Bourgeoisie Archives - Page 2 of 2

On December 23, 2018

Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German General Staff

From the graduates of the Kriegsakademie were chosen the officer students that were to become members of this new and, for a time, unique Prussian institution, the Grosse Generalstab, the Great General Staff. It was set up as a separate department of the Ministry of War and dedicated itself solely to the study of strategies, tactics and supplies deemed necessary to develop plans for likely military scenarios. Its members, who initially numbered a dozen or so men and never exceeded one hundred, were the best and the brightest – as much as possible, for the influence of the old military families could not entirely be neutralized. The General Staff, however, did not exert military command; it made plans, devised strategies, and “shadowed” the line officers: every corps had a staff officer assigned who could supervise the execution of the given plan or effect necessary changes.

The staff’s daily bread was physics, mechanics, mathematics and statistics, but some room was given to the human factors, too – an early exercise in what would one day be called “psychology”. There had, of course, been half- hearted predecessors to the Kriegsakademie; essentially schools for military clerks, in which prospective artillery officers were taught elementary geometry and future quartermasters Accounting 101. Not only had these been mostly shabby affairs, they lacked reputation, which in turn reflected negatively on their graduates’ promotion opportunities and able officer candidates avoided these career traps.

The spirit of the modern scientific approach evidenced itself early in the characteristic bifurcation of the studies: one part of the curriculum was detailed geographically – horizontally, so to say – the students were to evaluate scenarios or devise plans for attacking France or defending East Prussia; the other track ran vertically, as to ways and means: intelligence, logistics and supplies, ammunition, hospitals, food etc., and every candidate had to show proficiency in both inventories.

The curriculum was modelled after the university syllabus of the time: first the classics, then modern works, first menial tasks then intellectual analysis – per aspera ad astra. Twice a year the whole academy went on “staff rides” – on outings to old battlefields strategies were evaluated on the very ground where they had worked or failed; new concepts, deployments and strategies were devised and solutions approximated. Studies were written incorporating the results and became mandatory test material. Models were built of the locations and strategies tested by simulation; in the next summer the results of these indoor games were translated to the manoeuvre areas and evaluated – in short, “War Games” were born and developed. Some of the conventions created in these games have endured into modern times and the age of computer wars – the enemy is red, one’s own forces blue.

The names of four officers are indissolubly bound to the history of the Prussian, later the German Great General Staff, before 1914: the aforementioned Carl von Clausewitz, Helmuth Graf (Count) von Moltke [the “Elder”, ¶], Chief of Staff and author of the plans that succeeded in 1864, 1866 and 1870/71, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, Chief of Staff around the turn of the century and author of the famous but elusive plan named for him, and Helmuth von Moltke [the “Younger”, not a count, ¶], nephew of the Count and Chief of Staff until his dismissal after the lost Battle of the Marne in September 1914.

[Our header depicts a scene from the Battle of Gravelotte, the attack of Infantry Battalion 9 from Lauenburg]

The Rise of Books – Gutenberg and Luther

On December 22, 2018

A man living, say, in the year AD 500, who travelled in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine one thousand years to the future of the High Middle Age of AD 1500. would have found that few things had changed much. Life in villages and towns was running in ways that would seem familiar to him – agriculture had not changed much, neither had transportation or war (except for the longbow). He would notice castles and cathedrals – the expressions of feudal and clerical power. Yet in the next one hundred years, he would observe how a monk and a tinkerer laid the foundation of a new age to come …

We are now closing in on the crucial years between AD 1450 and 1520, in which the mechanical invention of a Saxon tinkerer and the religious theories of a Thuringian monk at length caused the liquidation of the medieval age, together with the use of Latin as the language of church and court and the whole medieval class system. Yet even these pivotal events might have been relegated to minor importance had not the rise of the town as political unit completely upended the economical roundabout of the Middle Ages.

