Abstract
Historians know that German bourgeois intellectuals (Max Weber being a prominent example) experienced the verdict of war guilt against their country as though suffering from the impact of an individual and private catastrophe. For a better understanding of this reaction it may be helpful to put Weber in his social context. As a member of the bourgeois and intellectual elite of the Kaiserreich Max Weber shared their politics and gallant upper-middle-class mentality. His social group had gained for their nation a prominent position in the world of learning, economic and egalitarian modernisation, and it was socially separated from the ordinary people by the boundary line of status honour and Satisfaktionsfähigkeit. Members of this educated middle-class elite (Bildungsbürgertum) held leading positions, they identified with their nation, they represented German scholarship, and, therefore, during the revolution of November 1918 and in the period after the country’s military defeat the verdict of German war guilt was experienced by Weber’s class as a collective as well as an individual condemnation. Its members felt disgraced by it, whilst the common people of their own nation held them responsible for all wartime hardships.
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Notes
The German term for this group is Bildungsbürgertum. ‘The enigmatic character of the Bildungsbürgertum is not only determined by origins, occupation, political and religious views, income situation and property; rather it is shaped by a sociality which is defined primarily by another characteristic, namely a commonality grounded in education whatever all other differences. The specific prestige which is thereby obtained is defined from within by convention and successfully claimed to the world. From this characteristic stems the equality within the group and the exclusivity from the world’. The claim to special social prestige is legitimised by the assumed representation of values and behavioural orientations that may claim general social significance. The standards of their own life-conduct are considered to be exemplary; analogously to ‘noblesse oblige’ it is ‘education demands.’ M. R. Lepsius, ‘Das Bildungsbürgertum als ständische Vergesellschaftung’, M. R. Lepsius, ed., Demokratie in Deutschland. Soziologisch-historische Konstellationsanalysen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), pp. 303–14.
See F. Ringer (1969), The Decline of German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969)
U. Frevert, Ehrenmänner. Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991)
Friedrich Naumann, Das Blaue Buch von Vaterland und Freiheit. Auszüge aus seinen Werken, and Von Vaterland und Freiheit. Auszüge (Königstein i.T./Leipzig: Langewiesche, 1913).
Marianne Weber, op. cit., pp. 522 ff. The German original is as follows: ‘Menschen, die inmitten einer raffinierten Kultur leben, die dann trotzdem draußen dem Grausen des Krieges gewachsen sind (was für einen Senegalneger keine Leistung ist!), und die dann trotzdem so zurückkommen, so grundanständig, wie die große Mehrzahl unserer Leute, — das ist echtes Menschentum...’). M. Weber, Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926), p. 531.
Except for the reports on discipline in military hospitals (MWG, I/15, pp. 26–48), there is only one — then unpublished — text in the respective MWG volume dating from before the end of 1915 (see note 39). See also W. J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), pp. 190 ff.
F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967)
N. Ferguson, ‘Public Finance and National Security: The Domestic origins of the First World War Revisited’, Past and Present, 142, (1994), pp. 141–68.
R. Collins, ‘German-Bashing and the Theory of Democratic Modernization’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 24/1, (1995), pp. 3–21.
W. J. Mommsen, ‘Die “deutsche Idee der Freiheit”. Die deutsche Historikerschaft und das Modell des monarchischen Konstitutionalismus im Kaiserreich’, Staatswissenschaften und Staatspraxis, 3, (1992), pp. 43–63.
J. Home and A. Kramer (1994) ‘German ‘Atrocities’ and Franco-German Opinion, 1914: The Evidence of German Soldier’s Diaries’, The Journal of Modern History, 66, (1994), pp. 1–33.
Home and Kramer, op. cit., see also K.-L. Ay, Die Entstehung einer Revolution. Die Volksstimmung in Bayern während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1968), p. 43.
See F. Fischer, op. cit.; Chr. Jansen, Professoren und Politik. Politisches Denken und Handeln der Heidelberger Hochschullehrer 1914–1935 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992)
K. Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral. Die deutschen Hochschullehrer und die politischen Grundlagen des Ersten Weltkriegs (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969).
See K.-L. Ay, Appelle einer Revolution (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1968).
For Weber’s positions and activities see W. J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Revolution 1918/19 (Heidelberg: Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstätte. Kleine Schriften 18, 1994).
For the discussions in Germany on the Kriegsschuldfrage, M. Dreyer and O. Lembcke, Die deutsche Diskussion um die Kriegsschuldfrage 1918/19 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993)
U. Heinemann, Die verdrängte Niederlage. Politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuldfrage in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983).
‘Dieser wirklichkeitsblinde Nationalismus wurde zu einer der schwersten Belastungen der Weimarer Republik. Der Kampf gegen den ‘Versailler Schmachfrieden’ und die ‘Kriegsschuldlüge’ geriet zur Lebenslüge eines Nationalismus, der über den Geburtsmakel der Republik, den verlorenen Krieg, nie hinwegkam.’ D. Langewiesche, ‘Nation und Staat in der jüngeren deutschen Geschichte’, Historische Zeitschrift, 254 (1992), p. 375.
Cited in Chr. Weisz, Geschichtsauffassung und politisches Denken Münchner Historiker der Weimarer Zeit. Konrad Beyerle, Max Buchner, Michael Doeberl, Erich Marcks, Karl Alexander von Müller, Hermann Oncken (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970), p. 238.
Among works by well-known authors were J. Ebbinghaus, Kants Lehre vom ewigen Frieden und die Kriegsschuldfrage (Tübingen, 1929); H. Kantorowicz, Gutachten zur Kriegsschuldfrage 1914, ed. I. Geiss, with an introduction by G. W. Heinemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, 1967)
‘politisch-sozialer Masochismus würdeloser Pazifisten, die bis jetzt wollüstig in “Schuld”-Gefühlen wühlen’; M. Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften (München: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921), p. 482.
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Ay, KL. (1999). Max Weber: A German Intellectual and the Question of War Guilt after the Great War. In: Whimster, S. (eds) Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27030-9_5
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