Ideas from 1914

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The term ideas from 1914 describes the journalistic reaction of nationally minded intellectuals in Germany to the outbreak of the First World War and the so-called August experience . During the war, national political meanings and blueprints for the future developed from this. They included u. a. Ideas about the political reorganization of Germany that were aimed at abolishing the ideals of the French Revolution , the “ideas of 1789” ( freedom, equality, brotherhood ). Anti-liberal, anti-democratic and corporatist concepts were advocated by the state and the people , often without specifying these moods.

Emergence

The catchphrase ideas from 1914 was coined during the first days of the war. Steffen Bruendel names the economist and sociologist Johann Plenge as the “inventor” . The term was quickly taken up by historians, philosophers, cultural workers, etc., who aimed to create an ideological meaning for the war. On the one hand elements of the criticism of democracy of the 19th century were taken up, on the other hand current discussions. Due to their lack of clarity, they offered both right and left connection options. One of the first significant manifestations was the Manifesto of 93 of October 4, 1914 , initiated by the Goethe Bund .

content

The ideas of 1914 were rooted in the nationalistic-romantic self- image cultivated in the 19th and early 20th centuries that Germany represented a special culture. In the ideological foundation of the German war effort by an intellectual, but partly also the youth moving Elite , this theory was a high point.

The ideas were propagandistically directed against English “shopkeepers”, “Gallic superficiality” and “Slavic despotism” and were linked to “phobias” of the pre-war period: hatred of England and anti-Semitism, the presumption of Germanization and romanticizing Germanism . But behind it was also an explicit attack against English liberalism and French democracy. Instead, the "trench community" was raised to solve problems in German class society .

The core of the ideology was the idea of ​​the peculiarities of the “German essence ” in culture, society and politics. Thomas Mann, for example, presented pairs of opposites such as “culture” and “civilization” as well as “community” and “society” in his considerations of a non-political . He argued that only Germany stood for a real culture, creative and profound, at the same time staid and energetic. In contrast, the other European states would only embody civilizations. Civilization, however, is something “ Welsches ” (Romanesque), sterile and superficial, at the same time insidious and tongue-in-cheek. The representatives of the ideas of 1914 opposed the ideal of society, which emphasizes equality, as it had propagated the French Revolution , an organic concept of community . Behind this was also the effort in the context of the internal political truce policy to integrate all parts of the population into a national united front and to use the cohesion created by the war ( war socialism ) for lasting solidarity within the “ national community ”.

The German writer Richard Dehmel , a pioneer of Expressionism, interpreted the war as follows in 1916:

“The war is about our highest souls: they want to put down our spirits, our peculiar strength which allowed those physical possessions to grow up in such a short time that other peoples fear for their future, for the sphere of power of their own spirits. They want to gag this creativity. "

The interpretation of the First World War as a battle of annihilation against the superior German "special entity" was an ideological novelty and had serious consequences. According to this interpretation, the war unleashed by the states of the Entente out of hatred, envy and despair is not directed against the military, the economy, etc., but against Germanism, which makes all material achievements possible in the first place. In this interpretation, the war was thus removed from all military, economic and political contexts and acquired an almost salvation-historical quality.

In August 1914 it was believed that a rebirth of the German character could be recognized, the war was wiping away the threatening decadence:

“In retrospect, a blatant contradiction soon becomes apparent between the idea of ​​a German 'special kind' called to the spiritual leadership of the world and the multiple complaints about an abysmal 'decadence' in the years before the war. For contemporaries, this contradiction was resolved by the conception of a 'rebirth' ( Gerhart Hauptmann ), the true, 'old German being' ( Rudolf Borchardt ) , which occurred under the pressure of the new war . The general conviction of a unique 'revolution of the German soul' ( Otto Ernst ) at the moment of mobilization is probably the decisive key to later understanding the enthusiasm for war of autumn 1914. […] The 'rebirth' of the German 'being' manifested itself suddenly Return of the Germans to their actual 'virtues' and attitudes. For Robert Musil , these included in the first place 'loyalty', 'courage', 'subordination' and 'fulfilling duty'. In a very similar way, Hermann Bahr defined 'renunciation, duty and reverence' as constitutive characteristics of the German 'personality'. "

The war-volunteer writer Walter Flex wrote in the spring of 1917 as an epilogue to "The Wanderer Between Two Worlds", which became one of the six best-selling German books of the 20th century:

“Today I am as willing to go to war as I was on the first day. It is me and it was not, as many believe, out of national but out of moral fanaticism. It is not national, but moral requirements that I make and represent. What I have written about the 'eternity of the German people' and about the world-redeeming mission of Germanness has nothing to do with national egoism, but is a moral belief that can be realized in the defeat or […] in the heroic death of a people [...]. I believe that the German spirit reached a height in August 1914 and beyond that no people have seen before. Happy everyone who has stood on this summit and does not need to come down again. The descendants of their own and foreign nations will see this flood mark of God over them on the banks on which they advance. - This is my faith and my pride and my happiness that snatches me from all personal worries [...]. "

The reality and the failure of the surely expected takeover of spiritual world domination by the “broadcast” ( Thomas Mann ) German “nature” had to deeply disturb the supporters of a world historical “missionary task” of the German “nature”. The blame for this was increasingly sought with an internal enemy who had undermined and destroyed the great spiritual and moral "uprising" of the German people of August 1914. At the end of the war in 1918, in addition to the notion of intellectual betrayal, there was also the assertion of stabbing in the back , i.e. the assignment of blame for the military outcome of the war to the social democracy, which was supposedly ruled by Jews and Bolsheviks. This laid an important basis for the later success of folk- national ideology:

"A new generation, hardened in the 'steel thunderstorms' of the First World War, was now considered to be chosen to revise world history."