Every former peasant, who left the fields he did not own anyway, and on which generations of his forefathers had toiled in sweat for little gain, and spent a year and a day in the nearest officially recognized Imperial city was freed of his obligations to the liege-lord and absolved from lifelong servitude; he became, in principle, a free man. The sharecroppers flocked to the towns in great numbers and took part in the revolution of the medieval economy: towns, and with them their new and recent citizens, could and did get rich by trade, which a nobleman was prevented to do by ancient Roman law. Before long, the burghers broke the Church‘s monopoly on education; the ancient sciences were taken up by a new generation of students and experienced a rebirth, a Renaissance; a first wave of enlightenment purged the continent of many strictures of the Catholic Church.

The rise of towns established the bourgeoisie as a political class;⁶ differing from the simple hierarchy of Middle Age society, towns harboured a complex multitude of peoples that defied easy categorization: cobblers and masons, artisans and merchants, doctors and lawyers,⁷ their helpers and assistants, and soon, philosophers and historians of both the abstract and the natural schools;⁸ professions the Holy Catholic Church had practically outlawed in her eternal wisdom since Justinian’s closing of the schools of Athens and Alexandria in AD 529.

This is the appropriate place to introduce the originators of the metamorphoses. They were two men from a land not yet called Germany; with a little help from their friends, their pursuits were to elevate the faculties of man to unknown heights of good and evil.

Scribes had sought a mechanical way to duplicate their efforts since the invention of writing. Around the year AD 1050, a Chinese writer named Bi Sheng came up with the first model of what we today call the movable type: he created a clay type for every character he wanted to print. But since the Chinese language requires one type for every symbol of its writing, Bi Sheng quickly faced the problem that he required so many different characters respectively symbols that his printing method proved too clumsy; not user-friendly enough, we would call it today. Eventually, the Chinese replaced the clay types with woodblocks, which worked fine but had a durability problem. They were still far ahead of Europe.

In the Occident, books were still laboriously copied by hand, usually by monks. Copying books was one of the few pastimes granted to the average monk, and a good part of the income of an abbey or cloister depended on the dexterity and dedication of its copyists. The variety and multitude of these copies, however, were humbled by a circulus vitiosus: since all books were copied by hand, they were very expensive, thus only important books were copied at all; important books, by the standards of the Church, were, of course, only such books which supported the teachings of Christianity: hence only such books were copied.

Meanwhile, in a small town of not-yet-Germany, a prospective print-shop owner named Johannes Gensfleisch combined several recent ideas of his into a device which, after protracted tinkering, introduced to a perplexed world the first viable and sturdy printing press. He had formed, much as Bi Sheng had done, separate types for each letter of the alphabet, but of cast metal, not clay, which improved their durability.

He had, of course, the advantage to require only thirty-five or so letters and numbers. He then assembled rows of these types, forming lines, then paragraphs, and soon whole pages which were fixed in a frame against which ink was applied and paper pressed. As far as the inner mechanics of the press were concerned, rumour had it that Gensfleisch had profited from the study of the wine presses he used for the preparation of his libations.

At any rate, a skilled worker could produce three hundred pages a day with Gensfleisch’s machine, a hundred times the daily output of a monk. It was a miracle. Of a sudden, books could be produced at a fraction of their former cost and in unlimited quantities, for instead of expensive parchment simple paper could be used, which was soon produced in bulk. Books became so cheap and ubiquitous that they were, for the first time, written in or translated into the vernacular of the common people, into Teutsch. Naturally, the first bestseller was the Christian Bible. Herr Gensfleisch meanwhile, suitably proud of his achievement, adopted the nom de plume under which he is known to posterity, Johannes Gutenberg.

Before Gutenberg, only members of the clergy or the families of the nobility could afford to possess their own, personal, copies of the Holy Writ: the average man could not afford one, and even if he could buy one, he could not read it for it was written in (a sort of) Latin. This now changed swiftly, and everybody could either buy or at least borrow a Bible written in German and check the contents independently.⁹

The Church was not truly ecstatic over the sudden development of amateur competition in Biblical exegesis, and for decades defiled printing as a satanic art; but the levee had been broken, and it was too late to turn back the clock. It was bad enough that the Bible was now accessible to the laity; that it was printed in the vernacular was worse, for every literate person could now read, for example, that Jesus had advocated poverty as the natural state of affairs for Christians, and this mandate, one would surmise, would be equally appropriate for the clergy. Yet when concerned Christians learned from the Bible that Jesus had declared not to own any earthly possessions and exhorted his apostles as well as his lesser disciples to follow his example, they dispatched embassies with dire warnings to the princes of the Catholic Church. The deputations explained that material wealth was in fact a handicap, instead of a benefit, in the acquisition of salvation, and recommended that the Church renounce its secular possessions and concentrate on the salvation of their parishioners’ souls instead of amassing worldly treasures. The Church was not amused and summarily declined the spiritually advantageous offer.

