The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of
the Authoritarian Imagination by James Retallack (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006)

It is hardly news that the German Right
during the Second Empire (1872–1918)
has been defined by key historians through
its commitment to an authoritarian regime,
and for decades it has been viewed as a
static and rather uninteresting phenomenon,
signaling a drab period of predictable
competition and tension between rising
democratic and reactionary conservative
elements. Perhaps its most signal interest
has been in providing a puzzle for historians
in trying to decipher its connection
to the emergence and eventual success of
National Socialism, the assumption always
being that there is a connection that only
needs finding.

What indeed is the relation between
that defining preference the German
Right ostensibly entertained for authoritarian
rule and the political nihilism of
twentieth-century totalitarianism? It is not
precisely Retallack’s subject, but he does
address it forthrightly, beginning his treatise
with a nuanced definition of authoritarianism
itself, which is, he believes, a
commitment to hierarchical command
(or governmental) structures that privilege
obedience over individual autonomy.
These are not exactly Retallack’s words; he
is conflicted, choosing at first a somewhat
harsher formulation, when he remarks
that “[a]n authoritarian regime also does
its utmost to enforce public conformity
and limit intellectual, artistic, and political
freedom—if necessary by force.” At
the same time, he continues, “any definition
of authoritarianism . . . will stress the
state’s limited control and its partial toleration
of pluralism, opposition, and freedom
of ideas.” In other words, authoritarianism
is not congruent with totalitarianism.

What we have gained at this point is an
understanding of the general attitude that
governs what Retallack would doubtless
call the authoritarian mind; this “mental
map” of an imagination that “favours the
principle of authority over that of individual
liberty.” Yet, such a topology is
hardly limited to any particular national
Right, and Hitler has not been the inexorable
consequence of it anywhere else,
though Italians have had their Mussolini,
Spaniards their Franco, and Russians their
Lenin. A respect for established authority,
a preference for hierarchy, a propensity
for self-restraint, and an understanding
of the prudent use of police power—the
cohesion of this constellation transcends
any particular condition and can be found
expressed to some degree almost universally
among conservatives. Still, the question
stated in the subtitle of the work presents
the reader with a provocative series of
interrogatives.

What are the limits of the authoritarian
imagination, and in what sense does it
influence the portentous developments in
Germany during the twentieth century?
At the outset the author depicts the Junker,
a word derived from junger Herr (“young
lord/squire”) and generally connoting a
person of noble rank. In the Anglophone
world the appropriate equivalent is “gentry”
because Junker denotes a practical
farmer of rank who operates a large-scale
agricultural enterprise. These noble farms
or Rittergüter produced grain products
and lay for the most part east of the Elbe
River. The Junker‘s vital interests involved
the continuance of a political, social, and
economic order that assured the profitable
maintenance of his life as a farmer.1

As a member of an aristocracy tied to a
historically rather small monarchical entity,
the Junker was fundamentally opposed to
any form of absolutism, and though he
was happy to glorify the Prussian state, he
was no nationalist and, therefore, a very
unlikely precursor of modern fascism. Since
Retallack appears to agree that ideology
is excluded from the conservative mental
map, it being anchored in the actual conditions
of a traditional order, it is hard to see
how the Junkers found any agreement with
the radical nationalists who joined them to
make up the German Right as it moved
into the twentieth century. Was it merely
their mutual preference for “authoritarian”
forms, or, perhaps, their antagonism to
Jewish participation in public life?

Certainly there is no way to impute
proto-democratic inclinations to the old
conservative wing of the Right. Their
opposition to an extension of the franchise
was indeed one of their formative impulses
and the chief ground of their ostensible
anti-Semitism.2 It could be argued that it
was not “anti-Semitism” at all, since the
Jews were simply one of many groups
the old conservatives would have preferred
to exclude. Neither could they have
borne within their movement the seeds
of nationalism since that required a vision
of das Volk (“the people”) as invested
with ultimate authority—a notion utterly
beyond the imagination of the old conservatives
for whom the “people” represented
a vulgar and politically incompetent mass
of subjects useful for many things but certainly
not endowed with the necessary
judgment for public affairs.

The Junker had been intensely engaged
in a continuing crisis of identity and survival
since Napoleon abolished the Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation
in 1806. The elimination of that ancient,
unwieldy but, in its own peculiar fashion,
viable institution left Prussia and its
political class without a constitutional
framework. Indeed, after the astonishing
success of French arms in vanquishing the
formerly-so-respected Prussian army, the
little kingdom survived only through the
unpredictable grace of Napoleon. In the
aftermath of their defeat, the Junker joined
in an odd underground alliance with German
liberals and proto-nationalists to
combat French hegemony.

