FROM INSTITUTIONAL RESTORATION TO IDEOLOGICAL COOPTATION

PART 6 OF LESSONS FROM THE GERMAN “HOMETOWNS”

This is part of a series on how the history of German hometowns constitute an episode in the longue durée of the phenotype wars. New readers just entering at this point, who want to understand the phenotype wars, should read my new book on the topic, and those who want to situate this series, should see the introductory installment.

The previous installment of this series examined the phenotype war as it played out on the battleground of the German hometowns leading into and during the early decades of the 19^th century. Despite early loses by the German temporalist hometownsmen, Walker observes that in the events of 1830-31, there was something of a restoration of hometown autonomy, citing among other examples the Hessen-Kassel constitution of 1831.

Hessen-Kassel's 1831 constitution promised a Community Ordinance that would give the communities the right to elect their own officials, to administer community property themselves, and to "exercise the power of acceptance into the communal union"; the state government would issue no more economic "privileges" – it would exempt no more enterprises from guild rules – without Diet approval; community and state fiscal resources were never to be consolidated. The Ordinance itself, when it came in 1834, allowed each community to choose its own membership, and to write its own constitution within the following guidelines: the assembled citizenry elected an Outer Council (Gemeindeausschuss), the Outer Council elected an Inner Council (Stadtrat); and the two Councils together elected the Bürgermeister, who was constitutionally responsible to the community, not to the state.

This was very close to a restoration of the governance practices of the German hometowns going back to the immediate post-Westphalian system, as discussed by Walker and addressed in earlier installments of this series (see here and here). Though, it would be naïve and simplistic to characterize this period as a renaissance of hometown life, Walker does observe that more Germans lived in hometowns during this period than any other in German history. That fact, though, perhaps indicates not just the appeal of such a life, but the perceived urgency on the part of spatialists to bring such gemeinschaft to heel. And throughout the 30s and 40s there was once again continue chipping away at the communal liberties of the hometowns.

Parenthetically, contrary to the widely told story that gemeinschaft was eaten away through the intrusion of mass industrialism, Walker offers a different assessment. He sees the earlier political assaults upon hometown gemeinschaft as steeling them for the later incursions resulting from the 19^th century industrialization.

…the German community had got its defenses built, legally, politically, and culturally, under the relatively weak hostile stimulus of bureaucracy and its handful of commercial allies, before the much more powerful forces connected with industrialization were ready to dissolve it. It was inoculated with a mild related virus, so that instead of succumbing to the infection it developed antibodies, antibodies that became a permanent part of Germany' s bloodstream.

Hometownsmen at the end of the forties actually directed their fire less against industry as such than against the traditional policies of state bureaucracy: against the legal undermining of the guild economy and against state incursions into communal self-determination.

And rightly so, for it was that great contest which was the breach into which the hometownsmen had to enter during the tumultuous times of the late 1840s. In Germany, the revolutionary period of 1848 started out as a common attack on empire and bureaucracy by both spatialist liberals and temporalist hometownsmen. It wound up, though, as a battle for the future of Germany between these two phenotypes. We’ll let Walker walk us through the story in his own words.

The two main discontented elements of 1848, hometownsman and political liberal, really were discontented with one another; but both blamed existing German bureaucratic regimes for their discontents and so did not confront one another while the regimes stood.

…the antibureaucratic movement of the 1840's among movers and doers was directed not against the traditional policies of administrative bureaucracy but against a growing conservatism at upper governmental levels: against a takeover of administrative direction by the nobility in Prussia, against an entrenched body of high administrators in Bavaria.

Hometownsmen were nationalist along with nearly everybody else when the revolution of conflicting expectations broke out in the spring of 1848.

Nobody was more sure of being the real people than hometownsmen, and nobody was more at odds than they were with the states they knew: the administrative caste that meddled in their affairs.

They anticipated, of course, no revolutionary social change from this relocation of high authority; quite the reverse; they expected the dismissal of state bureaucracies from the positions of power from which, in their repeated attacks upon the communities, officials had acted as agents of social revolution.