These ideas can be placed in continuity with the argumentation of the anti-democratic right in the Weimar Republic ( Conservative Revolution ) and with the rise of National Socialism . Bruendel, however, criticizes the fact that the ideas of 1914 have been dismissed as irrational, pre-fascist aberrations, primarily in a moralizing way, without attempting to work out their “conceptually reconstructable rational core” without value judgment.

literature

Exemplary fonts

  • Adolf von Harnack : What we have already won and what we still have to win. Speech on September 29, 1914. Carl Heymann Verlag, Berlin 1914, also in Adolf von Harnack as a contemporary. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1996.
  • Rudolf Kjellén : The ideas of 1914. A world historical perspective , Leipzig 1915.
  • Thomas Mann : Thoughts on War , 1914, and considerations of an apolitical , 1918.
  • Paul Natorp : About the present war, September 17, 1914. In: Kölnische Zeitung, p. 15 f .; The day of the Germans. Four war essays , Hagen 1915, and War and Peace . Three speeches, Munich 1915.
  • Friedrich Naumann : Central Europe . Reimer, Berlin 1915.
  • Johann Plenge : 1789 and 1914. The symbolic years in the history of the political spirit. Springer, Berlin 1916.
  • Gustav Radbruch : On the philosophy of this war. A methodological treatise. In: Archive for Social Science and Social Policy, Vol. 44, 1917, pp. 139–160.
  • Max Scheler : The Genius of War and the German War , 1915, and War and Construction , 1916.
  • Georg Simmel : The war and the intellectual decisions. Leipzig 1917.
  • Werner Sombart : Merchants and Heroes , 1915.
  • Ernst Troeltsch : Die Ideen von 1914. Speech given in front of the German Society, in: Die neue Rundschau 27 (1916), pp. 605–624; also separately Berlin 1916; Re-print in: Deutscher Geist and Westeuropa, pp. 31–58.

Research literature

  • Barbara Beßlich : Ways in the culture war. Criticism of civilization in Germany 1890-1914. Phil. Diss., 2000 (exemplified by Th. Mann, Eucken , Bahr and Plenge ).
  • Steffen Bruendel: Volksgemeinschaft or Volksstaat. The "Ideas of 1914" and the reorganization of Germany in the First World War. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2003.
  • Kurt Flasch : The spiritual mobilization. The German intellectuals and the First World War. Berlin 2000.
  • Domenico Losurdo : The community, death, the west. Heidegger and the ideology of war. Metzler, Stuttgart 1995.
  • Hans Maier : Ideas from 1914 - Ideas from 1939? Two different beginnings of the war. In: VfZ 38,4 (1990), pp. 525-542 ( PDF ).
  • Wolfgang J. Mommsen (ed.): Culture and war. The role of intellectuals, artists and writers in the First World War (Writings of the Historisches Kolleg, Colloquia 34). Munich 1996 ( PDF ).
  • Wolfgang J. Mommsen: The spirit of 1914. The program of a special political path of the Germans. In: Ders .: The authoritarian nation state. Constitution, society and culture of the German Empire. Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 407-421.
  • Klaus Schwabe : Science and Morale of War. The German university professors and the basic political questions of the First World War. Goettingen 1969.
  • Jürgen and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg: The appeal: “To the cultural world!”. The Manifesto of 93 and the beginnings of war propaganda in the First World War. Stuttgart 1996.
  • Ralph Rotte : The “Ideas from 1914”. Philosophical problems of European peace during the "first globalization". Studies on historical research in modern times, vol. 22. Hamburg 2001.

Personal research literature

  • Nils Bruhn: From culture critic to "culture warrior". Paul Natorp's path to the "war of the spirits". Königshausen & Neumann, 2007.
  • Peter Hoeres: The war of the philosophers. German and British Philosophy in the First World War , 2004.
  • Raimund Neuss: Comments on Walter Flex . The "Ideas of 1914" in German literature. A case study. SH-Verlag, Schernfeld 1992.
  • Andreas Peschel: Friedrich Naumann's and Max Weber's “Central Europe”. A consideration of their conceptions in the context of the "Ideas of 1914" and the Pan-German Association. Dresden 2005, ISBN 3-938863-00-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Maier: Ideas from 1914, p. 526 f.
  2. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Wehler : Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871-1918 (= German history, volume 9). 3. Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1977, p. 211.
  3. ^ Quote from Helmut Fries: German writers in the First World War. In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The First World War. Weyarn 1997, p. 833.
  4. ↑ Helmut Fries: German writers in the First World War. In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The First World War. Weyarn 1997, p. 834 f.
  5. ↑ Walter Flex: The wanderer between two worlds. Munich undated (edition "315. to 321. Tausend", approx. 1930; last reprinted 1998), p. 101.
  6. ↑ Helmut Fries: German writers in the First World War. In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The First World War. Weyarn 1997, p. 844.