Primarily dedicated to the German question of the time, it held positions on German imperialism, antisemitism, the Polish question, and support for German minorities in other countries.[2]
The purpose of the league was to nurture and protect the ethos of German nationality as a unifying force. By 1922, the League had grown to over 40,000 paying members. Berlin housed the central seat of the league, including its president and its executive, which was capped at a maximum of 300. Full gatherings of the league happened at the Pan-German Congress. Although numerically small, the League enjoyed a disproportionate influence on the German state through connections to the middle class, the political establishment and the media, as well as links to the 300,000 strong Agrarian League.[3]
Background
The origins of the Pan-German League lie in the growing movement for German colonial expansion, which gained traction over the course of the 1880s. In order to gain public support for the passing of the Steamboat Subsidy Act of 1885, which was a precursor to a state-funded colonial policy, chancellor Otto von Bismarck raised public outrage against British deals with both France and Portugal in dividing up Africa. Membership in pro-colonial societies, such as the Kolonialverein (Colonial Society) and the Central-Verein für Handelsgeographie (Central Society for Commercial Geography) grew rapidly.[4] In the following year, colonist Carl Peters, who had acquired the majority of Germany's colonial holdings up to this point, returned from Africa, and, using the public awareness following the steamboat subsidy debate to initiate a congress on German overseas interests. Taking place from 13-16 September 1886, the congress ended with the establishment of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Verband zur Förderung überseeischer deutsch-nationaler Interessen (General German Society for the Furthering of German National Oversea Interests). The Society was not successful and marked by internal strife and after Peters left again for Africa, it dissolved.[5]
History
Foundation and early struggles (1890–1894)
Colonialist Carl Peters was instrumental in the establishment of the Pan-German League.
On 1 July 1890, the German Empire signed the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty with Great Britain. The treaty was the first major sign of the new foreign policy of Emperor Wilhelm II, following the dismissal of chancellor Bismarck earlier in the year. The pro-colonial, national-conservative factions within Germany strongly opposed the treaty, as it gave away colonial possessions in Africa to the British. Peters was particularly negative, declaring that Germany had exchanged "two kingdoms, Witu and Uganda [...] for a bathtub."[6] Shortly before the signing of the treaty, on 24 June 1890, a declaration, signed by four Germans living in Switzerland, appeared in several German newspapers, titled "Germany awake!", calling for Germans to oppose the treaty. In another letter three weeks later, the authors called for the foundation of a National League, "the purpose of which should be to give expression to what we wanted and expected of a national government in situations similar to the situation created by the Anglo-German treaty".[7] By 1 August 1890, Alfred Hugenberg had picked up the call and declared himself temporarily in control of the management of such a league, while at the same time calling on Peters to become its leader. Peters, who had just recently returned from Africa, originally refused, not wanting to antagonise the German government, which he hoped would fund his further East African endeavours.[8]
The first official meeting of the organisation that would become the Pan-German League took place in Frankfurt am Main on 28 September 1890, presided over by university professor John Wislicenus and attended by seven people. As a result of the meeting, Hugenberg and Wislicenus issued another call to action. After the initial political struggles over the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty had subsided, Peters eventually agreed to join forces, on the condition that the remnants of the earlier General German Society were included. On 25 January 1891, Peters personally invited a number of members of the Reichstag, the German federal parliament, and several other people to meet with Hugenberg and Wislicenus. As a result, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Verein, a nominal resurrection of Peters' original society, was founded on 9 April 1891 in Berlin. The League took a quotation by Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg as its motto: Gedenke, daß Du ein Deutscher bist ("Remember that you are a German").[9]