Economic petitions from the [hometown] communities in 1848, again, did not so much denounce factories as demand restoration of community and guild controls over entry into the traditional local trades, which is not altogether the same thing. Hometown rejection of occupational freedom was not coupled with machine-breaking, which would in fact have made very little economic sense even for them, but rather with complaints against official liberality with trades licenses for unknown journeymen and with marriage and settlement rights.

As Walker observes, though, eventually the 1848 revolutionary conflict, in Germany, did become one between the spatialist liberals and temporalist hometownsmen. And at least in the initial formal manifestations of the supposed revolution, the latter were at a considerable disadvantage, compared to the spatialist liberals.

The general estate outnumbered hometownsmen by at least 612-24 at Germany's first national assembly. They were moreover the Burschenschaft generation of movers and doers, now in their prime of life, a generation that added to the traditional posture of that class a belief that historical progress was self-evident, and that economic development and social change were not merely advantageous to the whole society but inevitable aspects of the historic process.

This same liberal tendency was also evident in strategically significant committees established to address the crisis.

[The Constitution Committee] worked closely – but not so closely as to reach identical conclusions – with another powerful committee, the Economies Committee, similarly composed (almost half were university professors) but with a stronger dose of merchants and a smattering of industrialists. The majorities of both committees believed that occupational freedom from the kinds of controls communities exercised was the only way out of the impasse created by economic and demographic changes within a rigid social and legal structure. Both knew that occupational freedom was illusory without freedom of movement and settlement, and vice versa.

But both knew too that to call these freedoms irreducible rights of German citizenship would be to fly in the face of what a great many Germans meant by the Bürgerrecht; and the Constitution Committee was sensitive, both for doctrinal and for prudential political reasons, to the conflict between the civil rights it proposed for all Germans, and the rights of self-government it proposed for German communities.

This nuance identified in the Constitution Committee, in fact, Walker identifies as a paradox running through this period. For another example: “The Frankfurt Parliament's treatment of the home towns combined almost total distrust of the actual communities with almost total acceptance in principle of the virtues of local self-government.”

The German hometowns, rooted in the loose effective federalism of the Holy Roman Empire, it seemed had become such a deeply entrenched part of the German political ethos, that even those spatialist radicals felt the imperative to at least give lip service to the principles of local self-government. At the same time though they were, despite such expressions, undeterred in their insistence upon spatialist values of personal freedom of movement, marriage, and occupation. In other words, notwithstanding spatialist gesturing toward local hometown autonomy, they were in no way deterred from promoting the very cultural, social, and political norms and policies which would inevitably undermine the gemeinschaft foundations of the hometowns which had made local self-government a meaningful and effective institution.

The Paulskirche – a term widely used to denote the Frankfurt “national” parliament, referring to the church where it met – wound up attempting to impose just such a compromised and paradoxical solution. The final form of its article on local government, Basic Rights provision for free settlement, among other absurdities, left local police powers out of the specified rights of communities altogether. Indeed, the diabolical genius of the reasoning served to rationalize the state centralizing of such police powers. The argument was that the villages were too primitive to run themselves while the cities were too complex to do so. In Walker’s assessment: “The Paulskirche offered the home towns the burdens of self-government without any of the powers that made self-government worth their while.” Or, for that matter, practical.

Despite such initiatives, the spatialist liberals, and Paulskirche reforms, ultimately failed, in no small part due to the resistance of the hometownsmen. Though, Walker’s analysis was that these spatialists were simply too far ahead of their time. They were trying to mold a Germany for an industrialized-dominant world, which simply didn’t exist yet.

In the Germany of 1848-1849, no less than in the Germany that had met the contradiction of cameralism half a century before, positive law meant reform; the Frankfurt constitution of 1849 stood at odds with the true constitution of the country at that time: in a very real sense it was unconstitutional. No doubt the special place of its framers in German society had a great deal to do with that, but less because of any isolation from political reality than because they had a clearer sense of the social and economic changes in process, and where they were heading.