Yet the more mere mortals read the holy writings, the more the former spiritual and intellectual monopoly of Catholicism was forced to retreat. It was not only that scripture and reality were at odds: both the spiritual decay and the wealth of the Church, or rather the ways in which this wealth was accomplished, the abuses of simony and the atrocious selling of indulgences, would no longer be accepted by a new, more critical generation of Christians. Sixty years or so after Gutenberg’s invention, the crisis of the Roman Church became acute. A young monk, professor for Biblical Theology at the University of Wittenberg, set out to change the faith of Christendom forever.

Within the confines of the present volume, the complex history of Martin Luther and the Reformation can be presented only briefly. Luther composed ninety-five theses, which summed up his criticism of the orthodox, Catholic exegesis of the Bible and the conclusions he had drawn from his findings [Text, from Wikisource). These theses he had sent to the office of his superior, Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, the Imperial Arch Chancellor, where they might have caused damage or not. But he nailed a copy of them onto the door of his home church in Wittenberg, for public discussion [November 1517]. Perhaps not the primary but certainly the most aggravating cause for Luther’s public admonition was the flagrant indulgence trade. In AD 1515, Pope Leo X approved the sale of indulgences in the archbishop’s domain around Mainz, to finance various clerical projects, one of which, and self-evidently the most sacred and distinguished, was to raise funds for the enlargement of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Bishop Albrecht did not sell the documents personally; he had an agent, a man named Johann Tetzel, who sold them on a commission basis. Herr Tetzel, a devout believer, explained to his prospective customers that his documents could alleviate the duration or intensity of the purgatorial punishments their sins had purchased, or, for a few dollars more, could accomplish the immediate release of their souls from the sulphurous wells of the devil’s domain. Luther directed his reformatory ire in particular upon such fraudulent practices and composed a stream of theses condemning these theological outrages, and a few other little sins the Catholic Church had allowed herself in one-and-a-half millennia of orthodox rule. Yet soon Luther found himself mired in much more treacherous terrain. James Kugel explains [How to Read the Bible, Free Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-7432-3538-0]:

Well before the early 1500’s, individual Christians had been expressing dissatisfaction with the ways of the church, and their dissatisfaction focused on a broad variety of issues. One of the things that bothered them was what they saw as corruption within its ranks – priests’ sale of indulgences to their parishioners, for example, or the role of money in obtaining high office within the church hierarchy (called “simony”).

Along with these, some Christians objected to the church’s vast holdings of land and its evident concern for furthering its own wealth and political power (accompanied by a lack of concern for the poor): to many, the bishops and cardinals seemed more the servants of Mammon than of God.

In addition to these dissatisfactions, however, were others of a more theoretical and intellectual nature. The very idea of papal authority seemed illogical to some; how could a reasonable person accept a priori that the rulings of the altogether human leader of the church would always be correct?

And why should a human institution like the church, even if its existence was divinely authorized, play such a crucial role as intermediary between God and the individual Christian? Lastly – but probably not last in importance – what about the Bible?

Should the church have the unchallenged authority to say what the Bible means, especially when that meaning seemed to be derived not from the Bible’s own words as much as from old doctrines and questionable methods of interpretation?

Luther’s answer was a resounding “no”. The sole justification of faith, he argued, is the belief in the Divine Promise that Jesus died for the salvation of the sinner; and neither church nor pope are necessary paraphernalia in the achievement of this faith. Sinners, that is, every man who believes in the Biblical message, will be represented at God’s judgement by Jesus Christ and will be absolved, as Jesus is absolved. No purchase necessary.

