The German Bourgeoisie (Routledge Revivals)

Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century

David Blackbourn, Richard J Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317696124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

First published in 1991, this collection of original studies by British, German and American historians examines the whole range of modern German bourgeoisie groups, including professional, mercantile, industrial and financial bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois family. Drawing on original research, the book focuses on the historical evidence as counterpoint to the well-known literary accounts of the German bourgeoisie. It also discusses bourgeois values as manifested in the cult of local roots and in the widespread practice of duelling. Edited by two of the most respected scholars in the field, this important reissue will be of value to any students of modern German and European history.

1

The German bourgeoisie: an introduction

David Blackbourn

I

The German bourgeoisie has not been very well treated by historians. This has been partly a question of simple neglect. The Bürgertum has been eclipsed by groups such as the landowning Junkers and their allies when it comes to studies of the German ruling class or ‘power elite’. At the same time, social historians have usually been more inclined to devote attention to the peasantry and working class than to members of the business and professional middle classes. A primary focus on the lives and experiences of the lower classes has also been characteristic of the mounting volume of work in recent years on the ‘history of everyday life’ (Alltagsgeschichte). Where attention has been paid to the bourgeoisie and its role in modern German history, there has often been slighting treatment in a second sense. It is the failures and sins of omission of the bourgeoisie that have so often attracted attention. It has been variously depicted as a supine class, genuflecting to the authoritarian state, aping the social values and manners of the aristocracy, lacking in civic spirit and political engagement. Much of the celebrated Sonderweg thesis, concerning the alleged long-term misdevelopment of German society and politics and its contribution to the eventual success of National Socialism, has rested heavily on a series of propositions about bourgeois weakness, timidity, and abdication of political responsibility.¹

In the last decade there have been many signs that a richer and more differentiated picture of the German bourgeoisie is starting to emerge. There has been an increasing number of detailed investigations of particular occupational groups, whether businessmen, professionals, or academics.² There have also been studies that cast new light on the material position, the social networks, and the political activities of local bourgeois elites.³ New work in fields such as the family and the history of illness and medicine has similarly helped to give us a greater appreciation of bourgeois Germany.⁴ Works dealing with nineteenth-century Germany now refer to a ‘bourgeois world’ or a ‘bourgeois epoch’ with a naturalness that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.⁵ There has been, finally, a new interest in sustained comparative investigation of the German bourgeoisie with its counterparts in a variety of other countries.⁶ This welcome development promises more fruitful results than the tendency, widespread for so long, to judge the German bourgeoisie against an idealized Anglo-Saxon yardstick – and find it wanting. The present introduction looks at some of these valuable new departures, as well as the more important established literature on the subject. It attempts to place the chapters that follow in a larger context, by providing a general account of the development of the German bourgeoisie from the end of the eighteenth century to the 1930s. It examines the changing size and boundaries of the bourgeoisie, and its economic and social importance. There is discussion of internal divisions, but also of the forces and values that united the bourgeoisie, not least in relation to other classes. Consideration is given, finally, to the controversial issue of bourgeois politics, the varied forms it assumed, and the alleged shortcomings it displayed.

II

At the end of the eighteenth century two principal bourgeois groupings were identified by contemporaries. The first were the Stadtbürger, members of the urban middle class who enjoyed citizenship rights and associated privileges, and who corresponded broadly to the sense conveyed by the antiquated English expression ‘burghers’.⁷ This was a group that included merchants and businessmen, but also independent master craftsmen. The second group was what the historian Friedrich Meinecke in a classic account dubbed the Weltbürgertum, or cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.⁸ Defined above all by education, it was these officials and academics who provided a large part of the membership of the burgeoning (although still socially restrictive) reading clubs and lodges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It was in this milieu that the Enlightenment had its principal supporters in the last years of the Holy Roman Empire, among this group of the educated also that the idea of the German nation took shape as a cultural aspiration at a time when ‘Germany’ remained politically fragmented and divided economically into countless local and regional markets.⁹ Members of the first middle-class group remained largely limited in their geographical and social horizons, and it was burghers of this sort who acquired the label Spiesser, or philistines, from aristocratic or more cosmopolitan contemporaries.¹⁰ The exception was perhaps to be found in important commercial cities like Cologne and Hamburg, where wealthy and self-confident merchants with national and even international connections set the tone. It was also in cities of this sort that businessmen – especially merchants – mingled with academics and officials in the new associations of the period.¹¹ Mostly, however, membership of the latter was dominated by those whose occupations were defined by education or state service, rather than relationship to production or the market.