Peters initially took over the presidency of the League, but soon went back to Africa and resigned from his post, in order not to come into conflicts of interest between the League and the Foreign Office. Karl von der Heydt, a banker, took over the position.[10] The early period of the League was difficult. While membership rose quickly, from around 2,000 in June 1891 to around 21,000 in May 1892,[11] management of the League was lacking. The membership fee was set low, aimed to attract members, but the profits proved insufficient to run the operation. The League's journal, the Mitteilungen des allgemeinen deutschen Verbandes (News of the General German League) were only produced seven times between 1891 and 1893 and even those were not distributed to all members, since this required an additional fee. Expansion of the League outside of Berlin and Prussia was also scarce, partly due to improper management as well as bans on political associations in states like Saxony and Bavaria. A rise in open antisemitism in the Berlin branch affected the image of the organisation in the public eye. Additionally, von der Heydt and his general manager, along with other members of the League, attempted to form a new political party towards the end of 1892. Since the League had been formed as a body above party politics, this endavour threatened its existence. The failed attempt to sell a "Calendar of all Germans", leading to a deficit of 6,000 marks, further weakened the League's position.[12] By July 1894, membership had dropped to just 4,637.[11]
A crisis meeting in Frankfurt am Main in the summer of 1893 was called by West-German branches of the League, against the declared will of the leadership, with the intention of dissolution. However, John Wislicenus again presided over the meeting and as a result, a formal meeting was arranged for 5 July 1893 in Berlin. Here, von der Heydt resigned along with many other members of the League's executive committee. Von der Heydt paid 4,000 of the 6,000 marks debt, with Peters covering the remaining 2,000 marks. The presidency of the League was taken over by Ernst Hasse[de], a university professor from Leipzig. Hasse, together with new general manager Adolf Lehr, put the League on a more secure financial footing. On 1 January 1894, the first issue of the new journal, the Alldeutsche Blätter, was released. At a meeting of the executive committee on 1 April 1894, a decision was made to change the name of the organisation to Alldeutscher Verein (Pan-German League). This came about as an amalgamation between the League with a society called Allgemeiner Deutscher Verein (General German Association), aimed at promoting German education, led by Albert von Levetzow, the president of the Reichstag. The term alldeutsch (pan-German) had been a suggestion by August Diederichs, a friend of Hasse's, who had set up a donation fund for the League under this name. The name change took effect from 1 July 1894.[13]
Heinrich Claß, president of the League from 1908 to 1939
The aim of the Alldeutscher Verband was to protest against government decisions which they believed could weaken Germany. A strong element of its ideology included social Darwinism. The Verband wanted to uphold German racial hygiene and were against breeding with so-called inferior races like the Jews and Slavs. Agitation against Poles was a central focus for the Pan-German League.[14] The agitations of the Alldeutscher Verband influenced the German government and generally supported the foreign policy developed by Otto von Bismarck.
One of the prominent members of the league was the sociologist Max Weber who, at the League's congress in 1894 argued that Germanness (Deutschtum) was the highest form of civilization. Weber left the league in 1899 because he felt it did not take a radical enough stance against Polish migrant workers in Germany.[15] Later Weber went on to become one of the most prominent critics of German expansionism and of the Kaiser's war policies.[16] He publicly attacked the Belgian annexation policy and unrestricted submarine warfare and later supported calls for constitutional reform, democratisation and universal suffrage.[16]
The position of Pan-German league gradually evolved into biological racism, with belief that Germans are "superior race", and Germans need protection from mixing with other races, particularly Jews.[2] By 1912 in the publication "If I were the Kaiser," Claß called on Germans to conquer eastern territories inhabited by "inferior" Slavs, depopulate their territories and settle German colonists there.[2] There were also calls for expulsion of Poles living in Prussia.[17]
The Alldeutscher Verband had an enormous influence on the German government during World War I, when they opposed democratization and were in favour of unlimited submarine war. Opponents of the Verband were called cowards. Influential figures in the Alldeutscher Verband founded the Vaterlandspartei in 1917 following the request of the majority of the German parliament to begin peace negotiations with the allies.
After World War I, the Alldeutscher Verband supported General Erich Ludendorff in his accusation against democrats and socialists that they had betrayed Germany and made the Germans lose the war. According to Ludendorff and the Verband, the army should not have been held responsible for the German defeat. Ludendorff, however, had declared that the war was lost in October 1918, before the German November Revolution. That fanciful allegation was known as the "Stab-in-the-back myth" (Dolchstosslegende).