That was the rub, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned. Orthodox dogma had held for thirteen centuries that the faithful qualify for eternal benefits by the charitable works they donate to the community or the financial endowments they dedicate to the apostolic coffers for the relief of the poor. In other words, good deeds, or equitable pecuniary considerations, open the door to preferred treatment on Judgement Day. Yet if Luther’s findings were correct, such deeds had no relevance whatsoever to redemption or salvation, and the Church’s eagerness in collecting these contributions was nothing but the sign of a parasitic organism’s avarice. Just as useless would be the strange rituals of symbolic cannibalism, performed by men only, who dressed in garish costumes and walked in clouds of frankincense. If one could indeed find redemption without these follies, independent of such ceremonial ministrations, the Church might be out of business soon.

Why Revolutions devour their own children …

On December 19, 2018

Lenin during a pre-revolutionary speech at Sverdlov Square in Moscow – Leon Trotsky (in uniform), the hero of the subsequent revolution was later declared a non-person, and until 1991 deleted from all versions of this photo …

“The revolutionaries of today are the conservatives of tomorrow.” © Gerald Dunkl (* 1959), Austrian psychologist and aphorist

Article on famous and recent "Unpersons" — Article on famous and recent “Unpersons”

“With all his fibres, person M. participated in the revolution. Only when he felt the new shackles, he breathed with relief. “© Martin Gerhard Reisenberg (born 1949), librarian and author

La Liberté guidant le peuple - Painting by Eugene Delacroix — La Liberté guidant le peuple – Painting by Eugene Delacroix – The icon of modern revolution – the French Revolution of 1789 – ended in the Napoleonic Wars

Politics is a field of carefully groomed yet nastily imprecise definitions – none the least because it is the habit of its practitioners to steer clear of commitments, pronouncements or determinations which may face the need of reinterpretation tomorrow or the very next minute. On the cheap term “freedom” alone, long books have been written. Here we want to address a different terminology.

“Conservative” or “Conservatism” is one of the most popular catch phrases in the political vernacular – yet we might have a closer look at its etymology, inherent relativism and, indeed, rotative meaning as opposed to the more superficial use in common parlance.

It derives, naturally, from Latin “conservare”. “Servare” is the root word for “servus”, the servant, and basically means “to use” in the transitive way – something to be used, as in the English word “serviceable”. The prefix “con” has the basic meaning of “together” (“together with”, more precisely) and we could essentially translate it as “something that serves (well) with”, an idea which quickly developed into the notion of something that serves well hence it should be retained.

This is the more superficial way it is used generally as to denote – in the political domain – an existing structure which should be retained because of its merits.

This is the classic argument of the possessor – not the aspirer – and here we see that there is indeed a basically rotative connotation.

For the revolutionary of every kind – as soon as he, she or they have accomplished the goal, must turn to the preservation of the new achievement and immediately become a “conservative” him-, her- or theirselves.

Thus revolutionaries in due time always become conservatives – we may remember that the industrial conservatism of our time once was a revolution against the feudal system – liege-lords and manors.

Therein lies the reason for the old adage that all revolutions devour their own children – see Trotsky, Danton, Robespierre and all the others.

Thereafter, a new – post revolutionary – status quo is established, against which opposition arises. This is why each and every revolutionary movement necessarily creates its own counter-revolutionary movement – as inescapable as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

On the resulting – logically consequent – reverse instrumentalization of terror by the new “conservatives”, F. Fürstenberg wrote in 2007 in the New York Times [“Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons” (PDF here)], in connection with the French Revolution – upon the etymology of the word “terrorist”as well:

“… The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor, of course, to ‘Islamofascism’. A ‘terroriste’ was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during La Terreur.”

The French Revolution remains the classic example of a revolution that discarded their own founders and agents. Its reign of terror began, after a transitional phase, with the execution of the nobility and the king. Then the circle expanded upon thousands of suspects suspected of hostility to the revolution. The years of the monarchy finally ended with the execution of the king and the proclamation of the secular French Republic.

Executive power was transferred to a Public Security Committee, of whom Maximilian Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobins, was appointed headman. Within a period of not more than seven weeks, the commendable body managed to send some 1300 people to the guillotine. It must be admitted, however, that , in poetic justice, Robespierre and his enemy Danton lost their heads there as well.