These early patterns left their traces on the subsequent development of the German bourgeoisie. We see this in the persistent localist orientation of the middle classes, discussed in Celia Applegate’s contribution to this collection, and in the divisions that continued to exist between the ‘makers’ and the ‘thinkers’. It is sometimes also claimed – although this is more hazardous territory – that portents of a future German bourgeois weakness were apparent in these years, namely its fateful other-worldliness.¹² The German bourgeoisie at the end of the eighteenth century was, we are told, overshadowed by its English counterpart when it came to manufacturing and business, while at the same time it made far fewer political demands than its French equivalent. The result, in the seductive words of one historian, is that England had an industrial revolution, France a political revolution – and Germany a reading revolution.¹³ There is a good deal here with which one might quarrel, not least the assumptions that are made about the pattern of historical development in contemporary England and France. It is also perfectly possible to see the ‘reading revolution’ in Germany as a factor of enormous importance with positive implications for the future role of the bourgeoisie. It was, after all, a symbol of the way in which one particular part of the bourgeoisie was growing in size and self-consciousness through the incipient process of state-building. Education and cultivation were also to form a central part of bourgeois claims to social leadership.

It is nevertheless undeniable that the bourgeois presence in the patchwork of German states that existed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was less than imposing. Weak and fragmented, like ‘Germany’ itself, the various bourgeois groupings were frequently tied to the small German courts either as suppliers or as employees, the so-called ‘servants of princes’ (Fürstendiener); and they were overshadowed by an aristocracy that enjoyed legal privileges in the corporate or estates-based society (ständische Gesellschaft), and viewed the modest middle classes with disdain. Yet the signs of change were already there. The impact of the French occupation of Germany not only brought about the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803 and ended the chronic fragmentation of the German states-system.¹⁴ It was also accompanied by a wave of administrative reforms which found their counterpart in the indigenous reform movement associated with figures such as Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein, Karl August von Hardenberg, and Wilhelm Karl von Humboldt in Prussia. The abolition or weakening of the corporate powers wielded by the church, aristocracy, and guilds belonged to a powerful movement of institutional change and modern state-building which had major importance for the place of the bourgeoisie in German society.¹⁵

One of the most important developments here was legal equality, which removed many – although not all – bourgeois handicaps. The law was to remain central to bourgeois aspirations throughout the nineteenth century, whether in the form of the defence of formal equality, the importance attached to legal property rights, or calls for the legal accountability of state bureaucracies. At the same time, legal studies formed a central part of the training of bureaucrats to man the growing machinery of state.¹⁶ This process of state-building provided a general boost to members of the educated bourgeoisie, who went in growing numbers to reformed classical grammar schools (Gymnasien) and the new universities that were founded in Prussia and elsewhere at the beginning of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ This group became a crucial element in the emergence of powerful state bureaucracies recruited on merit rather than birth. For the rest of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, a vital element in the growth of the bourgeoisie was the growth in the numbers (and the prestige) of state officials: local, regional, and provincial administrators, judges and other legal officials, professors and school teachers, forestry officials, doctors in state employment.¹⁸

These groups partly moved into the gap left by the decline of the corporate state, in a development that had its counterpart elsewhere in Europe. Officials also increased in numbers as the state increased its areas of competence, and the growth of the interventionist, regulatory, and social state at end of the nineteenth century produced a further leap in numbers.¹⁹ It has sometimes been argued that this stratum was exceptionally large, even hypertrophied in Germany, and this in turn has been seen as a sign of the way in which the dynamism in German society was injected ‘from above’, by the state and its officials, rather than by a ‘proper’ bourgeoisie.²⁰ Several points are worth making here. First, the personnel of the growing German bureaucracies were – outside aristocratic bastions such as the Prussian field administration – largely bourgeois by social origin, and they certainly worked in ways that strengthened the underpinning values of bourgeois society.²¹ No less important, the growth of educated bourgeois officials in Germany, and their relative weight vis-à-vis businessmen, formed part of a Continental pattern that was very different from the one to be found in Anglo-Saxon countries where the state was weaker. Nevertheless, it is probably true to say that the importance and prestige of state officials within the German bourgeoisie was striking even by Continental standards. This spilled over into the way in which the educated middle classes more generally ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 The German bourgeoisie: An introduction
• 2 Arriving in the upper class: the wealthy business elite of Wilhelmine Germany
• 3 The titled businessman: Prussian Commercial Councillors in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the nineteenth century
• 4 Family and dass in the Hamburg grand bourgeoisie 1815–1914
• 5 The industrial bourgeoisie and labour relations in Germany 1871–1933
• 6 Between estate and profession: lawyers and the development of the legal profession in nineteenth-century Germany
• 7 Bourgeois values, doctors, and the state: the professionalization of medicine in Germany 1848–1933
• 8 Localism and the German bourgeoisie: the ‘Heimat’ movement in the Rhenish Palatinate before 1914
• 9 Bourgeois honour: middle-class duellists in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century
• 10 Liberalism, Europe, and the bourgeoisie 1860–1914
• 11 The middle classes and National Socialism
• Index