Membership in the league was overwhelmingly composed of middle- and upper-class males. Most members' occupations reflected the League's emphasis on education, property ownership and service to the state.
The League was clearly close ideologically to the Nazis and anticipated many of their basic ideas, such as the demand that the individual Germans should unconditionally submit to the national whole, represented by the state and the authorities, or the idea of expansion to the east in order to gain "Living Space" (Lebensraum). Still, the League's concrete relations with the Nazis were not always smooth. In 1932, there was moment when the Pan-German League accused the Nazis of betraying the national idea and called on their supporters to support the rival German National People's Party (DNVP). The Nazis, who came to power the next year, did not forget that incident.
After the Nazis came to power, the Pan-Germans were for a time tolerated due to their ideological closeness, but on the eve of the Second World war were finally dissolved by Reinhard Heydrich on March 13, 1939, on the grounds that their program (namely the unification of all Germans in one Greater Germany) had been fulfilled with the Austrian Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenlands.
Pan-Germanism, also occasionally known as Pan-Germanicism, is a pan-nationalist political idea. Pan-Germanists originally sought to unify all the German-speaking people – and possibly also non-German Germanic-speaking peoples – in a single nation-state known as the Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation.
The German Workers' Party was a short-lived far-right political party established in Weimar Germany after World War I. It only lasted from 5 January 1919 until 24 February 1920. The DAP was the precursor of the Nazi Party, which was officially known as the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Der Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, commonly known as Der Stahlhelm, was a German First World War veteran's organisation existing from 1918 to 1935. In the late days of the Weimar Republic, it was closely affiliated to the monarchist German National People's Party (DNVP), placed at party gatherings in the position of armed security guards.
Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was an influential German businessman and politician. An important figure in nationalist politics in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century, Hugenberg became the country's leading media proprietor during the 1920s. As leader of the German National People's Party, he played a part in helping Adolf Hitler become chancellor of Germany and served in his first cabinet in 1933, hoping to control Hitler and use him as his tool. The plan failed, and by the end of 1933 Hugenberg had been pushed to the sidelines. Although he continued to serve as a guest member of the Reichstag until 1945, he wielded no political influence. Following World War II, he was interned by the British in 1946 and classified as "exonerated" in 1951 after undergoing denazification.
The German National People's Party was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative, nationalist, monarchist, völkisch, and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League. Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism, German nationalism, monarchism, and from 1931 onwards also to corporatism in economic policy. It held anti-communist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic views. On the left–right political spectrum, it belonged on the right-wing, and is classified as far-right in its early years and then again from the late 1920s when it moved back rightward.
The Völkisch movement was a German ethnic nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through the dissolution of the German Reich in 1945, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor, and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk from the Germans.
Carl Peters was a German explorer and colonial administrator. He was a major promoter of the establishment of the German colony of East Africa and one of the founders of the German East Africa Company. He was a controversial figure in Germany for his views and his brutal treatment of native Africans, which ultimately led to his dismissal from government service in 1897.
Austrian Nazism or Austrian National Socialism was a pan-German movement that was formed at the beginning of the 20th century. The movement took a concrete form on 15 November 1903 when the German Worker's Party (DAP) was established in Austria with its secretariat stationed in the town of Aussig. It was suppressed under the rule of Engelbert Dollfuss (1932–34), with its political organization, the DNSAP banned in early 1933, but was revived and made part of the German Nazi Party after the German annexation of Austria in 1938.
Weltpolitik was the imperialist foreign policy adopted by the German Empire during the reign of Emperor Wilhelm II. The aim of the policy was to transform Germany into a global power. Though considered a logical consequence of the German unification by a broad spectrum of Wilhelmine society, it marked a decisive break with the defensive Realpolitik of the Bismarckian era.
In the fourteen years the Weimar Republic was in existence, some forty parties were represented in the Reichstag. This fragmentation of political power was in part due to the use of a peculiar proportional representation electoral system that encouraged regional or small special interest parties and in part due to the many challenges facing the nascent German democracy in this period.
The Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty was an agreement signed on 1 July 1890 between Germany and the United Kingdom.