The Prussian government-in-exile
encouraged liberals to hope that success
against the French would eventually lead
to an enfranchisement of the literate bourgeoisie.
For their part, the proto-nationalists
began to imagine a larger, more
inclusive all-German state emerging from
Napoleon’s defeat. Meanwhile, the Junker
officer class focused on the military task of
effective mobilization against the French,
although there were outstanding members
of their number who contributed markedly
to liberal reform, while humoring
the proto-nationalists. The cooperation
of these disparate groups lasted until the
death of the liberal Chancellor Hardenberg,
but it was not until the Insurrections
of 1848 that liberals and nationalists
understood how profoundly the Prussian
monarchy and aristocracy opposed what
they might have considered genuine liberalization.
3

Retallack picks up the story in 1860 and
traces the ambivalence of the old conservatives
to the exigencies of party politics
as they were developing, particularly after
the establishment of the Second Empire
in 1872. Since the old conservatives and
its Junker core were particularists and not
nationalists at all, the unification of the various
German principalities into a national
state was a kind of pyrrhic victory that
would ultimately cost them dearly. Their
king became the German emperor, and the
national state was soon engaged in larger
affairs to which their specific interests were
subordinate. If the federative constitution
of the new “empire” made allowance for
considerable diversity and diffusion of
power, the radical nationalists on the Right
worked more and more effectively after
1890 to have it otherwise.

German nationalists were only one of a
continental breed in late nineteenth-century
Europe. The idea of self-government
had provided a conceptual framework
for an ideology of ethnic nationalism to
emerge and many ethnicities had, in the
meantime, mounted their own movements
to achieve self-determination. Early
in the century, it had been Germans who
had begun to experiment with methods
of mobilizing the populace against French
supremacy and occupation. They had
come upon a set of ideas cohering around
the concept of a distinct Volk bound by
common language and experience and
distinct from the peoples around them.
These ideas had been developed into a
relatively systematic anthropology by J. G.
Herder during the late eighteenth century
and doubtless contained certain primitivist
aspects.4 If the racialist implications are
obvious, they were—at least in Herder—
benign and, moreover, necessary since, in
order to govern itself, a people must first
be somehow constituted or invested with
attributes that make them distinctive.
Self-government can hardly work if there
is no authorizing source.

The early understanding of what constitutes
Deutschtum (“German-ness”) emerged
in contradistinction to all that was understood
at the time to be French, that is, cosmopolitan
social forms, hostility to religion,
and rationalized political system. A good
German was therefore a person devoted to
traditional authority structures, a Christian
believer, and in his private comportment
down-to-earth or even homespun.
His devotion to the state followed from
his natural devotion to his people, for the
state was simply the embodiment of their
collective will. The sanction for collective
acts rested with the Volk, but the state was
the instrument through which the national
will was implemented. However, none of
this could sit well with an old conservative
who understood society not in terms
of a Volk at all but as a corporate authority
structure consisting of Stände (“estates”)
and divinely authorized to operate in the
saeculum.5 The university is the only modern
analogue with its corporatist structure
and appeal to the sanction of the quasidivine
and free “pursuit of knowledge” (das
Wissenschaftsstreben).

The nationalist views the very existence
of a person able to exhibit the appropriate
German-ness as a licensed participant in
the national polity, while the old conservative
saw in the person a set of circumscribed
rights, duties, and limitations determined
by that person’s rank and birth. The fact
that one was merely animate in no way
entitled that person to operate as the authorizing
force in public life. On this point we
have reached the limit of the conservative,
if not the authoritarian, imagination. There
is indeed a closer identity with the liberal
than the nationalist “mental map,” though
for the liberal the bundle of defining rights
and duties is determined by ability rather
than rank or birth. Nevertheless, the correspondence
is more readily apparent than
anything shared with the nationalist.

Retallack’s study elucidates the uneasy
alliance between the two wings of the
Right during a period that ended roughly
with World War I. Since he focuses on
the “imagination” or “mental map” of
these groups, exploring the habitus that
made them what they were and determined
how they formed their aspirations
and sought to implement their agenda, it
is all too obvious how little they belonged
in the same camp. Old conservatives and
nationalists agreed only superficially on
two points; yet, even these are problematical
in substance. The nationalist easily
qualified as anti-Semitic, his hostility
to German Jewry being directed with an
impassioned specificity that identifies in
the Jew an intolerably foreign element
offensive to the integrity of the German
Volk. As for their shared preference for
authoritarian regimes, the differences are
plain, the nationalist striving to bolster and
promote the supremacy of a state anchored
in nothing more than a völkisch abstraction,
an entity—viz. das Volk—defined chiefly
as the antithesis of anything ostensibly
French or exuding Enlightenment ideas,
while the old conservative was anchored
in an ancient and established institutional
triad of monarchy, aristocracy, and church.

