consolidate this situation. Because of its methodological and conceptual priorities, and because of its often justifiable aversion to Agrargeschichte and Volkskunde, this newer social-scientific history has generally been either unwilling or unable to enter into any meaningful dialogue with agrarian historians and folklorists. Neither has it encouraged any systematic research into the history of rural Germany since the early nineteenth century. In the absence of any sustained intellectual interchange between these various types of history, their respective prejudices and presumptions have survived relatively intact, a process helped in no small measure by the fact that some of the more important of these presuppositions complement rather than contradict each other.

Certainly there have been indications recently that historical research into the peasantry is beginning to review some of these preconceptions more critically. Nevertheless, the essential task of restoring the peasantry and the rural population to a more central place in history has only just begun. It stands little chance of success unless crucial theoretical perspectives are addressed more openly and more frequently. The final part of this essay will therefore offer some more tentative suggestions about the problems which an effective social history of the German peasantry will have to confront, if future research is to be more incisive in its methods and findings than much of the existing literature.

II

The most substantial contribution to that body of literature has undoubtedly come from the long-established tradition of agrarian history (Agrargeschichte). We are certainly indebted to this branch of historiography for providing us with a wealth of information and data on Germany’s agrarian and agricultural past. The immense store of knowledge accumulated by agricultural historians, particularly at the local and regional level, is an indispensable foundation for further study. It has to be acknowledged, however, that many works of conventional Agrargeschichte fall increasingly short of the quality demanded by current social-historical practice. They tend to be characterised by a high degree of empiricism, a restricted field of inquiry, a methodological conservatism, and a conspicuously legalistic emphasis.⁵ Although its previous and sometimes uncomfortably close identification with more reactionary political persuasions had to lapse after 1945, agrarian history in the Federal Republic has continued to exhibit considerable caution in the face of a rapidly changing intellectual climate. It still appears reluctant to conduct a serious examination of its own objectives and methods, and to embrace potentially helpful initiatives from the social sciences. It continues to pay less attention to the history of rural society since 1850 than to developments in the preceding century. Thus many of the critical analytical problems raised by the relative and then absolute contraction of agriculture and the rural population in a period of social change remain unresolved.⁶

The preoccupation of Agrargeschichte with developments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be traced back to the pioneering work of Georg Friedrich Knapp.⁷ It was his study which made the protracted process of Bauernbefreiung (‘peasant emancipation’, from the contrasting types of feudal and seigneurial obligation to be found in eighteenth-century Germany) a fundamental concern for subsequent agrarian historians.⁸ Furthermore, it was Knapp’s interest in property rights, laws of inheritance, and in the changing legal basis of the relationship between peasant and lord, which helped to give agrarian history its crucial juridical bias and made the study of Germany’s ‘agrarian constitution’ (Agrar-verfassung) the ‘real core’ of Agrargeschichte.⁹ Although his influence waned somewhat in the 1930s, the essential thrust of Knapp’s work continued to be represented—not least by Friedrich Lütge, who devoted a lifetime to clarifying the complex mosaic of laws, obligations, customs and inheritance patterns which was Germany’s Agrarverfassung.¹⁰

Lütge’s work and, by implication, that of other historians within the same school or tradition of agrarian history, has been subjected to a sustained and perceptive critique by Hans Rosenberg.¹¹ Rosenberg is inevitably and justifiably hostile to the excessively Germanocentric outlook evident in Lütge’s brand of Agrargeschichte, and to its close alignment with the outlook and priorities of nationalist politics in Germany. His major criticism, however, is of Lütge’s concentration on the written rather than on the real Verfassung. At the heart of many studies by more conservative agrarian historians is an examination of the legal formalities of landholding, of the purely juridical dimensions of peasant emancipation, and of the admittedly awesome technicalities of legalistic terminology. Descriptions of the legal framework of tenure, inheritance, landownership and feudal relations are rarely accompanied by an equally detailed assessment of the practical realisation and functions of these regulatory codes. Consequently, the real social impact of different forms of exploitation and domination seems rarely to be appreciated. Behind a comprehensive and sophisticated knowledge of Germany’s Agrarverfassung, built up over almost a century of research, lies a social reality which deserves urgent and more intensive scrutiny, irrespective of the undoubted difficulties that would be involved.

This is not to deny, of course, the contribution which a juristic approach can make, for example, towards an understanding of the socio-economic basis of seigneurial and feudal relations, or of the recomposition of peasant-lord relations in the process of peasant emancipation.¹² No analysis of the levels and forms of exploitation experienced by the peasantry, either before Bauernbefreiung or as a direct result of the way in which that reform was implemented, would be complete without this legal dimension; a fact appreciated more readily perhaps by Knapp than by some of his successors.¹³ What is at issue here is not the value of the legalistic emphasis per se, but the inordinate concentration on that aspect of Germany’s rural history, particularly given the abundant evidence from elsewhere of the dangers of interpreting peasant behaviour in excessively legalistic terms.¹⁴

The need to incorporate other factors into the study of rural society was recognised half a century ago by Wilhelm Abel, when his classic work on agrarian crises implicitly challenged the influence of the Knapp school.¹⁵ There is now a much wider appreciation of Abel’s work, his understanding of agrarian dynamics, and his determination to explain some of the deeper ramifications of major shifts in agricultural production, such as the incidence of mass poverty in the pre-industrial area. This admiration is reflected in the appearance in 1980 of an English translation of his pioneering study.¹⁶ While remaining sensitive to localised variations, as well as to short-term changes, Abel showed how one could chart demographic trends, the movements back and forth between arable cultivation and animal husbandry, and the conjunctural shifts in grain prices, wages, rents, land values and feudal obligations, without losing sight of their social and political consequences. The value of such perspectives was certainly realised by Abel’s own students, whose viewpoints have continued to inform the writing of agrarian history. Equally, a good deal of such writing carried on as before, betraying regrettably few signs of those influences, and frequently failing to heed Abel’s salutary warnings that historians should be constantly sceptical of naively romanticised portrayals of peasant life in the pre-industrial era. It is only quite recently that Abel has received fuller recognition in the Federal Republic for his undoubted contribution to our knowledge of rural society in Germany and Europe.

Two qualifications do, however, have to be entered at this point. In the first place the major thrust of Abel’s work was to establish the statistical series which, in turn, would facilitate broad comparative analysis of the interrelationships between population moveme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1. ‘Tradition’ and the Peasantry: On the Modern Historiography of Rural Germany
• 2. Peasants and Markets: The Background to the Agrarian Reforms in Feudal Prussia East of the Elbe, 1760–1807
• 3. The Junkers’ Faithless Servants: Peasant Insubordination and the Breakdown of Serfdom in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1763–1811
• 4. The Rural Proletariat: The Everyday Life of Rural Labourers in the Magdeburg Region, 1830–1880
• 5. Farmers and Factory Workers: Rural Society in Imperial Germany: The Example of Maudach
• 6. Peasants and Farmers’ Maids: Female Farm Servants in Bavaria at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• 7. The Sins of the Fathers: Village Society and Social Control in the Weimar Republic
• 8. Peasants, Poverty and Population: Economic and Political Factors in the Family Structure of the Working Village People in the Magdeburg Region, 1900–39
• 9. Peasant Customs and Social Structure: Rural Marriage Festivals in the Magdeburg Region in the 1920s
• 10. Peasants and Others: The Historical Contours of Village Class Society
• 11. The Rules of the Village: On the Cultural History of the Peasant World in the Last 150 Years
• Notes on Contributors
• Index