Presidential elections were held in Germany on 13 March 1932, with a runoff on 10 April. Independent incumbent Paul von Hindenburg won a second seven-year term against Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). Communist Party (KPD) leader Ernst Thälmann also ran and received more than ten percent of the vote in the runoff. Theodor Duesterberg, the deputy leader of the World War I veterans' organization Der Stahlhelm, ran in the first round but dropped out of the runoff. This was the second and final direct election to the office of President of the Reich, Germany's head of state under the Weimar Republic.
German nationalism is an ideological notion that promotes the unity of Germans and of the Germanosphere into one unified nation-state. German nationalism also emphasizes and takes pride in the patriotism and national identity of Germans as one nation and one people. The earliest origins of German nationalism began with the birth of romantic nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars when Pan-Germanism started to rise. Advocacy of a German nation-state began to become an important political force in response to the invasion of German territories by France under Napoleon Bonaparte.
Emil Kirdorf was a German industrialist, one of the first important employers in the Ruhr industrial sectors. He was personally awarded by Adolf Hitler the Order of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany's highest distinctions, on his 90th birthday in 1937, for his support to the Nazi Party in the late 1920s.
Alfred Roth was a German politician and writer noted for his anti-Semitism. He was sometimes known by his pseudonym Otto Arnim. Away from politics, he was a leading figure in the Commercial Employees Union.
Friedrich Lange was a German journalist and political activist with the Völkisch movement. Seeking to move beyond existing romantic nationalism, Lange sought to build a wider nationalist ideology on the German political right by marrying anti-Semitism to other economic and social issues. He would prove an influential figure for groups that followed.
The German Social Party was a far-right political party active in the German Empire.
The German Social Reform Party was a German Empire antisemitic political party active from 1894 to 1900. It was a merger between the German Reform Party (DRP) and the German Social Party (DSP).
Edgar Hartwig is an East German historian. In the GDR he taught scientific socialism at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar until 1989 and, within the framework of the "Arbeitsgruppe zur Geschichte der bürgerlichen Parteien" at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, he presented the history of the Pan-German League and the German Agrarian League.
↑ Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Michael Steinberg, page 55, University of Chicago Press (25 July 1990)
↑ Schönwälder, Karen[in German] (1999). "Invited but Unwanted? Migration from the East in Germany, 1890-1990". In Bartlett, Roger; Schönwälder, Karen[in German] (eds.). The German lands and eastern Europe. Eassays on the history of their social, cultural, and political relations. St. Martin's Press. pp.206–207. ISBN0-333-72086-5.
1 2 Kim, Sung Ho (24 August 2007). "Max Weber". Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 17 February 2010.
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Hartwig, Edgar (1968), "Alldeutscher Verband (ADV)", in Fricke, Dieter (ed.), Die bürgerlichen Parteien in Deutschland - Handbuch der Geschichte der bürgerlichen Parteien und anderen bürgerlichen Interessenorganisationen vom Vormärz bis zum Jahre 1945, vol.1, Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut, pp.1–26
Harrison, Austin, The Pan-Germanic Doctrine. (1904) online free
Hering, Rainer (2005). Konstruierte Nation: Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939[Constructed Nation: The Pan-German League 1890 to 1939] (in German). Wallstein. ISBN978-3892449188.
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Hofmeister, Björn (2014), "Realms of Leadership and Residues of Social Mobilization: The Pan-German League, 1918–33", in Jones, Larry Eugene (ed.), The German Right in the Weimar Republic - Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp.134–165
Jackisch, Barry Andrew. 'Not a Large, but a Strong Right': The Pan-German League, Radical Nationalism, and Rightist Party Politics in Weimar Germany, 1918-1939. Bell and Howell Information and Learning Company: Ann Arbor. 2000.
Jackisch, Barry A. (2012). The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918–39. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN978-1-4094-2761-2.
Jackisch, Barry A. (2014), "Continuity and Change on the German Right: The Pan-German League and Nazism, 1918–39", in Jones, Larry Eugene (ed.), The German Right in the Weimar Republic - Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp.166–193
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