In all else there was a chasm as deep as
history, so that the German Right can be
said to have suffered a bifurcation from the
outset, its future open only to the wing
willing to engage the modern instruments
of party politics. Radical nationalists were
of middle-class origin and unconstrained
by aristocratic codes and traditions. They
were perfectly willing to use the developing
media and proved in some cases to be
gifted demagogues. Their agenda included
an extension of the franchise to the general
population, so that the Volk could be
both instructed in and mobilized to promote
nationalist causes. The old conservatives
were left behind in all of this, since
they remained pledged on the whole to
an agenda that confined their activities.
In order to elucidate the Junker ethic, the
author cites Russell Kirk’s six canons.6

Even as the nineteenth century ambled
into its final decade, it was quite clear
that there was little real correspondence
between these two wings of the German
Right. In the end we know, of course,
who won the contest, although the tragic
chronicle must first run the gamut of
events, including a horrendous European
war in which the United States chose to
become equal partner in the carnage, for
the sake of providing Wilson with a place
at the table during the postwar negotiations
of 1918.

Ahead lay a period of near starvation
aggravated by a British blockade that
remained in place after the surrender and
was to some extent relieved only by the
noteworthy humanitarian efforts of Herbert
Hoover to provide the German populace
food assistance. In the meantime,
the travails endured by ordinary Germans
were soon compounded by the global
economic collapse that ended only in the
triumph of the fascist National Socialists
who turned German racialist or ethnic
nationalism into a campaign fueled by
rabid and homicidal racism and a drive for
power no longer anchored in either prudence
or common sense.

Not one of these events was inevitable.
They were all the consequence of
human choice and circumstance, including
the unlikely intervention of distant
powers like the United States. Not even
in the genealogy of German nationalism
can the seeds of National Socialist fascism
be sought with equity—that is, if
what we are really seeking is to establish a
causal sequence marked by clear intention.
Nationalism is, after all, an unlikely field
to sow if one is expecting a harvest that
bears a deified state. The original nationalist
honored the Volk and regarded the
government as its mere instrument and
not vice versa.

The two German words denoting
authority—Obrigkeit (“upper echelons
of a command structure”) and Herrschaft
(“peerage, assembly of lords or notables”)
refer at the most literal level to an
“establishment,” oligarchy, or governing
group. The old conservatives were more
intractably bound to the literal or even
personal denotation than the nationalists,
possibly because they were in fact the
aboriginal Herren (“lords”) in the term
Herrschaft. The old conservatives demonstrate,
in other words, a decided preference
for a personified authority embodied
in traditional elites, while the nationalists
were committed to expanding the meaning
of the terms to encompass an entirely
new range of meanings. The political limits
of the authoritarian imagination were
as different as the conceptual landscapes
and habitus of each of the two wings of
the Right.

Finally, Retallack’s study makes it clear
that it is not really accurate to dwell upon
any uniquely German character in either of
these movements, for they had their counterparts
all over Europe. The notion of the
German Sonderweg (“special destiny”) can
now safely be discarded, for it has caused
mischief enough, not only among Germans
but also among commentators and
historians seduced into inaccurate views
and observations dependent upon a specious
hypothesis about Germany’s singularly
eccentric historical trajectory. If the
idea of special destiny has been useful in the
past for frightening Germany’s neighbors,
it has also bolstered the pride of German
chauvinists. Now it is a relief to return to
normalcy and to discover in Germans and
their nation neither hereditary villainy nor
anointed destiny as the sole power gifted
to mediate between East and West.

NOTES

  1. See Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters & Lords: Mid-
    19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (Oxford:
    Oxford University Press, 1993).

  2. Retallack accepts
    the argument of Richard S. Levy in Anti-Semitism in the
    Modern World: An Anthology of Texts (Lexington, MA:
    D. C. Heath, 1990), 2–11, for the use of the unhyphenated
    form of the term.

  3. Matthew Levinger admirably
    discusses the period in his study, Enlightened Nationalism:
    The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–
    1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For an
    inside view of a liberal deeply involved in the period
    see Terry H. Pickett, The Unseasonable Democrat: K. A.
    Varnhagen von Ense, 1785–1858 (Modern German Studies,
    Vol. 14) (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann,
    1985).

  4. J. G. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History
    of Man (1784), trans. T. Churchill (1800).

  5. Terry
    H. Pickett, Inventing Nations: Justifications of Authority
    in the Modern World, Contributions in Philosophy, No. 56
    (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996): ch. 6, “The
    Marriage of Nation and State,” ch. 7, “Jahn’s Ethnogeny
    and the Sacralization of Germanhood,” and ch.
    8, “The Liberal as Ambivalent Nationalist.”

  6. Russell
    Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th
    rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001), 8–9.