In 1904, a disgusted lieutenant published Life in a Garrison Town, a roman à clef describing scandalous goings-on among the officers in For-bach in Alsace. Coming on the heels of Franz-Adam Beyerlein’s Jena oder Sedan, with its exposè of the alleged dry rot in the German army, this work earned the author the rewards critics expected of Imperial Germany: a sentence for libel accompanied by impassioned denials that anything serious was amiss. In fact, the German officer was the victim of a double bind. The army’s pretensions as the school of the nation and the embodiment of its highest ideals generated correspondingly high expectations of its officers. Like Caesar’s wife, they were to be above suspicion—mature, circumspect, and discreet; reflective in judgment and wise in counsel. In such a context even youth’s predictable lapses were unlikely to be ignored. Nor were critics willing to make distinctions between private behavior and that involving matters of public trust. German subalterns were never allowed the license their British contemporaries took for granted.4
Yet the army’s well-documented reluctance to stamp out antisocial exuberance was not entirely a crude manifestation of militarism. It is easy to forget just how thoroughly domesticated was the German soldier of the early twentieth century. In his unpublished memoirs General Otto von Below described his first courtesy call as a brigadier on his division commander. As he approached the door he overheard an outburst of scolding. When he rang the bell he found his superior deep in a “discussion” with his teenage daughter. As she flounced out of the house with a final “Oh, Daddy!” the general explosively vented his frustration, while his wife expressed her hope that Below’s own daughter would be a calming influence on their uncontrollable offspring. Both of these family men would take army corps into action in 1914. A few years later Below, in full uniform, found himself stranded in a small rural Gasthaus late in the evening. When he requested a meal the landlady informed him that she had no time; she needed to help her son with his schoolwork. The general promptly and gallantly mounted the breach and earned his dinner by taking the youngster through his Latin exercises.
Apart from their modification of the image of Imperial Germany as a militarized and patriarchal society, such anecdotes suggest a real problem within the officer corps. Combat leadership, particularly at junior levels, involves a mixture of forceful character and a certain indifference to consequences. Lieutenants and captains are never expected to have long life spans once the shooting starts. No army can contemplate with equanimity the thought of stable, settled, emotionally middle-aged men leading platoons into enemy fire. The German army had to walk a consistently fine line between the Scylla of emasculating its junior leaders by converting them into bureaucratized good citizens and the Charybdis of allowing panache and enthusiasm to degenerate into publicity-generating hooliganism.5
The war ministry and the general staff agreed that idle hands were mischief-prone. The expansion of the Prussian garrison, from one corps in 1889 to three after 1912, generated a critical mass that fostered efficiency by emulation and competition. Living conditions improved. New formations received new barracks, solidly built, comfortable structures with storage rooms, running water, accommodations for married NCOs, and separate quarters for the bachelor NCOs—the last a minor development that improved discipline and morale by giving the rank and file and their junior leaders mutual privacy off duty. The officers were not always so fortunate. As late as 1913, one major had to content himself with two tiny apartments, ten minutes’ walk apart. To go from his sitting room to his bedroom required the use of a lantern. In bad weather the journey was a nightly adventure. The storyteller leaves the sanitary arrangements to our imaginations.6
As the army in East Prussia increased in size it became more public. Old regiments like the 4th Grenadiers displayed their silver, their portraits of retired colonels, their trophies from past victories. Newer ones like the 141st Infantry showcased marksmanship prizes. Wise colonels made their regimental bands available for concerts, and regularly distributed invitations to the officers’ club among locally prominent citizens. For everybody else parades, target practice, and route marches offered welcome breaks in daily routines. In Ortelsburg, the lieutenants of the 1st Jäger Battalion occasionally ended a particularly relaxing session in the officers’ mess with an improvised midnight parade through the small town. At least one good citizen, far from deploring his interrupted sleep, complained instead that the merry pranksters never passed by his house. The oversight was remedied at the earliest opportunity.7 The incident, typical of many, suggests that the posturing, monocled caricature of Ulk, Simplicissimus, and the Social Democratic press was to a degree the product of perception and expectation. Particularly outside the big cities, a bit of good will accompanied by some concessions to immaturity was likely to give a garrison town the junior officers it deserved.8
The German soldier of 1914 was the product of a deferential society. Even the Social Democrats had an articulated, hierarchic organization rigid enough to be frequently described by contemporaries as directly borrowed from the military. At the same time the Second Empire’s was a society sufficiently open to diffuse and defuse a good deal of class antagonism and hostility. In particular the development of a large lower middle class, and the growing complexity of that class, contributed to a general perception of choice as a factor in class identity. The pride of the white-collar worker, so often described in negative terms by academic critics, had a positive side as welclass="underline" a sense of achievement and a promise of better things to come. Even the socialist movement drew its essential strength from affirmative identities. The ideal party member was class-conscious as well as class-determined—committed to the triumph of socialism because he wished to be so committed.9
These attitudes were part of the army. The negative aspects of Germany’s military have been so stressed that it sometimes seems every officer from the chief of staff to the newest lieutenant must have had as his first thought on arising, “What can I personally do today to fix the yoke of decaying Junker feudalism on the necks of the emerging proletariat?”10 The army of Imperial Germany was in fact much more than a collection of sullen conscripts marking time till their discharge, destined to shoot down their brothers or be sacrificed in pursuit of militaristic dreams. It was also a significant instrument for integrating and legitimizing the Second Reich.
The process of legitimation began with the officer corps. Its role was significantly enhanced by the relative confusion of Imperial Germany’s status network. No class, caste, or social group perceived itself as clearly dominant. In this climate an officer’s commission, active or reserve, easily became generally negotiable social currency. To consider it a symbol of bourgeois insecurity or an instrument for co-opting the middle class is to apply models irrelevant to most of the principals in the situation.11 The institution of the one-year volunteer, allowing young men with specific kinds and levels of education to serve a year in the ranks and then apply for a reserve commission, was not democratic. It was in a significant sense liberal in its encouragement of individual development, and correspondingly appealing to the ambitious. Acquiring a commission amounted to gaining membership in a club. The process was just difficult enough to make the goal desirable. But, at least for gentile Christians, it involved no extraordinary humiliations—nothing beyond the normal frustrations of entering a new environment, combined with the kinds of judicious logrolling and compromising that were increasingly the norms of a plural society. Engaging in this process was seen less as selling out than as buying in.