The trouble was that the Parliamentarians saw these things too soon, before industrial capitalism and all that went with it had modified German society and redistributed power within it into a form that would support the constitution they wrote.

This study of the home towns cannot of course by itself support the burden of explaining the Revolution of 1848, or the Paulskirche…Still the issues of local civic, economic, and social rights and of local government were the issues upon which the Parliament most directly engaged itself with the structure of German society and most vigorously debated it. It is possible to argue (though I am not quite ready to do so) that its positions on these issues were enough to assure its failure even without dynastic and foreign hostility, or to assure that at best (and this I do say) it could not have reached a better constitutional arrangement than Bismarck's Second Empire twenty years later, which was far from ideal – not without civil war, probably as a helpless ally of the Prussian bureaucracy.

Again, though Walker provides vastly more detail and nuance to these events and topics than I can hope to replicate here, his conclusion regarding the events of 1848 as they entailed the destiny of the hometowns can be summarized in these words:

Hometownsmen and Paulskirche had begun together in 1848 to make the nation and destroy state bureaucracy, but the communities learned that the main enemy now was not bureaucratic intrusion into local affairs but national unity on liberal individualist principles; and the men at the Paulskirche learned that the people did not want the nation: not insofar, at least, as the nation meant the general estate, and as the "people," the Volk, meant community, Gemeinschaft.

Herein is the core of a fundamental conflict which remains unresolved for many of us still today. Many contemporary populists conceive themselves as “national populists,” which is an understandable position given the globalizing reach of the ruling class against which they stand. However, political nationalism, from its apex in the 19^th century, has always been a centralizing force, bulldozing the localisms and gemeinschafts that embodied organic community and its concrete institutions – notwithstanding nationalism’s propensity to give lip service to such traditional identities.

Though I won’t go into it, here, this same conflict came to a head dramatically during the German unification of 1871. And while the newly unified Germany couldn’t dispense with features of federalism, the role of the hometowns at the center of that story continued to erode, in keeping with this story of Germany’s 19^th century told above and in past installments to this series. As will be relevant to understand momentarily, below, the federalist focus, away from the hometowns, shifted to the Länder regions: remnants of the states that had composed the Holy Roman Empire.

In light of the above observations about the intrinsic conflict between nationalism and localism, consideration of how the deep German hometown ethos was to be leveraged amid the rise of the Third Reich seems like a telling place to wrap up the historical part of this series. Though Walker doesn’t go into the matter, it is worth observing as a prefatory observation that the National Socialists were deeply hostile to federalism right from the start. Chapter 10 of volume two in my Mein Kampf was titled “Federalism as Mask,” in which Hitler condemned federalism as the deceptive instrument of the Jews to undermine Germany’s unified national strength. As we’ve seen, such a claim displayed breathtaking ignorance of German history. But, as I explained in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial, the National Socialist regime was the 1920s-30s German expression of the managerial class, and so the managerial ethos of centralized social control was going to be advanced one way or another.

Indeed, once they gained state power, the National Socialists engaged in a series of reforms to cripple German federalism: e.g., the Enabling Act striped the Länder of constitutional rights within the Weimer Constitution; the Provisional Law of March 1933 dissolved the Länder parliaments; in April of that year, the Second Law for the Coordination of the Länder with the Reich, appointed Reich Governors to the Länder, which possessed the authority to dismiss or appoint Länder ministers and higher officials, and to order new Länder elections; and the January 1934 Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich effectively abolished the federal system in Germany.¹

Walker begins his discussion of this period by acknowledging the common gesture in German scholarship to equate the German hometown tradition of gemeinschaft based on social exclusiveness and social regulation with the totalitarianism and antisemitism of the National Socialists. Walker acknowledges a symbolic and sometimes vaguely rhetorical proximity between these two. There is no doubt, just as we saw in the conflicts during 1848-49, that a powerful hometown ethos has persisted in German culture, and the National Socialists were not naïve about the benefits of trying to leverage related sentiments that served their goals.