The Crushing of the German Revolution 1849

Execution, of course, was the effective means of denying the physical existence of the adversary, but the nemesis of his or her remembrance remains. The ancient Romans already knew “Abolitio nominis” – the “abolition of the name” – today usually called “Damnatio memoriae” – the demonstrative eradication of a person’s memory.

Interestingly enough, we know the names of practically all persons who succumbed to “damnatio memoriae” – indicating the unfitness of the procedure. The same thing happened to the USSR and its imitators … but the basic problem remains – the radical change of interests of the revolutionary to maintain the new status quo … by terror …

“Revolution: in politics, this is a sudden change in the form of misrule.” Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – 1914), called Bitter Pierce, American journalist and satirist; Source: Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (The Cynic’s Word Book), 1906 (1909 as Devil’s Dictionary in Collected Works, Vol. 7)

The Rise of Prussia

On December 19, 2018

See the Related Post: The Rise of the General Staff

See the Related Post: Development of the modern Prussian Army

Our header is a clipping from a photograph of the Battle of Königgrätz (or Sadowa) 1866 and shows the attack of Infantry Regiment No. 68

Napoleon’s armies had severely defeated the Prussians at Jena and Auerstaedt in 1807 and subsequently occupied most of the country, that is, those portions which Napoleon had not confiscated and given away to his brother Jerome, whom he had made King of Westphalia, or to the newly established Grand-Duchy of Poland.

Yet occasionally, a loss may turn an into an unexpected gain. It was precisely in the years of her humiliation, after the defeat of her proud army, that Prussia initiated the reforms which were to result in making her a modern state which in some respects led the world.

Many things that are nowadays, for better or worse, associated with the workings of a modern state were first – in a consistent manner – introduced in Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century: communal self-government, freedom of trade and contracts, the income tax, compulsive education and, last not least, military service by conscription.

The feudal system had limited the nation’s entrepreneurial activities along social borderlines: to buy or sell land was the prerogative of the nobility, but to become a merchant or artisan, one had to be a commoner. These limitations fell, and with the eventual abolition of serfdom, the world’s first labour market was created; a necessary condition for Germany’s extremely rapid industrialization.

The economy of feudal Prussia depended on serfs working the extensive farms of the “Junkers”, the local barons. They ruled with a heavy hand, essentially independent of governmental supervision. On their possessions, they were employer, policeman and judge in one. They had the right to inflict corporeal punishment, could grant, or forbid, marriages; in some cases, while technically illegal, complete sharecropper families were bought and sold, in particular at the fringes of the country where the eye of the law was short-sighted.

A feudal right the Junkers were loath to give up was the ius primae noctis or droit de seigneur; the right of the lord to claim the sexual favours of a vassal’s bride on her wedding night. Whether this right truly existed or was a rather morbid fantasy is debated, but at least in Beaumarchais’ play “The Marriage of Figaro” it became a potent propaganda weapon against the excesses of the nobility. Under the impression of the French Revolution, demands for the abolishment of the old customs surfaced in Prussia as well.

The sober, Lutheran Prussian kings had early proven more interest in the affairs of their citizens than was the norm. In 1732 Friedrich Wilhelm I took in a community of Lutherans from Salzburg, Austria, whence they had been displaced.

Friedrich Wilhelm I receives the Lutherans from Salzburg at the Leipziger Gate in 1732, painting by Constantin Kretius

Frederick the Great was especially known for taking interest in the daily life of his wards and was spotted all over the country on inspection tours on things as mundane as the growing of potatoes to improve the food supply.

Frederick the Great inspecting potato fields - Robert Warthmüller, 1866 — Frederick the Great inspecting potato fields – Robert Warthmüller, 1866

Although the calls for political reform were based, as in France, on the theories of Rousseau, Locke and John Stuart Mill, there was another important theory for the framers of the new Prussian state: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), which described a possible new economic model for the country. Smith’s paradigm was based upon, first, the private right to property, second, the principle of competition, the “free market”, and third, the abolition of trade obstacles like customs, excises or levies.

These basic tenets of Capitalism happened to coincide with the most important invention of the modern age, the partnership of coal and the steam engine, which absolved man from a plethora of manual labours. Industrialization began in the English midlands in the eighteenth century but it took decades for Prussia and the other German states to catch up.

Five distinguished names are eternally united with the Prussian reforms: on the – less important – military side the generals Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August von Gneisenau; on the civil side of the government the Barons von Stein and von Hardenberg; yet none of whom would have effected much without the reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the famous geographer and botanist Alexander von Humboldt.

Any serious reform of the land, so much was clear to reformers and hesitaters alike, had to begin with and centre on the situation of the peasantry. They formed the basis of the population, of agriculture, and of the military, and to improve their lot should have positive repercussions on the rest of the nation.

The first issue the reformers attacked was the social integration of all “Prussians”, for there was a problem. The concept of being a “Prussian” did not come easy to many inhabitants, for the simple reason that they only had recently become Prussians; only a generation or so earlier they had been Brandenburgers, Silesians or Pomeranians, collected as spoils of war.

In the fall of 1807, Minister von Stein convinced King Friedrich Wilhelm IV that agrarian development was the key to progress and received the royal sanction to enact a Reform Act. On October 9, 1807, serfdom was outlawed in the kingdom of Prussia, peasants freed from feudal obligations, tithes were abolished, and sharecropping verboten. About half of the peasantry was freed immediately, and the rest had to wait until St. Michael’s Day, November 11, 1810.

Anybody could now, at least in theory, own land, or move, or marry, without permission. As one would suspect, the nobility was not exactly pleased with the reform package and resisted fiercely. They had been used to enjoy the unpaid labours delivered by their “subjects”, and now complained that they were entitled to compensation for the loss of it. They organized themselves in leagues and clubs and, for a time, succeeded in watering down essential provisions of the law.

On account of their resistance, it was to take another generation before the changes achieved full effectiveness. Yet a beginning had been made, and food production rose 40% within ten years. Other reforms proved just as decisive.

Gerhard von Scharnhorst was promoted in July 1807 to become the head of the Military Reform Commission, and he developed a few ideas his fellow noblemen could only call “radical”. As it were, only aristocrats had been able to secure officer’s commissions: this tradition was buried without ceremony, as was the custom that promotion depended on the officer’s favours with the ladies-in-waiting or the king’s game wardens: now advancement would be based upon performance, shocked old-timers learned.

The gauntlet was abolished, as was hazing, and in the future, so Scharnhorst’s plan, military service would be compulsory. Now that was a brick the king was not willing to swallow yet, and Scharnhorst was fired in 1810. The most crucial reform, however, had already been passed: Wilhelm von Humboldt created the Prussian educational system, the first one to compass a whole nation. He introduced compulsory schooling and guaranteed the building and maintenance of schools and the employment of secular teachers in every nook and cranny of the land.

But not only were primary schools established, but Humboldt also invented the German Gymnasium, a feeder school for colleges and universities. The curriculum was prescribed by law, and schools unwilling or unable to keep up with requirements, as some religious schools did, were closed. Personally, Humboldt also founded the Berlin University that still bears his name.

It is hard to imagine today, but even the simple proviso that a school year starts only once a year had not been considered a necessity until Humboldt ordered it. From now on, school began in September, and all over the world children still obey the regulation of the venerable Prussian scholar. Reform also assailed the ancient privileges of the universities: not only did Humboldt manage to liberate enough funds from the frugal king to run the university, where the teaching staff soon was to comprise names as august as Hegel and Fichte, he also invented the symbiosis of academic teaching and research: professors were required to provide both.

Baron von Stein’s most important innovation regarding the practical aspects of governance was the invention of the minister with portfolio; it sounds like a simple idea yet was unknown. Since the dawn of time, decision-makers had relied on the assistance of advisors, but seldom had the hired help been systematically organized; the gentlemen might work against each other or ignore each other, and most governments thus depended on a sort of chaos theory.

Stein replaced chaos with a pyramid of power and responsibility: the king as the head of government could rely on a cabinet of ministers with specialized portfolios below him, who, in their turn, could rely on a staff of higher officials that would not change with every new incoming minister and could provide continuity. Thus, the (hopefully) knowledgeable ministerial secretary was born, who could serve successive administrations. This system was replicated in every nation.”

Related Post: The Rise of the General Staff

Journalism vs. Muckracking

On December 19, 2018