However, as Walker finally concludes, not only were these not the same phenomena, but in many vitally important ways, they were intrinsically incompatible forces. The National Socialists’ hostility to federalism made this ultimate incompatibility pretty much inevitable. Again, I’ll allow Walker to explain at length.

In the Third Reich the two paths, the longings of intellectuals for national community and hometownsmen's parochial values, came closest together; or at least National Socialist rhetoric undertook to combine them, a rhetoric with real and wide powers of political attraction.

The enemies National Socialism proclaimed to be German enemies were hometown enemies; it chose them for its guise as defender and restorer of the true Germany.

[National socialism] justified its use of illegal techniques and its contempt for the legal state, the Rechtsstaat, by its claim to defend the intuitive values of German community against pedantry and materialism.

[However] it will not do to equate hometownsmen with National Socialism, one to one, nor to equate either with the formulae of classic elite conservatism. In the communities as in the state, party prominents seem at least as commonly to have been outsiders to established society and government, who achieved place and power through the national movement at the cost of older leadership. At any rate the National Socialist seizure of power was not accompanied locally by the hometown's traditional retraction in crisis to its traditional social leadership; old mayors and councilmen were more likely to be expelled or forcibly converted, as philistine and provincial obstructions to the national community being born, the Volksgemeinschaft.

National Socialism was, more nearly, a political expression of a tortured synthesis between hometownsmen and general estate. It was no restoration, but rather a revolutionary effort to accommodate community with modernity on a national scale. Its political success came from the conversion of hometown bigotries into national virtues, and from providing a way for the movers and doers of the general estate to unite finally with the German people, with the people as German history, sociology, law, and literature had described them for a century and more.

In a narrow political sense [National Socialism] really was a solution to the German problem: resolving the conflicting themes of national unity and community by translating hometown values into national organization. But of course the two could not be truly reconciled by pretending a modern state was a home town, and only a deliberate or despairing suppression of consequential logic could make it possible to suppose they could be reconciled that way. David Schoenbaum has described in detail the conflict within National Socialist doctrine and politics that reflected the aspiration for galvanic power and unity without change, the claim that power and unity would come through a reversion to earlier social and economic forms. He puts it that the social revision backwards to the small business, the small town, and the small farm was incompatible with revision of Versailles; and that Hitler, when he had to choose, picked the latter, and with it big banks, big industry, big cities, big labor organizations – all enemies of the home town – and so brought social revolution rather than restoration.

While the National Socialists, to some extent, especially in the early years, liked to swath themselves in rhetoric that at least seemed to evoke the ethos of the centuries-long German hometown tradition, at the end of the day, they were radical spatialists, intent on the transgression of norms and boundaries. And over the next decade-plus they transgressed a hell of a lot of both. Rhetoric notwithstanding, the National Socialists in reality were the archenemies of the temporals and their autonomous, local hometowns. And though the defeat of the hometowns was probably assured by 1871, the Nazis wound up providing the final nail in the coffin. Though federalism was revived in Germany following WWII, rooted in the Länder, the German hometowns’ long history of resilient return as local bastions of federalist gemeinschaft had come to its end.

And so, this brings us to the conclusion of this remarkable history of the German hometowns, with their centuries-long battle in the phenotype wars. I want though to add one more installment to this already lengthy series. I want to flesh out the distinctive mode of social and particularly political action characteristic of hometown values and practice, as described and explained by Walker. Better understanding these hometown political practices and norms will go a long way in fleshing out some fundamental differences in the politics of time and space biased societies – which ultimately is what we’re concerned with here.

So, if you want know about that discussion once it’s posted, and you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know of others who are interested in these topics, please…

Meanwhile: be seeing you.

1. For a good discussion of these events, see Jeremy Noakes, “Federalism in the Nazi State,” in German Federalism: Past, Present, Future, ed. M. Umbach (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).